ZPEnergy.com - Centrifugal Force in ZP Energy

One of the first things that struck me when I commenced a detailed study of Maxwell's 1861 paper 'On Physical lines of Force' (http://www.zpenergy.com/downloads/maxwell_oplf.pdf) was the fact that he was depending heavily on the concept of centrifugal pressure in his sea of molecular vortices in order to account for magnetic repulsion. Yet we were all taught at school that centrifugal force is only a fictitious force that doesn't really exist.

Centrifugal force is an outward acting radial force which acts on any particle that is undergoing tangential motion. It can have very real effects and it is the basis of many engineering devices such as the centrifuge. On the microscopic scale it can cause a pressure or potential energy.

So why are we taught that centrifugal force doesn't exist?

The official teaching today in applied mathematics is that centrifugal force is something that we only observe when we are in a rotating frame of reference. But we don't need to be inside a centrifuge to see it operating. We can see a centrifuge operating simply by sitting in the corner of the room.

Another common argument that is often used to deny centrifugal force is that if we use Cartesian coordinates it will disappear. Using Cartesian coordinates will make the mathematical description of the centrifugal force more cumbersome, but it won't remove the very real outward radial acceleration. Polar coordinates are the obvious choice of convenience when dealing with centrifugal force, and if the effect is real in polar coordinates then it will be real no matter how we describe it.

Often people who deny centrifugal force can only handle circular motion and are unwilling to look at the more complex elliptical and hyperbolic motions associated with planetary orbits. In these more general cases, there will be an inward or an outward acceleration along the radial direction at any moment in time, depending on whether the outward centrifugal force or the inward centripetal force is dominant at that point in time. If we restrict our attention exclusively to circular motion then we can easily be fooled into thinking that there is only a centripetal force acting which causes the particle to deviate from its straight line path. This erroneous way of thinking totally overlooks the fact that the straight line path in question would already contain an outward centrifugal force relative to the exact same point origin, and that circular motion is in fact the special case that occurs when the centrifugal force and the centripetal force are always balanced.

So long as people deny the existence of centrifugal force, then they will also deny its involvement in zero-point energy. But according to Maxwell, the magneto-luminiferous medium contains energy, alot of which is centrifugal force based.

See 'Centrifugal Pressure in the Aether' at,

http://www.wbabin.net/science/tombe39.pdf

Yours sincerely, David Tombe