Apparent weight

A dog shakes a rat by the neck. The acceleration breaks the neck. The apparnet weight of the rat is momentarily more than the neck can support. Apparent weight can be thought of as virtual gravity, due to acceleration.

Examples:

1 A person in a lift feels momentarily heavier as the lift accelerates upwards. His apparent weight reduces momentarily as the lift decelerates at an upper floor.

2 A person pressed against the inside of the outer wall of a spinning centrifuge feels heavier, due to his inertia and forced acceleration towards the center.

3 A person in a car feels themselves pushed back in the seat as the car accelerates.

Apparent additional weight is a vector of size f.

f = ma

... in the opposite direction to the acceleration.

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