= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Normal_Anomaly comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (541)
Isn't the normal force dependent on/related to this? My mental image is of people falling through the floor because the normal force doesn't automatically balance their weight.
I'm not sure but I don't think so. Thinking out loud: We do not fall through floors because the normal force is equal to the force of gravity. However this is not a consequence of Newton's laws as such, it happens because our weight compresses the atoms of the floor so that the repulsive forces between them become stronger, as they are closer together, and thus the topmost ones push harder on the soles of our feet. We can use Newton's laws to analyse this situation, but they don't seem to be immediately causal, as it were.
That said, I could easily be missing something more fundamental that causes both the opposite-reaction effect and the equilibrium I described above. I have zero intuition for how things would work in a physics so non-Newtonian as all that!
You may well be right. I was just thinking that that's how the opposite reaction manifests. I don't really know which law is more fundamental, they're all the same deep laws anyway.
This.