Chapter 13
Accelerating and Rotating Frames of Reference
All our discussions in this book up to this point have taken for granted the existence of an inertial frame of reference, abbreviated as IF, and all our experiments, or most of them, and the theories developed so far have been drawn up assuming that we are living on such a frame of reference. Reality seems to be otherwise. Our familiar home is rivetted to the surface of the Earth which is not an inertial frame. It has a translational motion, being in orbit around the Sun. It has a rotational motion around its axis. Therefore it is doubly non-inertal. Shall we then discard everything that we have developed so far?
We shall find an answer in this chapter. It is easy to offer a hand waving ...
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