The Faraday Paradox and Newton's Rotating Bucket
David Tombe
Keywords: rotation, centrifugal force, Newton's bucket, Faraday paradox
Inertia is generally understood to be that tendency of a body to continue in its state of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. This is a very limited Cartesian way of looking at the situation. The general situation can be understood within the context of centrifugal force. Inertia is centrifugal force in irrotational fields. Centrifugal force in turn is one mutually perpendicular aspect of a more general convective force of the form v x ? which acts in magnetic fields and in the cyclonic phenomena in the oceans and the atmosphere. In general therefore, inertia is v x ? where ? is the angular velocity of the aether at the point in question and v is the linear velocity of the particle or fluid element.
