Weight, weight, don’t tell me

• Kenneth W. Ford ^[1]
  1. [1] Gwynedd,
• Localización: The Physics Teacher, ISSN 0031-921X, Vol. 63, Nº. 2, 2025, págs. 84-84
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages in journals and textbooks have been devoted to definitions of weight, to which six pages have recently been added by Eugene Hecht.1 Is all of this attention justified? I think not. Weight is a useful concept but not a fundamental one. It’s a little like the color green—something you want to use in your teaching but that does not require a generally accepted definition because it does not appear in any law of physics. If, according to your definition of weight, an astronaut in orbit is weightless, fine. If your orbiting astronaut has weight, also fine. Physics teachers should live in harmony as they teach about force and mass and gravity in their own ways.