Quotes About Inertial

The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.

The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is.

The familiar Mercator projection used in maps of the earth gives a good idea of distances and directions near the equator, but produces horrible dostortions near the poles, with Greenland swelling to many times its actual size. In the same way, it is one sign of being in a gravitational field that there is no one freely falling frame of reference in which gravitational and inertial effects cancel everywhere.

What sustains us, in belief as in action, is not reason or justification, but something more basic than these--for we go on in the same way even after we are convinced that the reasons have given out. If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse--a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

Just as inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent, so too there is an equivalence, he realized, between all inertial effects, such as resistance to acceleration, and gravitational effects, such as weight. His insight was that they are both manifestations of the same structure, which we now sometimes call the inertio-gravitational field.

The special theory of relativity that Einstein developed in 1905 applies only to this special case (hence the name): a situation in which the observers are moving at a constant velocity relative to one another—uniformly in a straight line at a steady speed—referred to as an "inertial reference system.

It was a scene of ruin and despair, and of a ponderous, timeless, inertial heaviness.

That's what's "special" in special relativity: the "special" inertial frames are only a small subset of all possible reference frames.

You'll notice that the Intrepid's inertial dampeners don't work as well in crisis situations, Dahl remembered Jenkins telling them. The ship could do hairpin turns and loop-de-loops any other time and you'd never notice. But whenever there's a dramatic event, there goes your footing.