Rocket Fall: Rocket Series, #2

By D.W. Patterson

Rocket Fall: A Short Story

 

Sometimes it's dangerous to pursue your dreams.

 

Sometimes you suffer setback, disillusionment, or even defeat.

 

And sometimes you almost destroy mom's and dad's house, as Jack was about to find out.

 

Rocket Fall is the second short story in the author's Manifold Earth Universe: Rocket Series. Beginning in the near future and extending into the far future, the Manifold Earth Universe extrapolates future humanity's struggles, failures, and successes in moving out into the vast cosmos.

 

Hard Science Fiction - Old School.

Human-Generated-Content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D.W. Patterson
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223315254

Book preview

To Sarah

CHAPTER 1

Xplore Physics Online

Topic: Some Antecedents of the Mach Principle

Issac Newton wrote that every particle in the universe acts on every other particle with a force of attraction proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In the theory of Newton the inertial frame of reference (that is a frame of reference in which the particle is at rest or constant motion, i.e. no acceleration), is absolute space.

This concept of absolute space was immediately objected to by many including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1746), Christian Huygens (1629 – 1695), and George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) among others. Leibniz insisted that physics should, in today's words, explain relations between things, not to an unobservable absolute.

At the time Berkeley wrote: "It does not appear to me that there can be any motion other than relative, so that to conceive motion there must be at least conceived two bodies, whereof the distance or position in regard to each other is varied. Hence, if there was only one body in being it could not possibly be moved."

Eventually, Einstein's special relativity would make it clear that one could never hope to find a way that would give preference to one inertial reference frame over another moving relative to the first.

Now, turning to circular motion, a tool for distinguishing a locally rotating frame from a non-rotating one was developed in 1851. Leon Foucault (1819 – 1868) demonstrated the diurnal motion of Earth by freely suspending a long, heavy pendulum and noting the rotation