Random Thought #1: Can You Feel Constant Motion?

By mugen shiyo · Jul 16, 2011 · 544 · 4
  1. I like physics a lot and while I do venture to read about it every once in a while, it seems much more fun to speculate and sound things out in my head- the theories that are unproven but flooded with popular suggestions. So I had a thought... (please suppress the laughing till I explain this phenomenon) I was wondering if it was possible to feel constant motion?

    You can feel the change in speed when you are in motion due to the drag and vault of speeding up or slowing down, but when you are in constant motion, do you know you are in motion.

    I can feel motion because I feel the wind in my face. I hear the whoosh of things passed or passing by. I feel the rumble of the road through the tires, the work of the engine, and I can see things moving as I am moving. But without being able to feel or see or hear these things, would I feel motion itself? I doubt it. Like being in one of those really quiet, really smooth elevators, the sense of motion becomes lost as the those externalities are dramatically reduced. I imagine driving without these things would be unsettling and very disorienting also- like driving in complete silence.

    But I just came to the thought that we cannot feel it. I didn't bother looking it up because it takes the fun out of thinking about it for myself :p

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  1. LaGs
    An interesting question...but if you can feel wind initially blow you in the face, and it keeps on blowing at a constant speed, presumably you can still feel it; and since this is a form of constant motion, the answer is...yes? Am I being an idiot here? lol...Wait, wind's never constant, is it? What about a fan, blowing it out mechanically? What about artificial wind? My heads gonna fall off things like this!

    And...there's a loop here somewhere (As far as I can see)...if you remove 'Being able to feel or see or hear these things' you can't 'feel' motion because there's no feeling...you've removed it!

    And...WHY THE HELL would you think about such things anyway?? lol
    LaGs, Jul 16, 2011
  2. Solar
    All of us are in constant motion... For the time being lol
    Solar, Jul 17, 2011
  3. Quezacotl
    You feel no forces while at a state of equilibrium because there is no acceleration.

    You feel the wind, even if it is at a constant velocity, because it causes a steady force upon you. Since there is no balancing force, the wind breaks your equilibrium.
    Quezacotl, Jul 17, 2011
  4. mugen shiyo
    @ LaGs, I'm always thinking about stuff like this :) It would be very hard to get the wind to move uniformly at a constantly velocity. Different parts of a breeze/wind probably move at different speeds. But even still, feeling the wind is not the same as feeling motion. It can be a sign that you are moving...right, lol.

    @ at Quezcotl, I believe that if you were somehow able to get a breeze or wind to move across you face or body at uniform speed you would not be able to feel it. Something like being under water minus feeling the pressure and the change of temperature.

    which now makes me wonder if we actually feel wt or a merely the pressure and change of temperature. I should make a blind experiment where i place a small metal bead on someones arm and tell them it's a drop of water and see how they take it. Because it seems like if I were submerged in water and I couldn't feel the pressure of being under water or the coolness apart from the temperature of being outside of water, I might not register the feeling of actually having moved from free air to water. That when we think we can tell the difference between different textures, it is rather a noted difference of pressure over a given surface area and temperature that we have finely tuned.

    Look at me trying to be smart, lol
    mugen shiyo, Jul 19, 2011
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