On Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:40:21 -0400, Jeff wrote:

KLC Lewis wrote:
Never argue bouyancy with Roger Long. ;-)

Why? I think Roger is making a big deal of a very fine distinction.
Its true that an object that is said to be "buoyant" does not generate a
force by itself, the force really comes from water pressure which in
turn is caused by gravity. But, the force is real and buoyancy is
simply a convenient way to aggregate the net pressure on an object. If
there were no force (regardless of what we call it) holding up a ship,
it would sink.

There are, of course, imaginary forces, such as Coriolis which appears
in non-inertial reference frames, but that is a different thing.

There are many words in the English language that aren't proper
scientific explanations of a phenomena. Try "beautiful" or "ugly" for
two examples.

Is the fact that there is no scientific justification for the term
"beautiful" reason to stop using it?

Cheers,

Bruce
(bruceinbangkokatgmaildotcom)