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Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by sopooneo on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @12:48AM (#15488737)
A drunk awakens in a void and finds his arms, legs, in fact all extremities are bing pulled outward by some reverse gravity. It is quite unpleasant.

By some strange mechanism he is able to make himself start spinning. At first it is worse: in one direction the reverse gravity increases in effect! So he reverses and is relieved to find that in the other it slowly abates. Though the sweet relief is strange. Because if he goes too far in that direction, he finds that the expulsatory force begins to increase again.

But eventually he finds the sweet spot and stays there, relieved, to find himself not being pulled apart. "This", he says to himself, "I shall call an inertial reference frame. It is so much more relaxing than the others."

Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by taneq on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @02:28AM (#15489070)
Sounds like a first year physics question. "Consider a spherical drunk in a frictionless vacuum..."
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by madaxe_again on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @05:35AM (#15489667)
A perfect spherical drunk, in fact.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by noonespecial on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @08:50AM (#15490470)
...of uniform density.

Although, for us, it was always a spherical chicken.

Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by QAPereo on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @09:32AM (#15490718)
...Alone in a universe.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by eru on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @08:40AM (#15490404)
And interesting enough, the universe does have a unique privileged inertial reference frame: that which makes the background radiation look isotropic.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by Ari_Rahikkala on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @11:41AM (#15491858)
Only locally, though. The next galaxy cluster over has a uniquely privileged inertial reference frame, too, but it's in motion (and accelerating!) relative to ours.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by danbruc on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @05:10PM (#15494984)
I think you are wrong, observers in different galaxies will agree on the inertial reference frame in which the background radiation is isotropic. The relative velocity between different galaxies will show up as different dipole components in the measured background radiation, but if you compensate for that, you should get the same inertial reference frame no matter from which galaxy you measured.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by Ari_Rahikkala on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:21PM (#15496431)
I'll admit to not being a physicist and to being easily confused by the subject, so I'll just use a silly little metaphor to check whether I'm thinking straight, and try to avoid terminology I don't fully understand (which, since I don't have a particularly strong understanding of even special relativity, means not using relativity terms at all):

Think of the universe as a rubber sheet over a table, being stretched in all directions. My understanding is that cosmic background radiation is on the rubber, stretching and moving with it just like all the matter is. If background radiation were on the table instead, there would be exactly one spot on the rubber that saw no motion relative to it, while spots very far away from that spot would see a huge amount of motion. If you went out far enough, you'd be seeing hard radiation from half the sky.

Or, as another view, though I find this one harder to think about, since here the expansion of the universe seems to confuse rather than clarify things: The background radiation you see at any given point is simply the photons radiated inward from a sphere of a very large radius centered on that point. Every point has its own such sphere, and if an observer sees a dipole component in its background radiation, it means that that observer is in motion relative to the average motion of the matter that those photons originally came out of.

Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by empath75 on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @09:51AM (#15490853)
would it be possible for a drunk in a void to change his rotation?
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by CydeWeys on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:45AM (#15491318)
The story is phrased in a way that is delicately subtle, and thus elides the mechanism whereby the drunk can change his rotation.

Here's a hint: It's relevant that the person is drunk. Another hint: Newton's third law.

Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by madaxe_again on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:58AM (#15491442)
I call it my inbuilt vectoring urea reaction engine.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by Simon_says on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @12:26PM (#15492267)
Since you're the only thing in this hypothetical universe, you better make sure your urea makes it to escape velocity (which shouldn't be hard), otherwise you'll make it rain.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by scatters on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:31AM (#15491184)
No, because angular momentum is conserved, assuming flat space. It is possible to change one's orientation, however.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by twic on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @11:54AM (#15491984)
Yes. He can use the gyroscopic effect of his head spinning.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by dmikalova on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:02AM (#15490943)
You could blow in one direction or the other, at an angle. The air you push away will push you the other way.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by philipov on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:20AM (#15491066)
If you're suspended in a fluid or gas, you're not in a void.
Re:The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia by madaxe_again on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @10:57AM (#15491432)
Well, if he had a lungful if air, blowing would work - after all, rockets do work in a vacuum.

That said, he’s drunk, so the answer is to piss into the luminiferous aether.