Presenting g Available to Purchase

The paper “Why Multiply by g”¹ is a very timely topic, but it is often debated on various forums. The detractors always point out that N/kg is the same as kg·m/s². While true, students don't pay attention to this and the g expressed as an acceleration confuses them. Unfortunately most standard texts present g as an acceleration.

But this topic has already been researched by the UM-PERG group at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. They published the series of texts “Minds on Physics,” and this series always gives g as 9.8 N/kg, or more often rounds it to 10 N/kg. They explicitly state in the voluminous teacher's manual that using $g=9.8kg⋅m/s2$ confuses the heck out of students. In either case the equation $Fg=mg$ really comes from Newton's general gravitational equation, and not from...