Much has been written and debated about the Coriolis force.1–8 Unfortunately, this has done little to demystify the paradoxes surrounding this fictitious force invoked by an observer in a rotating frame of reference. It is the purpose of this article to make another valiant attempt to slay the dragon of the Coriolis force! This will be done without unleashing the usual mathematical apparatus, which we believe is more of a hindrance than a help.
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For a leisurely read, the curious reader is directed to
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12.
Figure 2 switches the reader's perspective from the horizontal track in Fig. 1 to a 90° rotation to a vertical plane. This corresponds to switching from the blue plane to the red plane in Fig. 2. The top of the tower corresponds to track 4 and the bottom of the tower, on the surface of Earth, corresponds to track 1. The height of the tower is very small compared to the radius of Earth. Nonetheless, sensitive experiments have successfully measured the eastward deflection of falling objects.
13.
In our simple analysis, we ignored the fact that conservation of angular momentum requires that the horizontal component of the velocity increase as the object falls. This effect serves to increase the expected amount of eastward deflection only slightly.
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2014
American Association of Physics Teachers
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