I have always been interested in how planes are able to stay in the air and I finally found a definition that I could understand by reading the Michael Crichton book "Airframe". This however did not explain how a helicopter managed to stay in the air, and after reading the article yesterday I became curious and decided to investigate today. I read a Wiki answers article on helicopters and I was utterly confused by the overly technical description and the fact that it assumed you knew the basics of aerodynamics. However I did stumble across the term centrifugal force in the article. Over the years I have attributed many incidents to the activities of the centrifugal force (which I had always pronounced cent-ral-fugal force). Activities such as, why the train was late or why my work colleague was unable to find their pen. To be honest, I had no idea what centrifugal force was or how it related to the world. That was until today when I decided to Google it!
It turns out that the Wikipedia article on centrifugal force is ridiculously technical and the only thing that I could interpret into real terms was the Latin meaning of centrifugal (centrum, meaning "centre" and fugere, meaning "to flee"). 'To flee the centre', was my first clue, but it didn't really mean anything, much like the rest of the article! I needed an example, which was why I turned to my old friend dictionary.com! The definition was "A force that tends to move objects away from the centre in a system undergoing circular motion". Again this was not clear enough in real terms, but there was also an example and it made me think of the fun game we used to play as kids, called corners! When you are sitting in the back seat of a car and the car goes around a roundabout, the passengers are thrown to the opposite side, this is because of the centrifugal force. Additionally when you have a bucket full of water and you spin around and hold the bucket out at arms length, the centrifugal force is what keeps the water from spilling out of the bucket (if you have never tried this, you should, it's fun). Finally I understand the meaning of centrifugal force! I will still use the term facetiously for explanations of random events, but now I will be doing it using the correct pronunciation and with knowledge of the real definition!
The technical article was on Wikipedia and the not as technical one was on dictionary.com.
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