Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 51 — page 121: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION the gravity due to his move- ments in the various vehicles he has devised. Without think- ing about the gravity of my situation, I stood at the open doorway of an aircraft a thousand feet above the sum- mit of Fujiyama and looked down with the line of my body making an angle of twenty degrees with the true vertical. In that situation, the force of gravity acting upon my body was the resultant of the Earth’s pull and the centrifugal force due to the fact that the air- craft was turning on a close arc. (I should add that when I got back to my seat and realised what I had been doing I felt decidedly queasy and maybe it was only because I was without an oxygen mask that I was so seemingly fool- hardy. However, centrifugal force being what it is, I was in no real danger—unless the aircraft had made a sudden change of course.’’) Here is another little experi- ment you can do if you want to confirm the idea of centri- fugal force opposing the Earth’s gravity. Pierce the top edge of a cocoa tin with two holes on opposite sides and attach a loop of string about a foot long. Fill the tin with water and swing the whole thing round in circles ver- 120 tically, horizontally or in almost any direction. If you are swinging quickly enough, no water will be spilled. The centrifugal force will be suf- ficient to overcome the Earth’s efforts to pull the water out of the tin, whether the tin be horizontal or inverted or in any other position. Now quite a lot of people have objected to possibilities of space travel because of the range of gravities of the situations involved. Well, tell them that man has been travelling in space through- out his history. After all, isn’t the Earth in it’s yearly orbits round the sun busy space travelling? And doesn’t it take man with it? It certainly does, and yet man is preserved because the Earth takes its own gravity with it—that is to say it maintains a form of attraction for a man on its surface, compared with which the attraction of the moon or the sun or any or all of the planets is negligibly small. Can a spaceship take with it it’s own force of gravity? Of course being composed of matter, it will attract other bodies and so it may be said to have its own gravitational field, but since it will be of so small a mass compared with the mass of the Earth, the comiclooks.com