Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 51 — page 123: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION difficulty would be to touch it in such a way that it would not move sideways. Now let us go back to the water in the cocoa tin. Let us suppose that the. cocoa tin is a spaceship travelling towards a distant planet. If the ship is lying at right angles to the course on which it is travelling (and in the absence of air resistance there is no reason why it should not be) and is also swinging round and round in a small circle, so that its nose is directed towards the centre of the circle, then there will be centrifugal force throughout the vessel directed towards its tail. By controlling the speed of rotation and the radius of the circle, the equal equivalent of a force of gravity to that on Earth can be maintained throughout the ship. There is another way in which gravitational effects may be produced by move- ment. When you travel in a lift such as an express elevator in a New York skyscraper which rapidly attains high velocity, the results can be most disconcerting. Do you remember your first down- ward trip in an underground railway lift? The odd feeling of the first few seconds while the lift was getting speed? Do 122 you remember feeling you had suddenly become much heavier as an upward lift began to move? Maybe you have be- come so used to these things that you no longer remember them or maybe you still feel them every time. Anyway, the fact is that acceleration will produce in the body effects akin to those of the force of the gravity. For certain purposes the force of gravity on Earth can be given the value “G”’ which, strictly speaking, is the ac- celeration produced in a body falling freely. When an air- craft is catapulted from the deck of a carrier, it may increase its speed by eighty feet per second in the first second of its motion. A falling body would get a velocity of thirty-two feet per second at the end of its first second. Eighty is two and a half times thirty-two, and so we say the aircraft is launched at two and a half “‘G.” In effect a passenger is pressed back- wards against his seat with a force two and a half times as great as that of gravity on Earth. A normally healthy person can stand up to two and a half G’s for a short time. In power dives aircraft have subjected pilots to more than comiclooks.corn