Talk:Weightlessness

Illustrations

While there is a need for illustrations, some of the ones in this article have minimal educational value. Perhaps they were intended to be GIF's with motion, but "a block of lead in free fall above planet X" -- really? I suggest this article be downgraded to "C" status until better illustrated and written. GeeBee60 (talk) 18:31, 11 September 2018 (UTC)

Rewrite or merge

This article needs some expertiese and a writer who communicates rather than pontificates. I made some edits to the lede, but as it was written and still is written, it mostly ignores the content of the article, which has everything from Newton's apple to the pitfalls of weightlessness aboard space stations. Some topic titles border on silly, such as "How to avoid weightlessness", with unrelated discussion. And as noted in my earlier post, some drawings are weak and unhelpful.

One problem is that debating weightlessness is like debating fire. Fire is both a chemical reaction and a visceral experience. And we require it in some form, and we take it for granted. Same with gravity and weight. For us earthbound humans, weightlessness is a temporary physical sensation, from a few seconds to, for an extremely small number, a few months.

Obviously it is also an academic exercise, but aspects of the debate resemble some "what if" reveries. Lets keep it real and grounded, folk. An earlier suggestion by User:SarahTehCat was to merge this article with Micro-g environment. Most of materials could be deleted in the merge, along with a redirect. Micro-g is a much-superior, though longer and broader, article. --GeeBee60 (talk) 01:52, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

I did some cleanup per MOS: and WP:NPOV. —Yours sincerely, Soumyabrata (contributions • subpages) 10:15, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

Four years later and this still needs to be addressed. Agree that the Micro-g environment article is better and support a merge. I'll see what I can do to facilitate the merge. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 21:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Merge proposal is live at Talk:Micro-g_environment#Merger_proposal. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 22:08, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I reduced "incorrectly" to "misleadingly". "Misleading" seems clearly from the contents of the merge discussion and the talk page, but "incorrectly" seems like a stronger claim that requires a citation. There is no where in the known universe with zero gravity, and so it seems plausible that the term "zero gravity" could have been de-facto repurposed to describe weightlessness, as the term "microgravity" was. Since the definition of terms are (at least partially) determined from their usage, it seems like a citation is necessary. At least, that's my opinion, since "zero gravity" seems to at least been used widely, and at least occasionally by NASA. Tbardwell (talk) 05:25, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Ambiguity with microgravity

It should be clearly stated that microgravity on the ISS for instance is NOT related to absence of gravity. It's a misused term. On the ISS the earth gravity is almost ALL there. If there was no gravity there would be NO orbiting. 87.27.134.42 (talk) 12:46, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

As of today, the article states this clearly in (1) the third paragraph of the introduction and (2) the first section. Tbardwell (talk) 20:24, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Ambiguity on microgravity

It should be clearly stated that microgravity on the ISS for instance is NOT related to absence of gravity. It's a misused term. On the ISS the earth gravity is almost ALL there. If there was no gravity there would be NO orbiting. The freefall condition that ALL orbiting objects experience is not clearly explained.

Fditrani (talk) 13:00, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

(this topic seems to be an accidental duplicate) Tbardwell (talk) 20:24, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Definition of weightlessness

The current definition of weightlessness "Weightlessness is the complete or near-complete absence of the sensation of weight, ..." is wrong. It would imply that masses in space, which are weightless, but do not have sensations are not weightless. I propose as a physical definition independent from human sensations: "Masses are weightless if all forces acting on them, including the inertial force, cancel each other out at each and every point of their body." This correctly includes water jumpers but excludes divers or fishes because the forces only cancel out on their surfaces. Besides gravitational forces, this definition correctly also includes external electric or magnetic forces. Near-complete weightlessness is called microgravity and should not be included in the definition. Astroflash (talk) 14:19, 22 May 2025 (UTC)