Sorry this is so long, but TB is just too easy to pick apart.
Actually, come to think of it, Zetetic observation while falling off a chair may evidence gravity. As I recall, that feeling in your stomach that you feel while falling is caused by acceleration acting on your body. If the Earth accelerated up to you, you would not get this feeling because you are not accelerating. If you fall down to the Earth, you are accelerating so you would feel it.
That feeling of falling is actually the feeling of being inert and weightless. You can't "feel acceleration on your body".
If you brought an accelerometer with you while you were in free fall it would read 0 m/s/s. It is inert. Once it is in contact with the ground again it reads 9.8 m/s/s, as it is again traveling upwards with the earth.
That's strange, because I had the same feeling when I was launching out from the loading stations at Rock'n'Rollercoaster at Walt Disney World and Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. But that whole thing was just a side thought that popped into my head. I personally do not know much about it, but then again, I sincerely doubt you do either.
As for your accelerometer statement, what you are saying may explain the phenomenon in FET, but trying to use it as proof against RET just proves that you don't know how it works (some physicist...). An accelerometer measures acceleration by the movements of an internal ball. If the accelerometer is stationary, the force of gravity still acts on the ball which pulls it down and the machine reads it. If the machine itself is experiencing the same acceleration as the ball, the ball will not move in relation to the machine and, therefore, the machine will read 0m/s^2.
It's an observation. It's a direct observation that the earth rises upwards when you walk off the edge of a chair.
It all depends on your frame of reference. If you use earth as a frame of reference, then it's you that are moving towards the earth, not the other way around. Or, you could choose another frame of reference where both you and the earth are moving towards each other.
Well, either the earth is accelerating upwards or these "puller particles" are a cause for gravity. On one hand we have a phenomenon which is known to exist: Acceleration. No one doubts that acceleration exists in the universe. On the other hand we have these sub-atomic puller particles which no one has ever seen or detected.
How can a particle pull? Not only is this fairy mechanism undetected, but it is unexplained as well.
No one has ever explicitly seen or detected the cause of UA either.
I'm no physics guru. All I'm saying is empirical evidence is evidence of itself and nothing else. The "evidence" that you see when you jump off a chair could be a number of things, not even limited to just gravity and Universal Acceleration. The most empirically accurate statement you could make is this: I took a parabolic path from the chair to the ground.
Anything more is simply your own bias.
No. When you step off a chair the most accurate empirical statement is that you are inert and the earth moves up towards you. That is what you directly see and experience. When you watch the ground it rises up towards you.
Thus it is the burden of anyone supposing some other fanciful "puller particle" or "bendy space" mechanism to demonstrate their speculations. Upward acceleration is directly observed. None of that other stuff is.
Taking all bias out of it, all you can objectively say is that you followed a parabolic path from the chair to the Earth. Saying anything more exhibits bias one way or the other.
As for the burden of proof, that lies with you. You are the one trying to disprove accepted science. In order to do so, you must come up with the evidence for your fanciful "universal acceleration." You are once again giving into close-minded bias by refusing to accept an objective point of view.
Fascinating. What do I observe when I watch somebody else step off of a chair, Tom? What do I observe when I stand in the middle of a field when it's raining?
Well, when you are on the ground you can feel the ground pressing up against your feet, right? Hence, you are being pushed up by the earth.
When you watch someone walk off a chair you see yourself and the earth rush up to meet them. When you stand in a field and watch rain drops you watch as you and the earth rush up to meet the drops.
No one sees anything attracting bodies towards the earth. What possible mechanism could cause such a thing? "Puller Particles" are absurd beyond the extreme, unknown, undiscovered, and unexplained. "Bendy Space" is likewise absurd and undiscovered. Complete rubbish.
The upwards acceleration of the earth can happen through a known physical mechanism. Ie. Via combustion or pressure gradients. Puller Particles/Bendy Space need entirely new branches of physics invented for them.
1) For an object that is experiencing no acceleration in a given reference frame, for every force there is an equal and opposite force. The Earth is pushing against you, and you are pushing against the Earth. This proves nothing.
2) Funny, why wouldn't the Earth rush up to meet the clouds either? And you are biased with the chair.
3) "Puller particles" are no more absurd than universal acceleration. Both rely on mechanisms that we have yet to observe explicitly. Your next statement proves this as you speculate on what might be causing universal acceleration.
As a side note, have you noticed how whenever TB joins a thread all other FEers disappear? Might this have something to do with the fact that no one agrees with him? If they do agree with him, they have to realize that they produce much more effective arguments than he does. TB is one of the worst debaters I've seen for FET.