sp332: > gravity accelerates things The confusion is between the transitive and intransitive forms of the word "acceleration". If I say "the pen accelerates",

sp332: > gravity accelerates things The confusion is between the transitive and intransitive forms of the word "acceleration". If I say "the pen accelerates", this implies net acceleration of the object. If I say "gravity accelerates the pen", this implies gravity's contribution towards net acceleration. Air resistance diminishes net acceleration, but not the acceleration as contributed by gravity. sp332 was fine. It's common for astrophysicists to talk about gravitational fields in terms of "acceleration fields" rather than "force fields". This is because the acceleration contributed by gravity only depends on a single argument (distance from the celestial body's center) as opposed to a force-field's two arguments (distance, the pen's mass). And next time you hear "g = 9.81 m/s^2 for all objects on earth's surface", the physicist is referring to gravitational acceleration, regardless of whether or not the object is moving.