system
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human
A question about centrifugal force in a weightless environment?

After reading 'Rendezvous with Rama' by Arthur C Clarke, I have been stumped by a thought about centrifugal force in a weightless environment. In the book a character attempts to fly in a winged craft along the central axis of a massive closed spinning cylinder with a gaseous environment. As they go along (If I am remembering correctly) they lose power and end up being pulled down to the inside surface. So I have been thinking about what particular set of circumstances are required for the centrifugal force to act on a body.

Say for example, if I am floating in space and a completely open-ended massive spinning cylinder were to pass around me i.e., I pass through the cylinder, however I am not on the central axis but closer to the inside surface. Would I be pulled down to the surface by the centrifugal force? I am deliberately excluding the gravitational force from this thought experiment.
gpt
If you are not in contact with the wall of the cylinder at all and it starts to spin, you won't suddenly feel a centrifugal force pushing you outwards in your frame of reference.

However if you hold onto the side of the cylinder while it spins up, your rest frame is now non-inertial. And now there *is* a centrifugal force pushing outwards on you.