this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Science Memes

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What is gravity? (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I still want to know what it is tho

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A force field generated by your mom's obesity

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So you are attracted to that, huh?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

We all are, a non-zero amount anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

that depends on his own mass and distance to her.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU try to follow along with this. Also, forces have force particles, there appears to be no such thing for gravity though I think scientists are still working on this problem to this day. Mass seems to be derived from the higgs field but I am not knowledgeable enough to answer how that relates to gravity per se.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Curvature of spacetime :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If that were true, the gravity wave detector wouldn't work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you sure about that? My understanding is that gravitational waves are predicted by general relativity, not inconsistent with it.

In any case, "all models are wrong, but some are useful". Gravity as curvature is a pretty damn useful model.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No, I'm not sure about it. And general relativity did predict gravity waves, and did generally describe gravity as being the curvature of spacetime.

Having said that, if "gravity waves" move at the speed of light, but speed is distance over time, how can you measure a "speed" when the thing whose speed you're measuring warps the units you use to measure it? It seems like you could talk about the movement of gravitational waves from the point of view of an observer outside the system with a ruler and a stopwatch that were unaffected by gravity. But, general relativity seems to suggest that there are no absolute / external reference frames you could use.

I fully admit that I don't completely get general relativity, and that it has been a very useful model. It just seems like it can be a useful model even if there are certain dusty corners where you shouldn't spend too much time looking because things stop making sense there.