Gravity

[Hyd]

Gravity is considered a misconception.

 

Gravity really is the warping of space and time

 

Explain, Elaborate Further and Debate.

 

[timo]

Gravity is considered a misconception.

 

Gravity really is the warping of space and time

 

Since Gravity is usually considered an effect of spacetime warping, I think those two sentences contradict. At least, I don´t get what you were trying to say.

[lethalfang]

Gravity is considered a misconception.

 

Gravity really is the warping of space and time

 

Explain' date=' Elaborate Further and Debate.

 

[/quote']

According to Newtonian physics, gravity is a force. Quantum mechanics hypothesized "graviton" as the subatomic particle that transmits the information of gravitational force. Graviton has yet been observed. The massive particle accelerator being built in Europe will provide the best shot of finding graviton, if it exists.

According to Einstein, gravitational pull is an illusion. Earth orbiting sun is not because Sun exerts a force on earth. Rather, earth is traveling straight in its space, only that the space is curved by the sun, thus giving the observation that earth is traveling in circles.

I'm no expert in gravity. That's about the best I can do.

[ydoaPs]

you have said in more than one post "gravity is a misconception." what do you mean by that statement?

[ecoli]

I think what we means, is that the common notion about gravity (the earth's mass keeps us in it's gravitational field) is false...according to the Einsteinian theory. An basically, he doesn't understand it past that sentences he posted.

[Martin]

Hyd posted in the wrong SFN forum.

It is not a quantum mechanics issue.

He or she is talking about the apparent disagreement between two classical (non-quantum) ideas of gravity: Newtonian (grav. = force) and Einstein General Relativity (grav. = geometry)

 

It has a kind of sloppy or naive look to have threads scattered around randomly instead sorted by category.

don't know if anyone cares tho

[5614]

It's just like lethalfang said: Newton says gravity is a force and relativety says it's the warping of space-time.

 

What's the prob?

 

And what do you mean it's a misconception?

[Daecon]

Gravity isn't really a force - it's just an side-effect of matter's presence in spacetime.

 

Therefore it dosn't even need a force particle like the graviton, and dosn't need to be merged into a theory of everything.

[Hyd]

To anwser how it is a misconception:

 

Gravity is not a force. We only observe it as a force, but it is the warping of space and time. A satellite orbiting the planet has a time difference of 0.0001 seconds from the humans living on the earth (probably not correct, but I'm trying to show that there is, in fact, a time difference), not very major, but still present. What causes the warping is the gravitron which is only a hypothesis, because it hasn't been proven observationally.

 

To elaborate more on why it is a misconception, we call gravity the "pulling" of objects toward a very dense mass. It is not "pulling", but the warping of space. The space of everything (and I do mean everything hence why light is "bent" into a blackhole) warps the object to be "pulled" towards the earth. When we see light "bend" into a blackhole, it is really the plane of space that has changed and not the direction of the light necessarily.

 

Now I could be wrong.

 

Hyd

[lethalfang]

Satellites in orbit indeed are in a time which moves faster than it is on the surface of the earth due to the gravity of earth. In fact, satellites for global positioning systems (GPS) have to correct for this time dilation effect.

[5614]

Photons travel through space taking the shortest path possible, this is commonly called a straight line. In a situation where space-time itself is bent, the shortest path between two points would be to follow the curvature of space-time, which the photon does, so to an outside observer who cannot see the contours of space-time is looks as the photon has curved.

 

Newton would call gravity a force.

 

Indeed relativety says it's the warping of space-time, but this exerts what appears to be a force, indeed, we cannot tell the difference between acceleration caused by gravity and another form of acceleration.

 

However this is all nothing you knew, gravity is only a misconception to those who don't understand it, and you can hardly base a "who knows what" style of thinking to only those who do not understand it. Are you looking to learn about gravity? Or teach others about it? Because you came here saying how it's a misconception, well it's only a misconception to those who don't understand it and as I said, you can't really call it a misconception only based on those who don't know it.

[Hyd]

However this is all nothing you knew, gravity is only a misconception to those who don't understand it, and you can hardly base a "who knows what" style of thinking to only those who do not understand it. Are you looking to learn about gravity? Or teach others about it? Because you came here saying how it's a misconception, well it's only a misconception to those who don't understand it and as I said, you can't really call it a misconception only based on those who don't know it.

 

So, rather you would just want to me to completely explain to everyone and basically disallow them to think for themselves? Are you trying to tell me that the purpose of science is to take what you are told and accept it? I hope this is not what you are not implying. Clearly, my goal was for people to think for themselves and try to understand it. Thus, I threw an idea up in the air, and people just did not understand what I was trying to do. So, I guided them in the right direction.

 

Also, Newton called it a force, yet people later theorized such findings that it was not, in fact, a force, but the warping of space/time. Why? Because they did not think Newton's word was god, and they thought for themselves. Nobody respected Einstein where he wrote his theorize and designed experiments to prove them. Most of the science community thought he was a idiot. Did he still continue to "think outside the box"?

 

I guess people trying to understand something by FIGURING IT OUT FOR THEMSELVES just doesn't suit you, does it?

[lethalfang]

Relativity was not univerally accepted when it was first published. There was a lot of skepticism as it should. However, we often exaggerate the amount of disbelief there was toward relativity. For all its worth, the theory of relativity was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Obviously the reviewers did not call Einstein an idiot.

It was counter-intuitive, but it was based on good logics. Scientists took it seriously, even if they did not immediately accept it.

 

This is a newspaper blip in 1915 reporting the publication of general relativity. It did not call Einstein an idiot. In fact, he was already highly respected at that time, for having developed the Brownian motion and photoelectric effect prior to general relativity.

http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~ltfang/einstein/inberlin.gif

[Severian]

Of course gravity is a force. Anything which produces an acceleration (in any frame, inertial or not) is a force. Gravity definitely produces accelerations, and is therefore a force. (So the Coriolis force for example is also a force.)

 

You are really questioning whether or not it is a fundamental force, ie. not just the result of some coordinate transformation. This is a better question because it looks to the untrained eye that it may not be, since everything is travelling in a straight line in a curved space-time. However, that is not the full extent of GR - you also need to change the curvature depending on the energy-momentum tensor, and it is this property which makes GR's gravity a force.