GRAVITY SUCK

[merrydolphin]

I don’t know about gravity, but I have an old beat up spinnaker that I can go directly up wind with. It sucks!

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by anotherT34C

So... the thing about physicists is that we care less about what things 'are' vs what they 'do'. There's a great deal known and understood about what gravity does. The primary problem for us is when we're trying to figure out what it does at the smallest scales.


Our primary tool for calculation is perturbation theory. For the math inclined, it's a type of expansion theory that allows the calculation to get arbitrarily close to reality, depending on how much you are willing to calculate. This seems to work great for the other forces (EM weak, strong) but fails in the case of gravity. The reason it fails (simply put) is because the piece of the formula that makes it apply to gravity (as opposed to the others) is on the wrong side of 1. As a result, subsequent calculations, instead of being ever smaller corrections, actually get larger, and blow the whole endeavor.

Sounds a bit like the monkey writing the bible on a type writer by randomly hitting keys theory to me.

[coastalexplorer]

I think that gravity is the most amazing aspect of this planet Earth that we live on . After all we have all seen the photographs taken from the moon in 1969. It is obviously an approximately round ball of rock. So It unexplaineably incomprehencable that oceans several miles deep do not fall off of it.

[transmitterdan]

Originally Posted by coastalexplorer

I think that gravity is the most amazing aspect of this planet Earth that we live on . After all we have all seen the photographs taken from the moon in 1969. It is obviously an approximately round ball of rock. So It unexplaineably incomprehencable that oceans several miles deep do not fall off of it.

Often we ask, “Why is the rum always gone?”. Now we know.

[jkindredpdx]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

A bit like marital partners - hard to live with and difficult to live without.

There is a theory by some nut who had a habit of dropping balls from a sub standard construction in Italy that it acts the same on all substances. If that's so how come the dropped bread slice always lands butter side down?

The slice doesn't always land butter side down... I'm pretty sure there's an direct relationship between the probability of the bread landing butter side down and the cost of the carpet.

[Tayana42]

Originally Posted by jkindredpdx

The slice doesn't always land butter side down... I'm pretty sure there's an direct relationship between the probability of the bread landing butter side down and the cost of the carpet.

And if you drop the beard before you butter it how does it know which side to land on?

[KP44]

Think of gravity as a push instead of a pull. The result is the same. But gravity becomes more understandable when we think of it as a push.

[Emmalina]

Lot s of bored people today !

[StuM]

Ok, one more question.


Why doesn't gravity pull all the atmosphere to the surface?

[LakeSuperior]

Interestingly enough is that the atomic clocks in the GPS satellites must be compensated for the fact that they run slightly faster than the clocks on the earth's surface because the space time curvature due to gravity is less farther from surface of the earth. They run about 45 microseconds faster per day. See GPS and Relativity.

[Wotname]

Originally Posted by StuM

Ok, one more question.


Why doesn't gravity pull all the atmosphere to the surface?

Trick question!
It doesn't pull, it pushes...
So the simple answer; it pushes the atmosphere to the surface but it doesn't have a big enough stick to do it all at once all the time so some gets away.

It would do a better job if gravity got itself a couple of collie dogs to help wrangle the atmosphere into place.

[er9]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Actually, it really depends on what you mean by "understand gravity." In the context of general relativity, gravity is a distortion of four dimensional space-time. The larger the mass, the greater the distortion. Stuff moving in space-time travel along travels the shortest path, a geodesic.

Easy-peasy.

Now, in the context of quantum mechanics, which is the context the other three forces are understood in, then we have a problem. But neither can we understand these other three forces in terms of spacetime distortions.

There have been many attempts to describe the three forces in terms of spacetime geometry (string theory being a major one). And likewise there have been many attempts to understand gravity in the quantum realm (quantum gravity being the big one).

So far, no theory has managed a complete picture of either. So... the mystery continues.

I wonder what would happen if we considered the possibility that dark matter is gravity?

its been speculated that the Higgs Boson could be connected to an energy field that allows all known matter to accumulate and form all the solid phenomena in our universe. this energy field surrounds and fill every inch of all the known universe similar to how ocean water surrounds all the life forms and phenomena in the sea. what if this energy field is dark matter is gravity?

The nuclear forces, radiation, light waves, electromagnetisn etc...would all then become phenomena of accumulated matter with no connection to gravity except that matter and its associated phenomena are allowed to exist because of it.

at a quantum level nothing could possibly be more finite than the energy field that allows everything to exist. a unifying theory would then have to take into account gravity as something that encompasses all know phenomena at the smallest scale imaginable. in other words...you cant get smaller than gravity. this would mean that all the phenomena of matter, even at sub atomic scales could have wildly varying properties because its all still just phenomena of matter.

or maybe im just drinking WAY too much wine again?

[jackdale]

Space.com: What Is Gravity?.
https://www.space.com/classical-gravity.html

[GordMay]

This just in:

[Singularity]

Originally Posted by KP44

Think of gravity as a push instead of a pull. The result is the same. But gravity becomes more understandable when we think of it as a push.

I like your inverse thinking. The same type of thinking caused people to recognize that you can create a white hole in your sink, complete with it's own accretion disk/event horizon.
----
On the gravity point, this guy (also a sailor) utilizing inverse thinking has conceptualized gravity, black holes, etc, to a degree that a secondary school student with above average grades in physics can conceptualize that which quantum physics guys seem to continue to debate about. His theory provides for Bohmian mechanics/pilot waves that basically dispenses with all the spooky at a distance stuff.