Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces
Quanta Magazine,
by
Natalie Wolchover
Original Article
Posted By: StormCnter,
6/16/2020 3:59:07 PM
Physicists have traced three of the four forces of nature — the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces — to their origins in quantum particles. But the fourth fundamental force, gravity, is different.
Our current framework for understanding gravity, devised a century ago by Albert Einstein, tells us that apples fall from trees and planets orbit stars because they move along curves in the space-time continuum. These curves are gravity. According to Einstein, gravity is a feature of the space-time medium; the other forces of nature play out on that stage.
But near the center of a black hole or in the first moments
Reply 1 - Posted by:
bpl40 6/16/2020 4:20:49 PM (No. 446615)
Can this be useful to make Joe Biden think in a straight line and speak two meaningful sentences consecutively?
8 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
davew 6/16/2020 4:23:32 PM (No. 446619)
Physics would be very boring if all the answers were easy and obvious. Its impressive that human minds like Einstein, Schrodinger, Wheeler, Heisenberg, and Maldecena can construct models of the world through sheer intellectual force and mathematics that will require many lifetimes of work by others to confirm or refute. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer once quipped that, "Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man." Some of the recent ideas like string theory and loop quantum gravity may take centuries to correct.
11 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Quigley 6/16/2020 4:28:43 PM (No. 446624)
Since the politicization and celebritization of science I can no longer read these articles and hope to be reading something which does not have some sort of political or celebrity seeking bias.
8 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
Safari Man 6/16/2020 4:39:41 PM (No. 446639)
While reading this, I felt like the info was going in one eye and out the other. Bottom line is there’s still a lot of fundamental stuff nobody really groks. Even the things our physicists claim to understand, I claim they don’t because they can’t explain in terms that make much sense.
My own theory about gravity is that it doesn’t exist, the world simply sucks.
16 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
chumley 6/16/2020 5:22:12 PM (No. 446684)
I wont even pretend to understand the article. It was so far over my head it might as well have been satellite. I always did think a successful faster than light drive would be gravity based. We know the speed of light is 186, 282 miles per second in a vacuum and even that fast would take us years to get to the nearest star. We still haven't calculated the speed of gravity so it must be a lot faster than that.
3 people like this.
The universe and we are here because of gravity. So........is gravity God?
2 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Bluefindad 6/16/2020 5:40:14 PM (No. 446716)
Gravity is a lie used to promote white privilege.
20 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
jdh 6/16/2020 5:41:23 PM (No. 446718)
If we could get a consensus of scientists to agree, then, like global warming, the question would be solved.
3 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
seamusm 6/16/2020 5:48:10 PM (No. 446732)
Dang! Yet another thing scientists have no consensus on. Thank goodness for climate change.
7 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Axeman 6/16/2020 6:19:47 PM (No. 446757)
I can't remember who said "The problem is all the damned infinities!"
The third scientist, Juan Maldecena, hits on this. I like his essay the most.
Everything is infinite. Absolute nothingness does not exist in our current reality.
Everything is an interaction with something else. Maybe gravity is a mass interaction with other universes.
6 people like this.
All the stuff that physicists postulate or theorize can never be proven or dis-proven because it's either sub-atomic in size, picoseconds in duration, millions of light years away, or occurred billions of years ago. I think they all belong to an exclusive social organization, and every couple of years they get together for a week of food and drink at others' expense and then think up another whopper to spring on us dupes who struggled with partial differential equations. The ensuing debate goes on for a couple of years while new research money pours in, and then they do it all over again.
9 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
DVC 6/16/2020 7:13:06 PM (No. 446802)
That Einstein's theory very accurately defines/predicts the behavior of gravity over 30 orders of magnitude of scale is a very impressive thing. And yet we know it is "wrong".
But as the last author says, we/Einstein must be missing some terms in the equation, terms which are vanishingly small at either less than extremely high energies, or greater than extremely short distances, terms which are totally negligible over 30 orders of magnitude, yet in those extreme regimes, those missing terms from Einstein's work suddenly become the overriding factors.
And gravity is far, far, far weaker a force than the other three fundamental forces, but it acts over immense distances, where only electromagnetic force can act over comparatively large distances. The strong force and the weak force only work over extremely short distances, essentially inside of atoms. But they are, at those short distances, something like 37 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity is at those distances.
That is a 1 followed by 37 zeros. A billion is only 9 zeros. So gravity is almost unimaginably weaker than the strong or weak nuclear forces at the distances that they work at, but acts at light years type distances, and (we believe) instantaneously over those distances, too. THAT part has always kinda blown my mind.
How in the heck can gravity work instantaneously over 100,000 light years distance? Clearly we don't understand what is exactly going on with gravity. And yet it is hyper critical to the functioning of the universe and we can predict the orbits of planets and moons and satellites to extremel degree of accuracy with our "defective" theory.
Yep, Gravity is sure as heck, WAY not like other forces.
And if physics doesn't just "make your head hurt" just a bit, you aren't looking closely enough at it. Goodly number of "impossible" stuff are provably factual. 😲
7 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
padiva 6/16/2020 7:28:37 PM (No. 446820)
Deuteronomy 29:29a 'The secret things belong to the Lord our God...'
9 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
Jennie C. 6/16/2020 7:31:23 PM (No. 446824)
How's about that. God created something they can't figure out. Who woulda guessed?
6 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
Videodrone 6/16/2020 8:05:51 PM (No. 446857)
There are major gaps in our understanding of gravity - the observed structure of galaxies does not match the "theory" and thus "Black Matter/Energy" (which can't be detected/measured) or "MoND" (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) along with String and other attempts of blind men describing the elephant...
And we don't even know what questions to ask!
3 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
smokincol 6/16/2020 8:34:11 PM (No. 446875)
i thought it was Sir Isaac Newton who made the connection with the apple and gravity. am i wrong?
1 person likes this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
immelman 6/16/2020 9:54:07 PM (No. 446928)
Colossians 1:27. In Him all things are held together.
4 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
DVC 6/16/2020 9:55:14 PM (No. 446929)
#16, you are not wrong. Newtonian physics is perfectly good enough to calculate orbits of planets, satellites, etc. All ordinary, everyday things are well handled by Newtonian physics.
Einstein added to it for more radical conditions, but even Einstein's improvements on Newtonian physics breaks down at the extremes.
3 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
Zarin 6/16/2020 10:55:31 PM (No. 446962)
We don't understand it because gravity is actually love.
1 person likes this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
Rumblehog 6/17/2020 12:00:43 AM (No. 447021)
We sent men to the moon and back based on nothing but Newtonian Physics and a command module calculator with a whopping 2kbytes of RAM, or about 50 million times less computing power than a standard iPhone. Slide rules were powerful tools in the hands of old school Engineers.
While in graduate school for Physics/Math, I was always challenged by the fact that I started out learning mathematics from the time of the Greeks (Euclid, etc.), English (Newton, Maxwell), French (Pascal, Fermat, Fourier, LaGrange), German (Gauss, Leibnitz, Einstein) and that each semester it seemed as I was only going up a hundred years, or so, until I finally ended my matriculation. I was only up to the cutting edge math of the late 1800's with a long way to go into deep stuff. What it takes to get to the top of that ladder today, I can't even imagine.
4 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
ladydawgfan 6/17/2020 1:49:08 AM (No. 447076)
So what did people do before the Law of Gravity was passed??
1 person likes this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
franq 6/17/2020 5:59:33 AM (No. 447122)
I nominate #13, 14, and 17 for the Nobel Prize.
0 people like this.
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