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Is Gravity Fake?

MoSurveyor said:
It's common knowledge among those who read a lot of science books and articles. I answered a quiz question about that exact subject a few months ago. I also knew the answer without having to "look it up". I have on doubt that Paralogic and many others on this forum are well aware of basic science facts like that.
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Fair enough.
 
einsteingravwell.jpg


One thing's for sure, this visualization technique is bogus and circular logic. It requires gravity to describe gravity. Turn off gravity and the ball flies off the curved paper and away in a straight line.
 
Matt Foley said:
einsteingravwell.jpg


One thing's for sure, this visualization technique is bogus and circular logic. It requires gravity to describe gravity. Turn off gravity and the ball flies off the curved paper and away in a straight line.
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The visualization isn't circular logic. Nobody is saying the image is proof of anything. You said it yourself, it's a visualization technique. It's hard for people to visualize warping of space-time.

Of course it requires gravity to describe gravity. It's an image designed to help you visualize the concept. You seem to be under the impression that this image is considered evidence or something. Help me out here, what's your issue? Do you disagree with the concept of curved space?

And yes, turn off gravity and the ball flies off. Turn off the Earth's gravity and the moon flies off. In a straight line. Like the image would describe. Same would happen to the Earth if you turned off the Sun's gravity.
 
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Matt Foley said:
einsteingravwell.jpg


One thing's for sure, this visualization technique is bogus and circular logic. It requires gravity to describe gravity. Turn off gravity and the ball flies off the curved paper and away in a straight line.
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It takes gravitons to warp space. So this hypothesis requires them to pull space from an outside dimension.
 
Matt Foley said:
einsteingravwell.jpg


One thing's for sure, this visualization technique is bogus and circular logic. It requires gravity to describe gravity. Turn off gravity and the ball flies off the curved paper and away in a straight line.
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teaching_physics.png


I don't think there's much else to add here. The thread is full of people (well, one or two) saying "But if the theoretically sound explanation for this phenomena isn't true, then it might just be my completely-unsupported explanation instead!". You might be right, you might be wrong - astronomy is so full of 'dark' terms at the moment (...matter, ...energy, ...flow, and now ...magnetism if the most recent New Scientist is to be believed) that, to quote a recent popsci book, "you can smell the paradigm shift in the air".

Thinking outside the box is great fun, and an entirely worthy cause. But if you want support rather than skepticism, try to focus on explanations for things that are yet unproven, or rest on shakey foundations, rather than for things which have a well-founded base of empirical observations which you simply haven't taken the time to yet investigate.
 
As I understand it, the word "Gravity" does not exactly refer to a known and understood force, but rather the observable effect of said force on all mass.

Since the effect can be observed and recorded, it is as real as any other scientifically observed and recorded phenomenon.

When you examine it closely enough, all scientific theories are nothing more than that…an explanation for observable and recordable phenomenon, to the extent that we humans can observe and record.
As we have no way of proving our records and observations are real without having another point of view to corroborate them, which as of yet we do not….
 
iangb said:
teaching_physics.png


I don't think there's much else to add here. The thread is full of people (well, one or two) saying "But if the theoretically sound explanation for this phenomena isn't true, then it might just be my completely-unsupported explanation instead!". You might be right, you might be wrong - astronomy is so full of 'dark' terms at the moment (...matter, ...energy, ...flow, and now ...magnetism if the most recent New Scientist is to be believed) that, to quote a recent popsci book, "you can smell the paradigm shift in the air".

Thinking outside the box is great fun, and an entirely worthy cause. But if you want support rather than skepticism, try to focus on explanations for things that are yet unproven, or rest on shakey foundations, rather than for things which have a well-founded base of empirical observations which you simply haven't taken the time to yet investigate.
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Fair enough...though I wonder if, in time, some of those empirical observations turn out to not be so empirical after all.
 
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iangb said:
teaching_physics.png


I don't think there's much else to add here. The thread is full of people (well, one or two) saying "But if the theoretically sound explanation for this phenomena isn't true, then it might just be my completely-unsupported explanation instead!". You might be right, you might be wrong - astronomy is so full of 'dark' terms at the moment (...matter, ...energy, ...flow, and now ...magnetism if the most recent New Scientist is to be believed) that, to quote a recent popsci book, "you can smell the paradigm shift in the air".

Thinking outside the box is great fun, and an entirely worthy cause. But if you want support rather than skepticism, try to focus on explanations for things that are yet unproven, or rest on shakey foundations, rather than for things which have a well-founded base of empirical observations which you simply haven't taken the time to yet investigate.
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Soooo, what does that have to do with anything?
 
Matt Foley said:
Yes it is........
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No. Circular reasoning is along the lines of "a is true because b is true; b is true because a is true"

This image is not an example of that.
 
makmugens said:
LOL, I know, I know. It sounds like a ridiculous question to entertain in the slightest. Please hear me out, the more open-minded.

We are told that gravity is what keeps the planets in orbit and it is a principal force or energy in the universe. I've always had a problem with this concept.
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Excellent topic.

My chosen first subject is maths, so let me attempt a few answers.

makmugens said:
1. Why doesn't the moon ever get any closer or further away? Why doesn't anything? Everything seems to keep moving on the same track. This implies, more or less, the same constant speed and trajectory. This is implying perpetual motion. How can something continuously move and not lose speed? Not waver? Gravity is energy but it doesn't apply or retract it's energy to keep a thing going in constant motion. Although to us the planets are moving fast, relative to themselves they are crawling through space. Swinging around one another on an invisible tether. But this movement creates momentum in which the orbiting object is always being pushed outward. If gravity were constant and, say, the moon was in our field, than just like something caught in a black hole, the moon would slowly but surely draw closer and closer to us until it crashed into us. But this doesn't happen. Why?
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Actually, as a matter of fact, the Moon is pacing away from Earth, very very slowly, and would break free is the Earth-Moon system lived that long. Perpetual motion is not impossible because of theoretical reasons, but that there is no experimental way of isolating a system to a 100 % efficiency. Even in a black hole, if you can equate the centripetal energy with the gravitational energy, then the object will never fall in the center but stay in a stable orbit, falling around endlessly. Only in a black hole, this centripetal energy would need a velocity higher than the speed of light.

(By the way perpetual motion becomes impossible at the point when you add a change of energy into/outof the system for an external "user" gain.)

makmugens said:
2. Is Gravity a constant form of energy? They say that gravity is dependent on mass. But if gravity is dependent on mass and the mass stays the same, that means the gravity is exerted continuously merely based on the mass of an object. An energy of attraction is constantly exerted whose intensity is proportional to it's mass. Constant energy. I can never bridge this concept in my head.
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Mass never exists. It is only a mathematical concept, to serve as a proportionality constant between 2 measurable quantities which are force and acceleration. The 19th century works of Eotvos and Einstein establish the equivalency of the gravitational mass with the generic inertial mass.

makmugens said:
3. Black Holes are one of the greatest examples of gravity we have...theoretically. Supposedly it has a force that is able to draw in anything that comes within the event horizon- meaning the point at which even light can escape. There are a number of questions here. If the event horizon exists at a certain point, does that mean that closer to the core the pull is even greater and things exceeding the speed of light can be pulled in?
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The speed of light is only a barrier to the observability of the movement of an object through electromagnetic means. It is valid as long as we define the measurement of the acceleration part of the definition of mass to be electromagnetic. Higher light speed is possible outside this.

makmugens said:
Two, I have often seen pictures of giant poles of radiation escaping from the poles of the Black Hole. If those pictures are true, how? If nothing can go beyond the speed of light and the Black Hole pulls everything in traveling at the speed of light (especially from its own central area i would think) then it would seem that either these radiation geysers are being expelled at speeds beyond the speed of light or that gravity is not as strong as light or it doesn't exist or exist in the way we think.

Perhaps we can't explain it because, in some way, it does not exist. Or the explanations are wrong? Something is wrong?

Any thoughts to add? It's a topic I can talk forever about.
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The radiations out of the black holes are somewhat a mystery but we can speculate that whatever starts them is above the speed of light, and the parts of them that become observable are those that fall below the speed of light.
 
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ab9924 said:
Mass never exists. It is only a mathematical concept, to serve as a proportionality constant between 2 measurable quantities which are force and acceleration. The 19th century works of Eotvos and Einstein establish the equivalency of the gravitational mass with the generic inertial mass.
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The way I understand it mass as we call it is really a misnomer and actually exists as concentrated or denser energy?

I think gravity is a result of the negative pressure exerted by zero energy space expansion pushing objects apart. Dark energy is a kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy but could be the cause of gravitons.
 
Last I read, the elusive graviton of the quantum theory of gravity has yet to be "observed".

If it does exist, it really hides well. Perhaps it's one of those things that would require an impossible violation of the laws of physics to evidence it.

If it doesn't exist, then perhaps the effect we experience and call "gravity" is a combination of all the other forces together.

Either way, we may not ever know what it is even though we know that it is.

In this way, gravity is a lot like love -- we know it holds us together, but we struggle to understand its essense.
 
Ontologuy said:
Last I read, the elusive graviton of the quantum theory of gravity has yet to be "observed".

If it does exist, it really hides well. Perhaps it's one of those things that would require an impossible violation of the laws of physics to evidence it.

If it doesn't exist, then perhaps the effect we experience and call "gravity" is a combination of all the other forces together.

Either way, we may not ever know what it is even though we know that it is.

In this way, gravity is a lot like love -- we know it holds us together, but we struggle to understand its essense.
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The theory of the Higgs boson explains a lot but it's yet to be observed. I'm not sure the way photons travel in a wave and particle is completely understood. The neutrino has mysterious properties. Many things happen that we're still trying to figure out.
 
grip said:
The theory of the Higgs boson explains a lot but it's yet to be observed. I'm not sure the way photons travel in a wave and particle is completely understood. The neutrino has mysterious properties. Many things happen that we're still trying to figure out.
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Though evidenced and observed are two different things, they can be similar enough in physics to mean "it exists", and I read somewhere recently that supercollider work has now pretty much evidenced the Higgs boson.

As for that wave particle thing, I once thought I understood it .. then some time passed .. and now I'm too old to recall.

But yes, there remains many great mysteries and so far a lack of a sufficient consensus as to a theory of everything.

We simply don't know everything, and maybe that's just as well -- nobody likes a know-it-all .. especially God. ;)
 
Ontologuy said:
Though evidenced and observed are two different things, they can be similar enough in physics to mean "it exists", and I read somewhere recently that supercollider work has now pretty much evidenced the Higgs boson.

As for that wave particle thing, I once thought I understood it .. then some time passed .. and now I'm too old to recall.

But yes, there remains many great mysteries and so far a lack of a sufficient consensus as to a theory of everything.

We simply don't know everything, and maybe that's just as well -- nobody likes a know-it-all .. especially God. ;)
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According to this article the most recent I could find they have "sort of" evidenced the Higgs.

Photons are the carrier force for the electromagnetic wave but exhibit particle and wave characteristics due to its massless, oscillating two-dimensional plane that does not have a third dimension in its direction of travel.

My knowledge comes from standing on the shoulders of giants.
 
grip said:
The way I understand it mass as we call it is really a misnomer and actually exists as concentrated or denser energy?

I think gravity is a result of the negative pressure exerted by zero energy space expansion pushing objects apart. Dark energy is a kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the Universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy but could be the cause of gravitons.
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I guess I can't support your theory about mass and energy. But there is a very good alternative working model about gravity, this one is based on the "M" theory and assumes that gravity is a resonance that overlaps into our universe from another universe as its source. This one can explain why gravity is so different from the other resonance types, in that it is apolar for example.
 
didn't Einstein say that gravity isn't actually a force, but simply bending of space-time by mass?
 
Sarcogito said:
Admittedly, I only have a rudimentary understanding, but the gist I garnered from Einstein’s work, and others, is that gravity is the bending of space.
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I don't know if that's an acceptable definition. An electric field can also be considered a bending of spacetime in a different dimension, but it's not gravity.

The more accurate definition is to say that it's a mathematical quantity calculated from the bending of spacetime around an object.
 
The giant particle acellerator was built to find the Boson particle which is believed to be responsible for gravity and mass. Gravity is the most important factor in the formation of the universe yet we don't really know what causes it. We do know that without gravity the energy from the big bang wuld never have formed stars or anthing else.
 
Actually we know that gravity exists for multiple reasons.

Example 1. If you look at earth's orbit, it's not a perfect circle, it's elliptical. This implies that at some point the earth is closer to the sun than at other times. It just so happens that durring these times the earths speed increases as it gets closer to the sun, then when it starts getting farther it's speed declines. It acts more or less like a sling shot. Because of this action we can infer that gravitational pull is stronger at these areas, causing the earth to speed up, and when it gets out of that area, the gravitational pull is less and the earth slows down.
Orbit.jpg
If this does not answer your question please clarify it, and if you'd like more examples just msg me. This doesn't seem to be a question about whether gravity exist or not, but rather how is it able to work in such a way that all of this is possible. And one more thing: this all happened by random chance....
 
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