How are we sure that gravity isn’t due to a flat earth being accelerated upwards? Maybe it’s an elastic string existing in the ether that pulls objects together? What if all matter is composed of very tiny colonial organism that try to move towards each other to create a super organism? Apples falling left or right is preposterous, but we do have things that fall upwards, like balloons and bubbles. What if there is a divine being that just decides how everything moves. Gravity being a side effect of mass bending spacetime really seems like some B plot sci-fi bullshit.
Edit: what I’m trying to convey here, is that a disbelief of something being true simply because there are multiple other beliefs or explanations isn’t a solid ground to stand on. What is true or real is irrespective of humanity’s explanations.
In relativity, the surface of the earth kind of is being accelerated upwards. It’s not flat, it’s spherical, but if put in a box with no way to observe outside, there is no test that can prove you’re not being accelerated upwards. This is because there actually isn’t a real difference. There could be elastic strings. In fact, certain unproven theories (that could supercede relativity and the standard model) imagines all fundamental forces, including gravity, as strings.
The biggest thing is that many versions of religion make claims that consistently contradict observable reality. A ton of people have religious ideas that have already been contradicted by science, while many more have ideas that can be proven wrong as science progresses. Some people do have religious ideas that might never be proven wrong in principle, but the biggest reason they can’t be falsified is because they don’t say anything about our material reality that can’t be said with simpler theories. Basically, if the idea has no consequence on what exists in this world, why should we use it to guide our beliefs?
There are a countless number of ideas about what Gods outside our universe might want us to do. Just as easily as a Christian God might exist that takes copies of our mind and puts us in eternal heaven after death if we display Christian virtues in life, a God might exist that rewards only the cruelest and most murderous people with heaven. It might be that the worst people are rewarded by God and the best people punished. Should we murder others and never show kindness to other people if the God that can give us eternal life wants us to? According to people that justify their morals with God and heaven, we must.
As someone that most religious fundamentalists would burn at the stake, this is not a hypothetical. The religious right often thinks justice and fairness is a vice, while God demands his believers destroy the unnatural. If you only look at what they advocate, you’d think they worship the evil, anti-Christian God I came up with. Yet they claim Christ wants them to prevent me from living. Ethics cannot be reasonably justified on the basis of religion. We must look elsewhere to discover what is right and wrong.
No. I’m not going to pretend to understand the math, but the reality has more to do with other forces resisting the pull of gravity. Gravity simply says that you’re pulled towards the center of the earth, but the other fundamental forces are necessary to explain why you don’t get there. Various repulsive forces resist the pull of gravity, like the fact that certain particles resist occupying the same space. The reason you’re basically being accelerated upwards is because the repulsive forces keeping the earth from collapsing into a singularity keep you from being at rest. When you’re on the surface of a planet and not in free fall, you experience the feeling of weight, because you’re not truly at rest.
The way to picture it is space constantly falling inward towards the net source of gravity. If you’re in free fall towards a planet’s surface, you’re actually at rest in relativistic terms. However, because the mass of the planet warps spacetime, you staying at the same spot in space results in you and the source of gravity reaching eachother at some point in time. Neither you or the other object are actually being pulled together by a force, the way both you and the object warp spacetime results in you occupying the same point in space at a future point in time without anything changing your momentum.
When you’re experiencing the sensation of weight, that isn’t really some force of gravity, but an illusion originating from the forces that keep the ground from giving way beneath you, combined with inertia.
A free body diagram uses classical physics, but the effects that we see in classical mechanics come out of deeper truths in relativistic mechanics. Part of it is the speed of light which is the same for everyone, no matter how fast you move. No matter how fast you travel, light always moves at a specific speed.
Time dilates depending on where you are or how fast you travel compared to others, observers can’t agree which event preceded another, and objects in orbit around a planet travel in a straight line. A free body diagram uses the assumptions of a flat plane where parallel lines never intersect, but relativity explains the apparent force of gravity using curvature on that plane. In curved space, the sum of all angles on a triangle are not necessarily 180°. It’s not just more complicated, it fundamentally throws out one of the foundational geometric postulates. However, it is the second most verified theory in all of physics.
And the wonderful thing about it is we know it is incomplete, because relativity math stops working at the quantum level. Quantum math and relatively math used to be incompatible… The standard model of physics unifies the two(or is it “is unifying” still?), but with that some truly mind-boggling math came out of it. String theory, m theory, multi universe theories… experiments that show macro objects that should respect relativity math behaving according to quantum math… And we are just at the beginning of understanding the implications of what some of the math suggests.
Well, if something can be demonstrably true or false, then we can get concrete answers. Gravity is proven. There is no evidece–so far-- of tiny organisms controlling matter. Religion, on the other hand, could not be falsified in the scientific sense. Many religious claims have been disproven or could not even be proven. Unless you’re a Mormon, we all know Jesus didn’t come to America. There is no evidence of Red Sea parting according to archaeological studies. Someone claiming to seeing ghost right now, how can that even be proven or disproven? Edit: actually, Brian Cox made a great point that since we created a machine that could detect particles that is billionth of a size smaller, we still have not detected any signs of ghostly presence. It’s a convincing point and to me, it sounds like he did debunk ghosts.
If I had to pick one thing in woo that had an even small chance of being true it would be ghosts. Just given the sheer volume of cultures that have reported them. Maybe 5% chance while skydaddy has a 4% chance.
I have zero interest in truth. Science is about shutting up, calculating, and model building. If demons making things fall better explained the data of gravity that would be the model, but as of right this moment a demon based model is a poor one.
How are we sure that gravity isn’t due to a flat earth being accelerated upwards? Maybe it’s an elastic string existing in the ether that pulls objects together? What if all matter is composed of very tiny colonial organism that try to move towards each other to create a super organism? Apples falling left or right is preposterous, but we do have things that fall upwards, like balloons and bubbles. What if there is a divine being that just decides how everything moves. Gravity being a side effect of mass bending spacetime really seems like some B plot sci-fi bullshit.
Edit: what I’m trying to convey here, is that a disbelief of something being true simply because there are multiple other beliefs or explanations isn’t a solid ground to stand on. What is true or real is irrespective of humanity’s explanations.
In relativity, the surface of the earth kind of is being accelerated upwards. It’s not flat, it’s spherical, but if put in a box with no way to observe outside, there is no test that can prove you’re not being accelerated upwards. This is because there actually isn’t a real difference. There could be elastic strings. In fact, certain unproven theories (that could supercede relativity and the standard model) imagines all fundamental forces, including gravity, as strings.
The biggest thing is that many versions of religion make claims that consistently contradict observable reality. A ton of people have religious ideas that have already been contradicted by science, while many more have ideas that can be proven wrong as science progresses. Some people do have religious ideas that might never be proven wrong in principle, but the biggest reason they can’t be falsified is because they don’t say anything about our material reality that can’t be said with simpler theories. Basically, if the idea has no consequence on what exists in this world, why should we use it to guide our beliefs?
There are a countless number of ideas about what Gods outside our universe might want us to do. Just as easily as a Christian God might exist that takes copies of our mind and puts us in eternal heaven after death if we display Christian virtues in life, a God might exist that rewards only the cruelest and most murderous people with heaven. It might be that the worst people are rewarded by God and the best people punished. Should we murder others and never show kindness to other people if the God that can give us eternal life wants us to? According to people that justify their morals with God and heaven, we must.
As someone that most religious fundamentalists would burn at the stake, this is not a hypothetical. The religious right often thinks justice and fairness is a vice, while God demands his believers destroy the unnatural. If you only look at what they advocate, you’d think they worship the evil, anti-Christian God I came up with. Yet they claim Christ wants them to prevent me from living. Ethics cannot be reasonably justified on the basis of religion. We must look elsewhere to discover what is right and wrong.
That would imply that gravity is a function of volume instead of mass. Yes?
No. I’m not going to pretend to understand the math, but the reality has more to do with other forces resisting the pull of gravity. Gravity simply says that you’re pulled towards the center of the earth, but the other fundamental forces are necessary to explain why you don’t get there. Various repulsive forces resist the pull of gravity, like the fact that certain particles resist occupying the same space. The reason you’re basically being accelerated upwards is because the repulsive forces keeping the earth from collapsing into a singularity keep you from being at rest. When you’re on the surface of a planet and not in free fall, you experience the feeling of weight, because you’re not truly at rest.
The way to picture it is space constantly falling inward towards the net source of gravity. If you’re in free fall towards a planet’s surface, you’re actually at rest in relativistic terms. However, because the mass of the planet warps spacetime, you staying at the same spot in space results in you and the source of gravity reaching eachother at some point in time. Neither you or the other object are actually being pulled together by a force, the way both you and the object warp spacetime results in you occupying the same point in space at a future point in time without anything changing your momentum.
When you’re experiencing the sensation of weight, that isn’t really some force of gravity, but an illusion originating from the forces that keep the ground from giving way beneath you, combined with inertia.
This just sounds like a free body diagram but more complicated.
A free body diagram uses classical physics, but the effects that we see in classical mechanics come out of deeper truths in relativistic mechanics. Part of it is the speed of light which is the same for everyone, no matter how fast you move. No matter how fast you travel, light always moves at a specific speed.
Time dilates depending on where you are or how fast you travel compared to others, observers can’t agree which event preceded another, and objects in orbit around a planet travel in a straight line. A free body diagram uses the assumptions of a flat plane where parallel lines never intersect, but relativity explains the apparent force of gravity using curvature on that plane. In curved space, the sum of all angles on a triangle are not necessarily 180°. It’s not just more complicated, it fundamentally throws out one of the foundational geometric postulates. However, it is the second most verified theory in all of physics.
And the wonderful thing about it is we know it is incomplete, because relativity math stops working at the quantum level. Quantum math and relatively math used to be incompatible… The standard model of physics unifies the two(or is it “is unifying” still?), but with that some truly mind-boggling math came out of it. String theory, m theory, multi universe theories… experiments that show macro objects that should respect relativity math behaving according to quantum math… And we are just at the beginning of understanding the implications of what some of the math suggests.
Finally, someone gets it!
Well, if something can be demonstrably true or false, then we can get concrete answers. Gravity is proven. There is no evidece–so far-- of tiny organisms controlling matter. Religion, on the other hand, could not be falsified in the scientific sense. Many religious claims have been disproven or could not even be proven. Unless you’re a Mormon, we all know Jesus didn’t come to America. There is no evidence of Red Sea parting according to archaeological studies. Someone claiming to seeing ghost right now, how can that even be proven or disproven? Edit: actually, Brian Cox made a great point that since we created a machine that could detect particles that is billionth of a size smaller, we still have not detected any signs of ghostly presence. It’s a convincing point and to me, it sounds like he did debunk ghosts.
If I had to pick one thing in woo that had an even small chance of being true it would be ghosts. Just given the sheer volume of cultures that have reported them. Maybe 5% chance while skydaddy has a 4% chance.
I have zero interest in truth. Science is about shutting up, calculating, and model building. If demons making things fall better explained the data of gravity that would be the model, but as of right this moment a demon based model is a poor one.