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Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

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Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#81
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we moving through time with constant speed? Or we're constantly accelerating through time?

We're moving through spacetime with a constant speed, so the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.

I still don’t understand the graphs at the link, but this intuitively makes sense to me. Thank you - I now have a new, apparently accurate mental model of relativity.

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light is moving so much faster. In the same two seconds it crosses a much larger distance in space. The line is only straight in spacetime, not in space.

If I’m understanding, a theoretical ball thrown at 1c would follow the same path as a photon?

Yes, although you can't actually get anything with mass to travel at 1c (subject to our current understanding of physics).

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a parabola in a uniform gravity field, an ellipse in a circular gravity field coming from a point mass. So if you want to be really pedantic, it's never an ellipse because the Earth is not a point mass. It would be equivalent to a point mass if the Earth were a perfect sphere of uniform density, but it isn't. In reality it's a potato like mass blob that's approximated by what geodesists call the "geoid". So in o…

> it's never an ellipse because the Earth is not a point mass. At least classically, a sphere is indistinguishable (gravitationally) from a point mass while you're outside it. The earth is pretty sphere-ish, locally speaking.

> The earth is pretty sphere-ish, locally speaking.

Kinda. There are mountains, they have their own gravitational attraction, and it can be measured... even in the 18th century! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment

It all depends on how pedantic one wants to be :)

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#84
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under special relativity, everyone and everything moves at a constant speed `c` through spacetime. If you feel like you're not moving, it's because all your speed is being put towards travelling faster through time. Conversely, if you manage to move very fast through space, the world around you will appear to speed up, because you've had to trade off some of your forward travel through time so as to travel in space;…

And at the same time, in your new frame of reference, you're still moving at exactly c through the time and 0 through space. But your time axis is no longer parallel with the time axis of the rest of the world.

Axes being parallel by whose point of view?

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#85
post #70

Gravity is a force in the same way the centrifugal force is a force An artifact of rotating coordinate frames in one, the curvature of spacetime in the other

I think you mean centripetal force. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Centrifugal_Force_vs_Centr...

No I mean centrifugal. It's a fictitious force, an artifact of choosing a rotating non inertial coordinate frame.

Gravity arises similarly, by being in a non inertial frame induced by mass energy

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_force

This was the key insight behind Einstein attempting to get general relativity working.

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a parabola in a uniform gravity field, an ellipse in a circular gravity field coming from a point mass. So if you want to be really pedantic, it's never an ellipse because the Earth is not a point mass. It would be equivalent to a point mass if the Earth were a perfect sphere of uniform density, but it isn't. In reality it's a potato like mass blob that's approximated by what geodesists call the "geoid". So in o…

> it's never an ellipse because the Earth is not a point mass. At least classically, a sphere is indistinguishable (gravitationally) from a point mass while you're outside it. The earth is pretty sphere-ish, locally speaking.

And a ball thrown in the air follows a parabola, locally speaking. At least, you're better off correcting for air resistance before you sub in the ellipse equation.

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#87
A pretty good model. Thank you.

The model shown is for 1D space and 1D time, and this 2D spacetime is curved, remaining 2D. Can you though show us a 3D model of curved 2D spacetime? Maybe as a rotatable, scaleable 3D scene, where more complex phenomena, like planetary motion around a star, would be possible to show?

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#88
My enlightening moment about general relativity: apples do not fall on the ground, instead, the earth is inflating, and the inflation of the earth is accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2. Eventually, the ground catches the apple.

Of course, you are going to tell me that the earth is not inflating, obviously, because it is still the same size after so many years.

But here is the trick: the earth is inflating at the same rate as spacetime contracts. If the earth didn't inflate, the contraction of spacetime would have collapsed it into a black hole.

Note: It is related to Einstein's elevator thought experiment. Here, the inflating earth replaces the rocket powered elevator.

Note 2: If the idea of an inflating earth bothers you, I suggest you start considering that the earth is flat, seriously! Flat Earthers took Einstein's thought experiment quite literally and consider the Earth to be a disk that is continuously accelerated upwards. And in fact, if free fall trajectories were parabolic, that would be the correct explanations. In reality, because the earth is not flat, free fall trajectories are elliptic, though it is only apparent on a large scale.

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's never an ellipse because the Earth is not a point mass. At least classically, a sphere is indistinguishable (gravitationally) from a point mass while you're outside it. The earth is pretty sphere-ish, locally speaking.

> The earth is pretty sphere-ish, locally speaking. Kinda. There are mountains, they have their own gravitational attraction, and it can be measured... even in the 18th century! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiehallion_experiment It all depends on how pedantic one wants to be :)

The first time I heard of the concept, it wasn't actually that, it was how in the 60s, they had to correct for mascons in the moon while orbiting.

Re: Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime

#90
I'm curious, how does the "gravity is not a force" viewpoint relate to the hypothesized graviton particle [1]?

Are they incompatible viewpoints, or just different perspectives on the same thing? (E.g. are gravitons hypothesized to disappear depending on frame of reference?)

I'm assuming they're incompatible (that we need the theory of everything [2] to reconcile them) but would love to know if there's something I'm missing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

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