My coworker told me gravity isn’t a force it’s an effect mass has on space time, like falling into a hole or something. We’re not physicists, I don’t understand.
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What does it feel like to gently float down a moving river?
Unless you bump into something, it actually doesn’t feel like anything at all. You’re moving along with the water. You don’t really feel the water “pushing” on you, like some kind of force. You don’t need to push against the water to be moving. You and the water move along together.
But what if you bump into a rock and get stuck? Now you can’t move along with the river. Now, you suddenly very much feel the force of the water pushing on you, and the force of your body pushing against the rock.
Gravity is like water in a river. It is *space itself* being bent in a way that it basically continually “flows” towards things with mass. If you simply flow along with it, you don’t feel a thing. You don’t even feel like you’re falling, or speeding up. There’s no force. You just float along with it, even though you’re “at rest.”
But when you hit the rock in the stream (in this case, the surface of the earth), now suddenly it feels like space itself is some “force” pushing you towards the center of the earth, and the earth is pushing back on you. But that is an illusion. Nothing is pushing you downwards.
Your body, “at rest,” with no effort or force acting on it, wants to move towards the center of the earth. But it can’t. The actual force you feel is the ground is stopping it, as space continues to “flow” towards the center of the earth, right through you, and your chair, and the ground.
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