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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Imagine you have a deep, round hole in the ground, and you want to put a ball at the center, without gluing it in place. If you roll the ball down the side of the hole, from really far away, it’ll start to fall into the hole, getting closer and closer to the center as time goes on. Mathematicians say it’s “rolling along a geodesic”; basically, it’s moving in the straightest possible line it can, given that it’s confined to the surface of this hole. What just happened when the ball fell in? If the ball is a laser beam, instead, it’ll follow the same path it did before! If you were on the surface of the ball, and you didn’t see it fall, you wouldn’t even be able to notice that it did, except that it gets a little cooler when the digging guy sticks it in the ground.
There’s really no sensible way to say that gravity “is” a force in this analogy. If anything, in this scenario, the “force” of gravity comes from the curvature of the hole, not from the ball at the bottom!
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