Gravity isn’t a force?

Question

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.

In: 152

Answer 1

Lets talk a little history! It’ll help understand much better than just an answer

So this guy Isaac Newton in 1687 published a physics paper describing gravity basically perfectly, and gave equations for it and everything. Huge deal, He described it as a force which objects ‘attract’ one another over any distance and his equations could be used to describe what we see in the world extremely well. He got it right. Except that, its completely and totally wrong. His equation do work in describing the world from a math perspective, but only to a point and then they don’t work

So Einstein comes, and well, does a lot, but instead of Newton’s ‘gravity is attraction’ thing, he says, No, Newton, the previous god of science and math was wrong. There isn’t any such thing as an attractive force or gravity, Gravity instead is an outcome we see, not an attractive force itself. Instead, space itself is affected by things with mass. This mass, any mass, bends and curves space towards them, instead of being attracted to each other, space itself is bent and things can ‘fall’ towards each other, but there is no force. We had previously been interpreting these objects ‘falling’ towards each other as an attractive force of gravity– it is not, it is just us seeing space bending.

Einstein basically said, Newton’s stuff is good, like super good, but thats not at all how it actually works… its way weirder

And now we have Einstein’s theory… which many people in physics now–and for a long time–have also felt isn’t entirely correct either (basically its just missing something, otherwise its mostly correct), although for very different reasons than Newton’s not being right. Even Einstein wasn’t entirely convinced his was the final solution, though he wavered on that a bit. So people are looking at ways Einstein’s theory can be improved, kinda like he improved Newton.

This doesn’t mean that gravity isn’t a force though… it just depends on how you define force, in some definitions, gravity would not be force, in others, it may be.