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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If you attach a ball to a string and spin it around, you can feel forces acting on the ball because it is attempting to go in a straight line, and you’re consistently applying energy get around the conservation of momentum. You can do this in space, on Earth, or anywhere.
The mass will keep trying to go in a straight line, and if you let go of the rope, it will.
Consider then, why a satellite can orbit around the Earth in a circle forever (ELI5 version of forever), without needing to constantly correct it’s direction (as there’s no rope to constrain it), and no accelerometer would ever be able to tell that you were in fact going in a circle.
Mass, via gravity, has changed the shape of spacetime such that your satellite is in fact going in a straight line around the Earth, and there is subsequently no violation of the conservation of momentum. It’s not actually doing anything to the satellite, so much as to the spacetime that the satellite is passing through.
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