I just can’t put my head around the fact that gravity isn’t just a force
EDIT : I now get how it gets stretched and how it’s comparable to putting a ball on a stretchy piece of fabric and everything but why is *gravity* comparable to that. I guess my new question is what is gravity ? 🙂 and how can weight affect it ?
In: Physics
We don’t really have a “Why” answer for you.
Keep asking ‘why’ about any topic, and you eventually end up at physics.
Asking ‘why’ about physics, you won’t really get a satisfying answer.
To try to explain gravity for you:
Time and space are connected, and collectively referred to as ‘Spacetime’.
Think of space like it’s a big 3-dimensional square grid that exists everywhere in the universe.
Time is harder to picture, but time is just another dimension, another coordinate, exactly the same as up/down, left/right, forward/back.
In old, less-accurate physics, ‘Gravity’ is a force that pulls massive objects (objects that have mass) closer together. The notion of spacetime doesn’t exist here, time and space are thought of as separate.
This is Newtonian gravity.
In modern, more accurate physics, gravity refers to the idea that massive objects distort spacetime.
This is General Relativity.
In exactly the same way that gravity affects how you move through space, gravity also affects how you move through time.
We don’t know “Why”, but in the early 1900s, Albert Einstein did explain ‘How’ gravity works.
By thinking of gravity as “Mass Distorts Spacetime”, rather than “Masses get pulled closer, but time isn’t involved at all”, Einstein solved all the little issues that Newtonian gravoty couldn’t quite answer.
It was surprising to many, but the idea is deceptively simple if you can accept that time and space are sort of the same thing.
It’s the fact it’s such a simple idea, and that it accounted for every small discrepancy found between Newtonian gravity and reality.
It’s the fact that we keep finding or inventing new ways to test General Relativity, and every time it’s been able to accurately predict reality.
All of these things together tell us that no matter why, this is HOW gravity works.
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