I understand that gravity is the curvature of space time. If that’s true, doesn’t it fully explain gravity? Why do we need gravity waves and/or gravitons?
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Gravity waves are just changes in gravitational force due to changes in mass (well location of the mass)
You can’t really increase/decrease the mass of an object, but you can move it around, or maybe jettison a big chunk of it away. So if you take like two black holes orbiting each other very quickly, they move closer and farther from you increasing and decreasing the amount of gravitational force you feel as their distance from you increases and decreases, and that shows up as a wave which can be detected with sensitive enough instruments.
As for gravitons though gravitons are a particle that falls under the standard model of quantum physics. Curved space falls under relativity, a completely separate and independent theory. Both explain things well enough one on large scales and one in small scales, but both are not complete theories of everything. And unifying the two, is one of those things physicists as re trying really hard to do.
The idea with the graviton is that it’s behavior when properly described would reproduce the same behavior relativity describes, just the same way that relativity reproduces the same behavior newtons laws do given the right scale and wiggle room for measurement tolerances.
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