If something is inbetween two objects how do the particles know there is something bigger behind the object it needs to attract to?
In: Physics
If someone in this reddit really knows why, he would get a nobel prize.
We know less about gravity than most people think.
People can explain how it works but not why.
Actual ELI5: We don’t know how to because we don’t know how gravity works. We can predict how it will behave very accurately, but we don’t understand the actual reason why it happens. We can have very accurate models; this much mass will create this much gravity, but why it does that is still a mystery. Since we don’t know what causes it, we cannot even start to block or dampen it.
We actually don’t understand gravity that well. We think we do because of how well we can generate calculations and predict the movement of planets. But what exactly generates the gravitational force? What is it about mass, or atoms, that generates the force as a natural byproduct? How can it have infinite range? These questions are still a mystery and prevent us from doing things like reproducing real gravity in a lab setting.
So in reality we can’t measure gravity directly or even sense/detect it. Everything we do involving gravity is either an indirect measurement of it’s effects (like a scale) or a calculation based on mass and distance.
It’s pretty much impossible to create something to counter a force that you can’t even detect. All we can do for now is generate forces to cancel out it’s calculable strength.
I like how not even proper scientists have figured out the answer to the the GRAVITY QUESTION and “The effects of Force Damping”…
But here we have 1.8k “Redditors” already answering it and at the same time, dumbing it to ELI5.
Absolute genius!
Why is it every time I visit this sub, nobody knows how to simplify it to honor the sub’s name?
[This video helps](https://youtu.be/MTY1Kje0yLg)
It’s not a complete definition of gravity, but it’ll help you understand.
Well, depends on what you mean by blocked or dampened.
Let’s look at heat here. Heat, just like gravity, is type of energy. It behaves a bit differently when it comes to exact science, but for our purposes it works fine.
How do we dampen or stop heat? We put something between heat source and what we want to stop from getting heated up. Heat dissapear? No, it gets absorbed into the material we used as a heat shield. Same with removing heat from object. We coat it in something that has low heat and well tranfers heat itself like water. The heat dissapears, it’s just divided between more matter, so original matter has less of it.
Similarly is with gravity. We can damper it by putting a force between two object that attract themself by gravity. That’s how we achieve flight. We create enough force to stop gravity. Like heat before, gravity doesn’t dissapear, it just is counteracted.
The only major difference is that we cannot really stop creation of gravity like we can put out the fire. Cause fire is a chemical reaction that generates heat. We can stop that reaction. But gravity is generated by existance of matter itself. And removing matter from existance is way harder.
But to shortly answer your question: we can damper gravity. That’s what wings and engines on planes do. That’s what you do for a short moment when you jump. Or even when you just stand. Your legs damper gravity enough so you aren’t crushed into the earth beneath you. There’s just a lot of gravity created non-stop.
I feel like a lot of the answers are presenting great theories, that are ultimately unproven and largely are just describing how we know things act.
The truth is, we don’t fucking know. We just don’t know a lot about gravity, what it ‘is’ and how it functions.
We know it has a pulling force, it acts broadly based on size of object. And there’s theories it fits nicely into for equations and working things out by maths.
But there’s a whole lot more we don’t know about gravity…yet…
So, even though we live on Earth, and the Earth’s mass keeps us on the surface, do other bodies with a mass greater than that of the Earth (ex. the Sun) affect us as well? Even a tiny bit?
Gravity isn’t pulling on stuff like magnets or a vacuum.
It bends space and time. To block gravity, you’d need to bend space the other way. To do so would require an absolutely incredible scientific discovery, and is the basis for the hypothetical warp drive.
The other explanations here are not really getting at the heart of your question (which isn’t any different for gravity – other forces do the same thing).
Your error is in going “this is a solid object and nothing can go through it”. But what you think of as “solid objects” are not completely impenetrable. As an everyday example, light has absolutely no trouble going through glass.
[EDITED to clarify: this part is here to explain to OP how their idea of ‘solid’ is inaccurate. It’s not directly about how forces can go through things] ~~’Solid’ objects don’t fill up all the space in the region they occupy (in fact, they’re not even *close* to filling up all the available space). They seem solid on human scales because electrons repel one another, so once two atoms get even somewhat close, they’re pushed apart by the repulsion of the electrons in each atom.~~
On an even more fundamental level, fields (like the electromagnetic field or, if you set aside some of the weirder aspects of relativity for a sec, the gravitational field) aren’t different things from the physical objects around you. Objects are “made of” these fields, in the same way that a wave in the ocean is made of water. What we think of as a particle is just a place where these fields take on different values from other parts of the field, in the same way that a wave is just a place where the water is a little bit higher. And so your question becomes, roughly, “how can water travel through a wave?”.
If this seems strange, well, it is. There’s a reason it took fifty years and some very surprising experiments for the most brilliant minds in physics to figure it out.
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