Why can’t gravity be blocked or dampened?

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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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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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