Gravity- it’s known as the “weakest fundamental force”, but we know the “attraction” is really just objects falling along the curvature of space toward a more massive object. I don’t understand how this explanation of gravity relates to the other fundamental forces.
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Ive always struggled with this too.
The best way I’ve seen this visualized is with a large rubber sheet stretched on a frame. Put two balls on the mat far enough away from eachother and nothing happens. You just have two balls on a rubber sheet making dents in the sheet.
Move the balls close enough and they will move towards eachother until they are touching and you have one larger dent in the sheet.
This is gravity in action. The mass of the two balls are now added together and their effect on the surrounding area has increased accordingly.
The dent in the rubber sheet is a representation of a gravity well, a curvature of space and time.
This however does not show the full picture, it shows gravity as existing in a single plane and implies a singular direction for the atraction. But when we look at objects in our solar system, they are not all in the same plane and we have objects that can orbit eachother at any 360 degree angle from their centre.
This is because space is 3 dimensional, and space isnt bending its stretching and compacting in all 360 degrees, and the degree of the stretch is a function of the objects mass, and the distance from the centre of the mass.
You can think of it like a weakening wave eminating from the centre, when the edges of two objects space distortions approach eachother and touch, their distortions interact much like a wave function. The degree of distortion increases at the edge as the wave functions add. That is, the space at their edges compresses and the objects become closer.
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