What is gravity?

Damn, this meme has some weight to it
- I am drawn to it.
  
  It is your density
- It’s heavy stuff man.

Everyone always asks what is gravity.
No one ever asks how is gravity.
Poor gravity, always helping us keep our shit together but no one ever truly understands the weight on gravities shoulder.
- Excuse me, but I don't see why I should have sympathy with the boot on our necks keeping us all down. Just imagine the freedom we would have if we weren't weight down by this oppression!
  
  dies b/c the atmosphere floated away
  
  "I get it! Platypus is a metaphor for whatever's keeping you down!"
  Gravity is a platypus

Perfect use of this format. "I don't know" is the foundation of wisdom. See: reddit where too many think they know.
- See: ~~reddit~~ literally any message board where members of the general populace can freely participate where too many think they know.
  FTFY
  
  Dunning-Keuger effect is real amd and it takes humility to avoid it.
- I know just enough to know that I don't know anything.
- https://youtu.be/ZcV25N37-C4?si=h03Zqeo7I8uwpwhG

It's not difficult. Gravity is like magnetism for things that aren't magnetic.
- Also for those that are magnetic
  
  I will assume that to be true, because it makes sense.
- Sweet just tell me how to find same polarity gravimagnetics to put under my hoverboard
  
  You just need some isolated antimatter.
- Yeah but if you scratch a little bit the surface, the comparison falls quickly. Okay, magnetism has two signs. Why not gravity ? Why does it attract and not repel? Okay, magnetism is carried by photons. What carries gravity?
- Wrong. Magnets don't float.

Working in neuroscience of consciousness field I feel him deeply. Although 57k sounds amazing to a Europoor
- You can basically half American salary numbers because we have to pay for a lot of stuff that Europeans usually don't need to pay for. $57k in America is struggling if you live in a city. Anything below $40k is one car repair away from being financially ruined.
  
  Anything below $40k is one car repair away from being financially ruined.
  You guys have cars while being poor? Sorry but seems stupid to me
  
  What are we considering in vs out of city? Does in city mean just downtown, within city limits, within metro area? And what are we considering a city - 300k population?
- 57k sounds nice until you realize that 1200 go to your health plan and you still need to copay hundreds every time something comes up.
  
  American salaries are also always presented as gross income before taxes instead if net income after taxes like in Europe.
- The biggest lesson from neuroscience: Most psychology is BS and the entire field is little better than pseudoscience.
  
  I think this is a very incorrect take. I don't think neuroscience has been able to make a single claim against psychology yet, nor any real and predictable claims at all which place it above psychology in application or correctness. Psychology of course has problems, and I'm very open to discussions of issues with methods and shit. But don't act like neuroscience has much of anything to say about it. They're entirely tangential fields with one at the experiential level and the other at the technical/non-experience level. Common mistake of thinking you know too much from the meme
  
  Really? What psychology has been disproven by neuroscience? Are psyc people resisting it or are they working together? Considering how much psyc has changed the world and helped people I think the idea that it's BS is a little strange.
  
  Damn I should have been a psychologist. I'm great at BS.

Yeah I think I'll be subscribing to this community. Thank you for the meme.

- No silly, gravity is caused by the fundamental fear of loneliness so pervasive and unrelenting in the universe that it causes the formation of stars and planets.
  
  But, like, maybe tho?
  
  This is no joke, pretty much most mystical religion’s cosmology.
  Like Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism etc.
  Not the gravity part, but basically that the first thought, after being came into existence, was longing for another, to be united.
  The first existence is in itself a separation from chaos, so its nature is “will”, wanting to fill a void.

"The nature of this elementary particle is best expressed through these thirty equations."
"Ok, ok, but what do those actually mean in reality?"
"Reality?"
- Most of those equations are full of things that can make sense, and then there is a fine structure constant.
  It's all over particles, but we don't know what it is. It has no units. It's just a number that is needed for physics to work.
  
  [The Fine-structure Constant] quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles.
  Why the constant should have this value is not understood, but there are a number of ways to measure its value.
  Sounds like we know what it is, we just don't know the reason for its value. (Edit: Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean)
  Wikipedia link
  
  Sounds a lot like what we used to call the "fudge factor".
- We still need to develop the equations for reality whatever that means

I still want to know what it is tho
- A force field generated by your mom's obesity
  
  So you are attracted to that, huh?
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU try to follow along with this. Also, forces have force particles, there appears to be no such thing for gravity though I think scientists are still working on this problem to this day. Mass seems to be derived from the higgs field but I am not knowledgeable enough to answer how that relates to gravity per se.
- Curvature of spacetime :)
  
  Lol
  
  If that were true, the gravity wave detector wouldn't work.

- Science progresses at the march of funerals
- It's almost like scientists are people, too.
  
  Remember kids, Appeal To Authority is bad for you.
  
  By people, do you mean neurotypical hustlers?

The squishy humanities version of this, in America at least, goes as follows:
In grade school you learn that the Civil War was about slavery.
In high school you learn that the Civil War was about a lot of complicated things.
In college you learn that the Civil War was about slavery.
- In Alabama you learn it's about Yankee Aggression.
  
  My mom (RIP) was a boomer born and raised in Georgia. In our house, we were taught that General Sherman was in hell right alongside Napoleon and Hitler.
  If he is, it's for his handling of the Native Americans and bison and not for how he prosecuted the March to the Sea. The Confederacy was a boil that needed popping.
- Apu learned in post-grad glasses that it was complicated again.
  
  That gag is cute, and I'm aware I'm killing the joke here, but it would have been funnier if it weren't for the fact that underpinning the "economic factors, both foreign and domestic" was just more slavery. The South was utterly dependent on it for their economic security and social identity, and it informed every decision their leaders made.

Genuinely we can't tell what it is. We once thought it was just a normal pull due to mass until Einstein proved us wrong during a solar eclipse where we could see stars that shouldn't be visible from our current position in orbit. Then we get into how it works, WHICH THERE IS NO TELLING AS THERE ARE TO MANY GOD DAMNED VARIABLES INVOLVED.
- You’re fucking with me, right?
  Stars were visible that shouldn’t have been visible?
  What am I missing?
  
  Stars that were behind the sun (within the radius of the sun, geometrically speaking) were visible due to gravitational lensing
  
  Gravity bends space itself (which makes it able to bend light). It's really fucky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Deflection_of_light_by_the_Sun
  It also fucks with time. If you saw the movie Interstellar, you know what this refers to.

Gravity is just the world trying to put all the stuff in the same area of space to waste less RAM
- Random Access Mass

- https://physicsworld.com/a/fruitloopery/
- Yea, me too, but I want whole quantum milk, none of that trash 2%
- Do you still have to clean up after quantum silly string?
  
  If you don't observe it you don't have to

I wish I made 57k a year.
- Now you can too! With our patented PhD system you will,
  Kill your social life!
  Kill your self-esteem, values, positivity and much much more.
  Spend the rest of your life fighting for tenure in an ever saturated field of your choice!
  Develop a growing sense of envy and dissatisfaction as you watch your friends in the corporate world quickly surpass you in income!
  With just 132 simple payments of $3,800 a month, all this can be yours!
  But wait, there's more! Call now and get your very own opportunity to be a TA! Enjoy belittling undergrads and sharing your growing disillusionment with the academic system. All while you're under pressure to complete your doctorate! Don't miss out!
  
  Oh and then!? Postdocs! Check acollierastro on youtube, she has a great video on postdoc exodus.
- For only 250k of college tuition?

There's a reason they call a hypothetical model that unites the standard model (quantum mechanics) and gravity (relativity) the Theory of Everything.
- Isn't more like grand unifying theory? Theory of everything is more broad and probably encapsulates the material and meta material.
  
  I think what the commenter was explaining was the difference between a hypothesis and a theory.
  This is for anyone else you seem to know the difference. Just as an fyi to anyone who doesn't know the difference, most laypeople say theory when they mean hypothesis.
  A hypothesis is "an assumption, an idea that is proposed for the sake of argument so that it can be tested to see if it might be true."
  A theory is "a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained."
  That's not very helpful, but basically a hypothesis is an untested answer whereas a theory is a whole lot of similar hypothesis's that have been answered and can be used to predict something.
  So when your crazy uncle/friend/co-worker says 'i have a theory that they're turning the damn frogs gay and I'm going to prove it.' They actually mean hypothesis. Why is this important? Cause words matter, that crazy person would be taken a lot less seriously if they didn't use words they didn't understand.

This is why I laugh at anyone who thinks we "Already know anything" or ever will
- At this point I take Simulation Theory about as seriously as someone saying "So, Creationism, but like, with a few more steps and a sci-fi horror twist!"

Timey wimey wibbly wobbly.
- Wibbily, wobbily, gravity's a flirt, keeps pulling me down, but never buys me dessert!

lemme give you a quick demonstration

Show us on the PhD where they hurt you.
- Somewhere in the region between the unrealistic deadlines, the post grad job prospects, and the price tag, sir.
  
  TW, please.

one unresolved corner of physics
Hardly! People board airplanes every single day and we still don't fundamentally understand the mechanisms of how lift works.
- When I thought there was higher pressure under the wing that pushed the plane up, I was happy. When I started thinking, instead, about little vacuum vortices above the wings pulling them up instead, I was suddenly much less comfortable with the whole proposition. Given the options and the limited effect on my daily life, I'm gotta go with Newton over Bernoulli on this one.
  
  ¿Porque no los dos?
  
  vacuum vortices above the wings pulling them up
  We know vacuums don't "pull" things. Instead it's air pressure elsewhere that isn't balanced by the vacuum that moves things in the direction of the vacuum.
- Wait how do we not know how lift works?
  
  I think it's more so that we know HOW it works but we don't know WHY it works
  
  How do we not know how gravity works??
- We don't? I thought we kind of did
  
  We do. Perfectly.
  What's trickey is modelling and simulating it cheaply.
  
  No we don't.
  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explain-why-planes-stay-in-the-air/#:~:text=On%20a%20strictly%20mathematical%20level,Both%20are%20incomplete%20explanations.
- Lift works the same way a tennis racket does.
  We know exactly why and how.
  
  No we do not.
  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explain-why-planes-stay-in-the-air/#:~:text=On%20a%20strictly%20mathematical%20level,Both%20are%20incomplete%20explanations.
- I heard that it was just the angle of the wings redirecting the air downwards as reaction mass, like how a rocket engine shoots air downwards.
  
  It is both, but the pressure one contributes more to lift. You can see this when a wing stalls, the airflow separates from the upper surface and the pressure difference is gone. The angle of a stalled wing still means air is directed downwards, but the overall lift is much smaller.
  At least that is what I've been told anyways

Now do doctors of sociology
- 0 to alcoholism in 11 years.
  
  What do you mean you don't have desk whiskey? EVERYONE has desk whiskey! Even the counselors!
  
  Pssh, sales can do that in 2.

So here's my lunesta fuelled dea on gravity.
Gravitons, like the rest of the standard model, are real. In order to measure them, we need incredibly high energy collisions.
In attempting to do this, our universe was created on accident. This is because our universe is in a black hole. But the cool shit is that black holes are really portals into our own universe. Instead of the energy spontaneously appearing as measurable particles, it's dark energy causing the expansion of the universe. The Dark energy ends up being gravitons, because gravitons are a boson and only interact with matter with the gravitational force. the black holes, then, take in "normal" fermions and bosons and spit out the gravitons. The graviton release causes an expansion of space time by "pulling" space time with it.
none of that is backed up by anything
- Missing a few turtles.
  
  Turtles all the way down.
  
  Don't forget the elephants!
- Add some string theory into the mix and it’s indistinguishable from Michio Kaku rambles.
  
  That particle accelerator really was the peak huh?
- You're sure the universe wasn't created by purpose? You're sure it was on accident?

... of space. The time part in spacetime is questionable yet again.
- Wait why - Aren't the clocks from Gps satellites only in sync with our clocks when they reach their defined speed and distance to earth's core? Isn't this related to the curvature of spacetime? Genuine question
  
  There's a new theory that time is only a side-effect of the warping of space and that they are not one and the same. Wouldn't change the result but has heavy implications on the larger scale.

You okay op?
- I'm in geoscience. Physicists are nerds. Touch grass, ya dweebs. We wear hiking clothes on campus and we aren't going on fieldwork until July. It's called dedication.
  
  Im a physicist and I took your advice and typed sudo touch grass and it said I don't have grass on my pc, what do I do?
  
  paleo, from the look of it. Vert or environmental?

57k per year just for making up technobabble? Shit, I'd settle for half of that.
- Did you miss the bit about 11 years of school to get to that point (and the debt that will come with that)?
  
  If there is one thing I've learned in my decades of life, is that If you try enough, you'll find somebody who will believe anything without checking for proof, including a made-up doctorate.
- I'd settle for half of that
  You mean 57k per year for making techno?
  
  The system is down

I respect physicists for doing something I can't. Realistically if I had the money and time, I could pursue a degree in it, I just need my work to be less abstract to stay sane.

See also: spin.
- spin is something that behaves like spin. the right answer is shut up and calculate
  
  WE SPIN. WE BALL.
- It's mind blowing to me that particles with no inherent physical shape or dimension can be considered "spinning" not because we observe them spinning but because they have literally all the characteristics of a spinning particle other than actual rotation around an axis
  
  Look man everything else is spinning so why not the tiny bits too
- Seems simple enough to me.
- Spin is easy, it just only shows in our current formulation of quantum mechanics, has no classical counterpart, is sort of a type of angular momentum, but isn't, whatever shut up.
- Unfortunately the algorithm has censored that url :(
- Meat has been shown to have spin also. They made a website about this
- Is that why spin doctors get paid so well?

Baby don't hurt me, no more.

Man based on this comment section I wish I could see this meme. For some reason I can never get content from mander.xyz to load on my phone tho
- Direct link: https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/a8bf5c3d-f993-45e0-94a3-e7d7a272668e.webp

https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a44776417/study-contradicts-newton-einstein-theory-gravity/
maybe there is a modicum of progress?
- From my understanding MOND has some pretty big hurdles to overcome as a model. When speaking to my PHD friend he still feels it's hammering away at a model to further fit observations; it might prove useful but is certainly no smoking gun for us to wave a flag that we're onto something. It's a 40 year old concept that hasn't born much fruit yet.
  https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1112.1320/

Christopher Caudwell has some pretty excellent critiques of bourgeois science. Scientific progress has stalled because it is no longer profitable for the bourgeoisie, and the world’s best scientists are all bootlickers, at least inside the imperial core. There’s a reason the best physicists in the 20th century were all communists. But China thankfully is turning this situation around.
- Every American researcher works for advertising companies, even if they don't realize it.
- https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic-matteo-farinella/