Carson: Gravity, where does it come from?

[eric82oslo]

This is an absolute non-issue. Carson is very easily close to having an IQ close to 50 points higher than that of ultra-imbecil Walker (who might very well be even stupider than Trump, if that's even possible). Even I, who have an inmense curiousity, have no idea from where gravity comes from. In fact, that's probably the only single question here in life I've asked myself more times than the other recurring question, namely, what's the freaking meaning of life. People say that love is the meaning of life and I believe that, yet love is something ephemeral. So basically the meaning of life is just something lasting for a few seconds of earth's life? At the very least the universe' gravity isn't ephemeral. That's the good thing about it.

[eric82oslo]

My god, anybody can become a neurosurgeon.

Spatial and hands-on skills do not correlate that tightly with standard academic skills, especially verbal intelligence and communication ability, which politics seems to emphasize....there are a lot of very "handy" people who might be considered "stupid" in other realms.   I really think you'd have to be pretty brilliant to become a brain surgeon.  My sister shadowed one for a week, and they have to use a microscope just to operate the tiny tools used.  Brain surgery is extremely serious and difficult business.  

It's s impressive and God damn am I in aww for Ben Carson. It might sound like a joke, but in this case I'm serious. Not saying that he is the one to pick for the Republicans, as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are obviously much more apy when show comes to shuffle. Yet Carson, despite his very obvious anti-gay-comments in the past, would still make for a pretty interesting president after all hehe.

[muon2]

It hasn't been unified with quantum mechanics, but we do know where it comes from.

That's a rather big caveat. Either there has to be something gravity "comes from" consistent with quantum mechanics (and which has not yet been discovered), or our current understanding of quantum mechanics and/or general relativity must be incorrect. The latter is very unlikely, so it's fair to say that it isn't known "where gravity comes from."

But at most that will result in tweaks to the theory, which do not obviate its accuracy or its explanation at non-microscopic scales. We may get a grander understanding of gravity, but it's not going to blow out of the water the basic explanation for why the apple falls from the tree. Before Einstein, that really was a mystery.

Actually, before Einstein most scientists would not have thought gravity to be a mystery. Scientists in the 1800's would say that gravity comes from pairs of masses interacting at a distance according to Newton's law of universal gravitation. In much the same way they would say that electrical forces came from two charged objects interacting at a distance. (Inter)Action at a distance was a well accepted principle by then.

The mystery to theorists in the 1800's was how to prove the mass in Newton's law of gravitation was the same as the mass in Newton's 2nd law of motion (F = ma). Einstein solved that with general relativity by applying the equivalence principle that an accelerated frame of reference was indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Because no one else has done it yet, and this is begging for it.

[HaveANiceLife]

Haha, that was pretty funny. I'm actually more interested in this more liberal approach to religion. I'm an atheist but I like that religion is attempting to update itself to the 21st Century (Schizoid Man) evolutionary science.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

It hasn't been unified with quantum mechanics, but we do know where it comes from.

That's a rather big caveat. Either there has to be something gravity "comes from" consistent with quantum mechanics (and which has not yet been discovered), or our current understanding of quantum mechanics and/or general relativity must be incorrect. The latter is very unlikely, so it's fair to say that it isn't known "where gravity comes from."

But at most that will result in tweaks to the theory, which do not obviate its accuracy or its explanation at non-microscopic scales. We may get a grander understanding of gravity, but it's not going to blow out of the water the basic explanation for why the apple falls from the tree. Before Einstein, that really was a mystery.

Actually, before Einstein most scientists would not have thought gravity to be a mystery. Scientists in the 1800's would say that gravity comes from pairs of masses interacting at a distance according to Newton's law of universal gravitation. In much the same way they would say that electrical forces came from two charged objects interacting at a distance. (Inter)Action at a distance was a well accepted principle by then.

The mystery to theorists in the 1800's was how to prove the mass in Newton's law of gravitation was the same as the mass in Newton's 2nd law of motion (F = ma). Einstein solved that with general relativity by applying the equivalence principle that an accelerated frame of reference was indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field.

Wasn't it a mystery why masses had this property that they could interact at a distance?

[Ljube]

It hasn't been unified with quantum mechanics, but we do know where it comes from.

That's a rather big caveat. Either there has to be something gravity "comes from" consistent with quantum mechanics (and which has not yet been discovered), or our current understanding of quantum mechanics and/or general relativity must be incorrect. The latter is very unlikely, so it's fair to say that it isn't known "where gravity comes from."

But at most that will result in tweaks to the theory, which do not obviate its accuracy or its explanation at non-microscopic scales. We may get a grander understanding of gravity, but it's not going to blow out of the water the basic explanation for why the apple falls from the tree. Before Einstein, that really was a mystery.

Actually, before Einstein most scientists would not have thought gravity to be a mystery. Scientists in the 1800's would say that gravity comes from pairs of masses interacting at a distance according to Newton's law of universal gravitation. In much the same way they would say that electrical forces came from two charged objects interacting at a distance. (Inter)Action at a distance was a well accepted principle by then.

The mystery to theorists in the 1800's was how to prove the mass in Newton's law of gravitation was the same as the mass in Newton's 2nd law of motion (F = ma). Einstein solved that with general relativity by applying the equivalence principle that an accelerated frame of reference was indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field.

Wasn't it a mystery why masses had this property that they could interact at a distance?

It is still a mystery.

[pbrower2a]

Science at most has models that at most assume that as is so with electromagnetic radiation, so is gravity. The inverse-square relationship applies to both. Some models anticipate such a article as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton|graviton analogous to a photon  but although loose photons are detectable by experiment, gravitons have yet to be detected or identified as having anything to connection with known particles.

Gravitation is apparently an inherent characteristic of matter and energy so difficult to separate from matter and energy that it defies discovery.     

[Ljube]

The inverse-square relationship applies to both.

Yes. The inverse square relationship is the kind of clue one needs when trying to create a Unified Field Theory. I believe that we will be able to accomplish that one day.

In the meantime, we'll have to get by with the kinds of half-baked theories, such as Newton's and Einstein's, which work most of the times, but are not universal.

[emailking]

Yes, we know far more about the properties of gravity than what generates it. Ditto for electricity I think. I remember pushing my science teacher in High School about this very issue. The teacher was made quite uncomfortable. It's all about the difference between science and technology, with the latter more focused on how it works, than why it works.

That's true. I graduated electrical engineering and we don't know where electricity comes from and we know where gravity comes from even less.

However, we know that electricity and gravity both exist. We're not entirely sure how they work, but we are pretty sure that in most cases we can approximate their work using mathematical formulae.

Bottom line, Carson is right. And nobody who knows anything about gravity or electricity can claim otherwise.

Electricity is just an overall net movement of electrons. In everyday experience, it arises from electric fields being present in metal wires. I don't know why you guys think we don't know where it comes from.

Also, we do know what generates gravity, and why it exists. That was my whole point.

Using the logic you guys are espousing, we don't know where rain comes from since we don't understand every little detail of cloud formation.

[muon2]

It hasn't been unified with quantum mechanics, but we do know where it comes from.

That's a rather big caveat. Either there has to be something gravity "comes from" consistent with quantum mechanics (and which has not yet been discovered), or our current understanding of quantum mechanics and/or general relativity must be incorrect. The latter is very unlikely, so it's fair to say that it isn't known "where gravity comes from."

But at most that will result in tweaks to the theory, which do not obviate its accuracy or its explanation at non-microscopic scales. We may get a grander understanding of gravity, but it's not going to blow out of the water the basic explanation for why the apple falls from the tree. Before Einstein, that really was a mystery.

Actually, before Einstein most scientists would not have thought gravity to be a mystery. Scientists in the 1800's would say that gravity comes from pairs of masses interacting at a distance according to Newton's law of universal gravitation. In much the same way they would say that electrical forces came from two charged objects interacting at a distance. (Inter)Action at a distance was a well accepted principle by then.

The mystery to theorists in the 1800's was how to prove the mass in Newton's law of gravitation was the same as the mass in Newton's 2nd law of motion (F = ma). Einstein solved that with general relativity by applying the equivalence principle that an accelerated frame of reference was indistinguishable from being in a gravitational field.

Wasn't it a mystery why masses had this property that they could interact at a distance?

It is still a mystery.

My point is that it was not considered a mystery during the 1700-1800's because Newton had solved the mystery. It became mysterious in the 20th century first when Einstein introduced his equivalence principle as part of general relativity, and then later in the century as physicists attempted to frame everything in terms of quantum mechanics. Early quantum mechanics only sought to describe some phenomena, and theories that included gravity came later. To deal with that both Einstein's equivalence principle as well as early quantum principles have had to be altered and expanded in reach.

I would say that gravity was a mystery before Newton's laws, and became a mystery again after relativity and quantum theory became the paradigm for physics.