Gravity is a pretty awesome fundamental force. If it wasn't for the Earth's comfortable 1 g, which causes objects to fall towards the Earth at a speed of 9.8 m/s², we'd all float off into space. And without it, all us terrestrial ...
Space Exploration
Dec 7, 2016
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10
Information and gravity may seem like completely different things, but one thing they have in common is that they can both be described in the framework of geometry. Building on this connection, a new paper suggests that ...
Numbers like π, e and φ often turn up in unexpected places in science and mathematics. Pascal's triangle and the Fibonacci sequence also seem inexplicably widespread in nature. Then there's the Riemann zeta function, a ...
General Physics
Jan 19, 2022
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3405
(PhysOrg.com) -- Spacetime, which consists of three dimensions of space and one time dimension, is such a large, abstract concept that scientists have a very difficult time understanding and defining it. Moreover, different ...
Physicists at the University of Sussex have discovered that black holes exert a pressure on their environment, in a scientific first.
Astronomy
Sep 10, 2021
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Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist.
General Physics
Jan 29, 2014
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1
The moon has come a long way since Galileo first peered at it through a telescope. Unmanned probes have circled around it and landed on its surface. Twelve American astronauts have walked on it. And lunar rocks and soil have ...
Space Exploration
Dec 26, 2011
25
0
Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, led by Markus Aspelmeyer have succeeded in measuring the gravitational field of a gold sphere, just 2 mm in diameter, using a highly sensitive ...
Quantum Physics
Mar 10, 2021
3
6183
Welcome to the new year, 2018. The Earth has yet again made a revolution about the sun. But not so fast. If you subscribe to the idea of a flat Earth, then you'd believe that no such thing happened, because the sun rotates ...
Space Exploration
Jan 24, 2018
259
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A team of researchers from Germany, Italy and Hungary has tested a theory that suggests gravity is the force behind quantum collapse and has found no evidence to support it. In their paper published in the journal Nature ...
A gravitational field is a model used within physics to explain how gravity exists in the universe. In its original concept, gravity was a force between point masses. Following Newton, Laplace attempted to model gravity as some kind of radiation field or fluid, and since the 19th century explanations for gravity have usually been sought in terms of a field model, rather than a point attraction.
In a field model, rather than two particles attracting each other, the particles distort spacetime via their mass, and this distortion is what is perceived subjectively as a "force". In fact there is no force in such a model, rather matter is simply responding to the curvature of spacetime itself.
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