4 ms·
Not that i understood much of what you just said, but you're the first person I've seen say gravity is a push force, so i have a question. Does it me any sense
by PuffinBlue 9y ago
Not that i understood much of what you just said, but you're the first person I've seen say gravity is a push force, so i have a question.
Does it me any sense to say mass repels spacetime? So imagine a spring on the surface of a massive sphere. Imagine that you compress the spring and release it. The spring would compress outwards, the sphere not moving (especially if an another antipodean spring was set up with a compression release cycle occurring at the same time).
What if spacetime was like that spring, constantly being 'pushed' away or repelled from mass as it tries to return to an uncompressed state . The local effects would seemingly be the same, objects would travel the same curved paths through spacetime around the sphere as they would if mass was attractivly warping spacetime. Or perhaps we xould set up the conditions so that was so.
Maybe ive misunderstood, but in most depictions of gravity its a point like a bottom of a well that's sort of stretched the 'rubber sheet' of spacetime. I know it's just an analogy but almost all layman explanations show spacetime elongating as it moves closer to the mass, the elongation depicting the 'warping' of spacetime. It's possible the real maths tells a more accurate story, but to me the more correct mental picture would be to think of circles around the mass spaced at distances where crossing between them takes time=1. For the outside observer it seems time slows as you draw nearer the mass, that would suggest the circles become 'closer' or you'd cross more space per unit time. It would also suggest the outside observer would see you eventually slow to a stop but locally you continue to accelerate along the curved spacetime, so it doesn't seem to violate special relativity.
I'm not sure if mathematically space and time are treated separately, but if they're the same then thinking of mass as repelling spacetime 'outwards' from the surface of the mass seems to still work but might explain on larger scales where some of the expansion of space comes from - i.e. mass repels spacetime but the curvature this creates causes other mass to follow paths through spacetime that appear to make the two masses attract each other.
I get that im no doubt wrong but ive not seen anyone adress this possibility (probably because it wrong!) but id be interested to hear where it breaks down, as i dont see it!