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> the apple falls because the earth is flat and accelerating upward due to the giant turtles it rests on Hmm, be careful ridiculing all of this, because under
by umvi 6y ago
> the apple falls because the earth is flat and accelerating upward due to the giant turtles it rests on
Hmm, be careful ridiculing all of this, because under GR the earth is accelerating upward toward the apple; it has to in order to remain in the same spot in curved spacetime.
- ncallaway 6y agoI'd argue as a distinction that the surface of the earth accelerates outward, not upward, and nuanced GR takes aside I'll happily continue to gently mock the claims of flat earthers.
- umvi 6y agoIndeed, I just think general relativity would never have been discovered had einstein not questioned settled science. In other words, if einstein assumed "the earth doesn't accelerate upward, the apple accelerates downward! The science is settled!", we would have never been enlightened by his paradigm shift.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> In other words, if einstein assumed “the earth doesn’t accelerate upward, the apple accelerates downward! The science is settled!”, But, insofar as there was a broadly accepted pre-GR scientific explanation, it was not “The earth doesn’t accelerate upward, the apple accelerates downardThe second half, yes, but not the first.
- falcrist 6y ago"Up" is away from the center of the gravity well. Since gravity wells are generally spherical in practice, up is always going to point radially outward, so there's no distinction to make.