3 ms·

For those of us like myself who are terribly naive, why wouldn't that just cause all of the atoms to be torn apart? Unless the sphere were infinitely far away,

For those of us like myself who are terribly naive, why wouldn't that just cause all of the atoms to be torn apart? Unless the sphere were infinitely far away, only the center point would be in balance, and everything else would be immediately sucked to the edge of the sphere. If the sphere's radius was infinite, that might explain the expansion of the universe itself, but not the presence of infinite density within the universe itself.

consilient 3y ago
> Unless the sphere were infinitely far away, only the center point would be in balance This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem
Dylan16807 3y ago
When you do the math for gravity inside a shell of material, the quadratic falloff exactly counteracts the distances and the total pull is exactly zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem