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Do you mean evidence for general relativity? Because there's a lot: gravitational waves, black holes, gravitational redshift, the bending of light by gravity, t
by griffzhowl 1y ago
Do you mean evidence for general relativity? Because there's a lot: gravitational waves, black holes, gravitational redshift, the bending of light by gravity, the expansion (or contraction, depending on density) of the universe, are all new phenomena predicted by GR and experimentally verified
- silisili 1y agoOh I meant expanded it down, if that makes any sense, applying it to more things that we'd normally learn in high school. At least in my case, you're taught gravity as this standalone force, and even the Newtonian idea in high school. Not until later college do they then throw that away and go into gr and the ideas you mention. Though I guess this is more a failing of public education than science at large.
- griffzhowl 1y agoAh, right. I would guess that's because it's just a much more complicated theory, and is well-approximated by Newtonian gravity for weak fields, e.g. like in the solar system. So applying GR to more everyday phenomena would just be a much more complicated way of saying almost the same thing. GR is written in the language of differential geometry, and before even beginning you need a good grasp of Newtonian gravity, special relativity, multivariable calculus, and ideally electromagnetism too, so it needs a fair bit of preparation. And in fact the methods of Newtonian mechanics aren't thrown away, but incorporated into the more general framework. In that sense Newtonian mechanics is a conceptual foundation for GR, so that's why it's still taught first at school