Recent content by terryl

once again, never said ptolemy had an account of gravity. miss the point again. my mistake is assuming that a forum under the heading of physics means that sober intellectualism will pervade here.

would you publish a paper saying that the heliocentric model may have been correct? you wouldn't, and you have good reasons for not doing it! you're right. i don't understand the mathematics. but i accept the consensus of those who do. Einstein could account for everything Newton...

how many times do i have to say that I am not looking for the easiest equations to calculate physics on earth? i understand that Newton's equations are still practical for most of the conditions we experience here. Ptolemy had accurate equations for predicting the movement of 'heavenly...

thank you. i didn't expect such an ardent defense of Newton on the matter of gravity. especially since he himself was perplexed by it and only claimed to describe its effects. and since gravity has been proven to affect massless photons, i thought the old way of talking about it was out. i...

forget it. i guess mass just has an mysterious power to attract me to it's surface, akin to magnetism. the professors must be right. all this stuff about distortion of space-time must not be relevant to understanding what gravity is. ill be quiet

ok. i want to know what gravity is. what causes it. I am not interested in mathematically describing its effects. I am being philosophical. for all his genius, Newton didn't know the how or why of gravity, only how to describe it precisely through mathematics. Einstein took us a step further...

yes, I've read that mass distorts space, and space tells matter where to go. that is why there is such a thing a gravity. i just want to know why professors gloss over this, to the effect of leaving students thinking that gravity is a force of *attraction* that the Earth exerts upon all of us...

does mass have a mysterious property that pulls me down toward it, or does mass distort space which, as a result, 'pushes' me down?

im thinking of cause and effect here... as i understand it, and i could be wrong because i have no scientific training!, mass doesn't pull other mass toward it. the only thing mass has an effect on is the medium of space, and it is this distortion of in space that creates the phenomenon of...

do physics professors still misunderstand Einstein?? i registered at this site just to ask this question: why do physics professors still talk about gravity in terms of "pulling"?? i download podcasts of physics courses at Yale, Berkeley, etc... yet i always hear these guys say things like...