New article on my website: The Problem With Flat Earth.
> Flat Earthers claim that objects fall because they are denser than the matter surrounding it and it has nothing to do with gravity. This can easily be debunked. You just need a balance scale and two objects made of the same material but with different masses (thus having the same density). The scale will be unbalanced with the heavier object on the lower end. This only proves that there is some force acting on the objects.
and here i thought gravity was the result of objects of extreme mass carrying so much angular velocity that they created an electrostatic pull.
@abitgray @icedquinn That can also be debunked. Objects accelerate as they fall. The Earth also has to be accelerating in that case, but if that's true, then objects will fall FASTER if you drop them a second time.
@icedquinn @xianc78 @abitgray Electrostatic pulls are a strong field we can measure in the real world.
Strong enough they requires the strong nuclear force to keep the nucleus of atoms larger than hydrogen together against the repulsion of the protons. Strong enough that is most of fission’s power, hurdling two parts of a nucleus away from each other.
i dunno i'm not physicist
@icedquinn @xianc78 @abitgray Neither am I, but I did study the classical parts in college.
You know “like charges repel, opposite charges attract?” That can be easily demonstrated on your tabletop.
A normal everyday atom has an equal number of protons in the nucleus and electrons in a probabilistic cloud around it, resulting in a net zero charge,
(Don’t ask about the quantum mechanics magic that keeps it from collapsing on itself, although note the distances are very very vast on the scale of the insides of atoms, and electrons sometimes do get captured by a nucleus.)
OK, if you accept this, a standard nucleus beyond normal hydrogen (which is just one proton and one electron) is a soup of protons and neutrons. Something keeps those protons in check; for unstable isotopes eventually something happens, with much more energy than can come from chemical means.
That too powerful radioactivity was what prompted us to probe deeper than the cloud of electrons in the bought of nuclear physics that followed the Thirty Years That Shook Physics which is quantum mechanics and is basically about the electrons.
when spun in certain ways objects also appears to lose their mass https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989PhRvL..63.2701H/abstract https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344757245_Characterization_of_Anomalous_Forces_in_Dielectric_Rotors
quinn that's a loss of weight, not mass, row row technically incorrect)
@icedquinn @xianc78 @abitgray This gets into physics I definitely don’t know much about.
Gravity is very much unlike the three other fundamental forces in nature, which are much stronger and easier to measure (well, aside from that apple dropping on your head :-), that is electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force which I haven’t studied.
Gravity is relatively weak, but works at distances fantastically larger than the other three, interplanetary and interstellar for example, why there are solar systems and galaxies.
And while Einstein and company have come up with neat elaborations and perfections on what Newton first described really well, no one has ever been able to “unify” it with the other three. Whereas we have theories that do an excellent job of unifying electromagnetism and the weak force, and a good enough but still not quite right one that adds the strong force.
So I’ll have to pass on this phenomena, but it sounds extremely cool assuming they did their measurements correctly (weeps for cold fusion…).
