Table of Contents
Can gravity be considered a force Yes or no?
6 Answers. Gravity is viewed as a force because it is a force. A force F is something that makes objects of mass m accelerate according to F=ma.
How does gravity affect force?
The size of the gravitational force is proportional to the masses of the objects and weakens as the distance between them increases. Both objects exert an equal attractive force on each other: a falling object is attracting the Earth with the same size force as the Earth is attracting it.
Who said gravity is not a force?
Albert Einstein
Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915), which describes gravity not as a force, but as a consequence of masses moving along geodesic lines in a curved spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass.
How does gravity affect objects in space?
Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other, and so gravity influences the paths taken by everything traveling through space. It is the glue that holds together entire galaxies. It keeps planets in orbit. It can also cause life-destroying asteroids to crash into planets.
Why is gravity not a force?
The General Theory of Relativity tells us gravity is not a force, gravitational fields don’t exist. Objects tend to move on straight paths through curved spacetime.
How does gravity relate to general relativity?
General relativity says that energy (in the form of mass, light, and whatever other forms it comes in) tells spacetime how to bend, and the bending of spacetime tells that energy how to move. The concept of “gravity” is then that objects are falling along the bending of spacetime.
Why doesn’t Newtonian gravity work for objects that are very fast?
The first is for objects moving very very fast, close to the speed of light. Newtonian gravity doesn’t correctly account for the effect of the energy of the object in this case.
How do we know gravity is acting on an object?
We can rewrite things slightly, to relate its position in space to its position in time. Then, when we look at this trajectory, it appears that the object is accelerating towards the earth, giving rise to the idea that gravity is acting as a force.