Comment by app
2 days ago
Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.
Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.
> He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment
> things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate
I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.
"Everything expanding at the same rate" sounds vaguely similar to the truth that what we feel as gravity (standing on earth) is us and everything around us accelerating upwards from the center of the gravity well - and what we feel as "pressure" on our feet is from the earth "holding us up" (in crude terms). So, it sounds crazy but it's not too distant from the truth.
Minus the expanding clause, you are describing Newtonian vs. Einsteinian physics.
I also remember this, and in fact I found an old Dilbert newsletter from 1996 ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") where he describes it:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...
The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
from the same newsletter. How to be Funny.
> Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."
Thanks for finding this!
Yeah, at the end of one of his books, I forget which, he described how he could manifest reality, such as getting a specific score on the GMAT not by targeted studying but by staring as hard as possible at the mail before he opened it. Absolute lunatic.
--absolute lunatic. To paraphrase Adams, he always said manifestation was likely not "magic" but that when you tried it out for yourself, it *seemed* like it happened by magic.
I just watched a Veritisium video that said the same thing: https://youtu.be/XRr1kaXKBsU
I don’t know Scott’s theory, but gravity as a force indeed doesn’t exist. That’s a classical physics concept.
For the last century, the accepted theory is that gravity is indeed not a force but a manifestation of the space-time curvature. That’s one of the main points of general relativity.
My physics is very rusty and very basic, but I don't think classical physics said gravity was a force either. eg in Newton's 2nd law or engineering mechanics, gravity is the "a" or the "g" not the "F".
Well congratulations, you just stated the equivalence principle that led Einstein to GR (you need special relativity and a bit of maths and you’re there)!
:) I see your confusion. But the F is caused by gravity there. The special case you are refering to (I think you are thinking about the Weight = g * mass of body) comes from a more universal expression.
If you look at the proper expression that calculates it's force, it becomes clear:
F = G * m1 * m2/ r^2 (so, gravity is the force between masses).
P.S. G is the universal constant of Gravity here, not the gravity itself.
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