Alright, I'm replying to AngryNotice's original post as if it was meant seriously. It's just this instinct that makes me want to explain something when I know it. If you already got the joke, just skip this post.
The problem with AngryNotice's post is that it criticises something without first understanding what it is. If your definition of gravity doesn't make sense, i.e. isn't based on reality in the first place, of course no one can demonstrate how it relates to reality. This is exemplified here:
show me a pebble that orbits a mountain or a bird that orbits the earth and then gravity will make sense. or better yet just show me how gravity works(if it works at all) and then maybe it will be more than just a theory
Of course, according to the theory of gravity, a pebble orbiting a mountain does
not make sense. No contradiction there. Another grave deficiency is not even knowing what 'theory' means in the scientific context. It means that scientists have enough of a working knowledge of gravity that they can work out, in theory, how to build and launch a rocket so it can put a spacecraft on the moon. And when they put that in practice, lo and behold, it works! Which is strong evidence that the general principles of the theory are correct, even though if you haven't worked out all the even more complicated details yet. For example, in the days of early spaceflight, it wasn't yet known whether gravity 'propagates' instantaneously or at the speed of light. However, from that it doesn't follow that the whole idea of gravity has to be dubious.
the way gravity reads, scientists have you think that objects of larger mass would have more of a gravitational pull then [sic] objects of smaller mass.
That's right, but it's not the whole story. You also have to take into account that gravity diminishes with the square of the distance. This can be verified in a laboratory, but also understood intuitively: it's just the way three-dimensional space works. It's the same with light, so let's briefly look at light, which is a bit more visible (surprise!) than gravity. If you have a lamp that projects a cone of light onto a wall (let's say there's a poster showing the earth on this wall, and let's imagine the lamp is the sun), and you increase the distance between the lamp and the wall twofold, the lit area increases fourfold. Why? because the area lit by the light cone doesn't just double in width, but also in height. That means you don't have half as much light to spare for illuminating the (image of) the earth, but only 1/4. Make the distance 3 times as great, the illumination will drop to 1/9, and so on. It's the same with gravity. It diminishes with the square of the distance. Logical, no?
when we look at the sun we see the earth orbiting the sun, and the moon obriting the earth. if gravity were true, shouldnt our moon be orbiting the sun???
This is a trick question. The moon orbits the earth and the earth orbits the sun, this the moon also orbits the sun. The moon orbits the earth
and the sun. No contradiction there.
how come a planet way out in the distance such as neptune will orbit the sun, yet its moons will not orbit the sun???
Same thing.
why is it, only planets have orbits??
That's another strawman argument. A strawman argument works like this: first you state something that is patently false, yet seems plausible to your gullible, uneducated (or dimwitted) audience, and then you proceed to rip the false statement to shreds and everyone can admire you for how smart you are. It's not possible to explain why only planets have orbits, since it's absolutely false that only planets have orbits.
Let's have a brief look at what 'escape velocity' means. If you're an astronout on a space walk outside your spaceship, you can take a rock and hurl it away into space. But if you're on earth, you can't hurl a rock away into space, beacuse you're not strong enough to overcome earth's gravity, which is a bit larger than your spaceship's gravity. You'd need a rocket for that. You'd have to make your rock so fast that is has enough kinetic energy to overcome earth's gravitational pull, i.e. even though it's slowed down by gravity, at any point of its journey it still has enough forward speed left to continue on. The minimum speed you need to achieve for this to work is the escape velocity. If the speed is slower, your rock will fall back to earth. However, if you throw at just the right angle, there's an equilibrium between escaping and falling back: if those two forces balance themselves out, your rock will circle the earth; now it's in an orbit.
you could put a space shuttle in outter space and a astronaut will not orbit it.
Well, the escape velocity for a space shuttle is naturally much, much lower than that of the earth. Its gravitational pull is so small that you could give an astronaut the slightest shove and the astronaut would drift away. Thus, you'd have to be
very careful to only excert exactly the right, miniscule amount of force on the astronaut in order to send him/her on an orbit that will be very, very slow (so as to not exceed escape velocity). Now the problem with this is not a conceptual one, but a practical one: This orbit will be so slow that before you can detect any movement at all with your naked eyes, the astronaut will see the oxygen tank depleting, become hungry and thirsty, and have to go peepee really badly. So of course no astronaut will orbit a space shuttle. That doesn't prove that the hypothetical orbit isn't there, it just proves that even astronauts don't have infinite patience.
you could put the smallest pebbble into outter space and it will not orbit the space shuttle.
Actually, as I've just explained, it really will orbit the space shuttle. There's no sense in asking why it won't except for getting the answer that it's patently false that it won't.
are you going to tell me that the gravity of the sun is strong enough to keep PLUTo in orbit but not an airplane or a little bird??????
Actually, all airplanes are in an orbit around the sun (see above). They move, along with the earth, roughly 30 kilometres per second
(about 67,000 mph) along earth's path around the sun. In that frame of reference, it doesn't matter much whether they're traveling through air or sitting at an airport's terminal.
You're also completely irgnoring the fact that pluto, while it's a small planet, is quite a bit larger than a little bird (or a plane for that matter). Thus, with distance being the same, of course gravity is much stronger between a mass the size of the sun and pluto, than between such a mass and a little bird. The sun just has much more atoms to pull on in pluto than atoms to pull on in a little bird. Conversely, pluto has much more atoms that will themselves pull on the sun than a little bird has atoms that will pull on the sun. So it actually works both ways, and you must not forget that because pluto has such a much, much larger mass, it also has much more inertia that must be overcome by the gravitational force. The bottom line is, you don't need more gravitational force to keep pluto in orbit than you need to keep a small bird in orbit. It's the same. In theory, you can put a small bird in the same orbit around the sun as pluto, and it will move at the same speed. In practice, an object the size of a small bird, orbiting the sun so far away, is a wee bit hard to see from earth. Doesn't mean it can't be done.
scientists dont know how gravity works.
Doesn't mean they can't calculate the effects of gravity and predict natural phenomeny with great precision. Four-year-olds don't know how television works. Doesn't mean they can't swith the tube on and watch sesame street.
so my point is that gravity(like other scientifist "tHeories" is very on shaky grounds.
Gravity,
as you understand it, is on shaky grounds. But as your understanding is pretty much non-existant, you don't have a point at all.
it doesnt have the evidnece [sic] to back it up
Well,
your version doesn't have the evidence to back it up. Which must mean you're wrong, no?
And that's that. I'm now leaving this silly mode of feeding the troll and taking AngryNotice's post seriously, as if AngryNotice is really too stupid to grasp the concept of gravity.
how do you evolutionsts explain gravity???
Amen, brother! Critisizing the theory of evolution without understanding what it means in the first place is every bit as silly as critisizing the theory of gravity and doubting that an apple will fall to the ground when you drop it, just because you haven't paid enough attention in school and don't have the education required to grasp the concept. You've shown how zealous ignorance, weasly strawman arguments, and disrespect for the achievements of science can be used to pull self-contradicting pseudo-fallacies out of thin air and use them to impress and confuse the uneducated. Just look at how many creationists are claiming that teachers of evolution say that "humans descended from monkeys", as if two apes should miraculously bring forth a human baby at any moment. This is just patently false.
No 'evolutionist' says this ever happened or could happen. But that's hard to realize if you have no working knowledge of the theory.
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