LeafByNiggle
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- Jul 20, 2021
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I haven't read the 300+ posts in this thread, so this may have been covered already, but let me try to answer the OP question about the "reality" of gravity from a scientific perspective.
The first thing to understand is that in science does not attempt to answer the philosophical question of what is real. What science does is develop theories that seem to explain observations. At one time (pre-relativity) there was a theory of the "ether", which was supposed to be the thing through which light travelled when it was otherwise in the vacuum of space. Was the "ether" real? Well, for a short time it was, because it seemed to explain the observations up until that time. But then along came relativity and the reality of "ether" disappeared because it no longer explained the newer, more refined observations. We could also consider the reality of the electron. Are they real? Well, we can't see them. We only observe the effects they have. But observations at that scale are sometimes difficult to interpret. As a sidebar, it is interesting to see how the structure of the double helix DNA molecule was deduced, not from direct imaging (because that was not possible in those days) but by the X-ray diffraction patterns produced. The Diffraction patterns looked nothing like the double-helix itself, but it was the kind of pattern that a double-helix would produce. I don't have a citation to look up, but if anyone is interested, it is worth looking up how it was first discovered.
Getting back to gravity, all that science says is that a force described by the equations of universal attraction do correctly predict the motion of objects. Whether the force is a real thing, or just a consequence of how matter works is not currently known. Maybe some day an experiment will be devices that shows that gravity is more correctly modeled some other way than a force field that emanates from all matter. That may further change our model of what gravity is. But that's all it means from a scientific perspective. A model is something that works. Whether it is real, or just a simulation on the holodeck or the matrix we may never know.
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