Why Gravity is NOT a Force

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According to the general theory of relativity, gravity is not a force.
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There are no gravitational fields, gravity is kind of an illusion.
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And in this video, I will prove it to you by blasting off into outer space in 321
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Albert Einstein said the happiest thought of his life
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was imagining a man falling off the roof of a house.
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What made Einstein so happy about this wasn't Schadenfreude,
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It was the realization that this man, while he was falling wouldn't feel his own
weight.
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He would be weightless and anything he dropped on his way down,
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Well, it would remain stationary relative to him or moving in uniform motion.
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The whole situation would be just like..
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If you were in deep space, not near any large masses.
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With your spaceship at rest or coasting along at constant velocity
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Here, you would feel no weight
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Objects would remain stationary relative to you or if you give them a push, they
would move in a straight line at constant velocity
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And you would be the very definition of an inertial observer,
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you're not accelerating, not in a gravitational field,
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all the laws of physics apply in your reference frame,
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meaning there is no experiment, you could do to distinguish your initial reference
frame from any other
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Now here comes the big leap:
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Einstein looks at these two scenarios and says they are equivalent, not just
similar
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Physically, they are exactly the same thing.
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Which means man falling from roof is not in a gravitational field.
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There are no gravitational fields, and he is not accelerating.
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He is an inertial observer, just like Rocket Man.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, okay, I can see how both of these observers feel
weightless.
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But man falling from roof is clearly in a gravitational field.
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I mean, he's right next to the Earth.
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And he's obviously accelerating his speed is increasing by 9.8 meters per second,
every second
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A fact that will become painfully apparent when he crashes into the ground.
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I know that these two situations look very different,
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but Einstein's equivalence principle tells us the one thing to focus on: the
experience of the observer.
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If they feel weightless than they are in an inertial frame of reference
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every bit as good as rocket man's out drifting through deep space.
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Imagine if Rocket Man coasting along at constant velocity
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and not paying attention comes upon a planet a long way off in the distance.
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An external observer might notice that the path of the rocket bends ever so
slightly towards the planet.
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But inside, Rocket Man would remain oblivious.
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He feels no force, experiences no acceleration
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As the rocket gets closer to the planet, it goes faster and faster
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But Rocket Man still feels weightless. For him, nothing has changed.
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So where on this journey would you say the frame of reference changes from inertial
to non inertial?
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An onboard accelerometer would never even register a blip.
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He has continued on his inertial path through spacetime
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So the logical conclusion is his frame of reference is inertial up until the
instant he crashes into the planet.
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Okay, so how do you explain the curved path of his rocket without gravitational
forces or gravitational fields?
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The answer is curved spacetime.
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First focus on rocket man's observation that the whole time he felt like he was
moving with constant velocity in a straight line.
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He was moving in a straight line through spacetime
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but space time around massive objects, like planets is curved.
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So that's why his path appeared curved to a distant observer.
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Now this isn't as unusual as it seems,
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Airplanes, for example, always try to fly the shortest route between cities.
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Essentially, they just go in a straight line.
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But since the Earth's surface is curved, the shortest path doesn't look like a
straight line.
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These shortest paths over curved surfaces are called geodesics,
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and we use that same word, geodesics,
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for the straight line paths followed by inertial observers through curved space
time
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Here's another analogy.
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Imagine you and a friend are standing 1000 kilometers apart on the equator.
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Now you both set off due North.
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Over time you will come closer together.
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Ultimately bumping into each other at the North Pole.
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It’s as though there was a force pushing you together, but you didn't feel a force
and your friend didn't feel a force.\N
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Gravity is just like that force, it doesn't actually exist.
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The real reason for you coming together was that you were both on straight paths,
geodesics, on a curved surface.
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Astronauts on the space station are weightless.
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That means they too are inertial observers traveling on a geodesic
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But the earth curves space time around it, which is why their straight line path
appears as a helix.
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It only looks like a circular orbit if you forget the time dimension.
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Don't forget, we are all moving through space and time, spacetime
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This is the standard bent sheet analogy for curved space time,
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but I think this demo is misleading.
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It allows you to fool yourself into thinking you understand general relativity
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when the intuition you're actually drawing on is just that objects like to fall
towards the middle of a well due to the gravitational force.
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But in general relativity, there is no gravitational force.
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What you should be thinking about is objects traveling on a straight line path
through spacetime
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It just so happens that spacetime is curved around massive objects,
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so that straight line path doesn't look like a straight line.
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Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move.
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Now let's go back to deep space.
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What happens if you turn on the rocket thrusters and accelerate at 9.8 meters per
second squared?
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Well, someone outside would see all objects remain stationary, while the floor of
the rocket accelerates into them.
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Inside the rocket, everything would appear to accelerate down to the ground
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and you would feel a force pushing up on your feet,
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the same force that's pushing up on you as you watch this video.
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This situation feels exactly the same as being at rest on the surface of Earth.
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Cause we are at rest on the surface of Earth.
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I want to ask you, are you watching this video in an inertial frame of reference?
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Well, I mean, do you feel weightless?
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No, so you are not an inertial observer.
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Your situation is exactly the same as someone accelerating on a rocket ship in deep
space.
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And let me be clear,
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I don't mean the being at rest and a gravitational field is like accelerating and a
rocket.
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I mean, it is the exact same thing.
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You are accelerating and there is no gravitational field.
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Gravitational fields do not exist.
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Now I know that sounds crazy, but come with me for a minute.
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This is you.
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in standard Newtonian physics we draw your weight force, the force of gravity
pushing you down
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and the normal force from the floor pushing you up.
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We say these forces are equal and opposite, so there's no net force on you, so you
are not accelerating.
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But in general relativity, gravity is not a force.
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You have no weight.
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So the only force on you are these normal forces pushing you up.
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So you are accelerating upwards.
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But I'm not moving up!
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Relative to what?
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I mean, relative to the flip chart and the floor and basically everything in this
room.
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But all of those things are in your frame of reference, which you know is not
inertial.
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Relative to everything in my rocket ship, I'm not accelerating.
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What you need if you really want to measure your acceleration is someone in an
inertial frame of reference,
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like the guy who fell off the roof
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And he would see you accelerating up at 9.8 meters per second squared.
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I think what this shows is that what an acceleration really is is it's a deviation
from a geodesic
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You can't follow a straight line path through space time because the floor prevents
you from doing that:
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it applies a force upwards on you, so you're accelerating up.
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But if I'm accelerating up and so is everyone else around the world
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and presumably the whole surface of the Earth,
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Then, shouldn't the earth be expanding?
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No. It is possible for you to be accelerating, even though your spatial coordinates
are not changing.
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I will show you one equation from general relativity
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This says that the second derivative of your position with respect to time
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is equal to your acceleration, that's just f on m,
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And if you were in flat spacetime, well, this is exactly what you're saying
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if you're accelerating your spatial coordinates have to change.
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But you're not in flat space time, and this term is related to the curvature of
spacetime
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and this is your velocity through time squared.
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You don't have to worry about the details here, the point is your position can be
not changing.
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This can be zero, which means your acceleration must be exactly equal to
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this curvature term times are velocity through time squared.
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So in curved spacetime, you need to accelerate just to stand still.
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A lot of this may seem more complicated than Newtonian physics,
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but one classical mystery looks a whole lot simpler in general relativity,
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which is why all objects fall at the same rate.
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Now I have made a number of videos on this topic
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and I would always give the standard Newtonian explanation:
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the only force on a free falling body is its weight g m m on r squared,
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which equals its mass times acceleration.
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You can cancel the objects mass on both sides of the equation.
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Hence, all objects will have this same acceleration.
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The mystery is why we could cancel these two m's,
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the one on the left was gravitational mass, the property of an object that creates
and experiences a gravitational field.
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While the m on the right is inertial mass, a measure of resistance to acceleration.
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Why should these two conceptually different properties be numerically identical?
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Scientists have spent a lot of time and effort experimentally testing
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down to around one part in 10 trillion that these two types of mass really are the
same.
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But in general relativity, there is no mystery.
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All objects appear to fall the same way because they're not accelerating.
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They're just following straight line pass through spacetime until they encounter
something that stops them.
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Like the objects in the rocket ship, they appear to accelerate at the same rate
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because they're not really accelerating.
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It's the floor accelerating into them.
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Now, a lot of us might seem pretty far fetched
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as it did back in 1915 when Einstein proposed it
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So he very cleverly came up with a measurable prediction that scientists could make
to test his theory.
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Imagine that this rocket ship is coasting through deep space
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If you shine a light beam across the rocket ship, well it'll do exactly what you
expect:
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light travels in a straight line and hits a point on the opposite wall at exactly
the same height as the source.
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But now what if this rocket is accelerating?
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Well, to an external observer, they're still going to see the same thing: light
traveling in a straight line,
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but inside the rocket, during the time it takes the light to travel across the
cabin, The rocket will have sped up.
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So by the time it hits the other wall, it'll hit a little lower than before.
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So in an accelerating frame of reference light deflects down
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Here I'm dramatically exaggerating the effect,
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even if I were accelerating up at 10 G's, which would probably kill me,
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the deflection would be on the order of the width of a proton.
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Still, it shows that an accelerating frame of reference will bend light.
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So Einstein reasoned light must also bend when it passes a large mass
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But where do you find a mass large enough?
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Well, the only obvious huge mass near the Earth is the sun.
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So the ideal experiment would be to look at light passing just next to the sun and
see if it is deflected.
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Say light from distant stars.
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The problem was, of course, the sun is just so bright, you can't see stars right
next to it.
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Unless there is a total solar eclipse, which is exactly what happened in 1919
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So Arthur Eddington set out to take pictures of the stars right next to the sun
during totality.
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And what he found by analyzing those pictures,
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was that their positions appeared deflected by the precise amount predicted by
Einstein's general theory of relativity
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The result was twice the deflection some had calculated using a strictly Newtonian
model
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And general relativity has passed virtually every test put to it over the past
hundred years or so,
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but there are still more things to try
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A well known and empirically validated finding is that accelerating charges
radiates electromagnetic radiation.
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So one conceptually simple experimental test
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would be to compare the behavior of a stationary charge and a gravitational field
to a free falling one
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If a more Newtonian picture of gravity is correct,
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well then the stationary charge should not radiate electromagnetic radiation,
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but a free falling one is accelerating and therefore it should radiate.
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In contrast, general relativity sees the free-falling charge as non accelerating.
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It's just going on a straight line path through curve space time,
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whereas the stationary charge is accelerating and therefore it should give off
electromagnetic radiation.
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Now, thus far logistical challenges have prevented anyone from actually carrying
out this experiment,
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but what you believe will happen reveals what you truly think about the nature of
gravity.
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Do you think that a freely falling charge will radiate electromagnetic radiation or
not?
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Is gravity an illusion?
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This episode was sponsored by Caseta
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and so I used the sponsorship money to have a rocket ship built
16:30
Caseta by Lutron makes these smart light switches in the rocket ship.
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They also make remotes, motion sensors, smart plugs,
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basically every smart switch you could use for turning things in your home on and
off
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But installing a smart switch isn't rocket science.
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You just turn off the power to the switch, detach the existing wires,
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and reconnect them to the Caseta smart switch.
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What's great about smart switches, as opposed to smart bulbs, is one switch often
controls multiple bulbs.
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So you can save money by replacing only the switch.
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And they connect to most smart devices like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple home
kit.
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And you can control them via an app on your phone.
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So if you forget to turn off the lights and the rocket, no need to go back, just
turn them off in the app.
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You can also use the app to set up schedules, turning the lights on when it goes
dark.
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This gives you peace of mind knowing your family will always come home to a well
lit house.
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Now we may not have personal rockets yet, but we have smart switches
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and the smart choice for these devices is Caseta by Lutron.