Friday, June 19, 2009

Blow me up, Scotty

Here's a fun thought experiment:

If you could blow up a ball to the same mass as the Earth, what would happen?

Although I am not a physicist or mathematician, I believe Newtonian physics predicts that the ball and the Earth would stick together because of their inherent gravity. But I believe Einstein's general relativity predicts that the objects would drift apart into their own curvatures of space.

It would be an interesting experiment because, assuming my prediction, it suggests that gravity is not an inherent property of matter. It is not an inherent property of a ball or of a planet, or anything in between.

Gravity, in my view, is an effect of matter in motion from the Big Bang. And as matter increases in mass, the Big Bang affects it more. This is consistent with general relativity.

In our thought experiment, the inflated ball proceeds on its own course independently through space because the Big Bang is moving it just like the Earth. The inflated ball establishes an orbit around the Sun, falling into its curvature, just like the other planets in our solar system.

So if we wanted to populate a new planet, I guess we could just inflate our own and launch it from Earth. Now wasn't that a fun?

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