Yeah it would fair point, I’ll be honest I haven’t touched Newtonian gravity in a long time now so I’d forgotten that was a thing. You’d still need to do a finite element calculation for the feather though.

There’s a similar phenomenon in general relativity, but it doesn’t apply when you’ve got multiple sources because it’s non-linear.

Possibly?

A bowling ball is more dense than a feather (I assume) and that’s probably going to matter more than just the size. Things get messy when you start considering the actual mass distributions, and honestly the easiest way to do any calculations like that is to just break each object up into tiny point like masses that are all rigidly connected, and then calculate all the forces between all of those points on a computer.

I full expect it just won’t matter as much as the difference in masses.

I actually thought the answer might be never, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests you can do this by dropping a ~1kg bowling ball from a height of 10^-11m. (Above the surface of the earth ofc)

This is an extremely rough calculation, I’m basically just looking at how big a bunch of numbers are and pushing all that through some approximate formulae. I could easily be off by a few orders of magnitude and frankly I didn’t take care to check I was even doing any of it correctly.

10^-11m seems wrong, and it probably is. But that’s still 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times further than the earth moves in this situation. Which hey, fun What If style fact for you: that’s about the same ratio of 1kg to the mass of the Earth at ~10²⁴kg.

That makes perfect sense because the approximations I made are linear in mass, so the distance ratio should be given by the mass ratio.

This is not correct, the force on the objects is the same sure, but the accelerations aren’t so you can’t calculate them both in one go like this.

If anyone’s wondering, I used to be a physicist and gravity was essentially my area of study, OP is right assuming an ideal system, and some of the counter arguments I’ve seen here are bizarre.

If this wasn’t true, then gravity would be a constant acceleration all the time and everything would take the same amount of time to fall towards everything else (assuming constant starting distance).

You can introduce all the technicalities you want about how negligible the difference is between a bowling ball and a feather, and while you’d be right (well actually still wrong, this is an idealised case after all, you can still do the calculation and prove it to be true) you’d be missing the more interesting fact that OP has decided to share with you.

If you do the maths correctly, you should get a=G(m+M)/r^2 for the acceleration between the two, if m is the mass of the bowling ball or feather, you can see why increasing it would result in a larger acceleration. From there it’s just a little integration to get the flight time. For the argument where the effect of the bowling ball/feather is negligible, that’s apparent by making the approximation m+M≈M, but it is an approximation.

I could probably go ahead and work out what the corrections are under GR but I don’t want to and they’d be pretty damn tiny.

Didn’t seem to doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, it can be difficult to quantify. Most people don’t notice a lot of the constant large scale ecological devastation that does happen.

The real concern is that even if it was fine in one location, that can’t reliably be assumed to be the case for other ecosystems. This issue is really complicated, we’ve acted hastily in the past and done some insane lasting damage so I’d say it’s best to be careful.

All that said, even if I’m vegan and this whole thing makes me extremely uncomfortable, working to eradicate malaria is objectively good.

Depending on the mass of the black hole, the “shell” doesn’t need to be a shell it could be effectively completely solid with an atom sized black hole at the centre.

PBH’s as discussed in this article have pretty wild mass ranges, so anything is possible. It’s entirely possible to have black holes so small they can’t easily absorb new matter as they’re smaller than protons. Tiny black holes only have large surface gravity, nothing noteworthy at a distance.

There’s an XKCD for that

That’s fair, I just like windows and that’s really all there is to it. I’ve had a few Linux installs in the past, but never really found an advantage to anything except compiling this one specific python library, but these days I can do that very easily running WSL, VS code SSH’d to my server or more recently a jupyter server that I can connect to from any device with a web browser.

Now macOS on the other hand, I absolutely despise. It was one of the first OS’s I learnt to use back in primary school, and now that I have to use it for work I have absolutely no nice things to say. Unintuitive, missing basic features and slow to navigate, and I can assure you that none of this is due to unfamiliarity…

Other than messing around with the beta for half an hour, I thankfully never had to use it.

Unpopular opinion that I have no justification for: I don’t mind windows 11 all that much

The huge caveat here is assuming gravity is quantised in the same way as the other forces, gravitons don’t need to exist for gravity to exist. This is just the beauty argument of string theory with a new name, it’s cool and I love this type of stuff because it’s amazingly satisfying, but that’s not enough to make it reality.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still useful work but I kinda hate the way quanta reports on a lot of physics…

Corporations have absolutely no incentive to change, consumers need to vote with their wallets if they want something to happen. But no, everytime someone points out this blindingly obvious fact we get the “uhm actually corporations need to change, it’s not my fault they’re feeding off my unsustainable habits.”

We have to work together, we only have power to effect change when we work together, solidarity is our strength.

Now I’m wondering, surely someone has already made a language that’s designed to read like scripture?

Oh god, no fluid mechanics is way too difficult. I stuck to studying quantum effects of black holes, which is much easier.

(This isn’t a joke, it’s literally true)

Constance? Never heard of her

As a theoretical physicist, units are for chumps

🙏

Holy shit this is some of the absolute worst data visualisation I’ve ever seen, thankyou for this

This whole thing has been very draining…

If LOC.wav sees this, I hope you’re taking some time for yourself, this has to have been absurdly stressful.