On 10/01/2015, at 4:42 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am far from being a physicist, but I conceive gravity as being a side-effect of the bending (compression?) of space/time by objects of large mass. But correct me if I have misunderstood?
>
> But what is the meaning of the expression "space/time," its *definition*? And what about "bending" (or "compression")? Let someone try to make a sentence about gravity using, not those words, but their *definitions*. I suggest that any resulting sentence will be totally meaningless in terms of any conceivable human experience. That is because in scientific usage the only referents for those terms are not words descriptive of possible experience but abstract mathematical equations quite divorced from physical reality and our perceptions of it.
Space/ti me is fairly obvious. The bending/compression thing is my conception and quite unscientific I presume. As for the scientific description, I think I saw somewhere some physicist put gravity as being about space/time being shifted by items with mass, rather than items with mass being moved in space. Something to do with mass influencing the time dimension, which warps space, thus space moving in relation to items with mass.
As you can see, I can't really get my head around it properly. Thus my conception of space/time being compressed/bent is just a feeble way to expressing something beyond my understanding. But that's just a problem with my feeble brain. I probably would have been able to understand it when I was a smoker, but bow that I no longer have the crutch of nicotine I seem to have lost about 25% of my cognitive capability.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas