RE: Strong Anthropic Principle vs Creationism
July 15, 2014 at 8:39 am
(This post was last modified: July 15, 2014 at 9:53 am by vorlon13.)
(July 15, 2014 at 3:34 am)ignoramus Wrote: Can I ask some silly back to basics questions?
We know the effect of gravity. We know mass has gravity.
. . .
That is not a silly observation. Einstein realized an extremely profound characteristic of our universe from 'simply' pondering 'mass hass gravity'.
It turns out, gravity has gravity too.
Really.
Near our sun, it's gravity is so strong that an effect of gravity's gravity becomes apparent to astronomers. Energy equals mass times the velocity of light, squared. Turns out the suns gravity represents, by itself, ignoring the sun for a minute, a tremendous amount of energy. That tremendous amount of energy is equivalent to an additional amount of mass and that equivalent amount of mass adds a tiny bit to the 'amount' of gravity we note from the sun.
The effect was already noted by astronomers in a subtle, non-Newtonian variation in the planet Mercury's orbit around the sun, but it took Einstein to figure out what was going on.
Einstein also noted that the positions of the stars we see near the sun are subtly changed by the suns gravity too. So gravity effects light!
Addenda:
the additional gravity from the sun's gravity is not peculiar to our sun, BTW. It is just that the sun is sufficiently large and close for the effect to be noticeable by astronomers. Everything that has gravity would experience the 'extra gravity effect', it just takes a heap of gravity to make it visible.
