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Einstein

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gravity is still often viewed as a force; it's not really that way

Newton conceived of gravity as a force of the universe; that, material objects were drawn to each other by a kind of hidden magnetism.

For many, even today, it’s still the explanation-of choice concerning how gravity works. The problem, though, it’s not true.

Einstein overturns nearly 250 years of physics

Newton is his day was so respected that just about everything he said was taken as gospel and the final word of God’s mind. Alexander Pope, a noted poet of the day, sums up the extreme deference accorded Newton:

“Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!”

It got so bad, and for a long time after, that the smart-money tried to preach that all of science’s mysteries had been discovered, and there was no use even trying to surmount the great Newton. No doubt, such servile sentiment was behind Einstein’s comment that undue respect for authority is the greatest enemy of the truth.

Therefore, Newton’s work was a very tough act to follow, but Einstein managed it. It wasn’t that Newton was totally wrong. His laws of motion took us to the Moon and back. They work just fine at slower speeds, small fractions of the speed of light; but as we near “c,” everything is chucked down the rabbit hole.

And so, with Newton’s charisma, having so perfectly explained the effects of gravity with his equations, it was assumed that his views on the underlying nature and cause of gravity must also be golden. It wasn’t.

gravity is not a force like magnetism; it’s a function of the warping of space by massive bodies 

Truly, especially in this so-counterintuitive case, a picture is worth a thousand words. Consider these artists’ portrayals of the nature of gravity:

circling it like a drain

The massive Sun, a million times larger than the Earth, warps the invisible, underlying, quantum morphic fields, and the Earth circles the Sun -- we somewhat inaccurately use the term "orbits" -- like a speck caught in a drain's whirlpool.

And it's not just planets that are affected, but light itself is bent, thrown and tugged off course -- called "gravitational lensing" -- by the warping of space, that is, the hidden quantum fields, of what we call "space," surrounding a gigantic body that is the Sun.

it's the same with the Moon, six times smaller than its mother-planet, held firmly in tether by the Earth's warping and curving of space

the greater the mass of an object, the more space will be warped and curved; black holes are the worst

a black hole is called "black" because space is so warped around it that not even light can escape

"Einstein eventually identified the property of spacetime which is responsible for gravity as its curvature. Space and time in Einstein's universe are no longer flat (as implicitly assumed by Newton) but can be pushed and pulled, stretched and warped by matter. Gravity feels strongest where spacetime is most curved, and it vanishes where spacetime is flat. This is the core of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which is often summed up in words as follows [as per the saying of John Wheeler]: matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move." https://einstein.stanford.edu/SPACETIME/spacetime2.html