Lending Gravity, is it possible?

I tried a moderate search to see if this could happen, but could not find anything on google about it.

I was at work and I got a little Magnetic desk sculpture for Christmas secret santa (a magnettic oval with little metal bars and figures). I was just working, fiddling with it since i seldomly keep it made into any thing, and as i picked up one bar with one figure between it and the magnet, the figure came up with the bar when i lifted it.

When i noticed this, I shook it a bit and after a few shakes, it eventually detached from the bar and fell back to the magnet. So I then took the bar and the figure, held the figure about 4-6 inches above the magnet and then touched the bar to the top of the figure, which then "grabbed" the figure, causing it to hang from the bar.

I thought of maybe pent up magnetism from the magnet (like static causing a baloon to stick to the wall, ect) so i took both of them, touched them to the metal of my desk, and neither stuck. I then rubbed both on my jeans and tried again, ala a baloon, but no results. But, when i held the figure again 4-6 inches above the magnet and touched the bar to it, same result. The bar and figure attached themselves again and held together even with swinging the figure around on the bar.

This bar is about the size of two toothpicks taped together and the figurine is maybe half the size of a dime, with the magnet being moderately strong but only 4-6 inches at its long diameter and about 2 inches tall (which that is just the case for it, the magnet seems much smaller than the case




So this makes me think, since we really know very little about how gravity works, it gave me a theory:

The sun, being a highly gravitized mass, attracts the planets. But, due to Earth being in its field of gravity, it lends the earth gravity, but only a percentage of it because of how far away we are from it. With the moon being the 3rd in this chain, the earth lends a portion of its gravity to the moon, which is why the moon has such a smaller amount of gravity when compared to the earth and the Sun.

Random thought but since I honestly couldn't find anything talking about this, I thought i'd see what you all thought.

I could have NO idea what i'm talking about but thats another reason i posted it LOL.

gravity is messed up. it is so strong that it prevents us from floating into space, but at the same time so weak that we can break it's bond just by lifting up a leg.

gravity has to do with something in the middle of the earths core. because everything is being pulled towards the centre.

so to create gravity on a spacecraft, it would imagine it would have to be a sphere.

they say mass has gravity, well the international space station has a mass of over 900,000 lbs but the cosmonauts are still floating around like rag dolls.

Originally posted by randomname
they say mass has gravity, well the international space station has a mass of over 900,000 lbs but the cosmonauts are still floating around like rag dolls.

900,000 lbs is nothing in mass terms from a gravitational point of view, an average building in a city has a mass of far more than that and have you ever been pulled towards one (noticeably)?

reply to post by Lynexon


Gravity is caused because mass distorts space time.

The classic analogy is a bowling ball sitting on a rubber sheet. The mass of the ball causes a depression in the rubber sheet. If you were to roll a golf ball across the rubber sheet, it would move towards the bowling ball due to the curvature of the rubber sheet.

If you were to analyze the whole system, the bowling ball would also be 'gravitated' towards the golf ball, but it would be a very small gravitation due to the much smaller mass of the golf ball.

Of course the rubber sheet is only a metaphor for describing things, the true case is that the curvature is multidimensional. Additionally, the rubber sheet analogy requires gravity to describe gravity and so is not an exact metaphor, either.

Gravity is also not magnetism and does not work like electromagnetic charge.

Still, your idea is interesting to consider but unfortunately, I don't think it actually applies.

Originally posted by Lynexon
So this makes me think, since we really know very little about how gravity works, it gave me a theory:

The sun, being a highly gravitized mass, attracts the planets. But, due to Earth being in its field of gravity, it lends the earth gravity, but only a percentage of it because of how far away we are from it.

We know a lot about how gravity works. Just look at the accuracy which our space probes have when following planned trajectories, landing on Mars, etc.

The cause of gravity is not understood. But, it's not necessary to understand the cause to say that our formulas say exactly how gravity works, at least on the local scale of our solar system. And the two body equation is so simple, I think it's even simpler than your idea, which is:

Gravity is proportional to the masses of the two objects and inversely proportional to the distance between the two objects (their center of mass). The three body problem is a little more complicated but the basic idea is the same. Everything with mass pulls on everything else with mass following that general relationship.

Now, where our explanations of gravity need some work is in observations of other galaxies, but then it's a 100 billion body problem of just the stars, plus neutrinos, plus massive compact halo objects, plus etc..instead of a 2 or 3 body problem. Whoever solves that problem to the satisfaction of other scientists will probably win the Nobel prize, as it's the most unexplained puzzle in modern science, I think, otherwise referred to as "Dark Matter".

It works on a different mechanism than magnetism. But you're not too wrong about it being passed along. Stars orbit the galaxy and each other, and planets the stars, and various satellites orbit the planets, etc. And in some ways this has an effect on tidal forces.

From what I understand, gravity to some extent works on center of mass, so if you had two equally sized and massive enough objects orbiting about a common center, you might be more attracted to that point in space between those two objects than the overall mass contributing to that gravitational field. However it seems unlikely for this situation to occur in nature as stuff attracted to that common center would eventually fill the void.

Gravity is sort of like time and space being displaced by the amount of energy which itself is stored in mass. So it takes a whole lot of mass to produce a noticable amount of gravitational force, and considering how much energy is locked away when it takes the form of mass... It's kind of ridiculous when looking at how much energy is involved in producing a noteworthy gravitational effect.

Gravity does have a kind of "cheaper" counterpart though. If you store up energy in kinetic form, you get inertia. Changing the vector of a moving object produces an acceleration force which from some relative viewpoints works like gravity.

Since gravity is apparently space-tme being displaced by mass, the thing I sometimes wonder about if there is any kind of material or phenomena that can cause displacement of spacetime in the opposite direction. Also is inertia itself somehow a perturbance on the space-time medium on a given vector (very directional rather than radiating in all directions), or is it something else different?