Comment on your mom falls significantly faster than g

• Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 massed.

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  • BB84@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    For the bowling ball, Newton’s shell theorem applies, right?

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    • Sasha@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah it would fair point, I’ll be honest I haven’t touched Newtonian gravity in a long time now so is forgotten that was a thing.

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

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      • BB84@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        So if I have a spherically symmetric object in GR I can write the Schwarzschild metric that does not depend on the radial mass distribution. But once I add a second spherically symmetric object, the metric now depends on the mass distribution of both objects?

        Your point about linearity is that if GR was linear, I could’ve instead add two Schwarzschild metrics together to get a new metric that depends only on each object’s total mass?

        But even in a situation with one source, does the shell theorem work in GR? Say I put a infinitely light spherical shell around a black hole. Would it follow the same geodesic as a point particle?

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