Will We Ever Be Able To Make Gravity?

Here is a bit more from the author’s discussion:

Once you’re in microgravity, you float around like a balloon. You have to drink and pee into a tube, and one of those involves a vacuum cleaner. Protip: Do not mix up those tubes.

The only way to get gravity is with mass. The more mass, the more gravity you get. Without mass, you can’t have gravity.

There are a few ways we can fake it.

The force of gravity that we feel is actually just an acceleration towards the center of the Earth at 9.8 meters per second squared, or 1G.

As Einstein showed us, everything’s relative. If you were in a spacecraft and it was accelerating away from Earth at a rate of 1G, it would feel exactly the same if you were standing on the ground.

Want to fly to Jupiter? It would only take about 80 hours of acceleration, and then 80 hours of deceleration. At the halfway point of this journey, you’re going more than 2,800 kilometers per second, which is close to 1% the speed of light.

There’s an idea that I’m sure you Arthur C Clarke fans know, which requires way less energy: artificial gravity from centripetal force… spinning.

Take a large enough spacecraft and set it spinning.

Thanks to inertia, free floating objects within the spacecraft, like astronauts, would try to fly off into space, but the hull of the spaceship would keep them inside.

Ok so can we do this or is this just a fun scientific discussion?  Feel free to comment.

And check out the video below of the “visualization of gravity”

thanks to phys.org for the great info



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19 Comments

  10. Nicholas Davis said:

    funny this pic was used….this is the front cover of Dwight’s E. Neuenschwander. book, Tensor Calculus for Physics….everything you need to know about Gravity is in that textbook…well…that and Kip Thorne’s “Gravitation”……

    Reply
  11. Nicholas Davis said:

    …but I’m sure once matter particles are created, they will emit a small, miniscule gravitational field (not that you’ll be able to discern from it thanks to Einstein’s Equivalence Principle)…….

    Reply
  13. Luke Patience said:

    I’m calling BS on this one. If you did, you’d be able to sell it for BILLIONS of dollars. You would have had to effectively overcome the Earth’s gravity in order for gravity from your chamber to have influence on whatever the object in question would be.

    This necessarily means that you would have to be able to CANCEL Earth’s gravity, so your chamber could take over, which is completely bonkers.

    Reply

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