RE: gravitation, and other forces, I think your framing is wrong here. Regardless of what else is going on in the system, gravitation does happen. There's no "ifs" involved in whether the two masses are attracted to each other in proportion to their values and the distance between them. The force applied doesn't change.
RE: gravitation, and other forces, I think your framing is wrong here. Regardless of what else is going on in the system, gravitation does happen. There's no "ifs" involved in whether the two masses are attracted to each other in proportion to their values and the distance between them. The force applied doesn't change.
The "if" appears in *what will observably happen*. Will they move? Where to? How quickly? Will you see it? That depends on the other factors in play. Other circumstances might cancel it out, or render the effect unobservable to you. But, at least theoretically, if you can account for all the other forces, gravitation will fall out of the sum of their effects.
You can say, "well maybe that's not true, maybe sometimes gravitation just doesn't happen in the first place, and we just assume it does because every time we've tried to measure it, it was there."
Ok, I'm down with that, but now we need to design an experiment that can show that gravity isn't there if we don't look for it. Which sounds like fun, but is probably difficult.
RE: gravitation, and other forces, I think your framing is wrong here. Regardless of what else is going on in the system, gravitation does happen. There's no "ifs" involved in whether the two masses are attracted to each other in proportion to their values and the distance between them. The force applied doesn't change.
The "if" appears in *what will observably happen*. Will they move? Where to? How quickly? Will you see it? That depends on the other factors in play. Other circumstances might cancel it out, or render the effect unobservable to you. But, at least theoretically, if you can account for all the other forces, gravitation will fall out of the sum of their effects.
You can say, "well maybe that's not true, maybe sometimes gravitation just doesn't happen in the first place, and we just assume it does because every time we've tried to measure it, it was there."
Ok, I'm down with that, but now we need to design an experiment that can show that gravity isn't there if we don't look for it. Which sounds like fun, but is probably difficult.