gravity has found itself grounded in a great deal of pop culture recently. from depictions in cinematic blockbusters to the recent historic breakthrough at LIGO, gravity has become somewhat of a household/cocktail party topic of conversation.
being a physics major, over the years i’ve come to think of cosmological things in visuals, or colors, or little mind models i have for myself. quantum mechanics is grey, and there is always a potential well in the image i conjure up. classical mechanics is a pulley, and it’s green. not the pulley, just the thought. e&m i don’t think of very often because i hate it, but when i do i imagine a gaussian cylinder. it’s always the same one.
so what are we thinking of when we think of gravity?
is it fun bouncy times with color like in the new ok go video?
is it a destructive thing of despair like in the clooney/bullock blockbuster?
is it a higher dimension hitherto inaccessible to us humans in our current plane of existence but manifests as the power of love in a tesseract?
is it a product of the curvature of space? if i stand still i am moving in one direction (forward in time !!) – similarly if i am right above earth i am moving downward – falling. time and space are part of the same fabric.
is it the love force of sara bareilles and john mayer? why do we romanticize it this way? why does it make us feel this way?
is it a force mediated by the imaginary graviton? if we find it will it help us unite quantum mechanics with general relativity?
so many questions, so much time and space. as one professor puts it, this is a matter of serious gravity.
