Gravity Bends Light Gravity is curved space and time. Starlight which passes a heavenly body bends just as space and time is warped by gravity and words spoken by the current president of the United States, Barach Obama, is deceptively skewed.
Pluto is no longer a planet and neither should Obama be the chief executive of the U.S. Mistakes happen. Shit happens! Those who were taken in by the Kenyan born fraudulent chief executive prove once again that we are a flawed species easily fooled and intelligence is the illusion. And, truth and reality is a delusion. Gravity curves space and Homo sapiens believe what they want to believe. It seems as-if we are stationary; just as it seems to a rational person that the land we're standing on is flat; but it isn't. In orbit we are falling but we fall around a mass or we may fall into it, just as it falls into us. Mariners navigate a path on a curved body of water. Their route is along a curve circle. The universality of gravity is all objects respond in the same way; they follow the path of least _distance_ in curved space and time. And as you stand on Earth you are pulled by its core as the earth falls toward the sun. Because the earth has inflationary momentum and all mass in the universe is stretching it never quite gets to the sun. In billions of years, it will. "At this very moment, our galaxy is hurtling toward the Virgo cluster of galaxies at a couple of hundred kilometers a second, faster literally than a speeding bullet. Virgo is pulling us into its gravitational field. At the same time, our galaxy continues to rotate sedately: The invisible hand of gravity ties together the 100 billion stars that mke up the galaxy. Our dear old sun stays within this hurtling swarm of stars only because of its attraction to all those other stars, just as our earth stays within the solar system because of its attraction to the sun. On an evewn smaller scale, we say tied to the earth by gravity, with nary a fear of falling off. On a grander scale, as the universe tries to expand to even larger size, every bit of matter it contains is trying to rein the universe in by pulling gravitationally on every other bit of matter..." (A. Zee, Einstein's Universe: Gravity at Work and Play, Oxford U Press, 1989) Everything you see in the night sky is moving. Planets move around stars and stars move. Galaxies move. Everything is moving. We understand most of this movement because of gravity and Einstein. When I took my first course in astronomy it was an extension course from the university of Utah (I think it was Utah, if my memory still serves me correctly?) before there was even an internet. I didn't do so well. It was not easy studying the celestial bodies by mail. There was a lot to learn but not nearly as much as we know now. It would of course be easier today because the science has changed; that is, it is more complete. Telescopes are better and many of them are now beyond the earth's atomosphere and use more than visible light to look at the cosmos. "...Galileo Galilei was the first person to collect data on falling objects (actually balls rolling down a sloped platform). From these data he produced an equation that showed falling objects travel in parabolas." (University Lowbrow Astronomers University Lowbrow Astronomers Gravity, Part 2: Newton, Hooke, Halley and the Three Body Problem. by Dave Snyder in Reflections: April, 2006) But before the telescope philosophers and astronomers were limited to what they could see with the naked eye. It took giant telescopes to see well stars, planets, comets, nebulae and it took new ways of looking at these things, i.e. xrays, gamma rays, microwaves, etc to really see the universe which may in actuality be multiple universes and our human time frame for looking at globular clusters, galaxies and universes and multiverses, may be the greatest limitation of all. Hank Roth
