> The earth is not a point, nor is the moon or any other body.
From a gravitational perspective, this doesn’t matter as long as you’re outside of the body: you can treat the object as a point mass located where the center was.
Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity... which describes gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of spacetime, caused by the uneven distribution of mass, and causing masses to move along geodesic lines.[1]
article goes on to state that gravitational pull effects surrounding objects without touching them, you know, like how we already know every fucking planet works?
quantum physics: the biggest waste of time since philosophy
Welllll…combination of that and angular momentum. Combined with the masses of the sun, and the moon, the other planets, and all the other masses of the universe.
Fortunately, orbits factor in, too. Everything that orbits is essentially in free fall, wellll…until they get tooo eliptical and the oscillating accelerations get really noticeable.
And it all affects time. Time is a bunch of wibbly-wobbly…stuff.
(( Ok, ok: Matt Smith might not have been that wordy as The Doctor. ))
The fact that mathematics is accurately replicating the semantics of gravitation is why we got to the moon — that model was projected back into reality as the rocket’s trajectory; via a computer directly mediating the translation of model into rocket parameters.
for thing in solar_system: thing.gravitate_around(everything_else.center_of_mass)
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