- #1
nemesiswes
- 81
- 0
Hi, a friend and I were talking and a question came up about a delayed force.
It goes like this:
This is hypothetical obviously.
You have the sun and the Earth pulling on each other because of gravity. (The force of the pull between them does not matter, it just has to be equal.)
The sun and the Earth are bolted down inside a gigantic solar system sized box, lol. So if one moves the other moves because they are both bolted to the box.
I attached a visual to help see what I mean.
The space between them inside the this box is 150 Million KM. Now the interesting part, the sun will at some point disappear (or shut off its gravity I guess, lol, doesn't really matter). The time taken for the sun to shut off its gravity or disappear is 1 minute. I assume that it would take a total of 8.3 minutes before the force pulling the Earth and thus making the net overall force on this box since they are bolted to it, becomes unequal. When the force does arrive and stop pulling the earth, since there was a 7.3 minute (sun took 1 minute to shut off) window where the sun was not there gravitationally to be pulled on from the Earth and the Earth was still feeling that pull from the sun even though it was not there gravitationally again, would that cause the box to move? Would that delay cause the Earth to experience the force and thus cause a overall net force on the box causing it to move?
I don't care how fast that force causes the box to move, just whether it ultimately will or not.
Every way my friend and I think about it, we think the answer is yes, weird but still a yes.
It goes like this:
This is hypothetical obviously.
You have the sun and the Earth pulling on each other because of gravity. (The force of the pull between them does not matter, it just has to be equal.)
The sun and the Earth are bolted down inside a gigantic solar system sized box, lol. So if one moves the other moves because they are both bolted to the box.
I attached a visual to help see what I mean.
The space between them inside the this box is 150 Million KM. Now the interesting part, the sun will at some point disappear (or shut off its gravity I guess, lol, doesn't really matter). The time taken for the sun to shut off its gravity or disappear is 1 minute. I assume that it would take a total of 8.3 minutes before the force pulling the Earth and thus making the net overall force on this box since they are bolted to it, becomes unequal. When the force does arrive and stop pulling the earth, since there was a 7.3 minute (sun took 1 minute to shut off) window where the sun was not there gravitationally to be pulled on from the Earth and the Earth was still feeling that pull from the sun even though it was not there gravitationally again, would that cause the box to move? Would that delay cause the Earth to experience the force and thus cause a overall net force on the box causing it to move?
I don't care how fast that force causes the box to move, just whether it ultimately will or not.
Every way my friend and I think about it, we think the answer is yes, weird but still a yes.