It’s a reasonable question, if your intuition comes from engines and muscles, where every intentionally applied force must have a power source.
My point is that if you ask an incoherent question (i.e., think of gravity as an agent) you’re bound to get an incoherent answer.
But few physics departments with decent instructors. And, as you well know, good scientists are not necessarily good teachers.
At the rate at which the number of countries with apparently no good physics teachers is expanding, given the other comments in this thread, there will be nowhere to study physics on Earth by tomorrow.
At the time, the question was by no means incoherent. I had been taught some of the basics of Newton’s Laws of Motion, the maths needed to compute standard problems directly relevant to those laws, and very little else.
I was, personally, extremely skeptical of the validity of some of the material being taught, but I was quite willing to adjust in favor of the material if I could find answers to my core doubts about it.
With the material that I was taught at the time, it wasn’t as trivial of an issue as you try to make it seem. There was this weird Force being created out of nowhere that created violations of momentum for no apparent reason and with zero energy conversion, which effectively would mean blatant violations of nearly all the “Laws” of physics I had been given so far (and I had to agree and take them as the Holy Word Of Supremely Divine Truth, lest I become a failure of society begging for bread near the local strip club, according to His Authority The Great Teacher).
As far as I can tell, you’re essentially arguing against a strawman. I fully agree, now, in hindsight, that the question, with my current knowledge, seems incoherent. However, the story wasn’t about how a stupid student asked a stupid question to a bunch of Great Authorities and the Great Authorities didn’t immediately know how to fix this poor broken tall-monkey.
It was about how “BECAUSE IT IS THE LAW”, as a major stopsign, sounded very much like what I actually got from teachers, along with related failure modes of physics pedagogy. That you or the teachers aren’t able to apply reductionism techniques taught here to the question and match the reduced question to your model of physics is a different matter altogether. The model I was given was flawed, but within this model, the question—and inherent inconsistency regarding gravity—was perfectly legitimate relative with the rest of the model.
It just didn’t match the territory all that perfectly, despite what I was told.
So, if they had clarified your question as “How does gravity violate momentum with no power source” and responded with “Momentum is conserved with gravity, it’s just that the effect of the column of water on the velocity of the Earth is negligible because of the difference in scale of scales between the two.”, would you have been less confused?
Or did they also fail to explain the Newtonian “One type of potential energy is what you have due to height, and is equal to mass times height times acceleration due to gravity.”? THAT would be a failure to teach Newtonian physics.
My point is that if you ask an incoherent question (i.e., think of gravity as an agent) you’re bound to get an incoherent answer.
I disagree with the “bound” part. A competent and patient teacher would attempt to identify and explore the issue you are really struggling with, not the surface question that is being asked.
My point is that if you ask an incoherent question (i.e., think of gravity as an agent) you’re bound to get an incoherent answer.
At the rate at which the number of countries with apparently no good physics teachers is expanding, given the other comments in this thread, there will be nowhere to study physics on Earth by tomorrow.
For clarification:
At the time, the question was by no means incoherent. I had been taught some of the basics of Newton’s Laws of Motion, the maths needed to compute standard problems directly relevant to those laws, and very little else.
I was, personally, extremely skeptical of the validity of some of the material being taught, but I was quite willing to adjust in favor of the material if I could find answers to my core doubts about it.
With the material that I was taught at the time, it wasn’t as trivial of an issue as you try to make it seem. There was this weird Force being created out of nowhere that created violations of momentum for no apparent reason and with zero energy conversion, which effectively would mean blatant violations of nearly all the “Laws” of physics I had been given so far (and I had to agree and take them as the Holy Word Of Supremely Divine Truth, lest I become a failure of society begging for bread near the local strip club, according to His Authority The Great Teacher).
As far as I can tell, you’re essentially arguing against a strawman. I fully agree, now, in hindsight, that the question, with my current knowledge, seems incoherent. However, the story wasn’t about how a stupid student asked a stupid question to a bunch of Great Authorities and the Great Authorities didn’t immediately know how to fix this poor broken tall-monkey.
It was about how “BECAUSE IT IS THE LAW”, as a major stopsign, sounded very much like what I actually got from teachers, along with related failure modes of physics pedagogy. That you or the teachers aren’t able to apply reductionism techniques taught here to the question and match the reduced question to your model of physics is a different matter altogether. The model I was given was flawed, but within this model, the question—and inherent inconsistency regarding gravity—was perfectly legitimate relative with the rest of the model.
It just didn’t match the territory all that perfectly, despite what I was told.
So, if they had clarified your question as “How does gravity violate momentum with no power source” and responded with “Momentum is conserved with gravity, it’s just that the effect of the column of water on the velocity of the Earth is negligible because of the difference in scale of scales between the two.”, would you have been less confused?
Or did they also fail to explain the Newtonian “One type of potential energy is what you have due to height, and is equal to mass times height times acceleration due to gravity.”? THAT would be a failure to teach Newtonian physics.
I disagree with the “bound” part. A competent and patient teacher would attempt to identify and explore the issue you are really struggling with, not the surface question that is being asked.
Oh? And what did your face look like before you were born?
??? My comment was in the context of physics questions, such as the one asked by DaFranker.