Gravitate Towards The Truth

 

We don't yet understand what underpins the fundamental force that glues the Universe together and stops us from frankly not having existed at all: gravity. Yes, folks it's been around since the dawn of the Universe, and we still don't know what it actually is. We have a pretty fair understanding of its effects and influences, though. I'm prompted to mention this by a comment that Joe made in a text early this morning, regarding a piece he'd read from Scientific American about gravity waves and stars. I think the early morning rant centred around what our old nemesis Mike [name withheld] would have characterized as a category error - he was very fond of highlighting those - regarding the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves and their relationship with gravity itself.

Gravity waves are basically fluid-mechanical phenomena, occurring either at the interface between two fluid media or within the body of a fluid itself; where gravity or buoyancy attempts to re-establish the equilibrium within the body or bodies of fluid: between the atmosphere and the oceans, for example, creating the waves we are familiar with on a daily basis. Conversely, gravitational waves are wave propagations created by massive stellar objects under [axial or bi-axial] acceleration, propagating now-detectable wavefronts in space-time, across the universe. These have been observed and correlated with visual and gamma-ray observations for some five years now, confirming the underlying theories that predicted them more than a century ago.

Although we still haven't proved the existence of the proposed fundamental particle supposed to be the reason for gravity itself - the graviton - the evidence of its effects on the cosmic level is out there and now becoming better understood, due to an awful lot of solid, globally collaborative scientific work between nations across the world. This is peer-reviewed, rigorous science. As always, things change and understanding improves incrementally. I'm minded of an article in a 1964 edition of Scientific American - yes, I did read that journal at the age of ten: my uncle used to pass on his copy when he'd read it - about lasers: "A Solution in Search of a Problem".

Lasers were a curiosity back then: advanced tech without any apparent purpose or use. Today, the world wouldn't function without them. To all the QAnon and 4Chan-type loons out there: you garner your nonsensical notions and propagate your ill-informed poison via a medium that you would have dismissed, had you been alive at the time of its invention, as pure hokum; as an invention of one of your own fictional and paranoid constructs - viz: reptilian aliens running paedophile rings from a global chain of pizza bars - go boil your collective heads and leave the rest of humanity in peace to think and do properly. Read more, compare notes, attribute your sources and stop dreaming up febrile fantasies that really belong in some 1950s comic. And that's doing comics a disservice...