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From the HN Guidelines [0]:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Ever since I first encountered G, I always wondered, "is gravity really constant? Is it emergent from 'the universe', or from matter?"
This eventually led to thinking about, "well maybe gravity has more or different properties than G".
As evidenced by the link to a typical comment from me above, these thoughts are always dismissed out of hand. For good reason. But now that a "legit" particle physicist is raising these questions, I hope to see some movement.
I recently finished reading the first volume of The Feynman Lectures and he brings up the possibility that G may not be constant, that it may vary over time or space. The argument why G likely doesn't vary over time is that a different value of G in the past, either bigger or smaller, would be inconsistent with what we understand about the formation of the Earth. If it were bigger by even a small factor then the Earth would be closer to the Sun and hence too hot for oceans to form and vice-versa if it were smaller.
mleonhard|4 years ago
From the HN Guidelines [0]:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
weeboid|4 years ago
weeboid|4 years ago
Ever since I first encountered G, I always wondered, "is gravity really constant? Is it emergent from 'the universe', or from matter?"
This eventually led to thinking about, "well maybe gravity has more or different properties than G".
As evidenced by the link to a typical comment from me above, these thoughts are always dismissed out of hand. For good reason. But now that a "legit" particle physicist is raising these questions, I hope to see some movement.
Kranar|4 years ago
Based on all current observations, G is constant.