Meanwhile, more good news:

The gimbled high-data rate antenna was deployed and the first mid-course correction burn went as planned.

Breaking news… First image has been received from James Webb Telescope.

- It’s the 29 days of “space origami” they’ll have to endure after the launch as Webb unfolds from its collapse state into a “giant sunflower.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecarte ... e954f048c9

Paul, with all due respect, you may be conflating a few things here.
Events at larger scales do not mean that the force that drives them is stronger.
Consider, for starters, that those big stars were not created by gravity. They are the results of interactions at a micro level between atoms, where other forces have a much stronger impact.
Those forces in return allow for the creation of bigger particles, which in turn grow in mass.

At a certain point, gravity start to have an effect when it forces more massive atoms to gravitate, impact, etc.

But that's a bit like inertia. Think of it as the effect of the moon on the ocean. The tidal waves are impressive, and they seem powerful to us. Nevertheless it is an effect that took a lot of time to start and increase, at a very slow rate. Because it affects a huge body (in comparison to us) of element, we think of it as big. And yet it has little to no effect on you. The moon attraction can be opposed by the gravity pull of an apple in your stomach.

With only gravity, you would not have atoms. There would be no visible universe.

I appreciate that it may be a bit counter-intuitive, even more so as the educational system focused for a long time on newtonian physics. You have more obvious interactions with gravity every day, than obvious interactions at the molecular level. Yet your atoms stick together without gravity. There is no cosmos without those other 3 fundamental forces.
That is nothing but a bias, if you will.

In other words, because gravity is a force that applies with a near infinite range, and our lifespan is minuscule in comparison to the universe, its effects look massive to us. And yet the electromagnetic force has the same range, at 10^36 the relative strength.


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Gravity is a force, the speed of light is a constant. Two different things.
Light trajectory is influenced by gravity. Not its speed.

Fabian, I am not a cosmologist by any means.

But in my limited understanding the universe started out as hydrogen clouds dispersed with the bang. After a few billion years, in places, they coalesced because of… gravity and as they got denser became stars, and as they got denser… because of gravity, they were fusion engines that created the heavier elements with super novas spitting out the heavier elements around the place.

Galaxies are held together in spiral shape by the …. Gravity… at the center, the black hole.

The whole place is being determined by … gravity.

(Not to mention the heavier elements coalescing into planets, planets orbiting stars, atmosphere held to planets, your and my feet held to the ground, every take off having a landing, etc.)

I never paid much attention to gravity as a chemistry major (for a time) in college. But. All that I was studying was formed by gravity. Obviously, I am now quite impressed with gravity, and to bring it back here, to how it can be played with by this new telescope project to provide a good spot to look outward.

The BT TOS forbid me to discuss how I believe such intricate necessary precision, so that often slight variations result in death or disability, was created.

IMHO, what we believe about our origen, accidental or designed, is a thing of faith and fraught with bias. One does not have to believe in intelligent design or a God to be convinced of their beliefs about the unknown.

I enjoy your discussions and wish I was more permitted to participate. Sadly faith, which is extremely dissimilar to religion, is so associated with religion as to be counted the same and the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater.

The blog written by the Webb team is a good read.

A post this morning goes into more detail about the course correction burns and the L2 point and "Webb’s loose orbit around it."

And here's an even more detailed discussion of Webb's orbit and L2.

EDIT: completely messed up the quotes, apologies.

(may have messed up the quote)

Gravity is unique among the forces in that it has infinite range (like the eletromagnetism part of the electro-weak force) and that there is only one sign - eg everything attracts everything else.

Nuclear force has an extremely short range, so doesn't have any effect on large scale structures

Electromagnetism has two "charges" and like charges repel. So if you somehow had a bunch of electrons close together, they would repel each other and just form a big diffuse cloud. If you have electrons and protons, they pair up to make hydrogen atoms, which no longer have a residual charge and don't interact.

With gravity, everything attracts everything else so it can make very large scale structures. It weak in that the gravitational force between two electrons is fantastically smaller than the electrical force - but once you get to the size of planets, all of the atoms are collectively providing gravity, while the electric forces all cancel out.

Gravity travels at the speed of light.

The most widely accepted physics model is that gravity is a force like electromagnetism, but its possible it really is curvature of space time, and completely different from the other forces. So far there are no experiments that can distinguish the two cases.



I think physics is still in the "what" phase, not yet ready for "why" - if why actually has any meaning. Its certainly useful to have all 3 forces - without any of them we wouldn't be having this discussion - which brings up the horrors of the anthropoic principal.


Back to gravity: The general relativity explanation is that mass and energy distort spacetime and objects take the straightest like through it that they can.


START CONFUSED QUOTES
Gravity is the “weakest force”. Yet gravity caused the stars to form, black holes to develop. It will cause Andromeda to collide with the Milky Way in many billion years. And it will be a collision where matter does not actually hit each other, but the gravitational fields of the two galaxies will reorganize each other.
Does the force of gravity exceed the speed of light?




Ok been watching too many NOVAs.

Nonetheless, gravity, the weakest force, does seem to be driving the entire progression of the universe
END CONFUSED QUOTES

Yup. The quote mangles Fabian’s and my comments.

Found this to explain the speed of gravity. In Newtonian physics, the speed of gravity is instantaneous. In relativity it has been proven to travel at the speed of light.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... ecacf32fc0
I surely need to read it a few more times…

And Andromeda and the Milky Way are approaching each other at about 400,000 km/hr. Collision is imminent, only +/- 4 billion years from now.

Well, that was mind opening

More good news. The process for deploying the solar heat shield is underway and is going well so far.

I'm really interested in what this will tell us about the origins of this universe, the only thing we've been able to see so far, and not all of it.

Space/time/gravity and the speed of light is mind boggling to most. I've tried explaining to people that what they see in the night sky may not actually be there anymore due to the speed of light and the distance to the source. Most think that light is instantaneous; turn on the flashlight and get "instantaneous" light on an object. I'm still trying to get my head around gravity bending light.

I’m not sure gravity bends light. Light travels in a straight line through space. Gravity seems to bend space itself!

It is mind-bending, regardless what else it bends.

I’m not sure gravity bends light. Light travels in a straight line through space. Gravity seems to bend space itself!

It is mind-bending, regardless what else it bends.