Zyxzevn wrote:Just adding this video which shows what electric forces can do in space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NbCzbDdd-g
Things like this make me think that gravity is a fictitious force. Like gravity, fictitious forces can't be screened and they produce the same rate of acceleration on all objects irrespective of their mass.
From what I can tell, there are only two considerations which count against the idea that gravity is a fictitious force:
1) The ubiquity of gravitational effects; and
2) All masses are gravitationally attracted to one and other.
The first consideration is an Argument From Incredulity; it's hard to believe that the very thing which keeps our feet on the ground isn't due to a real and fundamental force of nature. (On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting that one of the basic tenents of physics is that an object will move in a straight line unless acted upon by an additional force. The most obvious exception to this tenent was - and still is - the inexorable tendency of objects to fall to the ground, and it seems to me like "gravity" was initially conceived as an ad hoc "explanation" for this curious discrepancy between theory and empirical reality).
The second consideration is, like the first, very much a product of our own terrestrially-b(i)ased experience of physical reality. The purported gravitational attraction exerted by mass is so incredibly minute that it is virtually undetectable for any mass smaller than a moon. Such is the minuteness of this purported universal gravitational attraction, that I cannot understand how scientists can be sufficiently confident in its existence given that other factors -i.e. residual electromagnetic attraction, temperature effects, atmospheric conditions, measurement errors, and apparatus setup - would surely produce a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. Let me put it this way: if a parapsychologist suggested that telepathy occures at a level of weakness (and inconsistency!) comparable to "Big" G, how would the rest of the scientific community respond? Couple that with the fact that no one even seems to know what "mass" actually is, and the notion that all mass exerts "gravitational" attraction seems to be on very shaky ground indeed.