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1 year agoI studied Relativity at university as part of combined Physics/Maths degree, but please feel free to continue entertaining us with your popular magazine-based learnings.
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023
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If the gravity were strong enough and the source close enough then the tidal force would absolutely be strong enough to simultaneously crush you and rip you apart. The same effect gives rise to tides on this planet, hence the name.
I was thinking of the Equivalence Principle:
the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass, and Albert Einstein’s observation that the gravitational “force” as experienced locally while standing on a massive body (such as the Earth) is the same as the pseudo-force experienced by an observer in a non-inertial (accelerated) frame of reference.
I think General Relativity is based on the idea that a frame of reference that’s in freefall is equivalent to one that in a gravity free region of space (at least that was one of Einstein’s Gedankenexperiments that led him to his theory of GR).
Having said that, in reality a sufficiently strong gravitational field will cause a tidal effect, which will crush you along one axis and pull you apart along another.
The published “safe” levels of alcohol are generally completely arbitrary:
What, the generic Windows driver wasn’t good enough…?