What Everyone Gets Wrong About Gravity

Energy is Force times Distance. You're not moving (even though you're accelerating) so there's no energy expended. See Veritasium's video at 10m17s: this video He addresses that basic science makes this confusing because there's a curvature term that is usually left out of acceleration equations which balances out when you're accelerating along your curvature (e.g. against gravity), instead of along your spatial coordinates.

Light is not keeping the Earth and Moon "in sync". Gravitational force is.[1] That force propogates at the speed of light. It isn't light itself. Light does play a role in illuminating the system, rendering it observable. It's a signalling component. But again, that's exogenous to the system itself. (See discussion of Maxwell's Daemon and the resolution of that paradox for the role of light in that specific thermodynamic process.) But, and this is key: ANY clock needs some way of passing information on to the observer. From TFA, that might be light, or sound, or chemical potential (received as the smell of rotting garbage). But that is a common element, part of the signalling mechanism, but not of the timekeeping mechanism itself . For an astronomical clock, in most cases, the regular rotational or orbital motion is the timekeeping mechanism. The signalling mechanism is entirely separate. E.g., in the Earth-Moon system, timekeeping is noted by both the daily rotation of the Earth, and the monthly orbit of the Moon. The kinetic energy of both those regular motions is not driven in any sense, nor is it measuring a decay.[2] The signalling comes from an exogenous light source (the Sun) which illuminates both bodies. But the Sun isn't powering the timekeeping mechanism in question. And is equally significant in providing the light necessary for you to read a wristwatch or wall clock (of a non-illuminated variety). ________________________________ Notes: 1. I'm going to leave disc

> Considering any disagreement with the idea that gravity is a force would end your academic career Gravity is not a force. So thinking it is a force would end one’s academic career. See, even scientists can live in their own “bubbles” once things get complicated enough :-) Gravity is the effect of masses moving along geodesic lines in curved space-time. Edit: Since you probably don’t believe me this video

First, the idea of describing it that way comes from Veritasium. Take complaints to him. See this video for the video where he does it. Yes I know it is handwavy and misleading. But I consider it less misleading than most attempts at visualizing it. > Ok, how does this sketch work for a low-ellipticity eccentric orbit? At what point in the orbit does it not work as a description of what's going on locally where the orbiting body is? > Sure, it's a set of events in a region of the whole spacetime. If we take "Big Bang" colloquially enough to include the inflationary epoch, always assuming GR is correct, then at every point in that "Big Bang" region of the whole spacetime there is a small patch -- a subregion -- of exactly flat spacetime. However, these small patches must be small because most choices of initially-close pairs of test objects can only couple to timelike curves that wildly spread in one direction (and focus in the other). No, there is no requirement of any region of locally flat spacetime existing. It is required (outside of singularities) that, when measuring things to first order, things are flat. However in curved space-time, the curvature can be theoretically revealed in any region, no matter how small, by measurements that are sufficiently precise to show the second order deviations from flatness that we call curvature. > I don't know how to understand your two final sentences: how do you connect the period just before the end of inflation and the expansion his