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American physicist Edward Witten explains why it wasn’t until Einstein's work that we fully understand the reason behind the inverse square law, and why it's specifically a square rather than some arbitrary decimal 1 / distance² vs. 1 / distance¹·⁷⁴⁸²²⋅⋅⋅
427,896 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)
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I'm not sure what he means by "Newton could have used a different law." As he says, the inverse square is the result of geometry, so how could it be anything but inverse square?
Newton had to postulate inverse square law but in Einstein's theory it drops as a natural consequence! Great to know that.
It's 2 because the universe is 3-dimensional. It's 1 in a 2-dimensional universe (and 0 on the line).
That's just babblespeak. The inverse square law applies to Newtonian gravitational physics, Coulomb's electrostatic physics, and the physics of light irradiance. The inverse square law has nothing to do with Einstein's ontologies or complex calculus equations.
There's a rather intuitive way of considering it; How is the influence of a mass m distributed in homogeneous space at some distance r? Evenly across the surface of the bounding sphere. f = k * m/(πr^2)
Gravity requires an inverse square law if the attraction of a spherical ball is the same as that of a point mass at the centre. Newton knew that.
Correct however it still fails to correspond to what we witness in some observations and does not provide a full unified framework i.e quantum gravity, Ed knows we need a new idea @Cornell
I thought Gauss was the guy who figured out why it was an inverse square law...and isn't it only an inverse square in Einstein's theory in the weak gravitational field approximation?
No, this does not explain it, because it does not explain why the spreading of the field needs to be a constant.
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