Talk:Non-contact force

What utter rubbish
What utter rubbish!

Force relies on momentum or motion in representing its influence, So for Pete's sake Remove this Article, or at least get someone to provide some details as to how a non influential influence is to present influence without actual contact! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Peter J Schoen (talk • contribs) 02:25, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * You are importing Newtonian thinking, but even then forgetting something—electromagnetism. Magnets work without "contact".  In the conventional view of present physics, all forces are noncontact, although ultimately this is philosophical.  Any quantum field theory presupposes a classical field that mediates the contact, or else the relations among the quantum particles would not be mathematically invariant.  Without the classical field, the quantum particles would be flopping around chaotically.  So in some sense you are correct, yet not in the conventional—though superficial—view of quantum theory.


 * Simply, the field is unobservable, so it is not mathematically modeled. This has some virtue, since the classical field, which holds the particles in their invariant constellation, "jumps" into 4D spacetime only as quanta, how Max Planck—by calculating the electromagnetic field's energy delivery minimally at a unit corresponding to Planck's constant—resolved the paradox of the blackbody effect.  If the classical field—Maxwell's electromagnetic field—all poured into 4D spacetime, the blackbody would incinerate the room.  So in the quantum field theory—quantum electrodynamics—gets the data correct.


 * Yet behind the quantum barrier, the classical field is still in contact with the body in 4D spacetime. The quantum particles are messenger particles or force carriers simply carrying or transmitting the force into 4D spacetime on behalf of the unobservable field.  Thus went Einstein's complaint about quantum field theory modeling merely the particles—and predicting their locations only probabilistically—not tracking the particles while modeling the field mechanistically transmitting the force from behind the quantum particles.  I myself would like it if physics would return to mechanistic explanation by discussing the field and not only its messengers, yet that is going against mainstream convention. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.89.40.104 (talk • contribs) 15:53, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

The article describes gravitation falsely
The article says, "Gravity, the force of attraction that exists among all bodies that have mass. The force exerted on each body by the other through weight is proportional to the mass of the first body times the mass of the second body divided by the square of the distance between them". That explanation is Newtonian, accepted by mainstream physicists to be false. It is useful epistemically—a law to predict humans' own observations simply as human knowledge—but even then only within the everyday range of experience. Newton's theory is considered by physicists not useful ontically—to explain the natural world's causal, mechanical structure. This is not to say that gravitation is a contact force, but simply that the article's claim—Newton's action at a distance—was overturned by Einstein

In general theory of relativity, mass does not attract mass. Instead, mass associates with warped space and time, but so does energy, too, how gravitation and acceleration share a mechanism. Simply, the mass/energy associates with the "curvature" of the surface of 4D spacetime, so that the body experiences a free fall at light speed along a straight line—a geodesic or world line—which is simply the single pathway of least resistance upon the "curved" surface of 4D spacetime. At high mass, however, an entity contracts 4D spacetime mostly along the time dimension. A body traveling at light speed in a vacuum experiences maximal rate of motion through 3D space but no evolution of events along 1D time—the shape of the three spatial dimensions have "curved" into a world line concealing the time dimension—whereas a body at rest in 3D space experiences maximal rate of unfolding of events, all its "motion" in a free fall along a world line fully along the 1D time axis, as all three spatial dimensions are concealed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.89.40.104 (talk • contribs) 15:20, 30 October 2012 (UTC)


 * The first sentence of the Gravity article seems to match up quite well with the description for gravitation here. Also, this article isn't meant just for physics experts and doesn't need to be at the bleeding edge of scientific theory. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Newton's laws are still taught as valid theory, which is more than good enough for Wikipedia. I don't see a good reason to change it. -- Fyrefly (talk) 16:05, 30 October 2012 (UTC)