[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Does gravity attract masses in an existing space, or does it curve the space between them?

It depends. If you have to point masses then the spacetime is curved and the space between the two objects is also curved. However the presence of spacetime curvature or spatial curvature is not necessary to exist for there to be a gravitational force acting on an object. was that more complicated than met your eyes?

The answer to this question is much more complex than meets the eye?

You're asking a question that you already know the answer to? That makes it more of a rhetorical question, does it not?

Was my saying it was more complex than means the eye true or false, don't read into my statements something that is not there??

"I do not know the answer", but "what I do know"from reading about this topic "is that this issue that it is complex" and that the answer is complex and has been widely debated by better minds than mine and I am curious and would like to be informed and learn from people like you, who are much more knowledgeable than I am.

You should not just assume things I did not mean. I have emphasized on more than one occasion that I am not a physicist or a mathematician, I am a humble very curious Engineer, trying to broaden my understanding in the sciences of which I have a basic comprehension. However, in Engineer we have to use math and physics as tools in our jobs.

"You know this Pete and your comment was uncalled for"!

Edited and unnecessary underlining removed by me (Alan)

Alan

[jeffreyH]

Can we have a little decorum please. Challenge the ideas not the personalities.

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Can we have a little decorum please. Challenge the ideas not the personalities.

I see nothing wrong with my response to Pete, it was a polite and attempt to put right a misconception that I knew the answer because, I said it the answer was complex.?

In no way could the question I posed in this tread of mine be taken as a personal rhetorical question of which I knew the answer!

[IAMREALITY]

Can we have a little decorum please. Challenge the ideas not the personalities.

I see nothing wrong with my response to Pete, it was a polite and attempt to put right a misconception that I knew the answer because, I said it the answer was complex.?

In no way could the question I posed in this tread of mine be taken as a personal rhetorical question of which I knew the answer!

For sake of being up front, he was referring to our war, and triggered by my objection to your calling out Pete by saying what he said was uncalled for when it was benign and perfectly fine.  Though there was more, and it was written matter of factly, I won't get into it cause that's not the point of this post. The point was for sake of defending the mod and setting it straight, since I didn't consider at the time that deleting my post since the back and forth wasn't worth it, would end up causing Jeffrey's message to lose context.  So I figured I'd come forward. Anyway, let this thread move on now.  Thanks

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

Can we have a little decorum please. Challenge the ideas not the personalities.

I see nothing wrong with my response to Pete, it was a polite and attempt to put right a misconception that I knew the answer because, I said it the answer was complex.?

In no way could the question I posed in this tread of mine be taken as a personal rhetorical question of which I knew the answer!

For sake of being up front, he was referring to our war, and triggered by my objection to your calling out Pete by saying what he said was uncalled for when it was benign and perfectly fine.  Though there was more, and it was written matter of factly, I won't get into it cause that's not the point of this post. The point was for sake of defending the mod and setting it straight, since I didn't consider at the time that deleting my post since the back and forth wasn't worth it, would end up causing Jeffrey's message to lose context.  So I figured I'd come forward. Anyway, let this thread move on now.  Thanks

It takes at least two to engage in a war and two to make peace, this is my attempt to make peace and move on!

Best Regards

Alan

[PmbPhy]

"You know this Pete and your comment was uncalled for"!

This is supposed to be a friendly discussion and that's what I was posting into. Please don't make assertions such as "your comment was uncalled for" because it implies that I was intentionally being a perverse, because I most certainly wasn't (I know what I really meant).

Alan; I now consider you a friend and I never make rude comments to a friend of mine and I'm never sarcastic either. So I object to your (untrue) claim that I was reading into your statements something that is not there and then you claim that I know this which I most certainly didn't know. How do you know what I said was troublesome?

The statement you made that I commented on is this one - The answer to this question is much more complex than meets the eye?  When someone starts off a sentence with The answer to this question is ... which I understood, correctly or incorrectly[/i], to mean that you knew the answer. Just because a sentence ends with a question mark it doesn't mean that the person who wrote it was asking a question. There are uses of the question mark on sentences which are in reality statements and that's what I thought that you meant it to mean.

All you had to do was say that it wasn't what I made a mistake. After all I'm not the kind of person who can't admit that they made a mistake. So lets put this bed, okay?

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

"You know this Pete and your comment was uncalled for"!

This is supposed to be a friendly discussion and that's what I was posting into. Please don't make assertions such as "your comment was uncalled for" because it implies that I was intentionally being a perverse, because I most certainly wasn't (I know what I really meant).

Alan; I now consider you a friend and I never make rude comments to a friend of mine and I'm never sarcastic either. So I object to your (untrue) claim that I was reading into your statements something that is not there and then you claim that I know this which I most certainly didn't know. How do you know what I said was troublesome?

The statement you made that I commented on is this one - The answer to this question is much more complex than meets the eye?  When someone starts off a sentence with The answer to this question is ... which I understood, correctly or incorrectly[/i], to mean that you knew the answer. Just because a sentence ends with a question mark it doesn't mean that the person who wrote it was asking a question. There are uses of the question mark on sentences which are in reality statements and that's what I thought that you meant it to mean.

All you had to do was say that it wasn't what I made a mistake. After all I'm not the kind of person who can't admit that they made a mistake. So lets put this bed, okay?

Noted Pete!! you are the last person I want as my enemy because I look up at you as an expert from which I can learn, as your insightful posts have proved many times.

If I can address the question posed in this thread.

We know that two objects like asteroids when they get close to each other, out there in space, will drift toward each other due to their mutual gravity fields, In that I do not see any bending of space, but a simple attraction due to mass and gravity.

Gravity this scenario looks more like a force such as magnetism although much, much weaker, but the effect it the same?

What is causing them to drift toward each other a force or the bending of space or both?

[IAMREALITY]

What is causing them to drift toward each other a force or the bending of space or both?

Both.  The 'force' of gravity, which is a product of the the curvature of spacetime caused by any given mass.

[PhysBang]

What is causing them to drift toward each other a force or the bending of space or both?

One can describe spacetime in such a way that the objects, at rest, just approach each other with no force on the objects. This is part of general relativity.

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

What is causing them to drift toward each other a force or the bending of space or both?

One can describe spacetime in such a way that the objects, at rest, just approach each other with no force on the objects. This is part of general relativity.

Therefore Gravity is not a force?

[JohnDuffield]

It's not a force in the Newtonian sense, in that no work is done on a falling body. Gravity converts potential energy into kinetic energy, and when the latter is dissipated, you're left with a mass deficit. However if you look on the Einstein digital papers there's plenty of mentions of gravitational force, so IMHO one should be pedantic about this.

As for how gravity actually works, I think it's fairly straightforward. See this post where I attempted to explain it in easy-reading terms. 

[PhysBang]

However if you look on the Einstein digital papers there's plenty of mentions of gravitational force, so IMHO one should be pedantic about this.

It is not pedantic to answer the question. It is however, dishonest to present as a citation a search result that might appear to support the point that Einstein thought of gravity as a force when the specific search results do not support that conclusion.

The search results of Mr. Duffield's citation include the words of Einstein's translators, descriptions of the works of people other than Einstein, and Einstein speaking of other theories that General Relativity, including Newtonian mechanics. They do not include Einstein describing gravity in General Relativity.

Newtonian physics works extremely well for gravity, just not quite as well as General Relativity. Many people, including Einstein, will use Newtonian physics to set up a first approximation to a result and then use relativistic methods to finish a problem or application. This does not, however, commit them to the metaphysics of Newtonian physics. And the question of the OP is about the metaphysical content of gravitational theory. In General Relativity, gravity is not a force, it is part of the natural motion of particles.

As for how gravity actually works, I think it's fairly straightforward. See this post where I attempted to explain it in easy-reading terms.

Given the penchant of Mr. Duffield for providing, at the very least, misleading information about physics, I would recommend against following that link.

[Alan McDougall (OP)]

To simplify the question!

Are objects in space attracted towards each other due to their receptive masses bending the fabric of space?.

Or is gravity a force acting on objects causing them to drift towards each other if they get close enough something like magnetism?

Or is it both?

Is gravity a fundamental force of nature , like electromagnetism? the Graviton particle?

End of my comments (Alan)

http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/space-environment/1-what-is-gravity.html

What is gravity according to this article?

Gravity is a force pulling together all matter (which is anything you can physically touch). The more matter, the more gravity, so things that have a lot of matter such as planets and moons and stars pull more strongly.

Mass is how we measure the amount of matter in something. The more massive something is, the more of a gravitational pull it exerts. As we walk on the surface of the Earth, it pulls on us, and we pull back. But since the Earth is so much more massive than we are, the pull from us is not strong enough to move the Earth, while the pull from the Earth can make us fall flat on our faces.

In contrast Albert Einstein said

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2012/08/18/einstein_discovered_that_gravity_is_not_a_force_but_a_curvature.html

The classical theory of gravity had been a huge breakthrough in its time, and it still provides a good means of predicting the motion of objects. But it is wrong, in part because Newton misunderstood what gravity is.

Newton considered gravity to be a force that objects exert upon each other.

But, in a burst of brilliance, Einstein realized that no such force is required and in fact no such force exists.

[JohnDuffield]

It is not pedantic to answer the question. It is however, dishonest to present as a citation a search result that might appear to support the point that Einstein thought of gravity as a force...

It's not dishonest to refer to the Einstein digital papers. Einstein said what he said.

All: please take what PhysBang says with a pinch of salt. He's a stalker and a troll. He doesn't answer any of the questions, he just badmouths the people who do.

[PhysBang]

It is not pedantic to answer the question. It is however, dishonest to present as a citation a search result that might appear to support the point that Einstein thought of gravity as a force...

It's not dishonest to refer to the Einstein digital papers. Einstein said what he said.

It is dishonest to claim that there is a force of gravity because you can find it in a search of a set of documents. You clearly were trying to make an argument from authority to Einstein. It is important to counter your dishonesty by noting that the search results were not to the words of Einstein or were not about Einstein's own theory.

All: please take what PhysBang says with a pinch of salt. He's a stalker and a troll. He doesn't answer any of the questions, he just badmouths the people who do.

I also urge you to take everything I say with a pinch of salt. People on the internet are often dishonest. Mr. Duffield has given us a few examples of this.

[JohnDuffield]

All: there's been no dishonesty from me. I stand by my references. Read them for yourself.

[puppypower]

If gravity was a force, there should be an exothermic output; release of energy potential, similar to the way the other three forces give off energy when they lower potential. Maybe dark energy is nothing more than the exothermic output from gravity. Neither the energy output from gravity or dark energy have been seen in the lab. However, both can be inferred from affect, apart from direct lab evidence.

For example, when the EM force lowers potential, the photons given off can cause the EM force to increase elsewhere, to create what appears to be an anti-EM force affect. When mass collapses due to gravity, a rotation will often appear. The rotation generates centrifugal force, which generates a force vector opposite gravity. This cause and affect is consistent with an opposing force being generated.

There are examples of spiral galaxies which more turns than should occur based on the age of the galaxy. This can be explained with the exothermic output profile due to gravity; winds from the center.   

[PhysBang]

What is causing them to drift toward each other a force or the bending of space or both?

One can describe spacetime in such a way that the objects, at rest, just approach each other with no force on the objects. This is part of general relativity.

Therefore Gravity is not a force?

If one accepts General Relativity, then gravity is not a force.

[PhysBang]

All: there's been no dishonesty from me. I stand by my references. Read them for yourself.

Mr. Duffield, I urge you of all people to read your own references. Please.

[AndroidNeox]

Gravity curves spacetime because it stretches spacetime. A gravity well is "stretched", or "dilated", spacetime. Matter exists within spacetime. Light travels through spacetime. Some property of mass causes spacetime to stretch. I think the coupling between mass (or energy, because E=mc² has something to do with the Higgs field, but I don't understand Higgs).

The commonly used rubber sheet model is very good in that it shows the stretching as well as, conveniently, letting one roll a marble around the simulated gravity well, simulating an object in orbit. The amount of spacetime dilation is proportional to the difference in gravitational potential energy between two points. The delay in the travel time of a beam of light traveling through a gravity well due to the increase in path because space is stretched is called the Shapiro Delay. For example, between the Earth and the Sun, space is stretched about 60 km, due to the difference in gravitational potential energy.

Ideally, the rubber sheet can stretch infinitely, is perfectly slippery, and stretches vertically. The increase of stretch between two points is directly proportional to the difference in gravitational potential energy between the two points. If the mass is fluid, e.g. mercury or BBs, then a rubber sheet will follow a correct curve even under the surface of the fluid mass, curving more toward horizontal instead of getting progressively steeper. The maximum spacetime stretch will be at the center point, when the sheet is stretched deepest. Note, in the center of gravity of an object, although spacetime is maximally dilated and time goes slowest, there is no net gravitational vector so the observer, there,  wouldn't feel any gravity, they'll be in freefall, but their clock will run slower than for an observer at higher gravitational potential energy.

The rubber sheet model is also excellent because the stretch to space is entirely radial about the mass. For example, if the sun were compressed to a black hole, the orbital circumference of the Earth would remain unchanged but the measurable distance to the center of our orbit would approach infinite. The Shapiro delay to any event horizon will be infinite.

But, don't get hung up on the idea that spacetime is a thing. It's just an imaginary framework we've established for showing how motion in different frames relate to each other. Each observer has a "local" stationary, the local inertial frame. Whether you are experiencing acceleration or not, you can define an inertial frame. For example, for an observer in 1 g of acceleration, an inertial frame would fall downward at ~32 ft/sec/sec. For an astronaut floating freely in free fall, she is occupying her inertial frame, whether they are far from any masses or in vacuum in orbit around a planet.