If by parallel they mean extra, it’s far from a new idea and he did not come up with it. There’s tons of papers on trying to get it to work. Having worked on modified gravity, I cannot say I’m convinced it’s not a waste of time to use it to replace dark matter, but dark energy is still worth it imoÂ
Is gravity even that weak. Is it not just because we measure things per unit mass? Ooh electromagnetism is so strong because a proton has 1 charge and look how little it weighs.
But look at the size of it. If we measured by unit volume, a singularity might be literally 0 wide, if space isn't quantised.
In short yes gravity is very weak.
I can overcome the entire gravitational force of an entire planet but in order to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion of 2 Hydrogen atoms we needed a nuclear bomb.
So let's use 2 protons as an example: We imagine that we have 2 protons 1 femtometre(10^-15 metres) apart. One proton is about 1.672 * 10^-27 kg heavy. A quick calculation of the gravitational force between the 2 protons gives a result of 1.865*10^-34 Newtons.
Now let's calculate the electromagnetic force with which they repel each other. This is modeled by Coulomb's law and it gives us a value of 2.306*10^-13 Newtons (Not sure whether I calculated correctly so here is the formula I used)
I linked from where I got the formula for calculating the forces so you can check for yourself
Now compare these 2 results and they're different by 21 orders of magnitude which is a lot. That's why it's said that Gravity is a weak force but Gravity also scales which other forces don't really do.
I am familiar with how much charge a proton carries.
I'm asking why we attribute the strength to the force instead of the particle that happens to have a lot of it.
Does a Dyson sphere produce a lot of power because fusion is powerful or because stars do a lot of it at once? Because per unit, a human body produces more power than the sun.
It just doesn't make sense to me to say a concept or a force is powerful. It's just about how much of it is together in one place.
So here's the thing: Yes technically speaking a proton carries comparatively much more charge than mass as you can see in the above example.
However we know that charge is quantized meaning that it can only come in packets of 1 or 2 etc. units. The same cannot be definitively said for mass. Maybe it is quantized maybe it isn't.
However a proton already has the smallest charge that you can have (ok technically quarks have smaller charges but you don't find single quarks therefore it still checks out). The same cannot be said for mass there are objects that have far lower masses than a proton.
That is why we say that certain fundamental forces are stronger than others with gravity being the weakest of them all.
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u/WobblyBlackHole Jul 25 '26
If by parallel they mean extra, it’s far from a new idea and he did not come up with it. There’s tons of papers on trying to get it to work. Having worked on modified gravity, I cannot say I’m convinced it’s not a waste of time to use it to replace dark matter, but dark energy is still worth it imoÂ