Posted by araucaria
(here)
Posted by Operator
(here)
I think that the answer on dependency on mass was already given by our brilliant fellow member araucaria

in
post #7.
It is of course constant and independent because it is caused by the mass of the
earth ...

The whole experiment is a result of 2 opposite forces. But the gravity caused by feathers and bowling ball can be neglected
compared to that of earth.
Coming to understand this better ... would 2 bowling balls floating parallel in vacuum space eventually move
to each other? We would probably never notice because the acceleration is so tiny that it takes forever.
:blush:

Einstein said the curvature of space around a planet or star was like a ball stretching a rubber sheet – which is not much help until we know what makes rubber behave differently from steel. Tom van Flandern’s explanation, based on Laplace, seems the best to me: tiny gravitons (possibly the stuff of the aether) usually pass through matter but are occasionally deviated. The mass of an object is proportional to its propensity to deviate gravitons – more particles to get in the way. Hence when two objects come together, they have so to speak a windward side and a lee side between them where slightly fewer gravitons can penetrate. In other words, gravity would seem to be a large-scale Casimir effect.
If we see the power of attraction as the ability to reduce the space between oneself and another, we see how this would also work in human terms as love. It is not by chance that the French word for a magnet is
aimant, from the verb
aimer, to love. This would be a dual give-and-take process of radiating out while protectively shielding and drawing in.