Scientists have questioned Einstein’s claim that gravity is a local phenomenon of the curvature of space. The dark matter in the galaxies suggested to them that this force acts on them as something global.
What is gravity
A new study by scientists may call into question modern ideas about what gravity is and how it works. Sometime at the dawn of physical theory, Newton stated that the force of attraction acted instantly between any two bodies at any distance. Only its value changes, which can become almost zero.
Later, scientists realized that gravity could not act instantly at an infinite distance as a force. For example, how does the Earth know where the Sun is, because the speed of light is the limit for transmitting information.
That is why Einstein made the assumption that gravity is not a global force, but a local curvature of space. Bodies do not interact with each other, it’s just that the fabric of the Universe is curved so that celestial bodies change their motion in a certain way. In Einstein’s theory, non-local phenomena do not exist at all.
Dark matter and gravity
At the same time, there is such a field of science as quantum mechanics, which for its functioning requires that non-local phenomena exist. And they really are, for example, quantum teleportation. How the two theories actually get along in the same Universe, no one knows yet.
And now scientists have a new theory about dark matter. No one knows what it is either, but few doubt that it determines the evolution of the Universe. In particular, it is this strange kind of matter that determines how galaxies rotate.
In a new study, scientists have put forward the theory that fractional gravity acts on dark matter, which is described by a rather unusual, although long-known mathematical tool. And in this case, the main feature of the force of attraction is precisely its non-locality.
According to scientists, it looks as if dark matter particles in the entire volume of the galaxy are constantly interacting with each other, despite the distance. This is especially noticeable in small systems.
At the same time, many questions in the work of scientists remain unanswered. In particular, astronomers have not been able to explain how this nonlocality arises and how it should manifest itself in other cases. Perhaps if we learn more about what dark matter is, we will find answers to these questions.
According to phys.org.
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