• mrsemi@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    no science teacher would ever say that.

    Careful with those absolute statements there buddy. I was told the same by a teacher, who challenged the class to come up with natural examples of either straight lines or perfect circles. He talked about how such things cannot exist because at high enough resolution/magnification there will always be interruptions.

    Your own example of light traveling in straight lines doesn’t account for the fact that photons are waves and absolutely do not travel in straight lines.

    • Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org
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      2 hours ago

      Photons are both particles and waves, not only waves (that’s because of the wave-particle duality discovered by/after Einstein’s theories).

        • Maldreamer@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          But isn’t the gravity bending the space, so the light itself is travelling straight but seems curved to the observer?

          • SystemDisc@feddit.org
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            5 hours ago

            Hmm, I’m not actually sure. Are we also ignoring refraction and reflection because the path is straight between those? If we’re talking discrete photons, you may be correct about each segment in its path being perfectly straight, but I’m not a theoretical physicist.

        • 🍉 DrRedOctopus 🐙🍉@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          gravity isn’t a force, it’s the curvature of space-time itself.

          light follows a perfectly straight line through vacuum. the space itself isn’t straight.

          like drawing a straight line on a flat paper, if you roll the paper, that line is still straight within it’s medium.

          Newtonian gravity has been replaced by General relativity, and has been proven to be the correct model (at least more correct than Newtonian gravity).