if gravity exsists does it have intelligence?

Question

can you imagine placing three balloons in a box ?
one filled with water, one filled with air, the other filled with hydrogen. what would happen ? and how would gravity know
which balloon contained what
and on the same subject if you made a life sized replica of yourself out of poly styrene and weighted it would it weight the same as you ?

Answer 1

This reminds me of that joke about the thermos that keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. "How does it know?" goes the punchline.

It's not a matter of what gravity "thinks" is in the balloons. It's just pulling on whatever mass is present, the balloons, the box, what's inside the balloons and what's outside. A hydrogen or helium balloon doesn't float because there's some antigravity property of helium. It floats because the air OUTSIDE the balloon is denser than the gas inside. The weight of the outside air pulls it toward the Earth, pushing the balloon full of helium upward. When enough gas leaks out through the skin of the balloon, the weight of the balloon itself will overcome the lifting power of the outside air and the balloon will sink.

If you made a life-size replica of yourself out of polystyrene, it would weigh whatever it weighs based on however much weight you added to it. Polystyrene is denser than air so why would you weight it at all? Say the unweighted statue weighed 20 pounds and you weighed 120 pounds. If you add 100 pounds of weight to the statue, it will weigh as much as you do. Otherwise, it won't.

Answer 2

Gravity does not know what is in the balloons. The amount of gravitational pull acts on the balloons (or any object) in accordance with the mass of the body exerting the pull and the bodies being acted upon. On Earth, that pull might encounter interference from other forces, such as wind drag and air quality.

My answer to the polystyrene question is that it would not weigh the same as I do unless the replica itself weighed what I weigh. "Weighting" it suggests that additional weights are being added to hold it down, rather than the replica being made of a material that approximates my weight.

Answer 3

No. Gravity is dumb. Gravity attracts everything. Just there is more stuff in some things than in others, so gravity attracts them more, not because it knows that they're heavier, it just (in essence) gives every particle the property of weight and things with more particles are therefore heavier.

To answer your question -- think about density, not just size. There are more water molecules packed into the balloon than there are of the gasses. If you compare air with hydrogen, there are roughly the same number of of particles in each balloon, but each of the various atoms in air ways many times more than hydrogen.

And again, no, it would be much lighter. You are mostly water (which is dense) polystyrene is mostly air (which isn't). If you dissolved the life size you in nail polish remover you would end up with a little puddle of plastic yuck (which would be smaller and still wouldn't weigh very much).

Answer 4

Gravity responds only to mass, not what kind of mass. Even if the type of matter making up an object did make a difference in gravity, the response would still be automatic, so no intelligence is required (that would be a pretty boring job for any intelligence anyway, don't you think?).

Answer 5

no it doesn't have a brain or nervous sytem. gravity reacts to mass, not substance. denser objects have more weight because there's more for gravity to pull against. only if the replica weighed the same as you to begin with...the polystyrene weighed the same as you.

Answer 6

well to answer your first question no its not alive its just a reaction