General relativity is famously difficult to understand, and I don’t claim to fully understand it, so I’m going to fall back to the famous rubber sheet model.

Imagine the Earth in empty space. The mass of the Earth causes spacetime curvature that extends outward away from the Earth. However, if you look a single little patch of spacetime at some distance, say, 1000 km away, that little patch doesn’t know that it has to be curved because the Earth is 1000 km away. It doesn’t know where the Earth is. It just knows that its neighboring patch is a little bit more curved in the direction that leads to Earth, and its other neighbor is a little bit less curved going away from Earth. This essentially restates the principle of locality: all physics is local physics, and there is no spooky action at a distance.

Now imagine that the Earth moves by some small distance dx in a small time dt. Going back to our little patch of spacetime, it doesn’t know that the Earth moved. So how does it change its curvature to match the new position of the Earth? It changes when its neighbors change. When the Earth moves, the spacetime immediately near the Earth stretches and bends first, then spacetime a little further away, and so on and so on. This process doesn’t happen instantaneously; it takes time for changes to propagate to longer distances. The theory predicts that disturbances and ripples will propagate via waves, called gravitational waves, and that these waves travel at the same speed of light as electromagnetic waves.

Notice I called these spacetime waves “gravitational waves.” It is common to use the term “gravity waves” for typical water waves, of the kind you might see at the beach. Those are not the same type of wave.

Now let’s talk about energy. The Earth in the solar system has some energy, including translational and rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy as it sits in the Sun’s gravity well, and of course its own thermal energy and rest mass. Waves have the ability to transport energy from one location to another without transporting matter, mass, or electric charge. Spacetime waves are not any different. Because the Earth is moving in a periodic motion, it produces a periodic spacetime wave that propagates outward away from the solar system, and that spacetime wave carries some amount of energy away from the solar system. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the Earth, mainly from the Earth’s kinetic energy.

So the story is that the gravitational waves are very, very, very slightly causing the Earth to slow down in its orbit. And following the laws of orbital mechanics, this causes the Earth to fall closer to the Sun. The result is that over the long term, the radius of the Earth’s orbit gets smaller. Alternatively, the Earth’s circular orbit is an illusion, and it’s actually spiraling inward on a very, very, tightly packed spiral. That’s what I meant by “orbital decay.”

I find it hard to overstate just how small this gravitational radiation effect is for a typical solar system situation. We have an observatory called LIGO that can detect gravitational waves. It can measure a variation in distance of a tunnel of several kilometers down to well less than a single proton diameter. (Remember, this is trying to detect disturbances in space and time itself). Even still, it is only able to detect gravitational waves from the most powerful kinds of gravitational events–mergers of black holes and the like.

Essentially: Spacetime is very “stiff” and gravity is very weak.

They weren’t talking about radioactive decay, electrons are stable. They were talking about electrically charged particles emitting electromagnetic radiation when accelerated. (Circular movement is accelerated, see centripetal force) Since they use energy for this, they would very quickly fall into the nucleus (if I remember correctly, in around 10^-14 s).

Bodies with mass also emit gravitational waves when accelerated, but much less.

that is not what i’ve learned, afaik electrons do not orbit with any sort of movement, and in fact talking about positions and movements at all on such a small scale is misleading.

What i’ve learned is that electrons exist as a probability cloud, with a certain chance to observe them in any given position around the atom depending on the orbital and the amount of other electrons.

Comparing it to gravitational orbits is just basically entirely incorrect, and certainly isn’t going to help someone pass advanced physics classes.

Ok, hear me out for curiosity sake. What happens if you slow down time to magnitudes less then you can observe?

I just woke up and read that as “quantum aristocrat”.

Just testing how deep Cunninghams law will go haha

Well at one time people “knew” that space was filled with Aether, and people knew that the universe was no more than 2 million years old.

But once you understand things more, some of the things you know turn out to be wrong.

In this case it’s more like “we called this thing a planet before we knew just how tiny it really is but it’s still cool so we now have categories for things just like it”

Which I think is neat.

You can be sad it’s not a planet, we can also be happy that it pulled one over on all of humanity for such a long time.

the only thing that changed is what we call it, pluto has existed since before humans and will continue to exist after humans most likely, and it does not give even the tiniest shit about what we call it.

“planet” is an arbitrary category that mostly just exists because we like to put things into categories, much like the concept of a continent.

It’s just really difficult to say that pluto is a planet if we want to have any sort of vague definition for what a planet is, because pluto is more similar to a ton of objects in the solar system than it is to the other bodies we very confidently refer to as planets.

If nothing else you have to also call ceres a planet if you include pluto, and how many people give a shit about ceres?

That’s messed up

I don’t remember.

Please, jokes about this subject are very difficult for people affected by these situations. That is, it’s not the time to bring up comic sans, ok?

Yeah, we all learned it, you’re not special. I was calling you pretentious, not smart lol

Planck length is not like universal pixels. It’s just where current models say there’s little reason to look at smaller things, since it’s kind of like worrying about which flecks of paint are coming off a car in a racing video game. It’s just … so irrelevant as to be ignorable.

It’s nigh impossible to have any energy that could interact with us or atoms on the Planck length scale that wouldn’t just collapse in to a black hole. It’s not so much any observation of real-world pixelation, and more that even to atoms, it’s very tiny.

planck length doesn’t come up even once, it all boils down to these things: 1. electron has momentum, and from that follows it has a wavelength, and at the same time 2. orbit is stable, which means that after every “rotation” electron has to end up with the same phase, which means there is only a finite number of solutions to time-independent schroedinger equation for (hydrogen) atom (don’t bother solving it on paper for anything with more than one electron) and these things are spherical harmonics

planetary orbits are not quantized, for starters. atomic orbitals are occupied by pairs (at most) of electrons, and this is because of qm spin exists which has no analogue in large scale. electrons aren’t spinning around on an orbit, they’re more of a smudged standing wave. it’s also a staple among vapid thonkers like mckenna

Here’s a few reasons this doesn’t work:

1. Planets are different sizes, electrons are all identical
2. 2 planets cannot occupy the same orbit, but (at least) two electrons with opposite spin can
3. If you have a high speed planet entering the solar system, you can’t transfer some of its energy to another planet and have the rogue planet continue with less energy
4. All orbital energies are possible, not so much for atoms
5. Planetary orbits emit gravitational waves. If electrons produced the equivalent (bremstrahlung radiation) during “orbit”, they would collide with the nucleus hilariously fast. This isn’t a problem because electron orbitals don’t have a physical representation.