Falling for Physics Over and Over and Over Again

I love physics.

Sometime I wake up in the middle of the night and think about falling. I imagine my act of falling through three different lenses:

(1) Newton's Lens
The mass of every atom in the planet reaches out and pulls the mass of the falling object towards it.  You sum up the net effect of all these microscopic tugs and you fall straight down.  All the other atoms in the room are trying too, but they just can't compete with the number of atoms in the planet itself.

(2) Field's Lens
The mass of the planet is creating a field whose strength is communicated at the speed of light outwards into space, tagging every location with a vector value.  I exist at one location in this space and my mass responds to the vector field value here and I fall a bit where I find another value for the field and I fall a bit more....Newton cries out from the grave "Aha - so that is how the action-at-a-distance thing works!"

(3)Einstein's Lens
The mass-energy of the planet has brought space-time into existence.  This space-time is why and how meters and seconds have meaning.  As I try to obey the law of inertia and remain unchanged as I travel through time, my inertia carries me downward because the space-time is different down there closer to the planet.  Because the intervals of time itself are longer down there, there is less change in my state if I follow the intervals of increasingly longer time and I continue to "fall" through that inertial path until I hit the ground. Newton frowns and says "you lost me when you made space-time a consequence rather than an a priori." Einsteins shakes his head gently and responds "I didn't want to, but the equivalence principle made me do it."

I could tinker with these mental models all day and still not have them quite right.  So cool!

-------------------------

Inspired by the line of ASAP science's Science Love Song, "Take away gravity, I'd still fall for you" which I show to my students every year on Valentine's Day.