/tech/ - Soyence and Technology

this might sound retarded, but why does (Newtonian) gravity behave the way it does? why don’t objects with more mass have more acceleration? doesn’t it intuitively make more sense for earth to exert the same force on all objects instead of the force adjusting based on an object’s mass?
it’s like when a person has to manually apply more force to be able to pick up something heavy, and that person is a rock
and here’s where i get stuck: gravity’s law says F = G·M·m/r², so the bigger the object (m), the bigger the force. yet when you divide by the same m (F = m·a), the mass cancels and everyone accelerates at the same rate. so earth really is “pulling harder” on heavier things, but those things also “fight back” harder, so they still speed up at 9.8 m/s².
but why should nature be so perfectly balanced? why must the gravitational mass (how strongly you’re pulled) always equal the inertial mass (how much you resist being pulled)? wouldn’t it be simpler if earth grabbed everything equally and light things just zipped off faster?

i know galileo dropped balls off the leaning tower, and einstein made sense of it with spacetime curvature, but it still feels like a cosmic coincidence that gravity scales exactly with mass. is there a deeper reason—or is this “canceling-out” symmetry just one of those brute facts of our universe?