this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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Science Memes
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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.
It travels in a straight line, just not in every dimension. Look at a waveform from above, it's a straight line.
Uh...
Oh sure, bring evidence into it 🙄 lol. Um, how about sound waves?
Sound waves are compressive waves, they radiate spherically (in principle, turbulence in the medium is going to make them slightly irregular)
Neat!
they do tavel in a perfectly straight line though.
space time is curved, not the light path.
What about the fact that light bends around corners? Notably the interference pattern when shining light through a slit?
Stop being mean to light by making it choose what slits to go through.
it has choice anxiety.
False because they are affected by gravity, even if ever so slightly
But isn't the gravity bending the space, so the light itself is travelling straight but seems curved to the observer?
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.
"through vacuum"
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Newtonian gravity has been replaced by General relativity, and has been proven to be the correct model (at least more correct than Newtonian gravity).
Makes sense to me. Thanks
Only a Sith!
In that case that Pyrite proves nothing.
Photons are both particles and waves, not only waves (that's because of the wave-particle duality discovered by/after Einstein's theories).
But photons are also particles.