this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
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I can’t quite get over the fact that the premise is false
no science teacher would ever say that.
Light travels in a straight line, plenty of crystals, linear erosion, many trees evolved to be as straight as possible...
and to be esoteric, every object path, even when gravity affects them (they travel in a perfectly straight line, but it is spacetime that is curved).
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.
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.
Ah, sorry for the confusion, I was referring to the single-slit experiment, I wasn't giving light a choice.
that's worse :(
let light be free
I don’t think that’s right 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Newtonian gravity has been replaced by General relativity, and has been proven to be the correct model (at least more correct than Newtonian gravity).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!
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!
In that case that Pyrite proves nothing.
But photons are also particles.
Photons are both particles and waves, not only waves (that's because of the wave-particle duality discovered by/after Einstein's theories).