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Action at a distance is the concept in physics that an object's motion can be affected by another object without the two being in physical contact; that is, it is the concept of the non-local interaction of objects that are separated in space. Coulomb's law and Newton's law of universal gravitation are based on action at a distance.
In physics, action is a scalar quantity that describes how the balance of kinetic versus potential energy of a physical system changes with trajectory. Action is significant because it is an input to the principle of stationary action , an approach to classical mechanics that is simpler for multiple objects. [ 1 ]
Mechanical explanations of gravitation (or kinetic theories of gravitation) are attempts to explain the action of gravity by aid of basic mechanical processes, such as pressure forces caused by pushes, without the use of any action at a distance. These theories were developed from the 16th until the 19th century in connection with the aether.
The energy function in the action principles is not the total energy (conserved in an isolated system), but the Lagrangian, the difference between kinetic and potential energy. The kinetic energy combines the energy of motion for all the objects in the system; the potential energy depends upon the instantaneous position of the objects and ...
The first two conflicts with observations above were explained by Einstein's theory of general relativity, in which gravitation is a manifestation of curved spacetime instead of being due to a force propagated between bodies. In Einstein's theory, energy and momentum distort spacetime in their vicinity, and other particles move in trajectories ...
The gravitational potential energy is the potential energy an object has because it is within a gravitational field. The magnitude & direction of gravitational force experienced by a point mass m {\displaystyle m} , due to the presence of another point mass M {\displaystyle M} at a distance r {\displaystyle r} , is given by Newton's law of ...
The Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory (also called the Wheeler–Feynman time-symmetric theory), named after its originators, the physicists Richard Feynman and John Archibald Wheeler, is a theory of electrodynamics based on a relativistic correct extension of action at a distance electron particles. The theory postulates no independent ...
Kinetic energy is the movement energy of an object. Kinetic energy can be transferred between objects and transformed into other kinds of energy. [10] Kinetic energy may be best understood by examples that demonstrate how it is transformed to and from other forms of energy.