Where have all the gravitons gone? I've read that all forces are transmitted by particles. Things get hot because their molecules are made to move faster and faster, so that when you touch such a hot object it feels hot to you. This is because the huge number of particles vibrating against your skin causes the molecules of your skin to start vibrating faster. This is what we perceive as heat. What causes the molecules to move in the first place is being struck by other molecules. Like charges repel because, taking for example electrons, when one electron gets close enough to another it emits a photon toward the other electron. This emission causes a recoil, like the recoil from firing a gun, and the emitting electron is kicked away from the photon. When the photon hits the other electron that electron is kicked away from the first electron by the photon's impact.
So how does this work with gravity? Maybe we have a bunch of gravitons streaming down on us from space. It's like the whole Earth is a giant funnel where gravitons drain into it from space. These gravitons bump into objects from the top and force them to recoil downward, like floodwaters forcing everything in its path away. Well, where do they go after they've pushed us and every other object on Earth to the ground? Presumably they keep going through the Earth. But unless they somehow disappear at the center of the Earth they would come out the other side and then push everything UP against the force of the gravitons still coming down from the other side of the Earth and mitigate or neutralize the force of the gravitons coming down. So what happens to them? Do they disappear into another dimension? Do they merge with the Earth's core and heat it up or help to keep it spinning? Perhaps they all collide at Earth's center and turn into some unknown particles which then stream out the other side of Earth into space? Perhaps they turn into that mythical "life force" or Gaia energy depicted in some anime? Who knows?
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[–] The_Cat 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
What you're describing is not gravitons as they're hypothesized. What you're saying is called Le Sage's theory of gravitation and has long been discredited.
The way an interaction through particle mediation works is a little different. When a proton and an electron exchange a photon, they attract each other. The way you have to visualize it is not that these mediating particles "push", because that would just move the concept of force a level down.
How you have to consider it is that such a virtual mediating particle carries a bit of energy and momentum between two particles. This can be any amount of energy and momentum, and in any direction. The nature of the interaction determines what kind of energy and momentum values will dominate, making the interaction attractive, repulsive, or something else entirely. Feel free to ask more if you want.