To my understanding, Einstein predicted gravitational waves but was never a fan of quantum physics (“God doesn’t place dice”, etc). The warping of spacetime by gravity is a classical (i.e.- non-quantum) phenomenon and the ripples therein due to the collisions of massive objects can be described by general relativity without having to resort to quantum phenomena.
Sure, and you can describe photons classically, too. Until you can’t.
Granted, the conditions where you can’t treat light classically are a lot easier to produce in the laboratory.
Which is to say, at that point the collision kind of renders it moot whether the gravity from the object is still pulling you towards it.
I hate when that happens.
That didn’t land very well.
When I was an undergrad student, there was a sticker on one of the physic labs door reading “Gravity, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law”
I died after each of my Covid shots. But I got better.
I think what’s missing here is that gravitational waves are typically produced by rather distant objects. So in the hypothetical event of two gravitational waves cancelling each other out, that would nullify the gravitational attraction of those very distant sources, which while not exactly zero may as well be given the relative magnitude of the gravitational attraction of much nearer objects like, for example, the earth.
It would be like if you positioned two loudspeakers to exactly cancel each other out, but they are a half mile away and you’re standing right next to the subwoofer at a nightclub. Sure, you now can’t hear those two distant loudspeakers, but you’re not going to notice that and you can certainly still hear the band.
Not even that. For any source of gravitational waves, at any distance, the attraction towards that object will always be much greater than any forces due to the gravitational waves. Attraction is due to the static monopole moment of an object. Gravitational waves are due to the variation in time of the quadrupole moment of the system.
I still love Mafalda, and I still have the old strips. Well, 7 out of 10 remain.
Back to topic: we are fortunate this board is in English, if it were in French we would all be pregnant by now. And I am male! That would be embarrassing.
That is also why, should gravity ever be quantized, it will not be by a French. Because you are either pregnant, or you are not. There is no superposition there, no probability distribution, no Schrödinger, not even a bouncing dead cat.
I got better.
Welll of course I still love Mafalda too, but it started when I was a child.
Are you telling me a person cannot be a little bit pregnant?
Nope. Not even a woman can do that. Whatever twinkles in her SO’s eye.
@chronos and @Gorsnak are leaving out the previously well researched theory by @steronz , that we overlooked a local body phenomenon that compensated for the scenario. Specifically, the oft-cited “Yo Momma” Theory.
[bringing back the silly!]
Was anyone born during those seconds? Did that make it easier or harder?
I didn’t die, but one of my neighbors works for NASA…so maybe that is why I was spared. Unfortunately, my scale was also unaffected and it says I weigh the same as I did a week ago 
//i\\
It’d make it harder for the doc to drop the slippery squirmy baby. So safer for baby.
OTOH, maybe the baby would drift up to the ceiling and be hard to retrieve. At least for a few seconds.
Some day there will be childbirth on a spaceship. That’ll be … messy. Unless they put sick bay in the rotating part.
As I recall, in one of Heinlein’s stories, a childbirth on a spaceship was assisted by increasing the ship’s acceleration at the critical moment (or maybe it was artificial gravity; I don’t remember for sure).
I’m pretty sure that that was Lazarus Long, with one hand on the engine controls. Might have been The Tale of the Twins who Weren’t, from Time Enough for Love.