What is Gravity, Anyway?

March 2, 2018November 23, 2022 / Emma / 2 Comments

Welcome to my second “Science Answers” post! About a month ago, I sent out a post requesting science questions from all of you; you can find it here. This post addresses the second of the questions I was asked. If you have a question, you can ask it in the comments here or on that post, or ask it in an email. Or find me on Facebook!

Q: What is gravity? (asked by Simon)

Wow…great question. This is a question the greatest scientific minds have asked and tried to answer for centuries. It’s a question not even Stephen Hawking, the scientific genius of the century, has fully answered.

There are a few parts to the gravity question, and they have each been addressed one by one over time:

How does gravity work?
What is gravity?
Why does gravity work?

Isaac Newton stood on the shoulders of the giants before him—Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler—and figured out how gravity works. But he was at a loss to explain what exactly this mysterious force was.

Einstein built on Newton’s work and came up with a theory for what gravity is—that is, distortions in space-time.

We have yet to understand why gravity works. Why is space-time warped? Why do objects distort it as if it were the material of a trampoline? What exactly is the nature of space?

But, lucky for me, the question above specifically asks what gravity is. And that, I can explain.

The best way to do that is to turn one of gravity’s oldest tricks, one that has perplexed scientists and philosophers for thousands of years: What makes the planets move?

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Einstein: Space-Time Curvature

September 28, 2017November 23, 2022 / Emma / 2 Comments

When you hear about “space-time,” it’s just a way to say that space is related to time. And the curvature of space-time, as Albert Einstein predicted, is the way space and time alike literally bend around a mass such as the Earth or the sun.

That’s what’s diagramed above. This is a three-dimensional concept diagram of the way space sort of “clings” to an object. Notice the way it sort of tightens up when you get close to Earth? And because time is part of this whole equation…time sort of tightens up, too.

I assume that explains the “twin paradox,” as it’s called. That’s where the space-traveling twin returns home to Earth younger than their Earth bound twin.

Why? Seems to me it’s because time was tighter and passed faster on Earth, while it spread out and passed a bit slower for the traveler. (Don’t quote me on that, I just guessed that from this diagram.)

Einstein figured all this out. But scientists need evidence. Trusting Einstein’s genius wasn’t enough for them. How did they accept relativity as fact?

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Einstein: General Relativity

September 27, 2017November 23, 2022 / Emma / Leave a comment

Albert Einstein may have been the genius among physicists, but like all others before his time, he stood on the shoulders of giants.

Einstein did not propose that the sun was the center of the solar system; that idea was already widely accepted when he came around. He didn’t discover elliptical orbits; that distinction belongs with Johannes Kepler.

But Kepler never could figure out why planets orbit the sun in ellipses instead of circles. Even Isaac Newton, who at last identified gravity as the reason we stick to Earth’s surface, couldn’t explain what gravity was—only how it worked.

Einstein provided that explanation with his general theory of relativity.

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Einstein: Special Relativity

September 26, 2017November 23, 2022 / Emma / 4 Comments

Albert Einstein’s name literally sends shivers down my spine.

This is the man who discovered physics as we know it. This is the man who filled in the gaps where even Newton’s laws of motion went wrong and expanded our understanding of the universe.

This man was a genius in every right—even if his social skills were somewhat lacking.

By the way…I can’t help but notice this is my first post with actual photographs of the scientist in question, instead of portraits. We’re moving along, people…

So. To the point. Einstein is famous for taking revolutionary and widely accepted laws of physics—those that Newton figured out—and showing where there were some holes in the math. But Einstein wasn’t just an annoying critic.

He took it all a step further…and showed us how physics really works.

He came up with the idea of relativity.

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