• Question: how was gravity created?

    Asked by PRI to Daniel, Hannah, Maggie, Ry, Scott on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      I guess it’s kind of hard to say that gravity was created, it’s more like a natural phenomenon and as far as we know it’s been around for as long as the universe has. Anything that has a mass has gravity.

      Different theories of gravity have been thought of over history. In the 1600’s, Issac Newton realised that the strength of gravity depended on the masses of objects and also on the separation between them. His theory did pretty well, but didn’t quite work in every situation. In 1915, about a hundred years ago another physicist called Albert Einstein thought of a new theory of gravity called general relativity. He thought of space as a fabric and masses curve the fabric (like putting a bowling ball on a trampoline) so that gravity is like a curvature in the spacetime fabric. That theory fixed some of the problems with Newtons theory and has so far passed all the tests of general relativity that have been done. But general relativity doesn’t work on very small scales, where another theory called quantum mechanics works, so people are working on trying to figure out how the two theories can work together.

    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      Every mass has gravity, so if you believe that the Big Bang was when everything was created, then that is also when gravity must have originated.

    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      That’s a big question that we don’t really know the answer to.
      Most scientists think that all the forces started off as one super-force before the big bang. When the big bang happened these forces split up into four (Electromagnetic, Weak, Strong , and Gravity!) fundamental forces. We’ve been able to put the first three back together, but like Hannah said gravity is just being uncooperative and we don’t know how to make it work nicely with the others.
      Einstein spent a lot of his last years alive working on a similar problem. He believed by combining all the forces into one theory you could make a grand unified theory (GUT) and with it you could predict absolutely anything about the universe!

      Great question,

      Ryan

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