• Question: why does gravity exist?

    Asked by anon-267456 on 5 Nov 2020. This question was also asked by anon-267475.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      That’s a good question! I don’t think anyone knows for sure. Einstein found out that what happens with gravity is that objects like planets and stars (and even people, a little bit) bend space, which causes the force of gravity to happen. But if you keep going deeper, we don’t really know all the answers for why this happens.

    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      This is a really hard question!!!

      Einstein was the first person to answer this I think and he said that its because a heavy mass bends space-time and causes other masses to be attracted towards it. There’s a lot of scientists researching gravity at the moment though and it’s a really hot topic, you might’ve heard about them discovering gravitational waves quite recently?

    • Photo: Adrien Chauvet

      Adrien Chauvet answered on 5 Nov 2020:

      🙂
      It was even making Newton perplex!
      Indeed, at his time, scientist wanted to explain everything in terms of particles pushing on each other…
      Although he was able to find a mathematical formula to describe gravity, he was unable to explain why it worked. This is why he called his (most famous) book “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (=Physics)” and not just “Principles of Natural Philosophy”!

      Embarrassing… but hey, that’s what drive us to look always further.

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 7 Nov 2020:

      We don’t really know why. That’s more of a question for philosophers than physicists! We’re more concerned with understanding exactly how gravity works and how it interacts with things. We think that gravity is caused by massive objects curving space-time, but why that happens is anyone’s guess.

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