What is Gravity?!? Pt. 1.

A bit of context: I am a 14-year-old trying to find out how some of the things around me in this world works. I have no experience in this field other than high school physics. This is a series of blog posts where I write about all the topics that I come across while trying to figure out how gravity works.

I’ve always been told that gravity is a force by which the earth pulls objects toward its surface. I was never satisfied with this definition for the following reasons:

• For the past 9 years, all I’ve ever been told about gravity in school is this definition, calculations of gravitational force, and that an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head.
• The textbooks never had any information on how the force works or why this force works.

So I decided that I was going to find out what gravity is and how it works.

This is the 1st Part of the Topic “What is Gravity?” where I talk about how gravity works in space between objects in space

The first thing I found out is that this was already done. Gravity had already been figured out by Albert Einstein.

So here’s what I found out after doing some research :

• We, humans, are very small creatures on this planet. The only dimensions we can access are Length, Depth, and Height but it turns out that there exists a fourth dimension in the universe.
• This dimension is called Spacetime. Einstein found out that the two closely related parts of reality could be joined if the speed of light was constant. This is a vast topic that I am researching currently. I will be writing on all the topics related to spacetime later in the blog.

For now, in this blog post, I am going to try and help you to visualize Gravity that is experienced by objects in space.

Space-time is like a huge trampoline in space on which all of the objects in space move around.

So on this trampoline are objects with different masses that create curves on it. Like in the image above.

Now when there are many objects on this trampoline, like in space (due to Entropy), many curves are formed on the trampoline (Spacetime).

This results in the formation of very steep slopes around the bodies having large masses. So the bodies with less mass, move along the slope towards the heavier body. Hopefully, this image could help you visualize this concept

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This is how bodies of greater mass in space attract bodies of lesser mass.

Hope this helped!

Interesting Links

• I am currently researching on space-time. To understand it better I am right now listening to a an amazing 11 hour lecture by Brian Greene on YouTube. So if you would also like to do some research on space-time after learning about gravity I would suggest you check it out.