The Gravity of the Situation

Mercury, July/August 2005 Table of Contents

by James C. White II

The elevator was out of service in my building again, and climbing five-floors worth of stairs in an oven-like stairwell brought me to thoughts of gravity. Sorry, but it’s the scientist in me.

Have you ever really considered our constant struggle against gravity? It is an attractive force between any two bits of material in the Universe—you and Earth, two dust bunnies under your bed, two stars separated by one hundred thousand lightyears. As you lift your hand each time to raise a cup of water, you work against gravity. As we stand, sit, walk, saunter, jog, even as we sleep, gravity is the force that pulls us mercilessly toward Earth or whatever other big world we’re near. Indeed, parents giggle with pleasure as their child pulls herself up for the first time: a temporary victory against gravity, weakest force in the cosmos, but a triumph of us puny mortals over one of the four forces of nature.

In the coming years, scientists are again turning some of their experiments to the question of what makes gravity attract, pull, tug, suck, drag. We know it exists because we can see its effects on small scales (dust continuously settles on your furniture) and large scales (enormous clusters of star-filled galaxies are bound together), but what we want to know is what causes it and why it works.

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