HOW DOES GRAVITY WORK? NO ONE CAN BE SURE AT THIS TIME.

There are two forces in nature that we experience every day: gravity and magnetism. You may have magnets on your refrigerator, and you know that a magnet will attract a refrigerator with a certain amount of force. The force depends on the strength of the magnet and the distance between the magnet and the metal. Gravity is the other common force. Newton in the 1600's was the first person to study it seriously, and he came up with the law of universal gravitation: “Each particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.” It adds up to a rather powerful force. It is also interesting to think about the fact that every atom attracts every other atom in the universe in some small way! Starting with the great physicist Michael Faraday in 1849, physicists have searched continually for a hidden relationship between gravity and the electromagnetic force.

Why atoms attract one another is still not fully understood. The goal is to combine gravity, electromagnetism and strong and weak nuclear forces into a single unifying theory. Gravity holds us firmly on the ground and keeps the earth circling the sun. This invisible force also draws down rain from the sky and causes the daily ocean tides. It keeps the earth in a spherical shape. In many ways, gravity remains a profound mystery.

Gravity cannot be shielded in any way. Neither does gravity depend on the chemical composition of objects, but only on their mass, which we perceive as weight. Blocks composed of glass, lead, ice or even styrofoam, if they all have equal mass, will experience (and exert) identical gravitational forces. These are experimental findings, with no underlying theoretical explanation. Attempts to explain gravity have included invisible particles, called gravitons, that travel between objects. Two Bible references are helpful in considering the nature of gravity and physical science in general. The final explanation may come two days from now or two hundred years from now.