Īlthough he did not understand gravity as a force, the ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes discovered the center of gravity of a triangle. While Aristotle's view was widely accepted throughout Ancient Greece, there were other thinkers such as Plutarch who correctly predicted that the attraction of gravity was not unique to the Earth. He also thought that the speed of a falling object should increase with its weight, a conclusion that was later shown to be false. In Greece, Aristotle believed that objects fell towards the Earth because the Earth was the center of the Universe and attracted all of the mass in the Universe towards it. The nature and mechanism of gravity were explored by a wide range of ancient scholars. Main article: History of gravitational theory Ancient world Gravity is the gravitational attraction at the surface of a planet or other celestial body. Gravitation is the mutual attraction between all masses in the universe, also known as gravitational attraction. Scientists are currently working to develop a theory of gravity consistent with quantum mechanics, a quantum gravity theory, which would allow gravity to be united in a common mathematical framework (a theory of everything) with the other three fundamental interactions of physics. However, for most applications, gravity is well approximated by Newton's law of universal gravitation, which describes gravity as a force causing any two bodies to be attracted toward each other, with magnitude proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.Ĭurrent models of particle physics imply that the earliest instance of gravity in the universe, possibly in the form of quantum gravity, supergravity or a gravitational singularity, along with ordinary space and time, developed during the Planck epoch (up to 10 −43 seconds after the birth of the universe), possibly from a primeval state, such as a false vacuum, quantum vacuum or virtual particle, in a currently unknown manner. The most extreme example of this curvature of spacetime is a black hole, from which nothing-not even light-can escape once past the black hole's event horizon. Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915), which describes gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of spacetime, caused by the uneven distribution of mass, and causing masses to move along geodesic lines. Gravity has an infinite range, although its effects become weaker as objects get farther away. The gravitational attraction between the original gaseous matter in the universe caused it to coalesce and form stars which eventually condensed into galaxies, so gravity is responsible for many of the large-scale structures in the universe. Gravity also has many important biological functions, helping to guide the growth of plants through the process of gravitropism and influencing the circulation of fluids in multicellular organisms. On Earth, gravity gives weight to physical objects, and the Moon's gravity is responsible for sublunar tides in the oceans (the corresponding antipodal tide is caused by the inertia of the Earth and Moon orbiting one another). However, gravity is the most significant interaction between objects at the macroscopic scale, and it determines the motion of planets, stars, galaxies, and even light. As a result, it has no significant influence at the level of subatomic particles. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 10 38 times weaker than the strong interaction, 10 36 times weaker than the electromagnetic force and 10 29 times weaker than the weak interaction. In physics, gravity (from Latin gravitas 'weight' ) is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things that have mass.
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