![]() ![]() Later, in the seventh century CE, Brahmagupta proposed the idea that gravity is an attractive force which draws objects to the Earth and used the term gurutvākarṣaṇ to describe it. In India, the mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata first identified gravity to explain why objects are not driven away from the Earth by the centrifugal force of the planet's rotation. He also postulated that if two equal weights did not have the same center of gravity, the center of gravity of the two weights together would be in the middle of the line that joins their centers of gravity. Īlthough he didn't 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 which 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 was explored by a wide range of ancient scholars. Main article: History of gravitational theory Ancient world 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: 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 allowed 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. Investigation into the effects of weightlessness has shown that gravity may play a role in immune system function and cell differentiation within the human body. 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 with mass or energy. ![]()
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