Gravity is the Universe’s Problem Child

“You dig deeper and it gets more and more complicated, and you get confused, and it’s tricky and it’s hard, but it is beautiful.” -Brian Cox

From Aristotelian physics to Newtonian mechanics, from Einstein’s Relativity to string theory, the more we learn about gravity the less it wants to follow our rules.

The first earnest attempt to explain gravity came from Aristotle, who believed all things had an innate desire to move to where they belong based on their gravitas. He explained in “Physics,” in the geocentric model with the Earth at the center of the universe, heavy bodies like earth and water are drawn to the center, whereas light bodies like fire and air are drawn upwards, because that is their origin. He said, “It is the nature of every kind of sensible body to be somewhere, and there is a place appropriate to each, the same for the part and for the whole, e.g. for the whole earth and for a single clod, and for fire and for a spark.”

Over the many centuries since then, our understanding of gravity has become far more refined, yet gravity has proven itself to be far stranger than Aristotle could have imagined.