Why do objects fall to the ground? “Because of gravity,” you say. But what is gravity? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that objects fall because each of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) had their natural place, and these elements had a tendency to move back toward their natural place. Thus, objects that were made of earth wanted to return to Earth, whereas fire, for example, rose toward heaven.
This view of why objects fall reigned until the scientific revolution that began in the Renaissance. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” like Kepler and Galileo, Isaac Newton realized that the apple falling to the ground and the Moon orbiting Earth were subject to the same gravitational force. The force was proportional to the mass of the two bodies attracting each other and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (That is, when two bodies are twice as far apart as they were before, the gravitational attraction is 1/[2×2], or ¼ as strong.) The force operated between everything in the universe and explained the motions of the Moon and the planets very well.
Well, almost. Newtonian gravity had its triumphs. It was used to predict the location of the then unknown planet Neptune. However, for Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, Newton’s law was not quite as accurate in predicting the location of the planet’s perihelion (the point in its orbit where it is the closest to the Sun) as it was for the others. This point seemed to move about the Sun, and the motion vexed astronomers until Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity in 1915, in which gravity is not a force reaching out across the universe but is a bending of space-time around a massive object. The orbits of the planets and the apples falling to the ground follow the shape of space-time.
Einstein wrote four papers about general relativity in November 1915. In the third, he accurately calculated the movement of Mercury’s perihelion. General relativity’s new description of gravity quickly pointed the way to new science. The theory was confirmed in 1919 when British expeditions to observe a solar eclipse in Africa and South America showed that the path of light was affected by the Sun’s gravitational field. Descriptions of black holes and the big bang both have their basis in general relativity. Einstein’s theory has even led to a new kind of astronomy using gravitational waves, which were first detected directly in 2015 by LIGO.
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