C2C... Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Marcus Chown is currently the cosmology consultant for the weekly science magazine New Scientist. In the latter half, he talked about his latest work penetrating the enigma of gravity, and pondering some of the fascinating questions in science. He became intrigued by the paradoxes of gravity, which though it was first delineated by Isaac Newton way back in the 1600s, it remains the least understood force today. And, Chown noted, while it's a very weak force compared to such things as electromagnetism, on a vast scale-- that of planets, stars, and galaxies, gravity controls everything.
Gravity could be thought of as an "attractive force" between every form of matter, he explained, and the force gets weaker the further apart two masses are from each other. Einstein, he continued, showed that gravity didn't exist in the way that was previously understood, and that the sun warps or bends space-time around it, with gravitational waves produced by the disturbance. Interestingly, gravity cannot travel faster than the speed of light, he cited, so that if the sun were to disappear suddenly, the Earth would continue orbiting the sun for 8.5 minutes before realizing the sun was gone. The new quantum theory of gravity is attempting to describe the mysterious force through the principles of quantum mechanics, and suggests it may be caused by the exchange of theoretical particles called gravitons, Chown said.
Website(s):
mcremo.com marcuschown.com
Book(s):
The Universe Next Door The Ascent of Gravity
Poster Comment:
Every atom/molecule has an inherent attracting field force which is cumulative, showing up as gravity when an accumulation becomes large enough.