Eli5 How do we know gravity isn’t just magnetic

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This is boggling my mind as to why shouldn’t this be a main theory to explain gravity. I also know nothing about physics so what would I know.

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The simple answer is that gravity and magnetism affect different things in different ways. There are things affected by gravity but not magnetism, gravity is only (as far as we can tell) a pulling interaction while magnetism is more of a twisting thing.

The more complicated answer is that there is a whole load of research going on at the moment into trying to connect magnetism and gravity together.

Two hundred years ago magnetism and electricity were viewed as completely different things, but eventually it became clear they were different aspects of a combined electromagnetism interaction.

In the 60s and 70s the electroweak interaction was developed (winning the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics) – a way of combining electromagnetism and the weak interaction, showing that in certain situations (at very high energies) these two interactions turn out to be the same thing.

Since the 70s there has been a push to develop a “Grand Unified Theory” – a way of combining the electroweak interaction with the strong interaction (the other interaction in the “Standard Model” of physics); it seems like these interactions might also combine at even higher energies, but getting anything to those energies is practically impossible for now, making it very difficult to do any research. There are some interesting ideas, though, for GUTs.

And finally, getting a confirmed GUT is seen as a key step in developing a “theory of everything” (or TOE – physicists love silly acronyms), which would combine gravity with whatever the GUT proposed as a unification of the electroweak and strong interactions. For now, though, there are no candidate TOEs that seem to hold up.

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So it wouldn’t be that gravity is magnetism, but that maybe gravity and magnetism might be different aspects of the same thing. But no one is close to showing that.

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