I was watching a Vsauce video and learned that any two objects, like two baseballs, are attracted to each other because of their mass, and the bigger the mass, the more gravity an object has. What does mass have to do with gravity, and what causes gravity? Why does something just attract other things around it?
In: Physics
GOOD. FREAKING. QUESTION.
So the explanation given elsewhere here, which I won’t repeat because they’re pretty good, is that spacetime becomes curved in the presence of mass, and all things (apparently so far) curve spacetime the same direction, so when things get near each other, they follow the curvature caused by the distrotion, which pulls object closer to each other.
But what is the “spacetime” that is curving, and why do some particles cause a larger bending than others when not moving is still not particularly well established. The current theory is that some particles, notably bosons which are things like quarks that go on to make up protons and neutrons in matter, interact with a field known as the Higgs Field, like the particle you’ve no doubt heard of, and by interacting with this field they gain mass and curve spacetime. Other particles, like photons the particles that are responsible for light, don’t interact with the field and are thus don’t have mass, only energy.
But this is a huge rabbit hole of particle physics that ultimate remains not decidedly answered. There are several theories for how mass is generated and how they interact with gravity at many different scales, and much of it remains up for investigation. I would argue reconciling the connection between particle mass and gravity is the current holy grail of modern physics, in that even in a purely observational sense we can’t answer all of the relevant questions. This isn’t even bringing up things like dark matter, which is a big screw you question mark in the face of all of this.
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