How does mass have anything to do with gravity?

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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

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m probably butchering this as I’m just a random guy that likes to watch space videos online.

But I actually think it’s too simplistic to say two things are attracted to one another. It appears as if gravity is the curvature of spacetime.

From our perspective that curvature makes objects act like they’re attracted to one another… But, that’s not exactly what’s happening.

A simplistic way to think about it would be like if you stretched a bedsheet out tight on 4 poles and threw some marbles on it. Then you jumped in the middle. All the marbles would roll towards you like they were attracted to you. But those marbles aren’t so much attracted to you, they’re more just following the curvature of the sheet.

Spacetime is basically the sheet but only 4-dimensional and it’s unintuitive to our senses to think about it as a thing.

Now WHY does mass appear to be curving spacetime? IDK. It just does. I don’t think anybody has really pinned that part down yet. A lot of people are working on it.

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