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
Note: Not a physicist, but it’s not just a leading theory being talked about. There is some level at which we don’t know what mass has to do with gravity, and things get even weirder when you get to quantum scale. But the General Theory of relativity is one of the best tested and most robust theories out there. It is, for all intents and purposes the explanation linking mass and gravity.
The theory of relativity shows that spacetime is 4 dimensional and distortable. Energy is what causes that spacetime to distort. And since mass and energy are equivalent via E = MC^2, the more mass an object has, the more energy it has, and the more it distorts spacetime. The more distorted spacetime, the stronger the the effect of gravity you see, That Gravity Visualized video on youtube (mentioned by kylye) should give you an intuitive understanding of this.
Now the fun stuff, that we don’t know for sure (but there have been some really cool advances in in the last few years) is how gravity interacts on a quantum scale. All of the other forces (strong, weak and electromagnetic) are mediated by a particle. It is theorized that gravity is too, but gravity is so weak that we haven’t been able to observe that particle. We have seen gravity waves though, which helps to confirm the particle hypothesis. So the answer to your question is that we pretty much know on a macro scale what mass has to do with gravity (distortion in spacetime) but we don’t know on a micro scale for sure.
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