How gravity works? How can some particle go up to and grab hold of an atom and go… “here, buddy, come over this way with me, opposite to the orientation I was travelling”?

Question

How gravity works? How can some particle go up to and grab hold of an atom and go… “here, buddy, come over this way with me, opposite to the orientation I was travelling”?

In: 6

Answer 1

Let me clarify something for you. Einstein in 1915 taught us that Gravity is not actually a tangible force. Instead, when you place a big massive planet or star in the middle of space, it actually bends the space around it. In a sense it creates a big dip or well in space. If you enter this dip, then you’ll fall into it. That “falling” is what we call Gravity. It’s not actually anything pulling or pushing you. It’s you falling into a gravity well caused by the bending of space. Einstein figured this out in 1905 and finished it in 1915.

Well, in the 1920’s a new and very very accurate branch of science was discovered, called Quantum Mechanics. It changed our understanding of a lot of things in the universe and how they work. It has never failed scientists. Any time scientists have a problem, they use Quantum Mechanics to figure it out. Mostly…

There are some things that Quantum Mechanics tells us should be true, but we haven’t discovered some of those things yet. One of those things is a different way that Gravity works. A way that would make Einstein wrong about his theory of Gravity. This new version of Gravity is called Quantum Gravity.

Quantum Gravity states that the attractive “force” of Gravity isn’t cause by “falling” into a gravity well like Einstein said. Instead there are super tiny particles called Gravitons that kinda act similar to the way you asked in your question using particles. These Graviton particles carry the force of gravity if you will. In other words, the attractive force of Gravity comes from the interaction of these particles.

This theory of Quantum Gravity has not been discovered yet because we have not discovered the Graviton particle yet. So for now, we use Einstein’s explanation of space bending and causing things to fall in.

Keep in mind. I’m supposed to explain to you like you’re 5. Which means I had to simplify a lot of this and leave some stuff out