If gravity pulls everything towards it, why isn’t the Earth getting smaller by being pulled into the middle?
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Because gravity isn’t the only force at play here. There’s also various inter- and intramolecular forces acting on each particle, pushing them apart. The harder you try to push things together, the higher the force gets you need to exert on something in order to continue compression. This eventually reaches a point where these internal forces overcome the pull of gravity, at which point, you reach an equilibrium. Lowering the internal forces trying to push Earth apart causes gravity to push things back together, thus increasing the forces trying to push things apart. Trying to push things closer together in contrast causes the internal forces to get stronger and overcome gravity again, thus pushing things apart again. This is what constantly happens in nature. Stability essentially means that all the forces trying to do one thing and all the forces trying to do the other thing balance out, and thus nothing happens.
It already did. It’s like how when you crumple aluminum foil, you can only crumple it into a ball of a certain size. A machine might be able to crush it into a smaller ball. But in the case of the Earth, it’s trying to crush itself. It can only crush itself to a certain smallness, and there’s no machine equivalent to crush it further.
Atoms do not like to go near each other so they push back. The more you push in from the outside the more they push back, but not forever.
There is a point, when too much stuff is in too little space that it actually does collapse in on itself. We call this a black hole and it looks like this:
https://cdn.eso.org/images/large/eso2208-eht-mwa.jpg
Try getting a rock, and standing on it. Can you squish it smaller? No. Now, if you stand on that rock for a long time, it won’t get squished just because you stood on it for longer. And you can try that with any object – it may take a little while to squish at the start, but then it stops squishing and just stays a fixed size.
That is why the Earth isn’t getting smaller due to gravity. Gravity has already squished it as much as it can, it can’t squish it any smaller.
Incidentally, this is why the Earth is round. If you take some clay or Play-doh, and squish it equally on all sides, you will end up with a sphere. Gravity has squished the Earth into (almost) a sphere.
Because belief in gravity is for the common idiot that believes everything he’s told.. it’s like not believing in God because you can’t see him when there’s plenty that you can’t see yet know it exist (i.e. love, pain, air) and scientifically humans can only perceive 1% of the entire color spectrum
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