There is No Such Thing as Gravity

by CS Wagner

I don't want to freak you out or anything, but there is something you should know - there is no such thing as gravity. You aren't going to suddenly fly off the face of the Earth or anything. There is plenty of force to hold you securely in your chair. That force simply is not gravity.

This concept is very difficult to accept. It is like trying to accept the fact that the Earth is not a flat square riding on the back of a giant tortoise. Some people will dare to fancy the thought that the Earth is round. Some won't. So, if you are unwilling to accept that there is no such thing as gravity, please do not read any further. If you are willing, you will find an extremely simplified explanation of the force that we have mistaken for gravity all these years.

Before I get into that whole gravity mess, I'd like to discuss a few effects of the common force of inertia. How powerful is inertia? Imagine you are standing in the middle of a large room. There is a cannon pointed directly at you (don't worry - it shoots soft rubber balls, not iron explosives). It shoots. The rubber ball pelts you in the chest. What do you do? No matter how strong or weak you are, you exert force in the opposite direction. If the ball is small enough, you won't move, but you will feel it. If the ball is big enough, you will move.

What if the ball is so tiny that it just bounces off you? It could be the size of a little bullet. Could it possibly move you? Yes, it could. If it were traveling fast enough (about as fast as a bullet shot from a rifle), it would probably knock you over. This shows that size isn't all there is to inertia. There is also speed. Combined, it is truly energy. The larger something is, the more energy it can carry. The faster it is traveling, the more energy it has. There are two ways to increase inertia: increase size or increase energy (speed).

Now, make that ball so tiny that no amount of speed will allow it to move you. Is there another way to increase the inertia going against you? Of course, I wouldn't ask if there wasn't. You just use more and more tiny balls traveling as fast as physically possible. It is a sort of cheating way to increase mass. Instead of increasing the mass of one ball, you just shoot a lot of balls.

I know, you are thinking that this is stupid. There's no way a bunch of teeny little balls will ever knock you over no matter how fast they move. Well, what if they were so small that they were the size of dust particles (or even smaller)? What if they were moving at about 130kmh (80mph)? That is what we call hurricane force winds. The air particles have so much inertia that they are able to rip trees out the ground and topple buildings. Those little particles that are so small that you can't even see them can clearly knock you over if they are moving at high speed in large numbers. What makes it worse is that they don't just hit all at once and stop. They keep coming and coming and coming.

That's enough of that. I want to get back to big bruising rubber balls that knock you down and make you feel it for a good week. Once shot to the chest by one of those and you are down flat on the ground. But, can you take a hit from two of them and not move? Yes. You just have to be hit from opposite sides. To ensure you wouldn't move at all, you should set it up to be hit by a large number of them, all spread out in a circle. Sure, you'll get squished in the middle, but you wouldn't move (much).

What the rubber balls have taught us is that small objects with high energy can move much larger objects by simply working in huge quantities over a long period of time. Also, the pushing force of inertia can be cancelled out by simply being pushed from all directions at the same time with the same force. Now, I will finally make the jump to talking about gravitational force between planets.

It takes a hell of a lot of force to move a planet, right? You could move it by slamming another planet (or at least a large comet) into the planet. Another option would be to use extremely tiny high energy particles, like electromagnetic particles. They have almost no mass, but contain the most energy possible because they travel at the speed of light. When one of those things hits a planet, it actually hits an atom around the planet. With that much energy, it gives that atom a good shove. The atom moves and bumps another atom. Sometimes, the energy particle is so forceful that it pushes through one atom, then another, then another, and possibly even all the way through the planet!

When it comes to high energy particles and planets, it isn't a case of one particle hitting one planet. It is a nearly infinite number of particles bombarding the planets at a constant rate. Like hurricane winds blowing on a tree until it finally falls over, the high energy particles pound the planets until they move. But, they don't move that much because they are being bombarded from all directions. For the most part, the planets just get squeezed into a shape that handles the pressure in the most effective manner - a sphere.

So, what in the world could that have to do with gravity? Consider the space between the Earth and the Moon. The Moon blocks some of the energy particles headed towards the Earth. The Earth blocks some of the energy particles headed towards the Moon. To better see it, consider the big room with the ball cannons again. You and your best friend are standing a good arm's distance apart. Fire! You get hit by every ball except the ones that hit your friend. That means that one side of you is not pushed, so the energy is not cancelled out. You and your friend move towards each other because it is between the two of you that there is no force. The Earth and Moon do the same. Between them, there is a lack of force. With nothing pushing them away from each other, they drift towards each other.

This doesn't apply only to planets and moons. Right now, you are on the face of the Earth. You are getting very little high energy radiation pushing up from the Earth. However, there is a lot of air pushing down on you. It pushes down on you because the air on top of it pushes down. If you go high enough, you hit the edge of our atmosphere and you find air being pushed down by high energy particles. With the constant force of inertia pushing down on you from above and nothing pushing up from below, you experience a downward push and imagine it as gravity.

This does not rewrite the laws of gravity. Think of the Moon as casting a small shadow on the Earth. That small shadow is where there's no force pushing the Earth, so the Earth moves toward the Moon. The Earth casts a much larger shadow on the Moon. So, the Moon is pushed even harder towards the Earth. The more massive a body, the larger a shadow it casts. The larger the shadow, the more of a pushing force the other object will experience. Distance also plays a role. The more distance there is between two planets, the smaller the shadows will be. The laws still work - the force that pushes the planets together increases with the mass of the planets and decreases with the distance between the planets.

Once you understand this, you can begin to see how it all fits into the workings of space, the world, and even the tiny atoms. We are adrift in a monstrous sea of high energy force that constantly pushes everything together. I don't know where the high energy force comes from or why it appears to come in from all directions all the time, but I'm happy that it is there or we wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be able to look up and realize that there is no such thing as gravity.