Term Papers on Why Is There Gravity?

Term Paper Title	Why Is There Gravity?
# of Words	933
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.73

Why Is There Gravity?

     When you pick up a stone and release it falls to the ground.  This seemingly simple concept has been known throughout history as gravitation.  Isaac Newton managed to explain gravity in terms of its effects, but few have come up with a working explanation for the driving force behind it.  The mysterious nature of some of the more peculiar effects of gravity, as well as the simple ones, indicate that explaining why there is gravity will be a long, difficult, yet intriguing task.
     Ohanian (1976) writes that without other forces interfering, mass attracts mass.  This is the fundamental concept behind gravitation.  Newton explained it as "there is a power of gravity pertaining to all bodies, proportional to the several quantities of matter which they contain… The force of gravity towards the several equal parts of any body is inversely as the square of the distance of places from the particles."  This description of gravity creates the simple mathematical explanation of gravity: that the force of attraction, F, equals G * ((m1 * m2) / r^2).
This holds true for most gravitational interactions on earth, so any proper theory of gravity would have to include similar results for these interactions.  Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler (1973) explain that there are, however, some more complex aspects of gravity that this law does not account for.  One of these strange gravitational effects is observed in the "perihelion shift" movement of planets, the most dramatically affected of which is the planet Mercury.  Feynman, Leighton, and Sands (1963) contest that another hole in Newton's predictions about gravitation is that repercussions of changes in gravitational state are felt instantaneously.  In other words, gravitational effects travel faster than the speed of light, which is in direct contradiction with Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity.  This led Einstein to develop a more advanced theory of gravitation.  This was known as the General Theory of Relativity and is the closest and only thing that mankind has as an answer to "Why is there gravity?"
     Einstein's General Theory of Relativity introduces the idea that space itself can be curved.  Just as the ground on earth appears to be flat though it is actually curved, Einstein suggested that space may behave much in the same way.  Misner et al. (1973) compared the curvature of space to an ant walking on the surface of an apple whose direction was perfectly toward the stem of the apple.  The shortest possible path on the surface of the apple to the stem was a curved line.  Thus Einstein has theorized that the shortest possible path in a gravitational field is actually a curve, which is contrary to traditional Euclidean geometry.  The other basic concept of general relativity is that gravity is essentially indistinguishable from acceleration.  A person standing ...

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