gravity. Copyright © 2012 by Brian Clegg. All rights reserved.

Printed in
the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clegg, Brian.
Gravity : how the weakest force in the universe shaped our lives /
Brian Clegg. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-61629-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-0252-0 (e-book)
1. Gravity. 2. Gravitation. 3. General relativity (Physics) I. Title.
QC178.C457 2012
539.7'54—dc23
2012009439

First Edition: May 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CHAPTER ONE
what goes up

So in all their procedinges . . . they shew themselffes to be men of

gravyte and wisedom.
—State Papers of Henry VIII (1849), VII.614

Hold this book in your hand and let go. What will happen? It’s
such an obvious question that it feels embarrassing to have to
ask it. But humor me. What will happen? You don’t have to carry
out the experiment to know the answer. The book will fall. Why?
Just as embarrassingly obvious. Because of gravity.
This is the most directly obvious force of nature. Its influence
is programmed into our expectations of the world around us. If
we let go of something and it drifts upward instead of falling,
it’s a double-take moment. Either we’re dealing with something
special, like a helium balloon, or we’re not firmly planted on the
Earth. When we drop things, they fall, simple as that. And yet, as
we will discover, the story of gravity is anything but simple.
Gravity is so familiar and apparently obvious that we often
miss seeing just how remarkable it is. Most rational people laugh at
the idea of astrology. They may tolerate it as fun, but they accept
GRAVITY | 2

that it is garbage. It’s bizarre, they say, that anyone should be-
lieve that our lives are influenced in any way by astronomical bod-
ies that are millions of miles away. Yet we accept that gravity—an
invisible force with no detectable mechanism for exerting
an  influence—can have a real effect across just such distances.
After all, the only thing that keeps the Earth in orbit is the gravi-
tational attraction between it and the Sun, 93 million miles away.
You will sometimes see this distant reach of gravity being used
to try to give astrology a scientific basis. We are subject to the
gravitational attraction of the planets, the argument goes, so they
can have an influence on our lives. While this is strictly true, it is
worth bearing in mind that the gravitational force between a hu-
man body and the distant planets is tiny. By comparison, the gravi-
tational attraction between a baby and the midwife is greater. So if
astrology really were based on this idea, we should have astrologi-
cal charts including the position and mass of the midwife, and
everything else that was present at the birth.
In the real world of science, gravity has a much greater effect
on us than anything astrologers could even imagine. Without
gravity there are just so many ways that we wouldn’t exist or be
able to carry out our everyday activities. It isn’t just a convenient
way of sticking to the surface of the Earth.
It is thanks to gravity that bodies like planets and stars came
into existence in the first place. Just imagine you are visiting the
site of the solar system before it formed, around 4.5 billion years
ago. You are looking at a cloud of matter—gas and dust floating
in space. There is no wind to disturb this collection of material,
 3 | WHAT GOES UP

so it will not be blown from place to place, but there is gravity.

Each of the specks of matter has a tiny influence on the others.
Gradually, painfully slowly, the matter will be pulled together.
At the same time the whole thing is rotating. That’s the way it
started out, and there is nothing to stop it. So as the matter bunches
together, it is also whirling around, like the disk of a pizza as the
dough is spun between the hands of the baker. Eventually, at the
center of this whirling cloud will be a large clump of matter. As
each new particle comes crashing in, it will add energy, produc-
ing heat. (Think of the way rubbing your hands together produces
heat. It’s a much smaller effect for each particle but there are many
billions of particles contributing.)
After millions of years of collecting particles in this central
lump there will be enough heat and pressure from the gravita-
tional pull of the accumulated mass for something remarkable to
happen. Hydrogen atoms (or to be more precise hydrogen atoms
each stripped of its electron to leave hydrogen ions, simple pro-
tons) will be forced closer and closer together with more and more
energy. Eventually a reaction will occur. In a multistage process
the hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium, the next element up the
chemical chain. In this process energy is released.
The released energy from the nuclear fusion gives even more
oomph to the reaction, sending it snowballing through the mass
of the central lump. What we are seeing is a star being kickstarted.
The fusion process is the power source of the star. Without gravity,
this could never have happened.
As described above, the process has one flaw. The positively
GRAVITY | 4

charged hydrogen ions do not like to get near to each other. The
closer you push them, the more the electrical charge fights back.
The electromagnetic force causing this repulsion is much stron-
ger than gravity. Even all the gravitational pressure of a star, plus
the heat that has built up, is not enough to force the positively
charged ions close enough together to fuse.
The final hurdle is overcome by quantum effects. Just as gen-
eral relativity—the theory that explains gravity—deals with the
very large, quantum theory explains the behavior of the very
small. One of the oddities of quantum particles, like hydrogen
nuclei, is that they don’t have a specific position. They just have a
range of probabilities as to where they might be. So although a pair
of hydrogen nuclei are most likely to be held too far away to fuse
by repulsion, this quantum uncertainty enables some particles
to perform a process called quantum tunneling.
The particles have a small probability of finding themselves on
the other side of the gap separating them without traveling through
the space in between. Although the chances of any particular par-
ticle undergoing tunneling are very low, there are so many parti-
cles in a star that vast quantities of them make this jump every
second. The Sun, for example, converts around 4 million tons
of matter into energy every second, all derived from the minute
difference in mass that arises when particles fuse.
In a normal star there is a balance, an equilibrium between
the inward gravitational pull that drags all the particles in the
star toward its center, and outward pressure. This pressure is a
combination of traditional gas pressure—the result of the gas
 5 | WHAT GOES UP

particles in the star bouncing off each other and resisting

collapse—and the pressure of the light emitted in the fusion pro-
cess. This reaction is going on deep in the Sun. When mass con-
verts to energy it comes out as light. But the light doesn’t come
straight out—far from it.
Any particular photon of light will only travel a tiny distance
before colliding with another matter particle and being ab-
sorbed. The light is then reemitted. This process acts as if the light
were another particle that has bounced off the matter. As a re-
sult it gives some energy to the matter. The reemitted photon is
slightly lower energy and the extra energy of the matter particle
results in extra pressure resisting the collapse of the star.
As the photons very gradually make their way out of the star,
they reduce in energy all the way. This is reflected in the differ-
ences in temperature through the cross section of a star. The Sun,
for example, has a core temperature of around 10 million degrees
Celsius (18 million °F), while the outer layer that we see is only
around 5,500 degrees Celsius (9,900 °F). There are so many absorp-
tions and reemissions along the way that photons take some-
where between 10,000 and 1 million years to get out of the Sun.
Meanwhile, back at the newly formed solar system, other
clumps, whirling around that young star will also be coalescing
under the attractive force of gravity, producing the planets. Not
all will succeed though. This is a complex interaction. If there
are enough big planets nearby, the small bits of matter might
never have a chance to coalesce into a planet. This is thought to
be the source of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
GRAVITY | 6

Once assumed to be the wreck of a planet it is now thought to be

pre-planetary material that never made it because of the disrup-
tive gravitational fields of its neighbors.
All thanks to gravity. This omnipresent force might be a pain
when we drop something or fall, but without it there would be
no Earth. Even if gravity was somehow switched off after the
formation of the planets, we still couldn’t live. Apart from any-
thing else, the only thing that keeps the atmosphere in place is
gravity—not to mention keeping our feet firmly planted on the
Earth’s surface. You only have to watch the difficulties that as-
tronauts on the International Space Station have undertaking
basic tasks (including the familiar bodily functions) to realize
that gravity is beneficial for everyday existence.
More subtly, if people stay without that familiar gravitational
pull for too long, their muscles begin to waste and their bones
deteriorate. All the evidence is that we couldn’t exist for a full
lifetime in a weightless state. Evolution has developed us (and all
the plants and animals around us) to work under the influence of
gravity—it is as essential for our long-term existence as the air
that we breathe.
If plants are grown in space, the roots head off randomly, strug-
gling to find nutrition. Roots make use of the directive force of
gravity to know which way to head, something that Charles Dar-
win was aware of, and that is easily demonstrated by turning a
plant pot on its side and seeing how the roots grow. In zero grav-
ity, plants get confused. It’s even worse for birds’ eggs. In an ex-
 7 | WHAT GOES UP

periment on the space shuttle Discovery, bizarrely sponsored by

the fast-food company KFC, it was discovered that a series of
quail eggs failed to hatch without gravity to keep the yolks near
the shell.
No animals have lived their entire lifespans in space, but
there are reasons to be concerned if humans were ever brought
up in weightless conditions. Without gravity pulling down on
the internal organs, lung capacity is reduced by a change in posi-
tion of the diaphragm, while the liver floats higher in the body
cavity leaving even less room for the lungs to function. A baby
born in space may have seriously compromised ability to breathe,
which combined with bone deterioration emphasizes just how
much gravity is part of our natural environment.
It is impossible to escape the physical impact of gravity with-
out traveling to space or enduring a zero-gravity flight, but even
if we ignore its physical omnipresence, gravity still makes itself
known in the way that it threads through our consciousness. The
very word “gravity” stretches beyond a mere attractive force of
nature. In my dictionary, the first definition of gravity is about
being grave, serious, weighty, and important.
Looking back over the use of the word, this figurative sense
provided its first noted use in English. It wasn’t until the seven-
teenth century that the scientific meaning of gravity as that mys-
tical attractive force became common. The earliest scientific use
of “gravity” contrasts two concepts of ancient Greek physics,
gravity and levity. Gravity was a tendency to move downward
GRAVITY | 8

toward the center of the Earth, and hence of the universe. Levity
was a tendency to move up and away from the center. Solid mat-
ter had gravity, airy things had levity. (Of course, such gravity
was referred to earlier than the seventeenth century, but it would
usually have been in Latin.)
Strangely, while gravity was first used figuratively in English,
levity seems to have started with the physical meaning and then
moved into its more commonplace use, meaning something that
is light, frivolous, and quite possibly funny. The descriptive op-
posite of the solid, meaningful, and serious gravity.
Gravity seems to have exercised the minds of writers before
artists. The earliest art on the walls of prehistoric caves appears
to ignore the effects of gravity, allowing figures to float in space
at will. But long before the constraints of perspective were im-
posed to give paintings and other illustrations a pseudo three-
dimensional appearance that better reflected how we see the
world, painted feet had become planted firmly on solid ground—
gravity was there by implication.
So it would remain. In the work of surrealist painters like Sal-
vador Dali, gravity sometimes played a more visible role, acting
to distort the shape of familiar objects, but largely it would be an
unconscious inclusion in the arts. Only when cinema needed to
portray adventures in space and made its own attempts, all too
often inaccurate, to portray the impact of differing gravitational
force away from the surface of the Earth, would it be considered
more explicitly.
To understand the origins of the idea of gravity in the scien-
 9 | WHAT GOES UP

tific sense, though, we need to return to the ancient Greeks with

their concepts of gravity and levity. To minds like ours, brought
up on a Newtonian picture of existence, the Greek view provides
us with a surprisingly alien perspective.