-
Asked by to Aled, Ellie, Fiona, Kev, Willem on 18 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
-
Aled Roberts answered on 18 Mar 2014:
Hi Max170202
Gravity is one of the biggest mysteries of physics! We are not quite sure what it is or how it fully works… if we did though it would allow us to look at all the interactions in our universe and even possibly allow us to create anti-gravity devices! It is thought that a theoretical particle (something which doesn’t quite exist… yet!) called the graviton, controls gravity! All I know is that it keeps me on the ground! But I wish I could be in space and see what it feels like to be in zero gravity!
Hope that helps! 🙂 Don’t forget to vote!
-
-
Willem Heijltjes answered on 18 Mar 2014:
Hi max!
We actually know which particle “causes” gravity: the Higgs Boson! We’ve known about it in theory since the 1960s, but we’ve only “seen” it for real in the past years. This was an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (the name means nothing more than “Large Particle Smasher” 😉 )
But as Aled says, gravity is still the biggest mystery in physics. Einstein tells us how it works on large scales (between planets and stars), and we keep finding evidence that he was right (even this week, we found his “gravitational waves” !). The theory of *quantum mechanics* tells us how gravity works between sub-atomic particles – this is the theory that speaks about the Higgs Boson. And the “graviton” particle, as Aled says, is still unknown – we don’t know if it exists, but we think it might be what makes gravity work “at a distance”!
What we don’t know, is how to combine these theories! So in that way, gravity is the biggest mystery of our time!
Comments