Think about this: Gravity is the weakest of the 4 strong forces that bind the universe together. (Gravity, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, Electromagnetism). An example is getting a $0.10 refrigerator magnet. If you get close enough to a small metallic object, (such as a paperclip), you can pick it up. (duh). Consider this: You are working against the ENTIRE mass of the Earth, but you can still very easily do it. Compared to the rest of the fundamental forces, gravity is a very weak force. Also, consider picking up an object. You can walk along and pick up casually objects having a mass of over 100Kg. You are working against the entire gravitational pull of the Earth, but you can still do it. Can you rip an atom apart? Can you compress hydrogen atoms, (without technology), to fuse 2 of them into helium? Can you pull a car off of a 100T electromagnet, or rip a tree in half? No. But you CAN lift things, and use magnets to move metallic objects against the force of gravity.
Gravity is an odd'n. All the other three forces are explained in terms of the Standard Model, but gravity stands alone.
gravity allows for all these other fundamentals to be. however, the other fundamentals also allow for gravity to be. but saying that it is the weakest is erroneous, at least in my opinion. i think gravity is one of the strongest of the 4, otherwise you would NOT have elctromagnetism (in theory, im sure it may work with no gravity... even though particles would be flying everywhere all willy nilly like), you would not have strong/weak nuclear forces either. gravity is what allows these 3 to even take place, if it were weaker than the other 3, they would not 'work' as much as they do.
The four forces are largely independent of one another. Gravity is this phenomenon arising from the bending of spacetime, whereas the other three arise from particle interactions. For instance, the strong force is mediated by the gluon, the weak force by some assortment of bosons. If you have a universe that supports gluons you get the strong force. In terms of absolute force applied, gravity is one of the weakest forces out there. The strongest two forces are the strong force and electromagnetism. Gravity works across the largest scales (the strong force itself is the strongest but it has the sharpest drop-off, only working to hold things together on the scale of an atomic nucleus), but in terms of strength... well, it takes the whole mass of planet Earth to generate enough gravitation to accelerate something at 9.8 m/s^2. All it takes is a cheap kitchen magnet to accelerate something faster.
hmm... well, thanks for the enlightenment i guess i was completely wrong in my assumptions... i was thinking in terms of how the 4 are related... as in without gravity, the particle interactions would be static, sparse, and very minute. do you get what i am saying? that is just what i was thinking.. but how you put it makes a lot more sense i guess i confused strength for relevancy..
It's an interesting lesson, though. The weaker force ultimately ends up having the most influence at the largest scales of the universe. Without gravity there would be no stars, and therefore no heavier elements (which are all formed in the hearts of stars), no planets, no galaxies. There would just be a swirling mass of hydrogen gas which would dissipate totally as the universe expanded.
But you can also look at it like this. Pluto goes around and around and around the sun for millions and millions of years and will for millions more. Pluto's average distance from the sun is 3.7 BILLION miles. Yet, why does Pluto float around an object 3.7 billion miles away? Gravity. Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our own is a disk 141,000 light years wide. Thats 828,886,830,000,000,000 miles or 828.9 quintillion miles. What keeps that disk which is a size that you can't even begin to comprehend together? Gravity. The other forces may be stronger but gravity is pretty damn strong.
Yeah it is pretty interesting. The smaller you go in the universe, the stronger their forces are exponentially.
Consider this: If gravity were all the sudden switched off, (I have no idea how you could stop a fundamental force of the universe, but anyhow), all celestial bodies would dissolve into the atoms that they are composed of, but all living matter in the universe would not, as living material is held together with the force of electromagnetism. Even black holes would cease to exist, but you would continue to exist, (but you'd be dead because you couldn't breathe). How's that for a trip?
Well, for one, I already addressed this, and two, to reiterate what I already said, range and strength are two different things. The nuclear strong force is 10^39 times stronger than gravitation. Why don't we notice it on the day-to-day scale? Because its range drops off the fastest of all the forces. The dropoff in strong force between two particles is such that by the time they're more than a few score proton-widths away from each other the force becomes negligibly weak. Gravity is much, much weaker, but it has a range that extends across galaxies.
Haaha.....you must have been watching the discovery channel blazed to because i was watching a show that said the exact same thing you said the other day
gravity is interesting. the gravitational acceleration of one mass by another is directly proportional to the mass of the object acted upon and inversely proportional to the distance between the masses. AFAIK every mass in the universe is attracted to every other mass due to gravity. It means that ant you just stepped on is causing an acceleration of every other thing in the entire universe to it. But everything else is also causing the same accelerations to the ant. I means that all the weed in the universe wants, just a little, to be in my bowl and my lungs.
it may be a weak forse, or it may just be as strong as the other forces, but it is spread out into other dimensions unaffecting by us. its proposed in m-theory I believe.