A few thoughts on why gravity sucks

I was watching a special on The Science Channel last night which dealt with the running war in the science community between advocates of string theory and supergravity theory. Most of it was far beyond my amateur level of interest and knowledge. (Did you know that the key sticking point between the two camps was simply an argument over whether the universe has ten dimensions or eleven? Here's I've been trudging around with the same old four dimensions all these years.)

One of the side discussions, though, I found extremely interesting and enlightening. Gravity, the narrator said, was the weakest of the four forces in the universe. (The other three are magnetism and the strong and weak nuclear bonds.) Gravity may not seem very weak to the human eye, but that's primarily because it's so pervasive. Everything we see around us - at least that which we can perceive with our normal five senses - is impacted by gravity. For that matter, most of it was, in effect, created by gravity. (e.g the creation of the stars and the planets.) Gravity most certainly doesn't seem weak if you suddenly find yourself fifty feet in the air with nothing holding you up. At that point, it suddenly becomes a matter of extreme .... err, gravity. (Sorry... physics jokes are not my strong suit.)

Then a scientist was shown who did a short, simple experiment which has been right in front of all of our eyes for most of our lives. How much weaker is gravity than, say, magnetism? Place a steel paperclip on your table or desk. It will obediently lay there, assuming no other forces are brought to bear on it. Gravity holds it there.

Now grab one of those bottle-cap sized magnets which people use to hold notes on their refrigerator. Hold it above the paperclip and slowly bring it down. The paperclip will, at some point, jump up off of the table and stick to the magnet. What just happened? The force of gravity generated by the entire planet Earth was overcome by the force of magnetism generated by a magnet barely larger than the item being lifted.

The magnet, being composed of solid mass, also generates a theoretical amount of gravitational force, but it's not strong enough to make dust stick to it. The relative strength of gravity is actually billions, if not trillions of times weaker than that of magnetism. Kind of makes you think, eh?

Their last theory was an attempt to explain exactly why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces. They had a few, but the one I found most fascinating was that gravity doesn't really even exist in our universe of four dimensions, but is, in fact, leaking in from another parallel dimension. Trust me... if you think about that for too long your head will explode.

Anyway, just some odd concepts for you to ponder on a Monday morning.