The story goes that a young Newton was sitting beneath a tree when an apple fell to the ground, which he famously attributed to a force of attraction between the apple and the Earth called gravity. He went one step further to suggest that it is the same force that is responsible for the orbits of the moon around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun.
Whereas the story is most likely fictional, it illustrates an important concept that ideas are borne out of curiosity. Learning to ask the right questions is one of the cornerstones of scientific advancement. The lack thereof, I believe, has played a fundamental role in scientific decline in the Muslim world (as I’ve previously discussed here).
One of such questions and indeed one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in our understanding of the Universe is; why is gravity so much weaker than the other forces of nature? It is questions like this that the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, is designed to solve. This particular curiosity is also one of my primary research preoccupations and the reason for my somewhat long hiatus from the blogosphere.
Our current understanding of the Universe is embodied in a theoretical framework called the Standard Model. The theory describes the fundamental particles and their interactions with each other via four forces, the weakest of which is gravity. The weakness of gravity may come as a surprise since we hold gravity responsible for the Moon orbiting around the Earth, the Earth around the Sun, the motion of the galaxies and the fact that we’re not floating in space. However, it is actually extraordinarily weak compared to the other forces in nature.
Categories: Educational Resources