What is Gravity?

We humans have had some odd ideas about what makes the world go 'round (literally) over the years. In the days of the ancient Greeks, gravity was perceived as a force that pulled all things toward the center of the universe (Earth, it was believed at the time). In the Renaissance, thinkers toyed with a number of different notions about what made things that went up come back down.

It was during that era that the first true modern theory of gravity was crafted, by the legendary astronomer-physicist Galileo. It had only been a few years before that Kepler had perfected Copernicus's model of the helio-centric solar system, replacing the Earth with the Sun at the center; before that, it wasn't really necessary to think about gravity - the center of the universe explanation seemed good enough, for the most part. But now that Earth was no longer the center of creation, things had changed.

Galileo suspected that gravity was actually a force that existed between massive bodies. The famous 'simultaneous drop' experiment, which supposedly involved the free-fall of two objects of different weights from the top of the Leaning Tower of Piza, was part of that research (actually, that story is an amalgamation of two separate accomplishments - Galileo conducted repairs to the Tower to prevent it from falling the rest of the way over, and the drop experiment actually used slopes, not a sheer drop, and took place in Venice). He found that (barring wind, friction, and other resistances) any object with mass will 'fall' toward another massive object at a constant rate dependant only on the mass of the heavier object. (Note: technically, the heavier object also falls toward the lighter one.)

Sir Isaac Newton went on to revise Galileo's ideas with precise formulas and figures. Yet, despite his gift with math, he too concluded that gravity was an attractive force between objects, much like a monopole version of magnetism that affects all matter. This is a thought that lingers to this day, despite the proving and acceptance of Einstein's ideas to the contrary.

Einstein showed that gravity isn't really a 'force' at all: it is an effect caused by the very existence of matter. He believed that all of reality was very much like a fabric (a term still in use: "the fabric of the universe"). When something heavy is placed on this fabric, it creates a depression. If something else happens to pass into this depression in the fabric, it will fall toward the bottom, where the object that caused the depression is.

It is perhaps a bit ironic that gravity plays a role in an analogy used to explain itself.

Between Einstein's time and today, a number of other ideas have cropped up, hoping to better describe what gravity is and how it works. They have ranged from the Newtonian throw-backs, like Graviton Theory (particles convey gravitational force between objects), to the sci-fi inspired fantasies, like String Theory (gravity exists, at least in part, in alternate dimensions).

Finally, we arrive at the latest addition to our understanding of this most peculiar phenomenon. According to Zero Sum Theory, gravity is, as Einstein described, a result of the interaction between matter and the universe.

To simplify, we know that matter is essentially a bit of solid energy, an electromagnetic charge locked into a point in space. More precisely, matter is a non-zero charge of a certain type (antimatter being the opposite type). If we consider the universe to be more than just an empty space with little bits of 'something' floating in it, then there must be some kind of interaction between the universe and the 'something' within it.

It is that interaction that results in what we perceive as gravity. That bit of charge, matter, within the universe's field, what we call 'space', creates a distortion. The distortion, in turn, affects anything that comes within its range: the path of a ray of light, for example. In that way, gravity affects everything, not just other matter, but radiation and antimatter also.

This simple answer even explains why light has a mass of zero, even though it can be split apart into matter and antimatter (both particles with mass) or created from the combination of the two: matter and antimatter, being of opposed charge types, generate opposite distortions in the fabric of the universe. In short, the two negate each other.

When light, or any other EM radiation, is split, the two opposed masses become separated, and they stop negating each other. Each creates its own distortion in space - gravity. Likewise, when two equal opposed masses, matter and antimatter, combine, the sum of the masses becomes zero.

So what is gravity? It is a slope in the field of the universe generated by the field's reaction to the presence of a point of non-neutral electromagnetic energy. In other words, it is the dent matter leaves in space.