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The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet
What is gravity? Nobody knows—and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking, mind-bending book, gravity is a cold case that’s beginning to heat up.
In The Trouble with Gravity, Panek invites the reader to experience this ubiquitous yet elusive force in a breathtakingly new way. Gravity, Panek explains, structures not only our bodies and our physical world, but also our minds and culture. From our very beginnings, humans’ conceptions of gravity have been inextricably bound to our understanding of existence itself. As we get closer and closer to solving the riddle of gravity, it is not only physics that is becoming clearer. We are also getting to know ourselves as never before.
In The Trouble with Gravity, Panek invites the reader to experience this ubiquitous yet elusive force in a breathtakingly new way. Gravity, Panek explains, structures not only our bodies and our physical world, but also our minds and culture. From our very beginnings, humans’ conceptions of gravity have been inextricably bound to our understanding of existence itself. As we get closer and closer to solving the riddle of gravity, it is not only physics that is becoming clearer. We are also getting to know ourselves as never before.
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 9, 2019
91 people are currently reading
576 people want to read
About the author
Richard Panek
19 books88 followersRichard Panek, a Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award in 2012, and the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
March 20, 2020
Another non-fiction book that caught my attention in the new bookshelf at the local library. (Just before it closed for the virus in 2020.) It’s an academic book (notes and index) but written in a very readable style.
I’ll start with a passage a few pages from the end of the book (I am giving away plot - lol!): “…nobody knows what gravity is, and almost nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is except for scientists, and they know that nobody knows what gravity is because they know that they don’t know what gravity is.”
Despite the apple, Newton couldn’t crack gravity either. Think of the moon and our tides. He called the idea that something at a great distance can have such an impact without physical contact “the great absurdity.” He didn’t mean he didn’t believe it; he just could not explain it.
Gravity is the least understood of the four forces that hold the universe together and, compared to others, such as atomic forces, it is the weakest. Consider that paper clip on your desk. The gravity from the entire mass of the earth is pulling it toward the center of the world and yet you can take a tiny refrigerator magnet the size of a pea and displace the clip.
And think of that magnet. You can block the magnetic attraction with other material. Try that with gravity --- can’t be done. And then consider that thing we all know about bodies of different weight falling at equal speed. Don’t we all still kinda think that the bowling ball is really going to beat that golf ball down when we drop it off the Leaning Tower?
The author starts us off with myths. Sisyphus and his rolling stone is obviously a gravity-based myth but is Icarus falling from the sky really a story of gravity? I thought it was more about the physics of melting wax!
About half of the book is about great discoveries related to gravity and along the way, about half of the book is also about astronomy. You might ask, how can that be? Well the planets are all in orbit because they are “falling” toward the sun in an elliptical path. Comets follow the laws of gravity and of course black holes are, in a sense, the ultimate form of gravity. And the biggest question in cosmology is ultimately one of gravity: is the universe expanding or contracting? And when will gravity ultimately slow it down, reverse direction, and collapse back again – probably setting off another Big Bang.
So after starting with Aristotle and Ptolemy we move on to Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein. Even folks like the Thomases (Jefferson and Paine) make cameo appearances with their musings on the subject.
As we run through the history of scientists learning about gravity it was amazing to me to learn of the earliness of some discoveries and the lateness of others. Who knew that a Danish astronomer, Ole Roemer in 1676, made a calculation of the speed of light that led William Herschel (the discoverer of Uranus) to write that he was seeing light from stars that had taken two million years to reach him? He wrote that In 1813! How did that timeframe mesh with the idea of a 6,000-year-old earth?
And speaking of that old-time religion, John Wesley of Methodist fame makes an appearance in promoting the apocalypse in 1759 with the return of Halley’s comet. As for lateness (or should I say recency) of discoveries, I never realized that until Hubble’s work in 1925 we never knew that galaxies other than our Milky Way even existed!
Good stuff written in a very readable format. No math, and oddly, no illustrations. The author does a little chest-beating at times when it seems he is making a point that he discovered something about black holes before someone else and when he tells us about his consulting roles with video producers making sci-fi films. But all in all a good read.
Top image from inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com
Sisyphus from shutterstock.com
Variation in the earth's gravity from inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com
The author from images.gr-assets.com/authors
I’ll start with a passage a few pages from the end of the book (I am giving away plot - lol!): “…nobody knows what gravity is, and almost nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is except for scientists, and they know that nobody knows what gravity is because they know that they don’t know what gravity is.”
Despite the apple, Newton couldn’t crack gravity either. Think of the moon and our tides. He called the idea that something at a great distance can have such an impact without physical contact “the great absurdity.” He didn’t mean he didn’t believe it; he just could not explain it.
Gravity is the least understood of the four forces that hold the universe together and, compared to others, such as atomic forces, it is the weakest. Consider that paper clip on your desk. The gravity from the entire mass of the earth is pulling it toward the center of the world and yet you can take a tiny refrigerator magnet the size of a pea and displace the clip.
And think of that magnet. You can block the magnetic attraction with other material. Try that with gravity --- can’t be done. And then consider that thing we all know about bodies of different weight falling at equal speed. Don’t we all still kinda think that the bowling ball is really going to beat that golf ball down when we drop it off the Leaning Tower?
The author starts us off with myths. Sisyphus and his rolling stone is obviously a gravity-based myth but is Icarus falling from the sky really a story of gravity? I thought it was more about the physics of melting wax!
About half of the book is about great discoveries related to gravity and along the way, about half of the book is also about astronomy. You might ask, how can that be? Well the planets are all in orbit because they are “falling” toward the sun in an elliptical path. Comets follow the laws of gravity and of course black holes are, in a sense, the ultimate form of gravity. And the biggest question in cosmology is ultimately one of gravity: is the universe expanding or contracting? And when will gravity ultimately slow it down, reverse direction, and collapse back again – probably setting off another Big Bang.
So after starting with Aristotle and Ptolemy we move on to Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein. Even folks like the Thomases (Jefferson and Paine) make cameo appearances with their musings on the subject.
As we run through the history of scientists learning about gravity it was amazing to me to learn of the earliness of some discoveries and the lateness of others. Who knew that a Danish astronomer, Ole Roemer in 1676, made a calculation of the speed of light that led William Herschel (the discoverer of Uranus) to write that he was seeing light from stars that had taken two million years to reach him? He wrote that In 1813! How did that timeframe mesh with the idea of a 6,000-year-old earth?
And speaking of that old-time religion, John Wesley of Methodist fame makes an appearance in promoting the apocalypse in 1759 with the return of Halley’s comet. As for lateness (or should I say recency) of discoveries, I never realized that until Hubble’s work in 1925 we never knew that galaxies other than our Milky Way even existed!
Good stuff written in a very readable format. No math, and oddly, no illustrations. The author does a little chest-beating at times when it seems he is making a point that he discovered something about black holes before someone else and when he tells us about his consulting roles with video producers making sci-fi films. But all in all a good read.
Top image from inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com
Sisyphus from shutterstock.com
Variation in the earth's gravity from inteng-storage.s3.amazonaws.com
The author from images.gr-assets.com/authors
January 6, 2020
I want to politely call this book superfluous. The author, Richard Panek, previously wrote the most important book I had ever read, The 4% Universe. It was the book that ‘awoke me from my dogmatic slumber’. The first book that opened my eyes to a world of the real, a world I had been too busy to have noticed. Before that book, I had mostly only read fiction and believed appearances were authentic experiences not realizing that there was a knowable world that made coherent sense and that contained justifiable true beliefs.
I signed up for Goodreads because of that one book. I needed to reflect on what I had read after I read the non-fiction science books that book inspired me to read as follow-up, and I consequently forced myself to write reviews for all the books I read in order to understand what the book meant. I needed to find out more about science and reality and that one book led to a hundred other science books. I was hooked.
I just needed to know and discover for myself. Everything else that had easily been filtering into my consciousness seemed to have been a lie as if the overriding central authority by consensus was just meant to mislead and make me accept the stifling conforming norms of the times and falsely implicitly claimed to be authoritative and with certainty, the pretense was that there was a meta-narrative, a narrative for the narrative that would explain the three most important questions we all have. They can be any questions, after all they are your questions, but for me they go along the lines of 1) what is true 2) what is good and 3) what is deserving of my time.
Panek’s book led me to physics and cosmology then that led me to the importance of philosophy. One needs to get a familiarity with science before one can understand philosophy, and in order to fully appreciate the science one needs to understand its ontological foundations and never violate the ‘rules of thought’ (i.e. that of identity, mutual exclusive, and non-contradiction within the world of dichotomies, see Bertrand Russell or Arthur Schopenhauer for explication, but also one accepts that the double slit experiment violates mutual exclusivity and that ‘irony is jealous of authenticity’ as Kierkegaard will say). I was forced to make side trips into biology, evolution by natural selection, history and theology, but my real path was defined by what was in Panek’s book. I had to understand. I had to take an informed stand on my own understanding about my place in the universe.
This is why I say I politely found this book superfluous. Panek’s other book lit a fire within me 9 years ago that still burns with passion and that everything that was in this book I have read elsewhere because of his 4% Universe book. I suspect that this book of Panek’s would have connected just as much with me 9 years ago if I had read it then, but today it is all too familiar because of the journey he had set me on. BTW, within this book (Gravity), Panek makes Galileo’s book Dialogue’s Concerning the Two Chief World Systems a major character. I would highly recommend reading that one for other reasons beyond the nature of gravity; it illustrates the development of science with warts and all. I would recommend the 1954 edition since the Einstein introduction is a perfect example of un-self-awareness by a great thinker who never fully accepted quantum theory while criticizing Galileo for his wave theory of the oceans and never seeing the parallelism with his own firmly held beliefs for the existence of hidden variables, or God not playing dice with the universe, or for dismissing spooky action at a distance.
I signed up for Goodreads because of that one book. I needed to reflect on what I had read after I read the non-fiction science books that book inspired me to read as follow-up, and I consequently forced myself to write reviews for all the books I read in order to understand what the book meant. I needed to find out more about science and reality and that one book led to a hundred other science books. I was hooked.
I just needed to know and discover for myself. Everything else that had easily been filtering into my consciousness seemed to have been a lie as if the overriding central authority by consensus was just meant to mislead and make me accept the stifling conforming norms of the times and falsely implicitly claimed to be authoritative and with certainty, the pretense was that there was a meta-narrative, a narrative for the narrative that would explain the three most important questions we all have. They can be any questions, after all they are your questions, but for me they go along the lines of 1) what is true 2) what is good and 3) what is deserving of my time.
Panek’s book led me to physics and cosmology then that led me to the importance of philosophy. One needs to get a familiarity with science before one can understand philosophy, and in order to fully appreciate the science one needs to understand its ontological foundations and never violate the ‘rules of thought’ (i.e. that of identity, mutual exclusive, and non-contradiction within the world of dichotomies, see Bertrand Russell or Arthur Schopenhauer for explication, but also one accepts that the double slit experiment violates mutual exclusivity and that ‘irony is jealous of authenticity’ as Kierkegaard will say). I was forced to make side trips into biology, evolution by natural selection, history and theology, but my real path was defined by what was in Panek’s book. I had to understand. I had to take an informed stand on my own understanding about my place in the universe.
This is why I say I politely found this book superfluous. Panek’s other book lit a fire within me 9 years ago that still burns with passion and that everything that was in this book I have read elsewhere because of his 4% Universe book. I suspect that this book of Panek’s would have connected just as much with me 9 years ago if I had read it then, but today it is all too familiar because of the journey he had set me on. BTW, within this book (Gravity), Panek makes Galileo’s book Dialogue’s Concerning the Two Chief World Systems a major character. I would highly recommend reading that one for other reasons beyond the nature of gravity; it illustrates the development of science with warts and all. I would recommend the 1954 edition since the Einstein introduction is a perfect example of un-self-awareness by a great thinker who never fully accepted quantum theory while criticizing Galileo for his wave theory of the oceans and never seeing the parallelism with his own firmly held beliefs for the existence of hidden variables, or God not playing dice with the universe, or for dismissing spooky action at a distance.
August 17, 2019
Gravity: A tour of a heavy topic
Gravity is a fundamental force that creates physical reality we experience and become conscious of. Three major figures of science unlocked the mysteries gravity: Galileo, the first to take a close look at the process of free and restricted fall; Newton, originator of the concept of gravity as a universal force; and Einstein, who proposed that gravity is a curvature of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it goes further in quantum physics which describes spacetime in discrete quanta, i.e. in bits and pieces at the most fundamental quantum scale. In other words, it contrasts traditional wisdom that spacetime is continuous.
Gravity is still a cold case and we are not any closer to solving this, but it is leading into many new avenues about the cosmos. Detection of gravitational waves and black holes have been exciting in physics, and information is emerging as the key player in the operation of matter and energy in spacetime. It is the transformation of matter (nonliving) into a living material (life), and how forces of nature become essential for existence (physical reality).
If you are looking for a book to read about the recent advances in gravitation, then I would suggest looking elsewhere. The author does not focus on the concept of gravity to any significant extent that would generate interest. He reports a mishmash of news and physics ideas that looks like a smorgasbord than a navel discussion.
Gravity is a fundamental force that creates physical reality we experience and become conscious of. Three major figures of science unlocked the mysteries gravity: Galileo, the first to take a close look at the process of free and restricted fall; Newton, originator of the concept of gravity as a universal force; and Einstein, who proposed that gravity is a curvature of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. But it goes further in quantum physics which describes spacetime in discrete quanta, i.e. in bits and pieces at the most fundamental quantum scale. In other words, it contrasts traditional wisdom that spacetime is continuous.
Gravity is still a cold case and we are not any closer to solving this, but it is leading into many new avenues about the cosmos. Detection of gravitational waves and black holes have been exciting in physics, and information is emerging as the key player in the operation of matter and energy in spacetime. It is the transformation of matter (nonliving) into a living material (life), and how forces of nature become essential for existence (physical reality).
If you are looking for a book to read about the recent advances in gravitation, then I would suggest looking elsewhere. The author does not focus on the concept of gravity to any significant extent that would generate interest. He reports a mishmash of news and physics ideas that looks like a smorgasbord than a navel discussion.
July 26, 2019
This is a fairly breezy overview of the topic of gravity - how it was perceived in centuries past, how it was reconceived during the Age of Reason, and how it has come to be measured. The really exciting stuff (Black Holes! Gravitational Lensing! Multiverses!) doesn't come until near the end. I found myself skimming through the early chapters which dealt with a fair amount of mysticism and misunderstanding. The technical parts are explained for a layperson, there's no math to speak of (which is good for me), but if you're conversant with physics as a layperson then this book probably doesn't have much to teach you. Unless you want to learn more about creation myths.
September 6, 2019
This book is mostly a recounting of pre-scientific philosophy and scientific thoughts about the physical world. The majority of the book runs from creation myths to mid-20th century physics. Only the last 20 to 30 pages explores contemporary research on gravity; this is my biggest issue with the book - expectations were subverted and not in a pleasing way. Panek's writing style is also not my favorite. It is often difficult to comprehend his (usually long) sentences without reading them to conclusion. I would often re-read a phrase multiple times, thinking it was a typo before moving forward to the rest of the sentence. And the gravitas that the author wants to impart by continually invoking the phrases "down here" and "up there" in italics was lost on me. I wanted to enjoy the book more than I did.
March 6, 2022
Being a fan of physics and especially astrophysics, I was very drawn to this book. And although it was a well flowing text in general, and mostly an interesting read, it did get stuck for too long in some topics which felt quite irrelevant to the book, or topic. The cover description "solving the mystery beneath our feet" should really have been "pondering the mystery beneath our feet".
September 25, 2023
The book reviews the history of the concept, and re-affirms pretty much where it started out: while we know the effects of gravity, we don’t really know what it is.
Reading this history - it is a reiteration of much of what is commonly known - I wonder how much the challenge is due to trying to understand gravity as a force. Generally, within the Newtonian paradigm, a force is a push or pull effect on an object, or an “influence” that can change (accelerate) the motion of an object.* Four forces are said to be existent: the electro-magnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity. With the first and second, there’s the obvious +/- (pushing away, pulling toward) effect, which “influences” the movement that lies at the heart of atomic phenomena. The weak force is less clear as a force since it involves the decay of matter and the release of energy, so a pushing-pulling interaction seems to be missing, or I don’t understand it. If the weak force is about the release of energy from matter per Einstein’s formulation, I suppose that there is some sort of pushing outward effect and that energy is subsequently combined with other matter-energy, which may be the “pulling” aspect of the weak nuclear force.
So that leaves gravity. From a Newtonian perspective, there’s this action at a distance phenomenon where gravitational bodies influence each other. That force is said to be attractive only - it’s a pulling together of two bodies (mutual attraction), so the first problem with gravity as a force is the lack of a pushing (away) component. Yet, with Einstein, gravity and inertia are flip sides of each other. Mutual attraction is equal to mutual resistance to being moved (accelerated).** So here, you can get the pulling and pushing force-counterforce components of gravity, resulting in the equilibrating effect seen in orbiting bodies, which is a compromise between a pulling downward and a pushing away via inertial(internal) straight-line motion, with an orbit being roughly at a 45 degree angle between two bodies.
While gravity could thus be seen as a pulling-pushing force, Einstein had something else in mind when it came to understanding gravity as a force. A gravitational force does not reach out and grab another body, and an inertial body that wants to keep moving in a straight line doesn’t stiff arm a gravitational body to keep its distance.*** For Einstein, the interaction between gravitational bodies is geometry in motion. A large mass, which is concentrated energy (energy is pulled into itself), depresses a point in space - which is itself comprised of energy and matter (hence, “fabric”) - and curves space toward itself.*** A lesser mass’s inertial straight-line movement, subject to distance and speed, follows this geometry, per Wheeler’s formulation, toward the larger body. The force here is not active, unlike the inner activity seen in the other three forces, so the question is whether, really, gravity is a force at all. At best, it’s an indirect geometric force, but maybe it’s best to dispense with the notion of force itself, which is the way I thought Einstein saw how cosmic scale phenomena operate.
Seen this way, gravity loses its mysterious, unanswerable quality that Panek references.**** Rather than gravity, there’s a large concentration of energy and matter (i.e. concentrated mass), and inertial straight-line motion in the presence of curvature flows toward this gravitational center. In other words, a gravitational body has geometric (local) gravitational effects (on nearby bodies and space).
At one point, Panek himself seems to acknowledge that gravity is not, really, a force when he writes that “roping gravity into the ‘force’ realm requires a bit of rhetorical legerdemain, but for now let’s acknowledge that it is one of the four processes that apparently hold the universe together.” He is in good company as Bertrand Russell wrote in “The ABC of Relativity” (1925) the following: “Although ‘force’ is no longer to be regarded as one of the fundamental concepts of dynamics, but only as a convenient way of speaking, it can still be employed….provided we realize what we mean. Often it would require very roundabout expressions to avoid the term ‘force.’”
In other words, Einstein replaced gravity as a force with spacetime curvature and the movement of mass-energy toward geometric centers, and such concentrations of mass-energy in turn have gravitational (accelerating), geometric, effects.
*How is pushing and pulling to be understood? “Pushing” is used in two ways. There’s a body that resists being pushed and there’s a body that pushes. The former body reacts (pushes away); the latter body acts (does the pushing). These two ways of using push seem to be conflated more often than not and a problem comes when trying to understand gravity only as an attractive (pulling) force, where bodies pull toward each other, with the larger having more pulling effect than a smaller body. That’s one half of the dynamic. The other half is the inertial movement of both bodies, that is a resistance to deviation (pulling effect) to its straight-line motion or state of rest. There’s another problem with pushing and pulling when it comes to gravity. If gravity is attractive, bodies will bump into each other (depending on speed and distance), with a resulting pushing (accelerating) effect on a receiving body. So a larger body both pulls and pushes. When gravity is seen only as an attractive, pulling, force, its pushing effect on another body gets lost.
**While Newton’s first law of motion notes that a body at rest or in motion remains at rest or in motion, his focus was not on rest or straight-line motion per se, but on gravity’s accelerating effect on such rest or straight-line motion. I think it’s harder to understand gravity, with its curvature property, without having Newton’s first law, front and center, as the default state of energy matter: A body wants to do its thing - to remain at rest relative to other bodies or to continue with its straight-line motion - and resists external forces to do otherwise.
*** “Depresses” misleads because a large circular mass brings energy and matter to itself from all directions, so it’s not at all a top-down image as “depression” conveys.
****Even the term “gravity” itself is stuck within the Newtonian paradigm for it conveys “force.”
Reading this history - it is a reiteration of much of what is commonly known - I wonder how much the challenge is due to trying to understand gravity as a force. Generally, within the Newtonian paradigm, a force is a push or pull effect on an object, or an “influence” that can change (accelerate) the motion of an object.* Four forces are said to be existent: the electro-magnetic force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and gravity. With the first and second, there’s the obvious +/- (pushing away, pulling toward) effect, which “influences” the movement that lies at the heart of atomic phenomena. The weak force is less clear as a force since it involves the decay of matter and the release of energy, so a pushing-pulling interaction seems to be missing, or I don’t understand it. If the weak force is about the release of energy from matter per Einstein’s formulation, I suppose that there is some sort of pushing outward effect and that energy is subsequently combined with other matter-energy, which may be the “pulling” aspect of the weak nuclear force.
So that leaves gravity. From a Newtonian perspective, there’s this action at a distance phenomenon where gravitational bodies influence each other. That force is said to be attractive only - it’s a pulling together of two bodies (mutual attraction), so the first problem with gravity as a force is the lack of a pushing (away) component. Yet, with Einstein, gravity and inertia are flip sides of each other. Mutual attraction is equal to mutual resistance to being moved (accelerated).** So here, you can get the pulling and pushing force-counterforce components of gravity, resulting in the equilibrating effect seen in orbiting bodies, which is a compromise between a pulling downward and a pushing away via inertial(internal) straight-line motion, with an orbit being roughly at a 45 degree angle between two bodies.
While gravity could thus be seen as a pulling-pushing force, Einstein had something else in mind when it came to understanding gravity as a force. A gravitational force does not reach out and grab another body, and an inertial body that wants to keep moving in a straight line doesn’t stiff arm a gravitational body to keep its distance.*** For Einstein, the interaction between gravitational bodies is geometry in motion. A large mass, which is concentrated energy (energy is pulled into itself), depresses a point in space - which is itself comprised of energy and matter (hence, “fabric”) - and curves space toward itself.*** A lesser mass’s inertial straight-line movement, subject to distance and speed, follows this geometry, per Wheeler’s formulation, toward the larger body. The force here is not active, unlike the inner activity seen in the other three forces, so the question is whether, really, gravity is a force at all. At best, it’s an indirect geometric force, but maybe it’s best to dispense with the notion of force itself, which is the way I thought Einstein saw how cosmic scale phenomena operate.
Seen this way, gravity loses its mysterious, unanswerable quality that Panek references.**** Rather than gravity, there’s a large concentration of energy and matter (i.e. concentrated mass), and inertial straight-line motion in the presence of curvature flows toward this gravitational center. In other words, a gravitational body has geometric (local) gravitational effects (on nearby bodies and space).
At one point, Panek himself seems to acknowledge that gravity is not, really, a force when he writes that “roping gravity into the ‘force’ realm requires a bit of rhetorical legerdemain, but for now let’s acknowledge that it is one of the four processes that apparently hold the universe together.” He is in good company as Bertrand Russell wrote in “The ABC of Relativity” (1925) the following: “Although ‘force’ is no longer to be regarded as one of the fundamental concepts of dynamics, but only as a convenient way of speaking, it can still be employed….provided we realize what we mean. Often it would require very roundabout expressions to avoid the term ‘force.’”
In other words, Einstein replaced gravity as a force with spacetime curvature and the movement of mass-energy toward geometric centers, and such concentrations of mass-energy in turn have gravitational (accelerating), geometric, effects.
*How is pushing and pulling to be understood? “Pushing” is used in two ways. There’s a body that resists being pushed and there’s a body that pushes. The former body reacts (pushes away); the latter body acts (does the pushing). These two ways of using push seem to be conflated more often than not and a problem comes when trying to understand gravity only as an attractive (pulling) force, where bodies pull toward each other, with the larger having more pulling effect than a smaller body. That’s one half of the dynamic. The other half is the inertial movement of both bodies, that is a resistance to deviation (pulling effect) to its straight-line motion or state of rest. There’s another problem with pushing and pulling when it comes to gravity. If gravity is attractive, bodies will bump into each other (depending on speed and distance), with a resulting pushing (accelerating) effect on a receiving body. So a larger body both pulls and pushes. When gravity is seen only as an attractive, pulling, force, its pushing effect on another body gets lost.
**While Newton’s first law of motion notes that a body at rest or in motion remains at rest or in motion, his focus was not on rest or straight-line motion per se, but on gravity’s accelerating effect on such rest or straight-line motion. I think it’s harder to understand gravity, with its curvature property, without having Newton’s first law, front and center, as the default state of energy matter: A body wants to do its thing - to remain at rest relative to other bodies or to continue with its straight-line motion - and resists external forces to do otherwise.
*** “Depresses” misleads because a large circular mass brings energy and matter to itself from all directions, so it’s not at all a top-down image as “depression” conveys.
****Even the term “gravity” itself is stuck within the Newtonian paradigm for it conveys “force.”
September 5, 2019
"Just over two hundred pages of main content here includes a solid fifty pages of comparative cosmology. This extended exposition leads into a breezy overview of mankind’s evolving perception of reality from antiquity to today. Gravity is certainly a dominant theme, but it is merely a clothesline to hang upon this chronological history pondering the nature of reality, from the myth maker to the Nobel laureate...."
(This is the second time I have been seriously disappointed with a Richard Panek book and I doubt I will give him another chance.)
[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]
(This is the second time I have been seriously disappointed with a Richard Panek book and I doubt I will give him another chance.)
[Look for my entire review at MAA Reviews]
September 8, 2019
Not really what I expected (I thought it would be about gravity). Instead it was a compendium of myths and stories told in a sometimes incomprehensible string of too long and convoluted sentences. Some parts of the last chapter were interesting.
September 26, 2019
This is a fabulous account of the history of gravity and of physical science for non-scientists. Very well written but not so easily understood.
April 27, 2021
Early in his 2019 book The Trouble With Gravity, Richard Panek recounts a conversation with a physicist about the titular subject. "The trouble with gravity," he is told, "is that no one understands it, and no one understands that no one understands it." And despite the promise made by the subtitle, that contention will be more or less borne out by the end of the book.
Panek begins by sorting out what people have believed about the whatever-it-is that keeps us standing upright on the ground and not floating away. He explores a number of different creation stories offered by civilizations from around the world and shows that one of the things they seem to have as a common thread is the idea that "up there" is somehow different from "down here." Up there, things stay suspended above the Earth's surface, either because they're embedded in a dome or they fly or they're living beings who fly. From there, observation during the time of the ancient Greeks at least brought to Western thinking the realization that some of the things up there moved around in a regular pattern. What, these thinkers wondered, regulated it? What kept them up there while human beings and just about everything they could see stayed down here?
The answer of divine agency was enough for many, although as Galileo and Copernicus led the way in proving some of the things up there related to each other instead of to the Earth itself, and the Earth was revealed to be moving in relation to the sun, instead of the other way around. As developing sciences began to gain more and more tools to explore and reveal the way the world works, the idea of divine agency didn't disappear so much as open the door to a new question: How did God keep what was up there up there and what was down here down here?
The next chapters outline how first Isaac Newton and then others began to conceive of a universal force that linked everything together, which came to be called gravity. But as with nearly every answer since the initial creation stories, more questions lurked underneath. As Albert Einstein began to explore what the universe did as it got small, fast and weird, the answers to his questions seemed to leave gravity in a still more mysterious place. Defined as one of the four major forces governing the universe, it differs from the other three in significant ways and resists unification with them. Which is where, despite the discovery of gravitational waves and other solid advances, is where we are today: Not understanding gravity all that well and not understanding that we don't really understand it all that well.
Panek seems never have aimed to give a recap of the latest gravitational research and theory -- magazine articles might be best for that anyway, given the pace of change in the field. Trouble seems more a survey of the field that links some of our modern experimentation with ancient mythologizing as they both grope frustratingly towards an answer to something that exists all around us but which defies full explanation. The ancients were stumped by what kept things up there from falling down here; modern scientists are stumped by gravity's resistance to being quantized like the other three forces.
Sometimes Panek's breezy style gets in his way, as he winds up a sentence with a punchline when it really needs stronger exposition. He makes enough mistakes in relating Old Testament creation pericopes that a reader has full license to wonder how well he does with the others, and that section of the book is too long by half. It doesn't really weaken his point that human beings have recognized the up-there/down-here distinction for most of history but ordinarily accuracy is to be desired in a book discussing scientific work.
Trouble is still a fairly fun trip through the development of the ideas underlying our understanding -- and, I suppose, misunderstanding -- of gravity. It helps set the stage for better comprehension of such new discoveries as may be made in coming years and makes a useful addition to the layperson's science shelf.
Panek begins by sorting out what people have believed about the whatever-it-is that keeps us standing upright on the ground and not floating away. He explores a number of different creation stories offered by civilizations from around the world and shows that one of the things they seem to have as a common thread is the idea that "up there" is somehow different from "down here." Up there, things stay suspended above the Earth's surface, either because they're embedded in a dome or they fly or they're living beings who fly. From there, observation during the time of the ancient Greeks at least brought to Western thinking the realization that some of the things up there moved around in a regular pattern. What, these thinkers wondered, regulated it? What kept them up there while human beings and just about everything they could see stayed down here?
The answer of divine agency was enough for many, although as Galileo and Copernicus led the way in proving some of the things up there related to each other instead of to the Earth itself, and the Earth was revealed to be moving in relation to the sun, instead of the other way around. As developing sciences began to gain more and more tools to explore and reveal the way the world works, the idea of divine agency didn't disappear so much as open the door to a new question: How did God keep what was up there up there and what was down here down here?
The next chapters outline how first Isaac Newton and then others began to conceive of a universal force that linked everything together, which came to be called gravity. But as with nearly every answer since the initial creation stories, more questions lurked underneath. As Albert Einstein began to explore what the universe did as it got small, fast and weird, the answers to his questions seemed to leave gravity in a still more mysterious place. Defined as one of the four major forces governing the universe, it differs from the other three in significant ways and resists unification with them. Which is where, despite the discovery of gravitational waves and other solid advances, is where we are today: Not understanding gravity all that well and not understanding that we don't really understand it all that well.
Panek seems never have aimed to give a recap of the latest gravitational research and theory -- magazine articles might be best for that anyway, given the pace of change in the field. Trouble seems more a survey of the field that links some of our modern experimentation with ancient mythologizing as they both grope frustratingly towards an answer to something that exists all around us but which defies full explanation. The ancients were stumped by what kept things up there from falling down here; modern scientists are stumped by gravity's resistance to being quantized like the other three forces.
Sometimes Panek's breezy style gets in his way, as he winds up a sentence with a punchline when it really needs stronger exposition. He makes enough mistakes in relating Old Testament creation pericopes that a reader has full license to wonder how well he does with the others, and that section of the book is too long by half. It doesn't really weaken his point that human beings have recognized the up-there/down-here distinction for most of history but ordinarily accuracy is to be desired in a book discussing scientific work.
Trouble is still a fairly fun trip through the development of the ideas underlying our understanding -- and, I suppose, misunderstanding -- of gravity. It helps set the stage for better comprehension of such new discoveries as may be made in coming years and makes a useful addition to the layperson's science shelf.
July 10, 2022
not terribly impressed
The first part is OK. Classical views. history of ideas. Aristotle, Copernicus and Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton. But it’s a story that’s been told many times and the author adds nothing new. The second part is trivial and superficial. Scattered and meandering all over the place. Einstein, general relativity and Black holes. Dark matter and dark energy get brief mentions. Cosmic expansion. Fine. But the treatment is so fluffy and scattered, tenuously brief and rushed that you will learn very little here. The cover/blurb, seemed to promise subtleties, cultural/psychological insights. Nope. That cake is a lie.
There is no mention at all of more recent attempts to build a quantum theory of gravity. The latest stage in the saga. No mention of relational theories of space time and the need for background independent theories. Despite claims of having talked to leading theorists who most definitely know about these things.
Basically just light weight pop science of very little substance or value - conveyed with an utterly unearned pomposity and affectations of self congratulatory grace and charm. And this guy earns science writing awards!! What a world we live in.
The first part is OK. Classical views. history of ideas. Aristotle, Copernicus and Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton. But it’s a story that’s been told many times and the author adds nothing new. The second part is trivial and superficial. Scattered and meandering all over the place. Einstein, general relativity and Black holes. Dark matter and dark energy get brief mentions. Cosmic expansion. Fine. But the treatment is so fluffy and scattered, tenuously brief and rushed that you will learn very little here. The cover/blurb, seemed to promise subtleties, cultural/psychological insights. Nope. That cake is a lie.
There is no mention at all of more recent attempts to build a quantum theory of gravity. The latest stage in the saga. No mention of relational theories of space time and the need for background independent theories. Despite claims of having talked to leading theorists who most definitely know about these things.
Basically just light weight pop science of very little substance or value - conveyed with an utterly unearned pomposity and affectations of self congratulatory grace and charm. And this guy earns science writing awards!! What a world we live in.
October 13, 2021
Disappointing. The question, 'what is gravity?' may be unanswerable but it seems excessive to have to work your way through 218 (albeit double-spaced wide-margined) pages to not get one. Panek tells us this in his Introduction and then gives a possible answer in the last chapter, but in between we get a history lesson on the pioneers who have grappled with this question (and its cousin, motion) for 2500 years or more.
Panek is a clever writer, perhaps too clever. He uses interesting attention grabbers and teasers to take you to his next section or chapter, but too often the route of his narrative is confusing.
I would have referred a more straightforward attempt to tackle 'the double with gravity'. Every thinking person on earth wonders about it, Panek would be well advised to start there and work his way through the various theories until he gets to his big notion at the end.
Panek is a clever writer, perhaps too clever. He uses interesting attention grabbers and teasers to take you to his next section or chapter, but too often the route of his narrative is confusing.
I would have referred a more straightforward attempt to tackle 'the double with gravity'. Every thinking person on earth wonders about it, Panek would be well advised to start there and work his way through the various theories until he gets to his big notion at the end.
November 23, 2024
Such a difficult problem to understand for a layman like myself. But, Richard Panek managed to help me pretty well, due to his writing skills. Starting back from Aristotle (who knew he thought about gravity) through to Gallileo and onto Newton and finally onto Einstein and Hubble. I was disappointed though that the outstanding contribution made by Henrietta Leavitt was not mentioned. Several incredible discoveries were described. One of course was the fact that a laser beam travelling over 7 miles is made to deviate by the width of a proton by gravitational waves caused by colliding black holes light years away. How do they manage to measure so accurately? Another was that the power of gravity is 1 trillion billion billion billion times less than the power of the subatomic force. These numbers are just mind-boggling and added to the enjoyment of this book.
March 28, 2020
A *very* generous 3, instead of 2.5, and only because of the last chapter and the discussion on gravity waves. This was not a book about gravity, but rather, a book on philosophical and religious thought in ancient times up through the Renaissance. I ended up skipping many pages in the earlier chapters; I don't need to know nor do I care what religious thinkers thought about up and down and heaven and Earth 1500 years ago. It took me so long to read such a short book because I would rad a few pages, realize I was bored, and just put it down again. I kept at it instead of DNF just in case there was actual discussion of the physics of gravity, and there was, at the end, just a bit. I'll have to look for a different book, once that focuses on modern physics and gravity.
March 30, 2023
I think the author did a good job of summarizing all of the work through the centuries, including such scientists as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and most notably Newton and Einstein, that has gone into the study of gravity and gravitational forces. He even discussed black holes and the relatively recent detection of gravity waves through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). I was less interested in the material he included on how the ancient Greek philosophers thought about the universe. As a non-scientist, the author Panek did a very credible job of writing about what we know and do not know about gravity, but his writing style took me some time to get used to.
August 19, 2020
Panek would have been my most dreaded professor.
Not because he’s not excited or passionate about his subject. (He is.) Not because he’s not knowledgeable and open-minded about exploring how history and philosophy play an important role in scientific discovery. (He does.) Not because he’s not conversational in how he talks about his subjects. (He is.)
But because I can’t learn from him. I don’t know what I was supposed to take away from this book. I was ready and willing to learn about gravity—and I didn’t. Unless of course, what I was supposed to take away was that no one knows what gravity is. Then I suppose I could have saved some time and just read the introduction.
Not because he’s not excited or passionate about his subject. (He is.) Not because he’s not knowledgeable and open-minded about exploring how history and philosophy play an important role in scientific discovery. (He does.) Not because he’s not conversational in how he talks about his subjects. (He is.)
But because I can’t learn from him. I don’t know what I was supposed to take away from this book. I was ready and willing to learn about gravity—and I didn’t. Unless of course, what I was supposed to take away was that no one knows what gravity is. Then I suppose I could have saved some time and just read the introduction.
November 18, 2024
Just a wonderful read. As I said over on FB:
Great book. Highly recommended. An interesting framing for the book overall, plus solid science throughout without ever being too technical, and just beautiful prose.
h/t Ann Finkbeiner, who interviewed the author about another book, which led me to this one.
Nobody knows what gravity is, and almost nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is. The exception is scientists. They know that nobody knows what gravity is, because they know that *they* don't know what gravity is.
--Richard Panek, The Trouble With Gravity
Great book. Highly recommended. An interesting framing for the book overall, plus solid science throughout without ever being too technical, and just beautiful prose.
h/t Ann Finkbeiner, who interviewed the author about another book, which led me to this one.
November 2, 2021
Stopped reading a quarter of the way through when the author was still babbling on about myths, bible stories and philosophers, not even with any relation to gravity. Maybe later on he starts to talk about the subject, but I figure that he doesn't have much to say about gravity or else he wouldn't have wasted so much time. Or maybe that's "the trouble with gravity", Patek doesn't know what it is and how to describe it.
March 11, 2023
Objects fall to Earth. Anyone can observe this by dropping stuff to the ground. Gravity is a ubiquitous fact of our existence. How does it work, though?
I had an issue with this book. Initially, the author focuses too much on mythology and not enough on science. Given the Dewey Decimal number, I assumed it wouldn't be that way.
Eventually, Richard Panek covers Newton and Einstein.
I thought the book was adequate. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
I had an issue with this book. Initially, the author focuses too much on mythology and not enough on science. Given the Dewey Decimal number, I assumed it wouldn't be that way.
Eventually, Richard Panek covers Newton and Einstein.
I thought the book was adequate. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.
September 8, 2019
If you want an in-depth discussion of the modern theories of gravity (which was what I hoped for), this is not the book for you.
If you want an overview of the history of mankind's understanding (really, lack thereof) of what gravity is and how it works, from ancient times to modern times, then this is a perfectly fine book for you. Not amazing, just fine.
If you want an overview of the history of mankind's understanding (really, lack thereof) of what gravity is and how it works, from ancient times to modern times, then this is a perfectly fine book for you. Not amazing, just fine.
March 8, 2020
Spoiler alert, but turns out that no one knows what gravity is, and I’m not just talking about your regular person who doesn’t have an advance degree in physics, I’m talking about the people with advance degrees in physics. Gravity is a mystery still to this day. We can clearly see and understand its effects on our universe, but no one understands what causes gravity despite literally millennia of trying. Planek writes an understandable and engrossing tale of our efforts to understand what makes stuff down here stay down here and what makes stuff in the sky stay in the sky, mostly. He starts with creation myths across the world, proceeds to Aristotle and Plato, then on to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. The book is both a scientific history and explanation as we journey along with these great minds as they puzzle the mystery that also intrigues my 11 month-old. She loves testing gravity. Every time she’s in her high chair to eat she proceeds to drop the carefully prepared food that she’s supposed to be consuming right on the floor. Over and over and over. She’s basically a scientist.
July 30, 2020
The book had a lot of potential to make a difficult topic interesting - somewhere it lost a good opportunity.
Although the books tries to cover gravity and its concepts since the beginning of mankind, it gets a bit monotonous and dry most of the time.
I cannot point out what exactly went wrong, but I can sense it could have been made more interesting.
Although the books tries to cover gravity and its concepts since the beginning of mankind, it gets a bit monotonous and dry most of the time.
I cannot point out what exactly went wrong, but I can sense it could have been made more interesting.
September 18, 2023
Definitely an interesting book into the history of the concept of gravity and its origins. I thought it would go more in depth on what current issues what have with gravity and current research. Good read but definitely not everything I was hoping for. Some sections Panek rambled on about ideas that were ultimately unimportant and distracting
October 3, 2019
This wasn't quite what I expected, but that's probably on me for not comprehending the summary. I thought it would be more about current theories on gravity, but it was more a look at how we have defined gravity throughout history up to the current day.
November 1, 2019
Let's be clear right up front. This is NOT a highly technical book about gravity. It is more a philosophical exploration of gravity and how it was viewed and accepted within the canon of science and religion through history. I admit, that was not what I expected. But I really enjoyed it.
November 12, 2019
As many of previous reviewers have noted this is not the book to read to learn about gravity. It is more about the evolution of philosophical theories regarding the phenomenon of "gravity", quite often in terms of "up there" and "down here".
February 1, 2020
Good walk through the history of our understanding of gravity. I would have liked the later chapters to be more extensive, going into the mysteries of gravity as Einstein and current scientists see them.
April 17, 2021
A somewhat superficial treatment of the topic. Remaining at the surface-level I am not sure how useful these explanations are to people not well versed in the theory of gravity but certainly there is little value to those that have a general understanding other than a reminder of its history.
February 24, 2024
I know that do not know much about gravity still I picked this book. This book was interesting and captivating, it’s a comprehensive history about what humans knew or thought they knew about gravity.
Spoiler alert: author confesses that we know not much about gravity till date.
Spoiler alert: author confesses that we know not much about gravity till date.
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