Think About Gravity

                               Think About Gravity

By Pandiya Rajan

Gravity is present everywhere. It controls massive galaxies to tiny molecules of air with same law without any deviation or partiality. It governs the revolution of planets around Sun and by which our earth gets its periodic season and climate. By which our farmers are able to do their business of Agriculture in a productive manner(don't scold gravity for recent climate changes for it was caused by man's irrational greediness!).

Gravity powers Sun. The fission and fusion process of thermonuclear nature inside our sun is initiated and sustained by this grand phenomena by which we get eternal energy in the form of sunlight for our existence. Sunlight travels millions of kilometers and reaches earth. Traveling through our atmosphere, it falls upon leaf blades of plants. Plants convert this pure form of energy into sugar and stores it in their body. Later animals, including we humans, munch the plants to get that energy transformed into our body for vital and special body functions. Later with that energy we try ourselves to understand the whole universe.

Gravity balances they way you walk. It gives that branchy shapes to trees. It gives that beautiful falling of water from great heights which you all admire. It gives shape to mountains. It makes your muscle develop as you repeatedly walk, run and jump as a part of exercise. It makes the apple come down when you strike it by a stick.

Gravity makes the stone thrown into the air to curve and come down again to the ground. It again makes the satellite thrown with a greater velocity, say 11.2km/s to go round the earth indefinitely in time.

Gravity can keep a tiny mass of dust riveted to earth's surface and make a gigantic rock called moon to go around it. It is a supreme force that human can experience it with his senses directly.

Two bodies, say a car and a cricket ball, when released simultaneously, both irrespective of their masses will reach the ground at same time. This simple fact ignited the minds of great people like Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and so on. In turn, out of their joint effort, put the workings of this grand force of Nature in to a mathematical law and by which a research scholar was able to pinpoint a planet's existence(Neptune) just by making calculation and pointing out the telescope to such and such place and such and such time. Every rocket fired into space is a consequence of that mathematical form. Because of which NASA's Cassini going to complete its sojourn around Saturn, NASA's Juno got fiery gas hurricanes of Jupiter in its eyes and ISRO's Mangalyaan is making its trip around the red planet, Mars.

Gravity engulfs every object of the Universe. It shapes our life on Earth in a most subtle way and indirectly it directs our way of life on earth.

Then on one day Albert Einstein came and with all previous known facts about Gravity, he boldly suggested that Gravity is a warping of Space and Time by the object's mass. Very crudely it can be told that gravity is same as the undulations caused by a massive object when placed over a rubber sheet. He following his train of thought dared to predict that even path of light can be changed by the presence of gravity. It was experimentally confirmed and his theory is hailed now in the name of general relativity.

Gravity is omnipresent and I can possibly hail that the human beings sense of feeling the gravity was the starting point towards their understanding of Nature and all around technological development we perceive today is just a spark of that one human consciousness!

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