Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum How does gravity work?

Many recent theories suggest that gravity is caused by particles know as gravitrons emitted at the speed of light. However, Einstein's theory suggests that gravity is simply the curvature of space. How are these two distinct ideas related? Has there been any research/data which can help us understand, atleast in part, what actually causes gravity? Please let me know if you have found something, or know something interesting.

In a nutshell:

As John Wheeler put it, space-time tells matter how to move and matter tells space-time how to curve. The Higgs boson (graviton) comes into the picture as the agent that provides matter with 'mass'.

So, gravity causes the curvature of space-time, and exists wherever there is mass, which is an attribute of matter (theoretically) provided by the Higgs boson (graviton).

Some interesting related comments taken from an NPR Science Friday podcast:

"..our theory of the basic electric and weak forces - the so-called electroweak theory - ...has, as a fundamental component, that what we perceive as empty space is not empty at all. That it has material properties, and that in fact it's a kind of exotic superconductor. But unlike ordinary superconductors, we don't know what makes empty space have the properties it does. And so there are hypotheses about what it is - many different hypotheses. But the way we're going to find out for sure is to break off little chips of this material that we see ordinarily as empty space, and examine them and find out what their properties are. So, that goes under the name 'Higg's Boson' and it might be just one new kind of particle that does the job, but I suspect that it's a much richer story, and that we'll find that there's a whole world of phenomena that's connected with this superconducting property of empty space."

- Frank Wilczec (Nobel Prize in physics, 2004)