Cosmo 101

We interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to bring you the bigger picture. So we’ve been talking all about gravity, and we’ve been talking about it from the perspective of general relativity. In other words we’ve been looking at gravity as simply a bending in spacetime. It’s not a real force or anything it’s just a warping to the playing field. But there is a very different view on gravity that we haven’t talked about yet. It’s the particle view and it says that gravity is a force that is carried by a massless partial called the graviton. Yes I am aware that these two views are totally and completely in contradiction to one another. And everybody else knows it too. This is one of the great challenges facing physicists today. We have tried and tried again to fit two together. But we don’t have a straightforward answer yet. In fact string theory is one of the leading theories that people are trying to use to solve this conundrum. But if any of you young people out there (or old people for that matter) would like to give physics a go this could be an area you might check you.