G: GRAVITY

Albert Einstein rewrote the book on gravity when he launched the theory of general relativity. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation had served for 250 years to numerically predict the attractive force between objects, but it failed answer questions about how gravity worked. Newton’s math was good, but his view was only a beginning. To Newton, gravity was as we on earth experience it, instantaneous. I drop my cell phone and it falls. I miss a step and I fall. It was a simple and immediate pull, and, although Newton was studying the planets and using gravity to explain the pull of the sun on solar systems, it was (and this really happened) an apple falling to the ground that led him to conceive of gravity as a universal force and ultimately to effectively predict the strength of attraction between any two objects using their mass and distance from each other. Though the formula cut powerfully through a lot we did not yet know, there were still fragments all around from that severed Gordian knot. Einstein picked up those fragments, and in 1915 was able to more or less “slip the surly bonds of earth” as he tied them all together in one big idea. In the Newtonian concept, the force of gravity would have to travel faster than the speed of light to do its thing, and special relativity requires that nothing in the universe travel faster than the speed of light. To solve this dilemma, Einstein didn’t tweak the formula, but rather birthed a whole new view of the universe! Einstein conceived the universe as a vast landscape of “spacetime”—an invisible stretchy fabric that combined three-dimensional space with the fourth dimension of time, all rolled into one grid. Gravity is not, then, a direct object-to-object force, but rather a curve or bend in the malleable fabric of spacetime. (Imagine a heavy object in the middle of a trampoline.) It is currently believed that disturbances in the fabric of spacetime form gravitational waves that ripple out like those from a rock hitting a pond. These waves travel at—you guessed it—the speed of light! This is general relativity. And now for a truth from my personal world of Gordian knots: I really had not pondered the above in appropriate depth before the A to Z blogging challenge of April 2014 came my way, forcing me to choose a “inspiration from science” beginning with the letter “G”. My comfort zones are chaos, fractals and the more “quantum” science topics, which my inner wiring and training more predispose me to appreciate in a little depth. When faced with the letter “G”, I initially wanted to write about the fact that Newton’s laws of gravity imply that the whole universe is relational—everything is pulling on each other and nothing is understood alone. I jotted down a few of my initial thoughts and came up with glorious sentences like, “Nothing is defined, located or even examined in isolation.” But then I read more about general relativity and the warped fabric of spacetime, as I have shared above, and I had a small gravitational epiphany! (It is glorious when that happens—my writing and my living remaining one.) The universe is wondrously relational, but we’ll save that message for quantum physics topics later in the alphabet. I have known that and lived by it for a while now, and I have watched my empirical evidence corroborate what my growing inward belief: relationships are essential for spiritual health. However, I have also noticed that there are times in church, in social contexts, and even in my own family as a mother of three and a wife of one, that I have become LOST in those surrounding relationships--defining myself simply as the sum of the forces of other masses “acting on me”! At those times, I keep repeating mantra-like, but to little avail, “Must relate stronger to God; must increase that invisible relationship strength to overcome these earthly messy ones…Must increase mass of God in my life…” But, still the feeling of being overwhelmed by a relational universe had me in its grip. I was not experiencing the joy of free fall associated with gravity, but rather the sense of everyone else determining my orbit! In the past 24 hours, as I have tried hard to get it right for whatever “gentle reader” might appear at the other end of this connection, I have realized that I can upgrade my understanding of the gravity that pulls on my being! Newtonian strongholds can graduate to Einstein-like freedom! I am NOT (and neither are you) just at the mercy of other people’s pulls and tugs—the sum of relational vectors in our immediate proximity! I am instead, warping spacetime ON MY OWN! We each relate directly to spacetime before we interact with each other. I myself am in relationship with spacetime first and foremost before anyone relates to me! There is a GRID in the universe—a fabric of reality, which is both flexible enough to handle the masses that “assault” it, but also sturdy enough to support them each on their own! Again, the design of the universe gives me great comfort. I do not have to fit God into my juggling of relationships. He owns the whole grid! I am not just defined by others—I have my own place in the universe—my own bending of spacetime. Gravity from other relational masses doesn’t just seize upon me—it travels in waves through a matrix in which I clearly make my own dent! I am a force in spacetime; free to interact with every other mass without fearing their influence might drag me down. It’s not a contest of mass (competing to see who carries more weight); it is rather about my placing in the invisible continuum! Hence, I don't need to manically try to fit God in as the relationship with a capital “R”. He is not just competing with others to define me. He is the grounding and re-grounding of my storm-tossed identity. He created me to warp spacetime, bend light, and generate waves of gravity and He is the safe place I need to retain that grounded identity in a world full of Newtonian pulls and vectors that seem to threaten my moorings! I hold my mass in Him! Gravity is not even fully explained yet. There are whole layers of quantum speculation ahead. Could the gravitational waves also have particle manifestations like light does? I am sure that if it turns out that there are “gravitons” that strike like photons when observed, there will only come more comfort in the stabilizing knowledge of the genius arrangements of a relational God. I remain, through the letter G, convinced that the universe is, at heart, a GOOD place, with grace wired into its very fabric, the fabric of spacetime!