Is Gravity acting upwards or downwards?

[Cato]

Probably completely stupid as fuck...

Your words, not mine.

[Alex K]

I can't make heads or tails of this mess. Why would one even consider that gravity is pushing upwards.

[LostLocke]

Gravity doesn't pull towards the center of mass but rather push away from the center of mass?
And tell me if it makes atleast a least tiny bit of sense?

It doesn't. Otherwise everything on Earth would be flying off into space, Earth would be flying away from the sun, the sun would be flying away from the center of the Milky Way, etc.

[Longhorn]

I can't make heads or tails of this mess. Why would one even consider that gravity is pushing upwards.

Where even is 'upwards'? ._.

He would probably mean away from earth, so we'd be taking about repulsion and not attraction.....sooo.....accelerating universe??

I don't follow ._.

[Cato]

I can't make heads or tails of this mess. Why would one even consider that gravity is pushing upwards.

Probably completely stupid as fuck...

[Lemonvariable72]

To answer your question, gravity can pull up or pull down. It pulls towards the center of mass aka the center of the earth.

Ok,since i have no idea about how this thing works in the technical sense,can you think about it as,

Gravity doesn't pull towards the center of mass but rather push away from the center of mass?
And tell me if it makes atleast a least tiny bit of sense?

Probably completely stupid as fuck but,when i think about it,i think that maybe that's why we have an atmosphere.
Maybe gravity is pushing away from the center of mass?

But according to that,probably every planet with a really high gravitational field should have an atmosphere,right? Oh i donno about that

Are you flying away from the ground at 10 km/s no? Then gravity is not pushing you away

[Pyrrho]

I am going to give you the Newtonian version, which is good enough for most purposes, and easier to understand than the current theory.  If you want to read up on this, you can start here, but I recommend just continuing reading this post for the moment.


Gravity is attraction to mass.  It is proportional to mass, and inversely proportional to distance.  Thus, a larger mass has a greater attraction than a smaller mass.  The attraction is less the further apart the things are.

When you jump, the earth pulls you back, so you come back down.  That is because it is very massive relative to you.

Gravity only pulls, it never pushes.  It is not like magnetism in that way.  Everything with mass exerts a pull on everything else with mass, though distance makes some things practically irrelevant to some other things.

There is no up or down to this.  You think of up and down simply because you are (at least approximately) on the surface of something that is very massive relative to you.  So "down" is toward the earth, and "up" is away from the earth.  Notice, someone standing on the north pole and someone standing on the south pole would be pulled in "opposite" directions, because they are both attracted to the earth.  There is no up or down to gravity per se, there is just attraction of mass to mass.


(Uncle K may either dispute some of this or give it his seal of approval.  Listen to him.)

[Brian37]

Gravity is neither pulling up or down. It is more like falling from my understanding.

[Aoi Magi]

you threw a mountain? o_O
Are you related to superman by any chance?

But if you really did then you are missing an important factor in your observation: air.
Earth's gravity isn't the only thing acting on your ball and mountain, the air-mass around them is affecting them based on their density as well. I suggest you read up on the differences between mass, weight and density, and then check out the famous feather and coin falling in vacuum experiment.

[TheRealJoeFish]

Here's a different way to think about it:

Ok, so, we know that when we jump, we fall back down to the Earth, our velocity toward the center increasing at 9.8m/s^2. Knowing just that, it's not clear whether that's due to something pulling us downward, or pushing us downward.

But, if it was pushing - that is, acting on us from above, not within - there would have to be something above us - that is, on the opposite side of us from the earth - that somehow knows the size/mass of the earth and is acting on us in accordance with that.

*Disclaimer 1: Above explanation formulated on the fly, not rigorously, and thus qualifies as "pop science." Still, should be sufficient to explain one issue with OP formulation.
**Disclaimer 2: Someone with a Ph.D. in Physics, a Ph.D. in Math, and at least a Master's in Philosophy may be able to formulate a mathematical framework in which gravity actually behaves as described above. You can formulate systems with respect to all sorts of frames of reference. But no one would want to because it would be dumb and waste everyone's time, and also I would cry.