AS EVERY schoolchild knows, the concept of gravity came to Isaac Newton after a close encounter with an apple – or so the story goes. Older students go on to learn Einstein’s view of gravity: that masses warp space-time like a ball on a rubber sheet. Now we could be closing in on an explanation of where gravity comes from: it might be an emergent property of the way objects are organised, much as fluidity arises as a property of water (see “Gravity’s origin falling into place”). This idea might seem exotic now, but to kids of the future it…
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