← ⚛️ Physics · usually met in Std 6-10
The pull every piece of matter has on every other piece — too weak to notice between small things, and the thing that holds the solar system together between large ones.
Every object with mass pulls on every other object with mass. Your pencil pulls on you. You pull on the Earth exactly as hard as the Earth pulls on you — the difference is that the Earth is so much heavier that you are the one who moves. Newton's statement of it says the pull grows with the masses and falls away sharply with distance: double the distance and the pull drops to a quarter.
Weight and mass are not the same thing, and this is where most marks are lost. Mass is how much matter there is, and it does not change. Weight is the pull of gravity on that mass, so it changes with where you are: the same child weighs about a sixth as much on the Moon and has exactly the same mass. Einstein later described gravity differently again — not as a pull at all, but as matter bending space and time, with objects simply following the straightest path available. Both descriptions predict the same falling apple; Einstein's also predicts things Newton's cannot, such as the bending of starlight.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Gravity” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
This entry was written for Star Student in our own words — it is a summary, not a source. Here is where the people who actually hold these facts keep them. Go and check.
Your own textbook ↗Balbharati publishes the textbooks free to read online. Your chapter is the thing to check first — an encyclopedia is a summary, and the syllabus is the syllabus.Last gone through: 1 October 2026 · How these entries are written
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