Q.Gravitational force is the weakest force in nature but still it is considered the most important force. Why?
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →Gravity is the weakest force between two individual particles, but because it is always attractive and has unlimited range, it never cancels out as matter accumulates — making it the dominant force at the scale of planets, stars, and galaxies.
Of the four fundamental forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear), gravity is indeed the weakest — for example, the gravitational attraction between two protons is about times weaker than the electric repulsion between them. Yet gravity governs the motion of planets, the structure of stars and galaxies, tides, and the overall large-scale structure of the universe. This happens because of two special properties gravity has that the other forces (at macroscopic scale) do not:
- It is always attractive, never repulsive. Electric charges can be positive or negative, so in any large, bulk body the positive and negative charges very nearly cancel each other's electric field — matter is essentially electrically neutral overall. But mass has only one "sign", so gravitational effects of every particle in a body always add up in the same direction and never cancel.
- It has an infinite range. Unlike the strong and weak nuclear forces (which act only over the size of a nucleus), gravity's influence extends without limit, falling off only as . …
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