Gravitational Quotes & Sayings

Prior to then it was believed that black holes were just cosmic cookie monsters, swallowing everything that came within their gravitational clutches. — John D. Barrow

The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the rolling plenitude of information. It's the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to 'rip, mix, and burn' - to curate. — Gideon Lewis-Kraus

He had intense gravitational force. He was like Saturn because Saturn has so many moons. If I kicked my shoes up in the air, they would go into orbit around him. — Heather O'Neill

Apparently, a great deal of dark, unseen material exists, whose gravitational pull is responsible for the motions of the stars and galaxies that we see. — John D. Barrow

I was beginning to understand what Hiraku Makimura meant about Ame's wearing him down. Ame didn't give anything. She only took. She consumed those around her to sustain herself. And those around her always gave. Her talent was manifested in a powerful gravitational pull. She believed it was her privilege, her right. Harmony and peace. In order for her to have that, she had everyone waiting on her hand and foot. — Haruki Murakami

Indeed, as string theory was understood better, it became clear that the gauge interactions naturally emerged from it. But even more than this, during their period of exile from the mainstream, the string theorists realized that their theory naturally gave rise to an interaction that had all of the hallmarks of the gravitational force. In order to get the force to come out with the right strength, all they had to do was fix the length of the string to be about the Planck length. Thus, string theory had the potential to unify all of physics in a simple framework, in which all phenomena arise from the motion and vibrations of fundamental one-dimensional strings. — Lee Smolin

With no gravitational force to work against, your body not only doesn't need the same amount of muscle and bone, it starts breaking them down. As on Earth, so in space: use it or lose it. And exercise may not solve the problem. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990. — Dave Barry

[S]ecrets are like stars. They blaze inside the heart and ultimately could be explosive. But there are two types of secrets. Small secrets, like small stars, will eventually burn out. With time and space they lose their importance and simply vanish. No harm done. But big secrets, like massive stars, with time and constant fear grow stronger, creating a gravitational pull that eventually ... When they get so big, they become a black hole. — Jennifer Jabaley

Paul Bearer is so fat, he has his own gravitational pull! — Jerry Lawler

For in this world, marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the "I" and the "self." These chains must be broken to free us for a new love that places us in another gravitational field where we can enter new life. — Pope Benedict XVI

His attention felt more like an irrepressible gravitational pull than mere interest. — Blakely Bennett

While the circumnavigation of the solar system seems farfetched, it may not be once the problem of effective anti-gravitational control is solved. — Donald A. Wollheim

If I was being candid with her, she'd only find out that I felt something for her that could only be the equivalent of a gravitational pull towards the center of the earth. She was a magnet for me and I was powerless to resist. It was more than a mere attraction. — Fisher Amelie

Practitioners of SI do not feel ourselves to be therapists. The gravitational field is the therapist. What we do is prepare the body to receive the support from the gravitational field which gives a greater sense of well being. — Ida Rolf

The extreme weakness of quantum gravitational effects now poses some philosophical problems; maybe nature is trying to tell us something new here: maybe we should not try to quantize gravity. — Richard P. Feynman

It's like the world's gravitational pull has just lessened tenfold. Everything trapped in me, rushing in and out like the ocean against a jetty - pounding over and over, trying to crush the breaker wall with each rhythmic explosion - has finally been taken away. I cry for that and I'm not sure what else. — Nic Sheff

The hazards posed by Near-Earth Asteroids are assessed by Sentry, a computer system developed by the Near-Earth Objects Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The software factors together a cosmic rock's coordinates, distance, velocity, and gravitational influences to calculate its trajectory. — Brendan I. Koerner

He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me. — Heidi Julavits

The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is. — Richard P. Feynman

"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. — Frank Drake

Even now, I could no more chart her influence than I could the gravitational powers that rule the tides. I suppose that could be said of anyone we love, that their effects on our lives run so deeply, with such grave force, we hardly know what they mean until they are gone. — Aria Beth Sloss

Normally, the energy of the particle is still positive, but the gravitational field inside a black hole is so strong that even a real particle can have negative energy there. It is therefore possible, if a black hole is present, for the virtual particle with negative energy to fall into the black hole and become a real particle or antiparticle. — Stephen Hawking

Physicists traced the failure to the jitters of quantum uncertainty. Mathematical techniques had been developed for analyzing the jitters of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fields, but when the same methods were applied to the gravitational field-a field that governs the curvature of spacetime itself-they proved ineffective. This left the mathematics saturated with inconsistencies such as infinite probabilities. — Brian Greene

Trying to navigate the halls of Hogwarts was like ... probably not quite as bad as wandering around inside an Escher painting, that was the sort of thing you said for rhetorical effect rather than for its being true.
A short time later, Harry was thinking that in fact an Escher painting would have both pluses and minuses compared to Hogwarts. Minuses: No consistent gravitational orientation. Pluses: At least the stairs wouldn't move around WHILE YOU WERE STILL ON THEM. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity. — Kip Thorne

Whether it is a falling man or an orbiting satellite, the effect of inertia is to create an apparent upward force that depends on the mass of the object. It is the same force we feel when riding in a car that goes around a tight curve. This inertial effect is equal and opposite to gravity and therefore cancels the pull of gravity. In physicist language, the "gravitational mass" and "inertial mass" are equal. This is not a tautology, as Ambrose Bierce thought, but a recognition that the pull of gravity is proportional to the inertia of the object being pulled. Einstein called this the "Principle of Equivalence", and it became the basis for his new theory of gravity that he called the general theory of relativity. — Rodney A. Brooks

Galileo had already made a significant beginning toward a knowledge of the law of motion. He discovered the law of inertia and the law of bodies falling freely in the gravitational field of the earth. — Albert Einstein

Moon's gravitational pull means that earth doesn't wobble too much. Scientists call it obliquity. The moon holds us fast. — Jeanette Winterson

We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull. — Leslie Jamison

The threat of her relapsing had created a strong gravitational field around their little family and was part of the reason he had never left home. He — Reif Larsen

The action of the earth on the stone takes place indirectly. The earth produces in its surroundings a gravitational field, which acts on the stone and produces its motion of fall...The intensity and direction of the field at points farther removed...are thence determined by the law which governs the properties in space of the gravitational fields themselves. — Albert Einstein

Twisting space-time into knots requires energy on a scale that will not be available within the next several centuries or even millenia-if ever. Even if all the nations of the world were to band together to build a machine that could probe hyperspace, they would ultimately fail. And, as Guth points out, the temperatures necessary to create a baby universe in the laboratory is 1,000 trillion trillion degrees, far in excess of anything available to us. In fact, that temperature is much greater than anything found in the interior of a star. So, although it is possible that Einstein's laws and the laws of quantum theory might allow for time travel, this is not within the capabilities of earthlings like us, who can barely escape the feeble gravitational field of our own planet. While we can marvel at the implications of wormhole research, realizing its potential is strictly reserved for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. — Michio Kaku

Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heartstrings. — Jeremy Holmes

We must risk the journey to a higher ground where there
is freedom from the gravitational pull of our stories,
the pull that comes from years of trying to prove that
the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we've made up,
are the truth. — Debbie Ford

An event horizon is also called the point of no return. In a sense of general relativity, it's the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great escape is impossible. Some theorize quantum gravity effects become significant in the vicinity of such an occurrence. — Karen Marie Moning

I let my eyes drift into the maze of leaves that only trees understand. Hatred has its gravitational web, locking stray specks of confusion into spirals of violence. — Gregory David Roberts

Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be. — Jonathan Nolan

Who we loved wasn't always a choice. Sometimes it was an irresistible pull, a gravitational force, something we couldn't see or control that drew us toward another. Sure, we could try to fight it. But in the end, love always won because it didn't fight fair. It had a secret weapon, a tool of sheer force to use against us - our heart. And once that son of a bitch got involved, you could kiss away all options you thought might exist. — J. Sterling

Jacob was simply a perpetually happy person, and he carried this happiness with him like an aura, sharing it with whoever was near him. Lika an earthbound sun, whenever someone was within his gravitational pull, Jacob warmed them. It was natural, a part of who he was. — Stephenie Meyer

But imagine this, for a moment. If an asteroid happened to hit one of the rare remaining older surfaces; if its strike were glancing enough that it didn't pulverise the surface, but forceful enough that it ejected a chunk of rock with an escape velocity of 12,000 mph; if that chunk, flung out into space, wandered aimlessly for a million years or two before feeling the gravitational tug of a nearby planet; if it tore through the atmosphere of that planet in a blaze of glory and landed on one of the planet's frozen ice caps; if the chunk was buried in snow, squeezed, shoved and harried until it re-emerged, blinking, into the strangely blue daylight; and if, tens of thousands of years later a few local bipeds happened upon it, might it contain signs of alien life? If so, it would surely become one of the most exciting pieces of real estate in the entire Solar System. — Gabrielle Walker

The New York Times' was enigmatic: 'Some unimaginable gravitational force is pulling our entire galaxy in the opposite direction.' End of article. If you stop and think about that, we are recreating ourselves. — Dwight Schultz

I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull. — Caitlin Rose

There are 15 constants- the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.- that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people — Francis Collins

All this time I kept my gaze fixed on hers, an enormously difficult task given the gravitational pull exerted by her cleavage. While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them. The Chinese might have invented gunpowder and the noodle, but the West had invented cleavage, with profound if underappreciated implications. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Even if 'going retrograde' or 'moving into Aquarius' were real phenomena, something that planets actually do, what influence could they possibly have on human events? A planet is so far away that its gravitational pull on a new-born baby would be swamped by the gravitational pull of the doctor's paunch. — Richard Dawkins

When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses. — Kip Thorne

Innovative technologies such as cold fusion, and radical energy sources, including sonoluminescent-triggered fusion and anti-gravitational propulsion, are either being withheld or blocked by governments, old-fashioned science academia and multinational corporations. — Takaaki Musha

The term "FTM-Butch Border War" just sounds like an alien land of yore. How is it that the gravitational pull of my beard and low-voice should hold [my lesbian friend's] masculinity in deferential orbit? That when standing side-by-side we are supposedly read in comparison, rendering her unalterably more feminine - shorthand, in patriarchal societies, for "lesser than"?

Masculinity has more than enough space to spare. But sometimes its flesh-and-blood vessels act as if we have to wound each other for it, like dogs fighting over too few scraps. Anyway, [she] and I know without speaking that in reality, right here and right now in our present moment, that she and I are two different sides of the same coin; two keys sung for the same tune."

- from "Snapshots: "Sharing Space with Women," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 — Mitch Kellaway

With general relativity, we know that before gravity can act, spacetime has to deform. This process does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. Gravity waves travel at the speed of light. Gravitational effects can kick in at a given position only after the time it takes for a signal to travel there and distort spacetime. — Lisa Randall

Gravitational systems are the ashes of prior electrical systems. — Hannes Alfven

Like a lost satellite, I hovered around your orbit, with the knowledge that at anytime I might fall into your gravitational pull and willingly burn into your atmosphere. — A.J. Garces

Gravity is the force of attraction that exists between any two objects, any two masses, any two bodies. Gravity isn't just an attraction between an object above being pulled toward the gravitational center of the earth. Gravity is an attraction that exists between all objects, in all of the universe - the closer they are, the stronger the pull. — Katy Evans

gravitational pull" of depression by reminding you in key ways of what science has now shown: it is actually okay to — Mark Williams

For relatively small stars, the Pauli exclusion principle keeps the electrons in a star sufficiently separated to prevent the star from contracting further after it has spent its fuel. In other words, the electrons counteract the crushing gravitational force. However, for stars more than about 1.5 times the mass of the sun (a mass known as the Chandrasekhar limit), this repulsive force would not be enough to stop stellar collapse. — Clifford A. Pickover

The bioelectricity of her brain has ceased to function, and as I lay here, the cells are beginning to degenerate and every thought and memory she had is irretrievably fading into nothing. We were like phone towers in concert, reciprocating, each useless without the other, and now I feel like a massive star extending its light, heat, and gravitational pull into a radiant and beautiful universe only to discover that it is singularly without planets, only holding down a vestigial field of cold, dark rocks. — Bryan Way

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull. — Kevin McCarthy

For if there were a list of cosmic things that unite us, reader and writer, visible as it scrolled up into the distance, like the introduction to some epic science-fiction film, then shining brightly on that list would be the fact that we exist in a financial universe that is subject to massive gravitational pulls from states. States tug at us. States bend us. And, tirelessly, states seek to determine our orbits. — Mohsin Hamid

When it's my turn, I introduce myself as Josh Raymond, seventeen, no previous experience beyond my recent halfhearted experiment with sleeping pills. "The Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect is life," I add, even though no one knows what this means — Jennifer Niven

Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom. — Michael Flynn

[Max Planck] was one of the finest people I have ever known ... but he really didn't understand physics, [because] during the eclipse of 1919 he stayed up all night to see if it would confirm the bending of light by the gravitational field. If he had really understood [general relativity], he would have gone to bed the way I did — Albert Einstein

An observer who is sitting eccentrically on the disc K' is sensible of a force which acts outwards in a radial direction, and which would be interpreted as an effect of inertia (centrifugal force) by an observer who was at rest with respect to the original reference-body K. But the observer on the disc may regard his disc as a reference body which is "at rest"; on the basis of the general principle of relativity he is justified in doing this. The force acting on himself, and in fact on all other bodies which are at rest relative to the disc, he regards as the effect of a gravitational field. — Albert Einstein

A common refrain among theoretical physicists is that the fields of quantum field theory are the "real" entities while the particles they represent are images like the shadows in Plato's cave. As one who did experimental particle physics for forty years before retiring in 2000, I say, "Wait a minute!" No one has ever measured a quantum field, or even a classical electric, magnetic, or gravitational field. No one has ever measured a wavicle, the term used to describe the so-called wavelike properties of a particle. You always measure localized particles. The interference patterns you observe in sending light through slits are not seen in the measurements of individual photons, just in the statistical distributions of an ensemble of many photons. To me, it is the particle that comes closest to reality. But then, I cannot prove it is real either. — Victor J. Stenger

Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun. — Brian Swimme

There are stars in the night sky that look brighter than the others, and when you look at them through a telescope you realize you are looking at twins. The two stars rotate around each other, sometimes taking nearly a hundred years to do it. They create so much gravitational pull there's no room around for anything else. You might see a blue star, for example, and realize only later that it has a white dwarf as a companion - that first one shines so bright, by the time you notice the second one, it's too late. — Jodi Picoult

I realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new. — Jeanette Winterson

Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field. — David R. Brower

The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky. — Stephen Hawking

Why value humility in our approach to God? Because it accurately reflects the truth. Most of what I am - my nationality and mother tongue, my race, my looks and body shape, my intelligence, the century in which I was born, the fact that I am still alive and relatively healthy - I had little or no control over. On a larger scale, I cannot affect the rotation of planet earth, or the orbit that maintains a proper distance from the sun so that we neither freeze nor roast, or the gravitational forces that somehow keep our spinning galaxy in exquisite balance. There is a God and I am not it. Humility does not mean I grovel before God, like the Asian court officials who used to wriggle along the ground like worms in the presence of their emperor. It means, rather, that in the presence of God I gain a glimpse of my true state in the universe, which exposes my smallness at the same time it reveals God's greatness. — Philip Yancey

And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt.
It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead. — Chris Beckett

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge. — Werner Heisenberg

The biggest risk is that a lot of people will try to talk you out of pursuing your dream. The world has too many people who are happy to discuss why something might not work, and too few who will cheer you and say, "I'm there for you." The more time you spend navel-gazing, the longer you give those negative gravitational forces to keep you in their tether. — John Wood

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Meaning ... if enough people begin thinking the same thing, then the gravitational force of that thought becomes tangible ... and it exerts actual force." Katherine winked. "And it can have a measurable effect in our physical world. — Dan Brown

I felt a gravitational pull to the material so that there's a certain element of acting that's not really necessary. I've really liked this in foreign movies before or I've observed others working with them and I've noticed that there's a method that goes on where the actors try and get the children, like the child actor, to interact with them in a real way. It seems like you're the adult trying to get the kid to fall in love with him. — Brendan Fraser

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever. — Imre Lakatos

I do have some kind of gravitational pull towards young characters with more responsibility than they should have. — Jennifer Lawrence

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century.

Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.

We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology. — Gerald Holton

To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth - all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. — Lee De Forest

Like a lost satellite, I hovered close to your orbit, knowing that at any moment I might succumb to your gravitational pull and willingly burn inside your atmosphere. — A.J. Garces

Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red. — R.D. Ronald

Each day, the moon's gravitational field tugs at the earth as it rotates underneath. At CERN, this tiny stress caused the total length of the LEP tunnel to stretch and contract by about a millimeter (one-twenty-fifth of an inch) every day. Not such a big deal in a seventeen-mile-long beam pipe, but enough to cause a tiny fluctuation in the energy of the electrons and positrons - one that was easily detectable by the high-precision instruments. After some initial puzzlement at the daily energy variations, the CERN physicists quickly figured out what was going on. — Sean Carroll

Man is at the mercy of events. Life is a perpetual succession of events, and we must submit to it. We never know from what quarter the sudden blow of chance will come. Catastrophe and good fortune come upon us and then depart, like unexpected visitors. They have their own laws, their own orbits, their own gravitational force, all independent of man. — Victor Hugo

All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional world, at the same time that we are bending his emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star, a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating. (142) — Thomas Lewis

A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 1032 joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan. — Randall Munroe

That man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit. — Arthur Koestler

Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy. — Seth Shostak

Jupiter's fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.
Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System. — Arthur C. Clarke

It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. — Barack Obama

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. — Laird Barron

Greg's grin returned and I was happy to see it. "See? No vanity. You've lost the ability to care about bullshit that doesn't matter. You're a star, the center of a solar system, with no desire for the planets, asteroids, and moons caught in your gravitational field." "Who wants creepy planets anyway? Planets are amoebas, circling mindlessly in the vacuum of space. They're star stalkers of the worst sort." He continued to look at me like I was a treasure. "Planets are creepy, when you put it like that. — Penny Reid

With all reserve we advance the view that a supernova represents the transition of an ordinary star into a neutron star consisting mainly of neutrons. Such a star may possess a very small radius and an extremely high density. As neutrons can be packed much more closely than ordinary nuclei and electrons, the gravitational packing energy in a cold neutron star may become very large, and under certain conditions may far exceed the ordinary nuclear packing fractions ... — Fritz Zwicky

But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found - those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes - were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches. — Lee Smolin

Reality is a gravitational pull, yanking us back down to earth when we least expect it. — Cassia Leo

Why do guests always end up in the kitchen at parties? Is it a social phenomenon? Some strange gravitational pull? I don't know, but one thing is for sure: If your friends are going to congregate in your kitchen, you'd better make it as nice as possible. — Candice Olson

Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. — Stephen Hawking

Love, as Mercer had heretofore understood it, involved huge gravitational fields of duty and disapproval bearing down on the parties involved, turning even small-talk into a ragged struggle for breath. — Garth Risk Hallberg

(...)my mom was the gravitational pull that kept me stuck to this Earth — Gabby Rivera

Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur. — Paul Davies

For simple black holes, which do not rotate and have no electric charge, the values of the temperature and entropy can be expressed very simply. The area of the horizon of a simple black hole is proportional to the square of its mass, in Planck units. The entropy S is proportional to this quantity. In terms of Planck units, we have the simple formula S = .25 A / h G. Where A is the area of the horizon, and G is the gravitational constant. — Lee Smolin