Oscar Collica/Alamy
If Earth was flat, how would gravity manifest?
Mel Earp
Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK
That is a brilliantly simple question, yet so revealing. To answer this, we need to put to one side how an Earth with a flat side would form. With Newtonian gravity, this would be quite difficult, as any planet or celestial body large enough would tend towards being spherical.
If we ignore this but still assume there is Newtonian gravity, the key driver would be where the centre of mass of this Earth was. The gravitational force on the flat surface would act towards this point.
We…
