Gravity keeps us tumbling back to Earth (Image: SuperStock/Getty)

Editorial: A gravity story to take us out of Newton’s orchard

WHAT exactly is gravity? Everybody experiences it, but pinning down why the universe has gravity in the first place has proved difficult.

Although gravity has been successfully described with laws devised by Isaac Newton and later Albert Einstein, we still don’t know how the fundamental properties of the universe combine to create the phenomenon.

Now one theoretical physicist is proposing a radical new way to look at gravity. Erik Verlinde of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a …