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Why do all objects with mass attract each other?

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gravitational lens
gravity A galactic cluster, about five billion light-years away, produces a tremendous gravitational field that “bends” light around it. This lens produces multiple copies of a blue galaxy about twice as distant. Four images are visible in a circle surrounding the lens; a fifth is visible near the center of the picture, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The reason objects with mass attract each other is explained by two primary frameworks in physics:

  • Classical Mechanics: Isaac Newton proposed that gravity is a universal force of attraction acting between all bodies of matter. According to Newton’s law of gravitation, every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.12

  • General Relativity: Albert Einstein provided a different perspective, showing that gravity is not a traditional force but a consequence of the curvature of space-time. In this view, massive objects cause space-time to deform, and other objects move along the resulting "geodesics," or shortest natural paths, within that curved geometry. As physicist John Wheeler summarized, matter tells space-time how to curve, and space-time tells matter how to move.34