Gravity - a
force created by the presence of
mass.
Any two pieces of mass attract each other with a force more or less
inversely proportional to the square of their separation and
directly proportional to the product of their masses. This is
Isaac Newton's famous law of gravity,
F = Gm
1m
2/r
2 where G is the gravitational constant.
Of course, this has been proven wrong by
Albert Einstein's theory of
general relativity, which treats gravity as the result of the warping of space-time by mass. In most cases, the answers given by relativity match those of Newton's law.
Gravity is always attractive. Two pieces of mass are never repulsed from each other due to gravity.
Black holes are one prediction of general relativity, as are
gravity waves and various other phenomena.
General relativity isn't the final word on
gravity, either. Attempts at combining GR with
quantum mechanics and the unification of the four forces (
electromagnetism,
gravity, the
strong nuclear force, and the
weak nuclear force) under one
unified theory have lead to things such as
superstring theory and
M-theory which describe the universe in ways different from both QM and GR.