UTOPIAHELL

Hey friends. I hope someone can help me here because I'm starting to feel like I may be going crazy, and I hope someone can set me straight. My question comes in two parts: 1. Why does gravity often seem to have contradictory effects at different scales? The Earth is spinning at an extremely fast speed, while also moving through space at an extremely fast speed. This force called Gravity keeps me adhered to the Earth's surface, so it must be quite strong. I can easily imagine how strong a force would have to be to keep a tiny object adhered to the surface of a basketball while it was both spinning and moving. So I can empirically deduce that the pull of gravity must be extremely strong. However, this extremely strong force is also what keeps the moon orbiting the Earth, and the planets of our solar system orbiting the sun. The moon orbits the Earth at a relatively constant distance, and the planets orbit the sun at a relatively constant distance. I understand that the distances vary slightly as the orbits are actually elliptical, but my point is that the planets are not pulled towards the sun, and the moon is not pulled towards the Earth. Man has observed Mercury, for example, orbiting the sun for millenia, and it has apparently failed to be pulled into the sun by the force of the Sun's massive gravitational field, which paradoxically is strong enough to act on a planet such as Neptune, which is orbiting the sun at a distance that is orders of magnitude larger than Mercury's distance from the Sun. So gravity simultaneously pulls me towards the Earth with such immense force that I adhere to it despite the massive motion of the Earth, yet also keeps the planets and moon orbiting at a relatively constant distance, failing to pull them the same way I am apparently pulled towards the Earth. What gives? How can gravity apparently pull sometimes, yet paradoxically also be the force that allows planets and moons to obtain stable orbits? 2. The Earth is the only object that I can empirically verify as possessing Gravity. In my physics classes, when learning about Gravity, someone of course asked the obvious question of, "Why don't mountains have gravity?" or why we fail to observe gravitational fields forming around sufficiently large masses on Earth. The answer I received for this is that the gravity of the Earth is so extreme that it dwarfs the force of gravity of these smaller objects and renders them negligible. This seems to be in opposition to the apparent fact that perpendicular forces are supposed to not effect each other in this universe. For example, you are most likely familiar with the thought experiment of a car moving forward on a frictionless surface at 100 mph. This car is then struck from the side at a perfect 90 degree angle to it's current path by another object. I have always learned that on this frictionless plane, the car would still be moving forward at 100 mph, because the two perpendicular forces do not affect each other - it would just now also have additional momentum pushing it along the horizontal axis. If this is the case, then sufficiently large masses on Earth should have demonstrable gravitational fields. The gravity of the Earth is pulling down (we'll call this the Y axis), but a sufficiently large mass, such as a massive lead cube, would, if you were holding an object next to it, be exerting it's own gravity horizontally (on the x axis). The vectors of these two forces are perpendicular, and thus should not cancel each other out. To give a basic example, if you were throwing a football past a 200 x 200 ft. lead cube, the gravity of the Earth would be pulling the football down, but the gravity of the cube should also be able to pull the football towards it, to the left or to the right depending on where you are. This obviously does not happen. On a more practical level, it seems like objects of normal mass should be able to attract sufficiently small masses, as long as the ratio of their masses is similar to the ratio of my mass to the Earth's. This also does not happen. If perpendicular forces cannot cancel each other out, why can't we observe the gravitational force of masses on Earth? I sincerely look forward to any input someone can give me on these questions, as they have been vexing me for some time and despite a decent (albeit elementary) education in basic physics, I really cannot explain this. Thanks!