Ever played the game Space Engineers? If the answer is NO, it’s high time for you to give it a try! Just imagine yourself as a lone astronaut, exploring the asteroid laden universe and building your very own space assemblies (spaceships and stations). Pretty exciting, eh? Of course, there’re other impressive features of the game such as mining the asteroids and hijacking cargo ships for resources. But, the best thing about this game is the extremely realistic volumetric-based physics engine where technically all laws of space physics can be applied and witnessed!

Things get quite fascinating when you’ll start using those gravity generators. There’re two types of them– the normal one and the spherical gravity generator. When the normal one works quite normally (as we observe gravity on Earth) and helps you to roam around space without your jetpack thruster, the spherical gravity generator pulls the objects directly toward itself (within an artificial gravitational sphere created by this block-shaped machine)! This particular feature is much helpful in Space Engineers universe as you can easily collect rocks (for mining) which are all pulled at once by the spherical gravity generator.

Well, this sort of gameplay obviously raises concerns about the authenticity of the law of physics displayed there. So, for understanding the game better, a bit of general knowledge on the scientific parameters of the game can be really helpful. Let’s talk about the gravity here – one of the key features of the game.

The most popular and well – known notion about the discovery of gravity leads to the 17^th century English physician and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (Lin, 2012). However, Newton’s work was highly influenced by the discoveries of others – e.g. Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Robert Hooke. In 1687, Newton presented the world with the inverse-square law of universal gravitation through his famous book Principia. According to Newton’s law, each and every physical body of the whole universe attract each other where the level of attraction depends on the mass of the bodies and the distance between them (MacDougal, 2012).

Despite the fact that Newton’s law provided the theoretical background of gravity, an elaborate explanation was required for gaining greater insights into this theory. These explanations were provided by the general relativity theory of Albert Einstein in 1915. Einstein stated gravity as no ordinary force, rather a space-time curvature (Hartle, 2013). Making things simple, gravity is the creation of the distorted space-time which forces the straightest possible line of celestial particles and creates curvature. Interestingly, this distortion in space-time is actually the result of massive space objects which distort the inertial straight motions of space-time. Though the modern gravitational theory is based on Einstein’s relativity theory, Newton’s law of gravity is still widely used due to its simplicity.

Another much interesting phenomena regarding gravity is the gravitational wave. If the whole universe is considered as a straightly laid fabric of space-time, gravitational waves are the ripples in that fabric (Amaldi and Meshkov, 2000). The causes of this wave include the movement of massive space bodies, colliding stars and black holes and even the big bang itself! Detecting gravitational wave is not an easy task but it can help us to understand the origin of the universe. Extensive researches on the nature and functionality of gravitation are still going on which include the understanding of quantum mechanics, gravitational radiation and gravitational wave (Hawking et al., 2003). Well, it may not be a distant future when the existing theories on gravitation will be further developed, revealing the secrets of the universe to us. Till then, happy Space Engineering!

Disclaimer: This article was written for Project EduGaming. It’s republished here as the project website is not accessible these days.

References

Amaldi, E. and Meshkov, S. (2000). Gravitational waves. Melville: American Institute of Physics.

Hartle, J. (2013). Gravity. Pearson Education.

Hawking, S., Gibbons, G., Shellard, E. and Rankin, S. (2003). The future of theoretical physics and cosmology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Lin, Y. (2012). Isaac Newton and gravity. New York: PowerKids Press.

MacDougal, D. (2012). Newton’s gravity. New York: Springer.