Gravity as Glue

In much of a Nature article (here), gravity is presented as the force that “holds things together,” a cosmic glue that binds matter and space-time. Such language is common in popular accounts: planets orbit because gravity tethers them, galaxies spin because gravity threads them into coherent forms. The metaphor is intuitively appealing but ontologically misleading.

Gravity is not a substance, nor is it a universal adhesive acting independently in the world. In relational terms, gravity is a systemic construal — a symbolic articulation of how events and matter align across the relational field of space-time. To speak of gravity as glue conflates the observed patterns of relation with an inherent property of matter or space.

This framing also masks the constructive role of the theorist. The selection of reference frames, the imposition of metric relations, and the modelling of curvature are all symbolic acts that instantiate the patterns we call gravitational phenomena. We do not uncover “glue” in the world; we construct a coherent symbolic system that captures the relational regularities among events.

Treating gravity as glue naturalises a model of relational alignment as an ontological fact. It encourages the assumption that the patterns of interaction are properties waiting to be discovered, rather than emergent structures contingent on our symbolic cuts.

A relational ontology insists: gravity is not a thing sticking the universe together. It is a patterning of potential and actualised relations, a way of construing the coherence of events. The universe does not require glue; it requires a lens — and that lens is ours to articulate.