Gravity, or what we call gravity, was here, always has been... you are right...
However, there was no need to investigate what the cause of this force was....until people were told that we live on a ball...
Think about it... people in the US and Australia are upside down to each other... how is that possible without some force to hold our feet to the ground... Or, hold the oceans to bend around the curve and stay in their banks and shores....
You didn't need any mysterious force of attraction, to the center of the mass... before it was a ball. Down... was just down. Everyone was standing the same way.. water just sat in it's place....
Enter the globe..... enter a necessity for a force to hold it all together.
The story is told ... of Sir Isaac Newton napping under an apple tree ... when an apple fell and hit him on the head. Happenings like these led to the initial study on the phenomenon of gravity ... long before we contemplated a spinning disk.
From
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/question232.htm
Every time you jump, you experience gravity. It pulls you back down to the ground. Without gravity, you'd float off into the atmosphere -- along with all of the other matter on
Earth.
You see gravity at work any time you drop a book, step on a scale or toss a ball up into the air. It's such a constant presence in our lives, we seldom marvel at the mystery of it -- but even with several well-received theories out there attempting to explain why a book falls to the ground (and at the same rate as a pebble or a couch, at that), they're still just theories. The mystery of gravity's pull is pretty much intact.
So what do we know about gravity? We know that it causes any two objects in the universe to be drawn to one another. We know that gravity assisted in forming the universe, that it keeps the moon in orbit around the Earth, and that it can be harnessed for more mundane applications like
gravity-powered motors or
gravity-powered lamps.
As for the science behind the action, we know that Isaac Newton defined gravity as a force -- one that attracts all objects to all other objects. We know that
Albert Einstein said gravity is a result of the curvature of space-time. These two theories are the most common and widely held (if somewhat incomplete) explanations of gravity.
In this article, we'll look at
Newton's theory of gravity, Einstein's theory of gravity and we'll touch on a more recent view of the phenomenon as well.
Although many people had already noted that gravity exists, Newton was the first to develop a cohesive explanation for gravity, so we'll start there.
In the 1600s, an English physicist and mathematician named
Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree -- or so the legend tells us. Apparently, an apple fell on his head, and he started wondering why the apple was attracted to the ground in the first place.
Newton publicized his Theory of Universal Gravitation in the 1680s. It basically set forth the idea that gravity was a predictable force that acts on all matter in the universe, and is a function of both mass and distance. The theory states that each particle of matter attracts every other particle (for instance, the particles of "
Earth" and the particles of "you") with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
So the farther apart the particles are, and/or the less massive the particles, the less the gravitational force.