Is it a physics thing? or a god thing?
Yes.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Interesting question. It is my belief that God sets up the rules (gravity), and sometimes we get to understand at least part of them (Newton, Einstein)...
Fill the sink at home, and mix in some bubble bath. Not too much, you want some surface where there are no bubbles. Now, take your finger and poke it into an empty spot. Watch the bubbles gather around your finger. They don’t collect in a straight line, do they?
That’s because of the surface tension of the water. One useful visualization of gravity is looking at space like the surface of your water, and gravity would be the surface tension. The area around your finger has a “gravity” about it, and draws things from all directions.
Every thing in space has a mass, and a slight gravitational “pull” (some now say it’s a “push”) on everything else. The more mass, the bigger the pull. Those bubbles collect together and around your finger as close as they can because they are all fighting to be close to the others, and to your finger. This forms a natural optimization.
Take a look at the bubbles that are sort of little islands out in the middle of the empty spots, if there are any. They will be pretty much in circular patterns, if they are close to the same size. The bubbles are circular, too, all by themselves, aren’t they? The forces doing this are going pretty much equally in every direction, and that’s what causes circular, or spherical shapes.
So, yes, gravity can make things round. As the article says, if there is enough mass to create enough gravity.
(For all you hard-core physicists out there, I know this is not a perfect explanation, so please, don’t get picky on me. I’m “just” an Engineer trying to make the complex understandable for a fellow FReeper.)
By the way, posts 9 and 11 are telling you the same thing as post 14, only in a more precise, technical way...