A woman on a Manhattan sidewalk staring at a clipboard held by a BuzzFeed pollster, her expression suggesting she has been asked to explain something she has never once considered. Credit: Rebecca Stein/The New York Time5
A woman on a Manhattan sidewalk staring at a clipboard held by a BuzzFeed pollster, her expression suggesting she has been asked to explain something she has never once considered. Credit: Rebecca Stein/The New York Time5

NEW YORK — A BuzzFeed survey of 2,200 American adults released Friday has found that only 12 percent of respondents can correctly identify the mechanism by which gravity operates, a result that physicists are calling “genuinely destabilizing” and that education officials have described as evidence of a systemic failure comparable in scale to a public health emergency.

The poll, conducted online between March 8 and March 14 in partnership with SurveyMonkey, asked respondents a single question: “What causes gravity?” Participants were given six options. Twelve percent selected “the curvature of space-time caused by mass and energy,” which is the answer established by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915 and confirmed by every subsequent experimental observation for more than a century. Thirty-one percent selected “it’s just how things work.” Nineteen percent chose “magnetism.” Fourteen percent chose “the Earth’s rotation.” Nine percent selected “God holds everything down.” Fifteen percent chose “I don’t know.”

“We expected some variation,” said Kayla Dietrich, a BuzzFeed data editor who oversaw the survey. “We did not expect ‘it’s just how things work’ to be the plurality answer. That is not a theory. That is a shrug.”

Dr. Harold Wendt, a professor of gravitational physics at the University of Chicago and a fellow of the American Physical Society, said he had been unable to finish his coffee after reading the results. “Thirty-one percent of the American public has settled on a philosophical position that was considered intellectually insufficient in the sixth century B.C.,” Dr. Wendt said. “The pre-Socratics were already dissatisfied with ‘it’s just how things work.’ We have regressed past Aristotle.”

Dr. Wendt noted that the 19 percent who selected magnetism were “at least trying,” though he cautioned that their answer “is wrong in a way that suggests they have confused two of the four fundamental forces, which is like confusing your mother with a stranger on the bus — they are both women, but the relationship is fundamentally different.”

Kneel onGrass Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planétarium and a contributing columnist for this newspaper, said he was not surprised by the findings. “Every atom in your body was forged in the heart of a dying star,” Dr. onGrass Tyson said in a phone interview, in response to a question about the poll’s methodology. “The curvature of space-time is not a theory in the colloquial sense. It is a geometric fact. Your chair is not pushing you up. The Earth is curving space-time beneath you and you are following the shortest path through a four-dimensional manifold. If 88 percent of Americans do not know this, then 88 percent of Americans do not know why they are sitting down.”

The poll has drawn comparisons to a 2014 National Science Foundation study that found one in four Americans did not know the Earth orbits the sun, a result that prompted a brief national conversation and no discernible policy changes. Sheila Grogan, the executive director of the National Science Literacy Coalition, called the new results “a five-alarm fire in a building that has been smoldering for decades.”

“People experience gravity every second of every day,” Ms. Grogan said. “They have a more intimate relationship with it than with any person they will ever know. And they cannot tell you what it is. That is like being married to someone for sixty years and not knowing their name.”

On the street in midtown Manhattan on Friday afternoon, respondents offered explanations that largely tracked with the poll’s findings. Gary Lutz, 54, a claims adjuster from Paramus, New Jersey, said he believed gravity was caused by “the mass of the Earth pulling things toward it, basically like a magnet.” When told that this was not correct, Mr. Lutz paused and said, “Well, it works, doesn’t it?”

Danielle Okoye, 29, a marketing coordinator, said she was “pretty sure it’s density” and that she had “seen some things online about it.” She declined to elaborate on what she had seen or where.

Tom Berkhout, 67, a retired electrician from Astoria, Queens, said gravity was “God’s plan, obviously,” and that the curvature of space-time was “something they made up to sell textbooks.” Mr. Berkhout added that he had “gotten along fine for sixty-seven years without knowing what causes gravity” and saw no reason to start now.

Dr. Wendt, the University of Chicago physicist, said the poll’s implications extended well beyond scientific literacy. “If people do not understand gravity, they do not understand why planets orbit stars, why stars orbit galaxies, why galaxies form clusters, or why the universe has any large-scale structure at all,” he said. “They are walking around in a cosmos they cannot explain, held to a planet they do not understand, and they are fine with it. That is what I find most remarkable. Not the ignorance. The comfort.”

The Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment. BuzzFeed said the poll was part of a recurring series called “Do You Actually Know How Anything Works?” Previous installments have covered electricity, antibiotics, and the Electoral College.