According to his theory, the exact expression of gravity came down to mass and distance. The farther apart two particles are and the less massive they are, the less the gravitational force. That's Newton's law of universal gravitation in a nutshell, and it stood unchallenged for three centuries. Then, in the 1900s, a wild-haired physicist by the name of Albert Einstein stepped in the ring and let fly with his general theory of relativity.