# Electric vs. Gravitational shielding [duplicate]

There are great similarities between electric and gravitational fields and, furthermore, a room can be electrically shielded so that there are no electric fields simply by surrounding it with a conductor. Why can't the room be gravitationally shielded? Does it have anything to do with mass?

## marked as duplicate by Waffle's Crazy Peanut, Qmechanic♦Mar 24 '13 at 12:00

In case of electrostatic shielding, the charges redistribute themselves in an electric field, producing their own field which opposes the applied field. But in the case of gravity, you can't do that (till now). Whenever you place the massive object in the field, the objects attract towards each other and move towards the source of the field, which is not shielding but instead, attracting. Though gravity is a long-range force, the field is much weaker than electrostatic attraction. I don't want to do much calculations, but a simple plugging shows that roughly, electric field is about $10^{40}$ times stronger than that of gravity. So, you can't achieve this effect in many possible ways. That maybe a reason why it's hypothetical...