[zdragnar]

For those of us like myself who are terribly naive, why wouldn't that just cause all of the atoms to be torn apart?

Unless the sphere were infinitely far away, only the center point would be in balance, and everything else would be immediately sucked to the edge of the sphere. If the sphere's radius was infinite, that might explain the expansion of the universe itself, but not the presence of infinite density within the universe itself.

[Dylan16807]

When you do the math for gravity inside a shell of material, the quadratic falloff exactly counteracts the distances and the total pull is exactly zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem

[consilient]

> Unless the sphere were infinitely far away, only the center point would be in balance

This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_theorem