Why doesn the moon make waves on rivers and smaller lakes?
Some lakes do have waves, especially larger ones, which leads me to suspect that it has to do with a fundamental property of how gravity works: larger bodies have larger gravitational forces acting on one another. So the gravitational pull between a puddle and the moon is relatively weak, whereas the gravitational pull between the ocean and the moon is much stronger simply because the ocean is so much larger: Mathematically, you can find the force of gravity between two objects by: F=G(m1)(m2) / r^2 Where G is the universal gravitational constant, m1 is the mass of one body, m2 is the mass of the second body, and r is the distance between the two. So you can see why the force of gravity, and consequently the size of the waves, would be much stronger as the body of water grew larger. That’s my best guess.
