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The first test of Newton's law of gravitation between masses in the laboratory was the Cavendish experiment conducted by the British scientist Henry Cavendish in 1798. [5] It took place 111 years after the publication of Newton's Principia and approximately 71 years after his death.
Christiaan Huygens, in his Horologium Oscillatorium (1673), put forth the hypothesis that "By the action of gravity, whatever its sources, it happens that bodies are moved by a motion composed both of a uniform motion in one direction or another and of a motion downward due to gravity." Newton's second law generalized this hypothesis from ...
Derivation of Newton's law of gravity Newtonian gravitation can be written as the theory of a scalar field, Φ , which is the gravitational potential in joules per kilogram of the gravitational field g = −∇Φ , see Gauss's law for gravity ∇ 2 Φ ( x → , t ) = 4 π G ρ ( x → , t ) {\displaystyle \nabla ^{2}\Phi \left({\vec {x}},t ...
In physics, gravity (from Latin gravitas 'weight' [1]) is a fundamental interaction primarily observed as a mutual attraction between all things that have mass.Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 10 38 times weaker than the strong interaction, 10 36 times weaker than the electromagnetic force, and 10 29 times weaker than the weak interaction.
In mechanics, Newton was also the first to provide the first correct scientific and mathematical formulation of gravity in Newton's law of universal gravitation. The combination of Newton's laws of motion and gravitation provides the fullest and most accurate description of classical mechanics.
According to Newton's law of universal gravitation, the magnitude of the attractive force (F) between two bodies each with a spherically symmetric density distribution is directly proportional to the product of their masses, m 1 and m 2, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance, r, directed along the line connecting their centres of mass: =.
Based on the principle of relativity, Henri Poincaré (1905, 1906), Hermann Minkowski (1908), and Arnold Sommerfeld (1910) tried to modify Newton's theory and to establish a Lorentz invariant gravitational law, in which the speed of gravity is that of light. As in Lorentz's model, the value for the perihelion advance of Mercury was much too low.
The equation of motion for a particle of constant mass m is Newton's second law of 1687, in modern vector notation =, where a is its acceleration and F the resultant force acting on it. Where the mass is varying, the equation needs to be generalised to take the time derivative of the momentum.