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In physics, gravity (from Latin gravitas 'weight' [1]) is a fundamental interaction primarily observed as 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.
General relativity is a theory of gravitation developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915. The theory of general relativity says that the observed gravitational effect between masses results from their warping of spacetime.
Newton's law of universal gravitation, which describes classical gravity, can be seen as a prediction of general relativity for the almost flat spacetime geometry around stationary mass distributions. Some predictions of general relativity, however, are beyond Newton's law of universal gravitation in classical physics.
It is a generalisation of the vector form, which becomes particularly useful if more than two objects are involved (such as a rocket between the Earth and the Moon). For two objects (e.g. object 2 is a rocket, object 1 the Earth), we simply write r instead of r 12 and m instead of m 2 and define the gravitational field g(r) as:
In classical mechanics, a gravitational field is a physical quantity. [5] A gravitational field can be defined using Newton's law of universal gravitation.Determined in this way, the gravitational field g around a single particle of mass M is a vector field consisting at every point of a vector pointing directly towards the particle.
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In other words, gravitation is exactly equivalent to acceleration. Einstein's two-part publication in 1912 [ 115 ] [ 116 ] (and before in 1908) is really only important for historical reasons. By then he knew of the gravitational redshift and the deflection of light.
Newton–Cartan theory (or geometrized Newtonian gravitation) is a geometrical re-formulation, as well as a generalization, of Newtonian gravity first introduced by Élie Cartan [1] [2] and Kurt Friedrichs [3] and later developed by G. Dautcourt, [4] W. G. Dixon, [5] P. Havas, [6] H. Künzle, [7] Andrzej Trautman, [8] and others.