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LaCoste's most famous invention is the ship- and aircraft-mounted gravimeter. These revolutionized exploration for minerals by allowing wide-ranging geological surveys. The chief problem that Lacoste defeated was to distinguish the accelerations of the vehicles from the accelerations due to gravity, and measure the minute changes in gravity.
A gravimeter measures this gravitational force. For a small body, general relativity predicts gravitational effects indistinguishable from the effects of acceleration by the equivalence principle. Thus, gravimeters can be regarded as special-purpose accelerometers. Many weighing scales may be regarded as simple
To make this into an equal-sided formula or equation, there needed to be a multiplying factor or constant that would give the correct force of gravity no matter the value of the masses or distance between them – the gravitational constant. Newton would need an accurate measure of this constant to prove his inverse-square law.
The equation for universal gravitation thus takes the form: F = G m 1 m 2 r 2 , {\displaystyle F=G{\frac {m_{1}m_{2}}{r^{2}}},} where F is the gravitational force acting between two objects, m 1 and m 2 are the masses of the objects, r is the distance between the centers of their masses , and G is the gravitational constant .
General relativity is a theory of gravitation that was developed by Albert Einstein between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. According to general relativity, the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses.
A Kater's pendulum is a reversible free swinging pendulum invented by British physicist and army captain Henry Kater in 1817 (made public on 29 January 1818), [1] for use as a gravimeter instrument to measure the local acceleration of gravity.
Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (/ l ə ˈ m ɛ t r ə / lə-MET-rə; French: [ʒɔʁʒ ləmɛːtʁ] ⓘ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, and mathematician who made major contributions to cosmology and astrophysics. [1]
The basic ideas of quantum theory were introduced in 1900 by Max Planck (1858–1947), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918 for his discovery of the quantified nature of energy.