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The Schiehallion experiment, proposed in 1772 and completed in 1776, was the first successful measurement of the mean density of the Earth, and thus indirectly of the gravitational constant. The result reported by Charles Hutton (1778) suggested a density of 4.5 g/cm 3 (4 + 1 / 2 times the density of water), about 20% below the modern ...
The mass of an object is a measure of the object's inertial property, or the amount of matter it contains. The weight of an object is a measure of the force exerted on the object by gravity, or the force needed to support it. The pull of gravity on the earth gives an object a downward acceleration of about 9.8 m/s 2. In trade and commerce and ...
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.
[citation needed] The kilogram-force is equal to the magnitude of the force exerted on one kilogram of mass in a 9.806 65 m/s 2 gravitational field (standard gravity, a conventional value approximating the average magnitude of gravity on Earth). [2] That is, it is the weight of a kilogram under standard gravity.
An overview of ranges of mass. To help compare different orders of magnitude, the following lists describe various mass levels between 10 −67 kg and 10 52 kg. The least massive thing listed here is a graviton, and the most massive thing is the observable universe.
To simplify comparisons of density across different systems of units, it is sometimes replaced by the dimensionless quantity "relative density" or "specific gravity", i.e. the ratio of the density of the material to that of a standard material, usually water. Thus a relative density less than one relative to water means that the substance ...
The specific weight, also known as the unit weight (symbol γ, the Greek letter gamma), is a volume-specific quantity defined as the weight W divided by the volume V of a material: = / Equivalently, it may also be formulated as the product of density, ρ, and gravity acceleration, g: = Its unit of measurement in the International System of Units (SI) is newton per cubic metre (N/m 3), with ...
A special type of area density is called column density (also columnar mass density or simply column density), denoted ρ A or σ. It is the mass of substance per unit area integrated along a path; [ 1 ] It is obtained integrating volumetric density ρ {\displaystyle \rho } over a column: [ 2 ] σ = ∫ ρ d s . {\displaystyle \sigma =\int \rho ...