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Newton's law of universal gravitation describes gravity as a force by stating that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers of mass.
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.
It is due to the influence of gravity on the geometry of space and to the contribution of self-energy to a body's gravity (encoded in the nonlinearity of Einstein's equations). [92] Relativistic precession has been observed for all planets that allow for accurate precession measurements (Mercury, Venus, and Earth), [ 93 ] as well as in binary ...
The equivalence between gravitational and inertial effects does not constitute a complete theory of gravity. When it comes to explaining gravity near our own location on the Earth's surface, noting that our reference frame is not in free fall, so that fictitious forces are to be expected, provides a suitable explanation. But a freely falling ...
The idea can be stated in the form that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which the force of gravity no longer continues to increase as the distance between the masses becomes shorter, or alternatively that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance.
If an observer measures a patch of space to be flat, then the strong equivalence principle suggests that it is absolutely equivalent to any other patch of flat space elsewhere in the universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity (including the cosmological constant ) is thought to be the only theory of gravity that satisfies the strong ...
At the time he only considered the time-dilating manifestation of gravity, which is the dominating contribution at non-relativistic speeds; however relativistic objects travel through space a comparable amount as they do though time, so purely spatial curvature becomes just as important.
Formally, c is a conversion factor for changing the unit of time to the unit of space. [4] This makes it the only speed which does not depend either on the motion of an observer or a source of light and / or gravity. Thus, the speed of "light" is also the speed of gravitational waves, and further the speed of any massless particle.