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# Newton's Law of Gravity

Why does the gravitational field on our planet have the particular value it does? For insight, let's compare with the strength of gravity elsewhere in the universe:

A good comparison is Vesta versus a neutron star. They're roughly the same size, but they have vastly different masses --- a teaspoonful of neutron star matter would weigh a million tons! The different mass must be the reason for the vastly different gravitational fields. (The notation 1012 means 1 followed by 12 zeroes.) This makes sense, because gravity is an attraction between things that have mass.

The mass of an object, however, isn't the only thing that determines the strength of its gravitational field, as demonstrated by the difference between the fields of the sun and a neutron star, despite their similar masses. The other variable that matters is distance. Because a neutron star's mass is compressed into such a small space (comparable to the size of a city), a point on its surface is within a fairly short distance from every part of the star. If you visited the surface of the sun, however, you'd be millions of miles away from most of its atoms.

As a less exotic example, if you travel from the seaport of Guayaquil, Ecuador, to the top of nearby Mt. Cotopaxi, you'll experience a slight reduction in gravity, from 9.7806 to 9.7624 J/kg/m. This is because you've gotten a little farther from the planet's mass. Such differences in the strength of gravity between one location and another on the earth's surface were first discovered because pendulum clocks that were correctly calibrated in one country were found to run too fast or too slow when they were shipped to another location.

The general equation for an object's gravitational field was discovered by Isaac Newton, by working backwards from the observed motion of the planets:3

equation

where M is the mass of the object, d is the distance from the object, and G is a constant that is the same everywhere in the universe. This is known as Newton's law of gravity.4 This type of relationship, in which an effect is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the object creating the effect, is known as an inverse square law. For example, the intensity of the light from a candle obeys an inverse square law, as discussed in subsection 7.2.1 on page 142.

self-check:

Mars is about twice as far from the sun as Venus. Compare the strength of the sun's gravitational field as experienced by Mars with the strength of the field felt by Venus.

Newton's law of gravity really gives the field of an individual atom, and the field of a many-atom object is the sum of the fields of the atoms. Newton was able to prove mathematically that this scary sum has an unexpectedly simple result in the case of a spherical object such as a planet: the result is the same as if all the object's mass had been concentrated at its center.

Newton showed that his theory of gravity could explain the orbits of the planets, and also finished the project begun by Galileo of driving a stake through the heart of Aristotelian physics. His book on the motion of material objects, the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, was uncontradicted by experiment for 200 years, but his other main work, Optics, was on the wrong track due to his conviction that light was composed of particles rather than waves. He was an avid alchemist, an embarrassing fact that modern scientists would like to forget. Newton was on the winning side of the revolution that replaced King James II with William and Mary of Orange, which led to a lucrative post running the English royal mint; he worked hard at what could have been a sinecure, and took great satisfaction from catching and executing counterfeiters.

x / Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

##### Example 12: Newton's apple

A charming legend attested to by Newton's niece is that he first conceived of gravity as a universal attraction after seeing an apple fall from a tree. He wondered whether the force that made the apple fall was the same one that made the moon circle the earth rather than flying off straight. Newton had astronomical data that allowed him to calculate that the gravitational field the moon experienced from the earth was 1/3600 as strong as the field on the surface of the earth.2 (The moon has its own gravitational field, but that's not what we're talking about.) The moon's distance from the earth is 60 times greater than the earth's radius, so this fit perfectly with an inverse-square law: 60×60=3600.

y / Example 12.