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Before Newton’s law of gravity, there were many theories explaining gravity. Philoshophers made observations about things falling down − and developed theories why they do – as early as Aristotle who thought that rocks fall to the ground because seeking the ground was an essential part of their nature.
Gravitation, also known as gravitational attraction, is the mutual attraction between all masses in the universe.Gravity is the gravitational attraction at the surface of a planet or other celestial body; [6] gravity may also include, in addition to gravitation, the centrifugal force resulting from the planet's rotation (see § Earth's gravity).
It is also known as the universal gravitational constant, the Newtonian constant of gravitation, or the Cavendish gravitational constant, [a] denoted by the capital letter G. In Newton's law, it is the proportionality constant connecting the gravitational force between two bodies with the product of their masses and the inverse square of their ...
Isaac Newton's law of Universal Gravitation (1687) was a good approximation of the behaviour of gravitation. Present-day understanding of gravitation stems from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity of 1915, a more accurate (especially for cosmological masses and distances) description of gravitation in terms of the geometry of spacetime.
Scientific laws or laws of science are statements, based on repeated experiments or observations, that describe or predict a range of natural phenomena. [1] The term law has diverse usage in many cases (approximate, accurate, broad, or narrow) across all fields of natural science ( physics , chemistry , astronomy , geoscience , biology ).
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. The magnitude of the field at every point is calculated by applying the universal ...
Many of these advances continue to be the underpinnings of non-relativistic technologies in the modern world. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the effect that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation. [104] He further solved the two-body problem, and introduced the three-body problem. [17]
General relativity generalizes special relativity and refines Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or four-dimensional spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever is present matter and ...