### Gravity

Let's start with Newton's Law that force is proportional to acceleration:

force = mass * accel in N

When I'm standing on earth, it is constantly accelerating me so that I stay glued

to the ground. That acceleration is called **standard gravity**.

std g = 9.80665 m/s^2

Now some personal info:

weight = 165 lbs

With that out of the way, we can measure the force that the earth exerts on me:

earth force = force(weight, std g)

=> 733.95657 kg*m/s^2

That was fun! We now know that the earth exerts `734 N` of force on me. All the
time. But we love her anyway.

Change the values in blue above to find out how much she exerts on you!

#### Newton's Universal Gravitation

Previously, we used the fact that the earth constantly accelerates us at the rate
`std g` to keep us on the ground.

But where did this number come from? We can use Newton's Law of Universal
Gravitation to calculate it. Here's that law:

force of gravity = G*(mass * other mass)/dist^2 in N

It states that the force due to gravity is proportional to the masses of two
objects and *inversely* proportional to the squared distance between them.

The constant of proportionality is `G` - a very different number from the `g` we
knew before. It is:

G = 6.67384e-11 m^3/kg/s^2 #gravitational constant

Let's now use the law to calculate that value of `g = 9.8m/s^2` from above. We'll
do it by using the mass of the earth and the ma

mass of earth = 5.972e24 kg #googled

radius of earth = 6,378,100 m #googled

earth gravity = force of gravity(

mass = mass,
other mass = mass of earth,
dist = radius of earth)
=> 9.79745 m*mass/s^2 in N

And there it is! Well it's not quite `9.81m/s` but that's just because our input
numbers for earth's mass and radius weren't exactly what is used to calculate
standard gravity, but it's darn close!
How close is it? Well let's give it our mass and see how close to `734 N` it gets:

earth gravity(mass = weight in kg)

=> 733.26782 kg*m/s^2

So close! It calculated `733 N`.

Why not try changing the numbers to see how much gravity would affect you if you
lived on mars?

Or we can just plot the various weights:

plot(earth gravity(mass=mass), 0..200kg)

We can see that the slope of that plot is our standard gravity of `9.8m/s^2`.