Newton’s Laws of Motion

“If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on

the shoulders of giants.”
-Sir Isaac Newton
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
 Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
In 1666, some 45 years after Kepler did his work, 24-year-
old Isaac Newton used mathematics to show that if the path
of a planet were an ellipse, then the magnitude of the force,
F, on the planet must vary inversely with the square of the
distance between the center of the planet and the center of
the sun.

Newton wrote that the sight of a falling apple made him

think about the problem of the motion of the planets.

He recognized that the apple fell straight down because

Earth attracted it.
Newton was so confident that the laws governing motion
on Earth would work anywhere in the universe that he
assumed that the same force of attraction would act
between any two masses, mA and mB.
 Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation

• Any two objects attract each other with a gravitational

force, proportional to the product of their masses and
inversely proportional to the square of the distance
between them.

• The force acts in the direction of the line connecting

the centers of the masses.
Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation
 Henry Cavendish’s
experiment determined
the proportionality
constant G in 1798.
 The Value of G

G = 6.67 x 10-11 N m2 / kg2

Example #1

Two spheres of mass 35 kg are 60 m apart.

a. What force does one exert on the other?

b. What is the force if the mass of one is tripled

and the radius is quadrupled?
Example #2

Two spheres of equal mass have a force of

gravity of 7x10-9 N exerted on each other. If the
distance between them is 7 m, find the mass.
Example #3

Suppose that you have a mass of 70 kg. How

much mass must another object have in order for
your body and the other object to attract each
other with a force of 1 Newton when separated by
10 meters?