“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?
Development of Gravity Pendulums in the 19th Century
Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, Papers 34-44 On Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, 1966