Sir Isaac Newton -- The Discoverer of Gravity! Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and mathematician and physicist who lived from 1642-1727. The legend is that Newton discovered Gravity when he saw a falling apple while thinking about the forces of nature.
Newton's law of universal gravitation states that every mass attracts every other mass in the universe, and the gravitational force between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
Gravity is a very important force. Every object in space exerts a gravitational pull on every other, and so gravity influences the paths taken by everything traveling through space. It is the glue that holds together entire galaxies. It keeps planets in orbit.
And some scientists think that it is made up of particles called gravitons which travel at the speed of light. ... Gravity is a force of attraction that exists between any two masses, any two bodies, any two particles. Gravity is not just the attraction between objects and the Earth.
It was learned in the previous part of this lesson that a free-falling object is an object that is falling under the sole influence of gravity. A free-falling object has an acceleration of 9.8 m/s/s, downward (on Earth). ... The numerical value for the acceleration of gravity is most accurately known as 9.8 m/s/s.
Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915) which describes gravity not as a force, but as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass.
The same equation used to determine the value of g on Earth' surface can also be used to determine the acceleration of gravity on the surface of other planets. The value of g on any other planet can be calculated from the mass of the planet and the radius of the planet.
The gravity of Earth, which is denoted by g, refers to the acceleration that is imparted to objects due to the distribution of mass within the Earth. In SI units this acceleration is measured in metres per second squared (in symbols, m/s2 or m. s−2) or equivalently in newtons per kilogram (N/kg or N.