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Nature 421, 899-900 (27 February 2003) | doi:10.1038/421899a

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Gravity: The weight of expectation

C. D. Hoyle

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Newton devised his universal law of gravitation for planets, but does it work at small scales? A search for a deviation from the expected behaviour could provide the first evidence in support of string theory.

Gravity, one may think, is a rather well understood subject. It has been more than 300 years since Isaac Newton determined that the magnitude of the gravitational force, F, between two bodies of masses M and m (separated by astronomical distances) depends on the inverse-square of the distance, r, between them: F = GMm/r2.