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Gravity

The weight of expectation

Nature volume 421, pages 899–900 (2003)Cite this article

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. And we have recently passed the two-century mark since Henry Cavendish made his first measurement1 of the gravitational constant, G, which sets the fundamental strength of the interaction.

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Figure 1: Gravity, past and present.

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  1. the Department of Physics, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, Povo (TN), 38050, Italy

    C. D. Hoyle

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  1. C. D. Hoyle
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Correspondence to C. D. Hoyle.

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Hoyle, C. The weight of expectation. Nature 421, 899–900 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/421899a

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