The force of gravity: essence and practical significance

Absolutely all material bodies, both directly on the Earth, and existing in the Universe, are constantly attracted to each other. The fact that this interaction can not always be seen or felt, says only that the attraction is in these specific cases relatively weak.

The interaction between material bodies, which consists in their constant striving towards each other, according to the basic physical terms, is called gravitational, while the phenomenon of attraction itself is called gravitation.

The phenomenon of gravitation is possible because there is a gravitational field around absolutely any material body (including around the person). This field is a special kind of matter, from the action of which nothing can be defended and with which one body acts on the other, causing acceleration to the center of the source of this field. It was the gravitational field that was the basis of the law of universal gravitation formulated in 1682 by the English naturalist and philosopher I. Newton .

The main concept of this law is the gravitational force, which, as indicated above, is nothing more than the result of the gravitational field acting on a particular material body. The law of universal gravitation consists in the fact that the force with which the mutual attraction of bodies occurs both on Earth and in outer space, directly depends on the product of the mass of these bodies and is inversely related to the distance separating objects.

Thus, the force of gravitation, the definition of which was given by Newton himself, depends only on two main factors - the masses of interacting bodies and the distance between them.

Confirmation that this phenomenon depends on the mass of matter can be found by studying the interaction of the Earth with the surrounding bodies. Soon after Newton, another well-known scientist, Galileo, convincingly showed that, with free fall, our planet sets all bodies exactly the same acceleration. Perhaps this is only if the force of gravity of the body to the Earth directly depends on the mass of this body. Indeed, in this case, when the mass is increased several times, the force of the acting gravitation will also increase exactly as much, and the acceleration will remain unchanged at the same time.

If we continue this idea and consider the interaction of any two bodies on the surface of the "blue planet", then we can conclude that each of them from the side of our "Mother Earth" is the same force. Moreover, relying on the famous law formulated by the same Newton, it can be confidently said that the magnitude of this force will directly depend on the mass of the body, therefore the gravitational force between these bodies is directly dependent on the product of their masses.

To prove that the force of universal gravitation depends on the size of the gap between the bodies, Newton had to draw the moon as an "ally". It has long been established that the acceleration with which the bodies fall to the Earth is approximately 9.8 m / s ^ 2, but the centripetal acceleration of the Moon in relation to our planet as a result of a number of experiments turned out to be only 0.0027 m / 2.

Thus, the force of gravity is the most important physical quantity that explains many processes occurring both on our planet and in the surrounding space.