WebQuest
GRAVITY
Introduction
Have you ever wondered why things fall to the ground? What keeps everything on earth? A young man in the 17th century was walking down a street and saw an apple fall from a tree. And then he saw the moon. He asked the question, "if apple falls, does the moon fall as well?". And the answer is yes. It is gravity that causes the apple and moon to fall. The young man who discovered and named this phenomenon is Isaac Newton.
Modern work on gravitational theory began with the work of Galileo Galilei in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In his famous experiment dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa, and later with careful measurements of balls rolling down inclines, Galileo showed that gravitational acceleration is the same for all objects. This was a major departure from Aristotle's belief that heavier objects have a higher gravitational acceleration. Galileo postulated air resistance as the reason that objects with less mass may fall slower in an atmosphere. Galileo's work set the stage for the formulation of Newton's theory of gravity.
Newton's law of universal gravitation states that a particle attracts every other particle in the universe using a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. ALL objects attract each other with a force of gravitational attraction. Gravity is universal. This force of gravitational attraction is directly dependent upon the masses of both objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance which separates their centers.
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