gravity

Hi What is the relationship between superconductors and gravity? Eugene podkletnov came up with some interesting findings. The first experiment centered on a spinning superconducting disk and the possibility of slight weight reduction above it .

Earth’s gravitational force, g, has been known for centuries. But the exact value of G, the universal gravitational constant, is elusive

Nature, Published online: 21 April 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-01284-3 Physicists have spent the past decade trying to pin down the elusive fundamental constant, to no avail.

The present work develops a variational account of gravitational phenomena based on a closed quartic functional framework. Starting from a universal functional and its stationary condition, the admissible configuration space is constructed explicitly, together with the associated Hessian operator and its spectral structure. Within this framework, long-range interaction is not introduced as a fund…

Gravity is weaker than other fundamental forces because it spreads across extra dimensions and interacts universally with all mass-energy, diluting its strength. Unlike electromagnetism or nuclear forces, which act locally and strongly, gravity’s influence is cumulative but diffuse. Physicists suspect hidden dimensions or quantum effects may explain this imbalance, making gravity’s weakness one o…

Gravity is one of the great questions that classical science, based on the primacy of matter, has failed to resolve despite decades of countless efforts, just as it has failed to resolve the Three-Body Problem. This essay addresses how the impossibility of finding a general solution to these two key mysteries of Cosmology and Physics allows us, from the coherent framework of Informational Metaphy…

After a 10-year effort, physicists got a value for “Big G” that does not settle the debate over one of nature’s hardest numbers to nail down.

_Zenodo_. 2026This paper reclassifies the quantum gravity problem by exposing a directional error embedded in its very formulation. The phrase "quantum gravity" presupposes that gravity—like the other fundamental forces—should be quantized as an internal interaction. We demonstrate that this assumption conflates two operationally distinct roles: constraint (Type II) and generation (Type I). Gravi…

I have a conceptual question about surface gravity for non-spherical bodies. This is partly motivated by curiosity and science fiction, but I'm interested in the actual Newtonian physics. Consider a ...

Einstein taught us that gravity is not a force. But in a recently published paper, researchers claim that we might have had it wrong this whole time, arguing that gravity is a force after all. They say that when treated correctly as a force, gravity can more easily be made into a quantum theory. I’ve had a look.

It depends entirely on what you mean by knowledge. This figure (Credit:NASA/Conceptual Image Lab) shows magnetic field lines and the graded decrease of Earth’s gravity in an artistic rendition. We know how both of these work in considerable detail. Our theories for gravity and magnetism allow us to describe the essential physics of systems from … Continue reading Do we really know how gravity and…

Just over a week ago, European physicists announced they had measured the strength of gravity on the smallest scale ever. In a clever tabletop experiment, researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of Southampton in the UK, and the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies in Italy measured a force of around 30 attonewtons on a particle with just under half a milligram…

Gravity is a natural phenomenon by which all things with mass or energy are attracted to each other. Here are some important things you need to know about gravity. What is Gravity? Everything Thing You Need To Know About Gravity We all know the fact that Gravity is responsible for why objects attract to each other, why we stick to the surface of the earth and why planets orbit around the sun. The…

In a previous series of articles, I posed the question “Does Gravity Gravitate?” and explained how, depending on how you interpreted the terms “gravity” and “gravitate”, one could answer the question, either way, yes or no. This article will similarly treat its title question. :-) To be sure, this case is a bit simpler than...

I started reading James Joyce's Ulysses yesterday, on the flight home from the COMEX6 conference.  I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, excepting one of the best novels of all time, but I was was a little surprised to find some musing on that difficulty in basic physics of understanding of weight as a force: What is weight really when say the weight?  Thirtytwo feet per second, per second.  L…

A new experiment using neutron scattering off noble gasses has shown no deviation from Newton's gravitational law at 0.1 nm scale. The team fired pulses of neutrons at a chamber filled with either helium or xenon gas and monitored both the travel time of the neutrons through the gas and the neutrons’ scattering angles. From these measurements, they reconstructed the scattering process with the…

Abu al-Fath Abd al-Rahman Mansour al-Khāzini or al-Khāzini defined gravity as a universal force directed towards the center of the Earth. Two pages from Book of the Balance of Wisdom Al- Khāzini originally a Greek slave who flourished in Merv at the beginning of the 6th/7th century and who continued the study of mechanics and hydrostatics in the tradition of al-Biruni and the earlier scientists. …

Yes, it is pouring with rain outside, but inside... another pouring situation is taking shape as part of my Sunday activity. It's a discussion about gravity. But not in the way you think. -cvj (For those interested, the hands and head were done on paper with pencil... then I connected them roughly digitally, which you see in progress...) Click to continue reading this post → The post Pouring… ap…

The title question of this article is one that often comes up in PF threads, and I would like to give my take on it. This will be the first of several posts on this subject. Short answer: mu. (The terms of the question are not well-defined, so it doesn’t have a well-defined answer.)...

The universal law of gravitation was discovered by Newton in the seventeenth century. Before Newton’s discovery, no one knew of the existence of such law. The year was 1665; the month was August. Newton, then a 23 year old Cambridge University student retired to the solitude of his family’s farm. The university was closed for two years because of the Greta Plaque. There is a story that Isaac Newt…