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"The Newtonian scheme says that the planet tends to move in a straight line, but the suns gravity pulls it away. Einstein says that the planet tends to take the shortest route and does take it."
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Gravity"The truth is, my notions about things of this kind are so indigested, that I am not well satisfied myself in them; and what I am not satisfied in, I can scarce esteem to fit to be communicated to others; especially in natural philosophy, where there is no end of fancying. But because I am indebted to you... I could not forbear to take the opportunity of conveying this to you... I shall set down one conjecture more... it is about the cause of gravity. For this end I will suppose aether to consist of parts differing from one another in subtilty by indefinite degrees; that in the pores of bodies there is less of the grosser aether, in proportion to the finer, than in open spaces; and consequently, that in the great body of the earth there is much less of the grosser aether, in proportion to the finer, than in the regions of the air; and that yet the grosser aether in the air affects the upper regions of the earth, and the finer aether in the earth the lower regions of the air, in such a manner, that from the top of the air to the surface of the earth, and again from the surface of the earth to the centre thereof, the aether is insensibly finer and finer. Imagine now any body suspended in the air, or lying on the earth, and the aether being by the hypothesis grosser in the pores, which are in the upper parts of the body, than in those which are in its lower parts, and that grosser aether being less apt to be lodged in those pores than the finer aether below, it will endeavour to get out and give way to the finer aether below, which cannot be, without the bodies descending to make room above for it to go out into."
In physics, gravity, also known as gravitation or a gravitational interaction, is a fundamental interaction, which may be described as the force that draws material objects towards each other.
"The Newtonian scheme says that the planet tends to move in a straight line, but the suns gravity pulls it away. Einstein says that the planet tends to take the shortest route and does take it."
"Newtonian action at a distance is spoken of as "immediate action." Newton, on the other hand, postulates an agent and gives it time to act. To be sure, in his calculations of gravitational attractions, he assumes, as a necessary approximation (having no experimental data on the speed of propagation of gravitational action), that the action is instantaneous, but not so in his talks on gravity. In a letter to Boyle he considers the cause of gravitation between two approaching bodies. They "make the ether between them begin to rarify"; and again, in his hypothesis on light, he says, "So may the gravitating attraction of the earth be caused by the continual condensation of some other such like ethereal spirit... in such a way... as to cause it [this spirit] from above to descend with great celerity for a supply; in which descent it may bear down with it the bodies it pervades, with force proportional to the superficies of all their parts it acts upon."
"For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a “precision” measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer."
"Einsteins law of gravitation controls a geometrical quantity curvature in contrast to Newtons law which controls a mechanical quantity of force."
"Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming."
"Cotess Preface [to the 2nd edition of Principia] is of historical importance... It is interpreted as advocating the theory of "action at a distance", and the theory that gravity is an innate property of matter. Phrases in Newtons Principia appear to carry a similar implication. ...In these expressions, the "bodies" or the "corpuscles" are represented as active, as "attracting." They are not passive like a chip of wood carried about by a eddy in a pool, or like a planet passively swept through space by a Cartesian vortex. It was easy, therefore, to jump to an inference that in the Newtonian theory, gravity was an innate, inherent property of matter. ...such an interpretation was made by writers on the European continent, for example by Huygens, Lalande, [Jean Baptiste] Bordas-Demoulin, and others. Thus, after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Huygens... abandoned the explanation of the planetary motion by Descartes theory of vortices, and published his adherence to Newtons celestial mechanics. But Huygens did not accept the view that gravitation was an innate property of matter, a view which he attributed to Newtonian philosophy. On this point Huygens rejected what interpreted to be the tenet of Newton, and continued his adhesion to the tenet of Descartes. While the reader of the first edition of Principia had some justification in attributing to Newton the view that gravity was an innate property of matter, they were nevertheless mistaken. In the first edition Newton had made no explicit declaration on this point. ...Newton was no more a believer in gravity as an innate property of bodies than was Descartes. But the readers of the first edition of Principia had no means of knowing this."