Universal Gravitation Menu Project

By stephanie.graham19

  • Tycho Brahe

    Employed Johannes Kepler to work on the problem of the orbit of Mars. He observed the motions of the planets which lead to Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.

  • Johannes Kepler

    Kepler’s laws of planetary motion:
    1. Elliptical oribits around the Sun
    2. The line joining the sun to a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times
    3. The square of the period T of the planet about the sun is proportional to the cube of the length of its semi-major axis r

  • Edmund Halley

    Visited Newton who asked about the trajectory of a body under the influence of inverse-square law forces directed towards a given centre. Helped Newton relate Kepler’s laws to centripetal forces.

  • Isaac Newton

    Law of universal gravitation (attraction is proportional to their masses)

  • John Michell

    Created the torsion balance that is used to accurately measure the force of attraction between two masses (used by Cavendish)

  • Henry Cavendish

    Calculated big G in order to determine Earth’s mass. He suspended dumbbells on a wire, with lead spheres at different distances nearby, then measured how much the dumbbells rotated in response to the attractive pull of gravity from the neighboring dumbbell.