Everything in human experience, and really human history or human civilizations experience, is that everything
seems to fall to the earth, that if you have water particles, they don't just float up.
If they are small enough they are being held up by the wind and all that, but if they are large enough, they will fall.
That you don't have people that are able to just float around, they will fall.
You don't have taxi cabs that float around, they'll fall.
Not only will the water fall, it will hit the ground, it will puddle up, and if there is a gutter it
will fall into the gutter. It is just trying to get lower and lower and lower.
If i were to drop a bunch of needles they would just fall. They don't... If i had a needle at rest here
it doesn't just automatically for no reason jump and fly upwards and start to float.
And so it is just a thing that is fundamental to everything that we have ever
ever experienced.
And so, for most of human history or human civilization, we just accepted it as a given.
We thought, "well look it's just obvious, everything should just fall down, that's just the way the universe is.
To think otherwise would just be crazy." And that's why this guy, this guy right over here, is one of the greatest geniuses
of all time. He did many more things than just the things I am going to describe in this video,
and any one of those things would have earned him his place in history.
And this, as you may already know, is Isaac Newton.
Easily one of the top five minds in all of human history. So a pretty fascinating dude.
And one of his big insights about this 'things falling down' problem is:
Do they have to fall down?
Is this just something we should assume about the universe?
Things just need to fall down, he said, or we were told he said that he was somewhat inspired by
observing an apple falling from a tree. It's probably not true that you'll see in some cartoons
on television that the apple hit his head or hit his head while he was sleeping and gave him the idea.
Most people were to see... Let me draw a tree here.
That's a twig right there, some leaves. So if most people... So that is an apple over here.
So if most people... If i were to snap this twig over here, the apple would fall. Pretty much common sense. The apple would fall.
And if most people were to see that, they would just think it's a normal happening in the universe. But for Isaac Newton, at least on that day,
he asked himself, "Why? Why did that apple fall?"
And this, to some degree, is a great example of "out of the box" thinking, because something
for thousands of years or tens of thousands of years human beings had taken for granted, just
because that's the way it always was. He actually asked the question why?
Does it always have to be that way?
And that question took him down a entire line of reasoning that set up the basis for all of
classical mechanics for the most part we still use today.
It has been tweaked a good bit by this gentleman in the last hundred years. [Albert Einstein]
But for most purposes, when we're engineering things on the surface of the planet,
and we are not going close to the speed of light, we can still use the mathematics that Isaac Newton came up with from this simple question.
And not only was he able to kind of think that there's something...
There's something that might be pulling, somehow,
acting on this apple, bringing it to the earth.
But he actually formulated an entire, an entire.. I guess
Law around this thing. So, as you can imagine,
the thing that Isaac Newton believes brought the apple to the Earth
is gravity... is gravity.
And he formulated the universal Law of gravitation, or the law of universal gravitation; either way.
And in it, he theorizes that the forces between objects
now it's a vector quantity, it's always going to attract the two objects to each other.
So the direction is towards each other. The force of gravity between two objects...
is going to be equal to this this big G, which is really just a number, its a very small number.
I'll give you that number in a second. It's equal to this constant, this gravitation constant.
Which is a super-duper small number, times the mass of the first object, times the mass of the second
object, divided by the distance between the two objects. Distance squared.
So this is distance between two objects.
So if you're talking about the force of gravity on Earth, this right over here...
You pick one of the masses to be Earth, so this mass over here. You pick one to be Earth.
This is the object on Earth. Maybe it's me. Then this is the distance between the center
of masses between those two objects. The center of me and center of the Earth.
So really it's from roughly the distance from the surface of the Earth or if I'm roughly
five foot-nine [inches tall] then about half of that distance to the center of the Earth
is this number right over here. So right when you see this, before we even talk about me and Earth,
or needles and Earth, or taxi cabs and Earth and that force of gravity, you might have something
bizarre raising up in your brain. You might be saying, "the way gravity is defined
by Isaac Newton, this formula we're given right here, it's saying we have gravity between
any two objects" and you're saying, "Look, I'm looking at a computer screen right now,
so you're looking at a computer screen right now..." And let me draw an old school computer,
not a flat panel. How come your not attracted to the computer screen?
How come it doesn't fly into your face? And the answer there is, this number, this number is
really small. And there actually is some force of attraction between you and the computer.
It's just that it's more than overcompensated for the friction between the computer and the desk,
the friction between you and your seat, which is frankly being caused by the force
between you and the Earth, the force of gravitation between the computer and the Earth.
That you and the computer have such small masses that you really can't notice it. It's really negligible.
It's being overpowered by other forces that are keeping the computer from even drifting
into your face or your face drifting into the computer. So just to get a sense of that...
This G, this big G,
this constant of proportionality, just to get a sense of how small it is... This is, and I'm going to round
it here, it's approximately 6.67 times 10 to the negative 11th Newtons.
And we'll talk about Newtons, it is the metric unit of force.
Let me actually make sure I say this correctly. Newton meters per kilogram squared. Newton times meter per kilogram, squared.
It's this strange set of units here, but the units are really there. So when you multiply by two masses,
which are in kilograms, and divide by a distance, which is in meters, you'll end up with Newtons.
But I want to make it clear that this is a super small number.
Ten to the negative 11th. If I were to just write 10 to the negative 11th, it would be 0.0 and
then we would have eleven 0's. So this number right here is the same as 6.67 times
this thing over here. So this is a super small number. And that is why if you multipy it by not so
large numbers, if you don't use Earth, if you use yourself and a computer,
you're going to end up still with a super duper small force. Something so small that you won't
notice it. It is going to be overpowered by other forces, so these things don't fly into each other.
But when you think about really massive bodies, like the Earth, the force of gravity
starts to become noticeable, very noticeable. And I'm not going to give you the mass of Earth in this
video, you can look it up yourself. But if you put in the mass of Earth right over here,
if you put it in right over there, and if you put in roughly the distance from the surface
of the Earth to the center of the Earth for R, and you multiply that by G. All of these terms over here...
So this term, if you multiply that times that term and multiply by this term squared,
they simplify to what is sometimes called little g. Little g. So this right here, we can view that
as the gravitational field at the surface of Earth. It's also the same thing as the acceleration
of gravity at the surface of the Earth, and this, and once again I'm just going to round it
for the sake... This is... This comes out to be, units wise, 9.8 meters per second squared.
Then you're left with just the other mass. So times M1. So for simplicity, if something
is close to the surface of the Earth, the distance does matter. We can say that the force of
gravity can be this "little g" times whatever the mass is close to Earth. For example,
if you were to take me, and I weighed 70 kilograms... So, in the case of Sal, Sal has a...Actually I
shouldn't say weight, I have a mass of 70 kilograms. I have a mass of 70 kilograms.
Weight is actually a force, but we'll talk about that, clarify that more later.
My mass is 70 kilograms, then we can figure out the force that the Earth is pulling down on me
which is actually my weight. So in this situation, the force is going to be g, which is 9.8 meters
per second squared, times my mass, which is 70 kilograms. And let me get my handy T85 calculator
out to figure this out. So I get 9.8 times 70. That gives me...686. So this is equal to 686
kilogram meters per second squared. OR this is the exact same thing as this thing right over here.
This IS the definition of a Newton. So this is a newton, which is appropriately named for
the guy that is the Father of All Classical Physics.
So my weight on Earth, which is the same thing as the force that Earth is pulling down on me,
or that the gravitational attraction between the Earth and me is 686 newtons. Now I will ask you
an interesting question.
So here is Earth,
and I am not even a speck of a speck on Earth, but say for simplicity let's say
this is me, I'm hanging out in the Indian Ocean some place. So that is me.
And we already know that Earth is pulling down on me with a force of 686 newtons.
Now my question to you is, "Am I pulling on the Earth with any force? And am I pulling on the Earth with
a larger or small force that is pulling on me?"
And your gut or your knee-jerk reaction might be: Earth is so huge, Sal is so tiny.
Clearly the Earth must be pulling with a greater force than Sal is pulling on the Earth.
Unfortunately that is NOT the case.
That I am. So the Earth is pulling on Sal with the force of 686 Newtons and Sal is also pulling on the
Earth with a force of 686 Newtons. So Sal is also pulling on the Earth. It makes me feel very powerful
with the force of 686 Newtons. But you might say, "Wait, that doesn't make sense, Sal."
If I have a building over here, and if you were to, let's say, jump from the building, you're going to start...
The force of gravity is going to be acting on you, and you're going to start accelerating downwards.
It doesn't seem that the Earth is accelerating up to you. Wouldn't we notice that, every time someone
were to jump off a building, that the Earth starting accelerating in a major way. And the way to think
about that is that the force is the SAME. And we'll talk about that in other videos.
Force is equal to mass times acceleration. So when we are talking about 686 Newtons, in terms of
the force of Earth, the gravitational attraction between myself and Earth. And this is going to be
68 kilograms, then this provides a pretty good acceleration on me. So in this case, if you
solve for A... Solve for A over here. You're going to get 9.8 meters per second squared. Now, if you
do the same thing for Earth... I already told you that we are pulling on each other with the same
force, 686 Newtons. Now if you want to find out how much is the Earth accelerating... That force
you're going to get a... I'm not even going to put it here. You're going to put a huge number
in here. Huge number times the acceleration of Earth towards me. And since this is such a huge number,
very very very large number, this is going to be an immeasurably small number, super small number.
And frankly it's probably averaged out by the acceleration of Earth, or the force of gravity
and all the other people and things on the surface of the planet. So it all averages out in the end.
But even if it didn't, it would be negligible, you wouldn't even notice the acceleration of Earth
towards me. But you would notice the acceleration of me towards Earth because of our vastly
different masses. Even though we have the same force of attraction.