Laws and Constants
According to the law of universal gravitation, the attractive force (F) between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses (m1 and m2), and inversely proportional to the square of the distance, r, (inverse-square law) between them:
The constant of proportionality, G, is the gravitational constant.
The gravitational constant is a physical constant that is difficult to measure with high accuracy. In SI units, the 2010 CODATA-recommended value of the gravitational constant (with standard uncertainty in parentheses) is:
with relative standard uncertainty 1.2×10−4.
Read more about this topic: Gravitational Constant
Famous quotes containing the words laws and and/or laws:
“The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms ... you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
“It is dangerous to tell the people that the laws are unjust; for they obey them only because they think them just. Therefore it is necessary to tell them at the same time that they must obey them because they are laws, just as they must obey superiors, not because they are just, but because they are superiors. In this way all sedition is prevented.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)