According to law of gravitation, we attract each other, if 2 objects of 10 lakh kgs each are kept at a distance of 1 m, will they attract each other?
Answers
Newton's equation first appeared in the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, July 1687. It describes why that apple fell from that tree in that orchard in Lincolnshire. Whether or not that apple actually landed on Isaac Newton's head, as some stories would have it, this equation describes why you stay rooted to the ground, what locks the Earth in orbit around the sun and was used by Nasa engineers to send men to the moon.
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It encapsulates the idea that all the particles of matter in the universe attract each other through the force of gravity – Newton's law tells us how strong that attraction is. The equation says that the force (F) between two objects is proportional to the product of their masses (m1 and m2), divided by the square of the distance between them. The remaining term in the equation, G, is the gravitational constant, which has to be measured by experiment and, as of 2007, US scientists have measured it at 6.693 × 10−11 cubic metres per kilogram second squared.
Newton came to the formula after studying the centuries of measurements from astronomers before him. Stargazers had spent millennia cataloguing the positions of the stars and planets in the night sky and, by the 17th century, the German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler had worked out the geometry of these movements. By looking at the movement of Mars, Kepler had calculated that planets orbited the sun in elliptical paths and, in a kind of celestial clockwork, his three laws of planetary motion allowed astronomers to work out the position of the planets in the future based on data from past records.
Kepler's laws explain how the planets moved around the sun but not why. Newton filled in that gap by supposing there was a force acting between the bodies that were moving around each other.
The story goes that Newton saw an apple fall to the ground and it made him wonder why the fruit always fell straight to the ground; why did it not veer off to the left or right? According to his own laws of motion, anything that begins moving from a standing start is undergoing acceleration and, where there is acceleration, there must be a force. The apple started in the tree and landed on the Earth, which means there must be a force of attraction between the apple and the Earth.