Gravity: One of the four fundamental forces

Gravity is a non-contact force (a force that can be exerted on a body without touching it), one of four
fundamental non-contact forces we know of. They are

the gravitational force (gravity)

the electromagnetic force (the force between charged particles or poles of magnets)
the weak nuclear force
the strong nuclear force

The latter two are active only at distances as small as those present between protons and neutrons in
the nuclei of atoms. Sometimes a non-contact force is called "force at a distance."
Unlike the other three forces, gravity is a purely attractive force. If we bring a negative and a positive
charge together, the electrostatic force is attractive (brings them together). But if we bring two positive
charges or two negative charges together, they repel one another (opposites attract, likes repel).
There is no such repulsive component to the gravitational force; you never see someone walking
down the street suddenly get ejected from the planet by gravity.
Isaac Newton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton) and others determined, mostly from
astronomical data — observations of the motions of planets in the sky — that the gravitational
attraction is a property of mass, that it is proportional to the product of the two masses involved, and
that it is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers of mass. Here is
the definition:

This diagram shows the picture that the law of gravitation describes:

The Universal Law of Gravitation

The Universal Law of Gravitation says that the force, F, between two objects of mass m 1 and m2 is directly
proportional to the product of the masses
and inversely proportional to the square of the distance, r, between them. The proportionality
-11 2 -2
constant (which just gets the units right) is G = 6.674 x 10 N·m Kg .
Dependence of gravitational force on mass and distance
The graph below shows how the force of gravity (F g) varies as one of the masses is increased from
zero and the other is held constant. Fg is directly and linearly proportional to each mass — thus the
linear graph.

We generally think of gravity in terms of one variable mass and one fixed mass, like a planet. The
force of gravity is greater on a more massive person than a less massive person, therefore the more
massive person weighs more — weight, unlike mass, is a measure of force.
The gravitational force on the moon is 1/6 that on Earth because the mass of the moon is about 1/6 the
mass of Earth.

The universal law of gravitation is called an inverse-square law because the force is inversely
proportional to the square of the distance between two masses.

We will see another inverse square law when we study the electrostatic force.
The important thing about this feature of gravity is that if we double the distance between objects,
2
the force of gravity is reduced by a factor of four (2 ), not two. The graph shows that when r, the
distance between masses, is small, the gravitational force is high, but as r is increased, the force
drops non-linearly. The graph of force vs. the separation distance is quadratic: