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Re- noodling Newton: Gravity may not be a single fo
Renoodling Newton. (gravity may not be a single force)
The experiment had all the simplicity of watching an apple fall to the
ground, but it produced results that would have shocked Isaac Newton:
Lowering a sensitive gravity-measuring device thousands of feet through a
hole in Greenland's ice sheet, scientists found strong evidence that
Newton's centuries-old theory of gravity may be flawed.
The experimental results, announced last week by physicist Mark Ander of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, suggest that gravity is not a single force
as Newton believed, but several forces acting together. Ander and his
colleagues took readings as the gravity meter passed more than a mile
through the ice toward the much denser rock below. They found that the
gravitational pull on the probe increased at a rate slightly faster than
Newton's law predicts, indicating that another force was pulling on the
probe at the same time. Ander estimates that this additional force is about
one fiftieth as strong as gravity and has a range of only a few thousand
feet.
If such a force indeed exists, physicists will have to reconsider their
theoretical models of how various particles of matter interacted during the
birth of the universe. Several other studies have documented similar traces
of a new force, and other research indicates that a repelling gravitational
force may exist as well, but the evidence remains inconclusive. "We are
like blind men investigating an elephant," explains Andrew Lazarewicz, a
geophysicist at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. "We think we have
something, but we don't exactly know what it is yet."
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