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Measuring Gravity in Your Basement

Posted by michael on from the 9.8-m/s^2 dept.

Jack Durian writes "John Walker, the founder of Autodesk/co-author of AutoCAD has some fun playing pretend experimentalist, measuring gravity in his basement."

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. How the current Big G was measured at Los Alamos by Dave21212 · · Score: 2, Informative



    You want to see what Gabe Luther and and William Towler,current "holders" of Big G, used to measure it ? Here's a great shot of the torsion balance device from this short summary .

    Here's a link to the press room at LANL Look for "17) Measuring the Gravitational Constant ("Big G") -- In the Lab of Gabe Luther, Los Alamos scientist. Sound bite on methodology." - no link but an interesting page of resources.

    --
    "Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
  2. Re:Nice experiment - but .... by EvanED · · Score: 2, Informative

    The reason he used dynes and stuff (part of the cgs - centemeter, gram, second - system) and not the SI (formerly the mks - meters, kilograms, seconds) system is that most of his measurements would have been different by many orders of magnitude. Who wants to see something with a force of 0.0000001 newtons (kg*m/sec/sec) when you could see 0.01 dynes (gm*cm/sec/sec)?