Gadgets: Testing the Theory of Gravity Itself
Anyone who's taken a high school science class or two (and paid attention at all, of course) knows that everything has gravity, from the smallest molecule to the largest celestial body. What most people probably don't know, however, is that the formula that measures gravity's force, a calculation developed some 200 years ago, isn't necessarily as accurate as scientists have thought in the past. How inaccurate? No one is quite sure. However, a Washington University physicist named Ramanath Cowsik is in the process of fixing that problem.
According to The University of Evansville Crescent, Cowsik has built a 600 pound, $100,000 gadget that measures gravity using a torsion balance – the same technique used by Henry Cavendish when he first measured gravitational force in 1798. Cowsik's device is much, much more sensitive than the original, allowing scientists to measure the gravitational pull of something as small as 1/60,000,000,000th of a grain of salt. Although he's taking his time in setting up the experiments, Cowsik hopes to determine whether there's a breakdown in the theory of gravity as the objects get smaller and smaller and, in so doing, perhaps discover a new subatomic particle or a few of the extra dimensions that proponents of string theory theorize are true.
