The Explanation of Mechanical Gravity and Gauss Law

About the Study

The relation of the distance of objects in free fall to the square of the time taken was confirmed by Francesco Maria Grimaldi and Giovanni Battista Riccioli between 1640 and 1650. They also made a calculation of the Gravity of Earth constant by recording the oscillations of a pendulum. In 1644, René Descartes proposed that no empty space can exist and that a continuum of matter causes every motion to be curvilinear. Thus, centrifugal force thrusts relatively light matter away from the central vortices of celestial bodies, lowering density locally and thereby creating centripetal pressure. Utilizing aspects of this theory, between 1669 and 1690, Christiaan Huygens designed a mathematical vortex model. In one of his proofs, he shows that the distance elapsed by an object dropped from a spinning wheel will increase proportionally to the square of the wheel's rotation time.

Mechanical explanations of gravitation

In 1671, Robert Hooke speculated that gravitation is the result of bodies emitting waves in the aether. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (1690) and Georges-Louis Le Sage (1748) proposed a corpuscular model using some sort of screening or shadowing mechanism. In 1784, Le Sage posited that gravity could be a result of the collision of atoms, and in the early 19^th century, he expanded Daniel Bernoulli's theory of corpuscular pressure to the universe as a whole. A similar model was later created by Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928), who used electromagnetic radiation instead of corpuscles. English mathematician Isaac Newton utilized Descartes' argument that curvilinear motion constrains inertia, and in 1675, argued that aether streams attract all bodies to one another. Newton (1717) and Leonhard Euler (1760) proposed a model in which the aether loses density near mass, leading to a net force acting on bodies. Further mechanical explanations of gravitation were created between 1650 and 1900 to explain Newton's theory, but mechanistic models eventually fell out of favor because most of them lead to an unacceptable amount of drag (air resistance), which was not observed. Others violate the energy conservation law and are incompatible with modern thermodynamics.

Gauss's law for gravity

In 1679, Robert Hooke wrote to Isaac Newton of his hypothesis concerning orbital motion, which partly depends on an inverse-square force. In 1684, both Hooke and Newton told Edmond Halley that they had proven the inverse-square law of planetary motion, in January and August, respectively. While Hooke refused to produce his proofs, Newton was prompted to compose De motu corporum in gyrum, in which he mathematically derives Kepler's laws of planetary motion. In 1687, with Halley's support, Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which hypothesizes the inverse-square law of universal gravitation.I deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centres about which they revolve; and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth; and found them to answer pretty nearly.