Gravity is, at heart, a mystery. Yes, we can talk about curvature of space-time and perhaps make analogies with stretched rubber sheets. But we don’t know why mass causes space-time to curve. To put ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. Comtoise watches, as seen here in the Comtoise Museum of master ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about physics, science, academia, and pop culture. To unpack these a bit, Karl Popper was the philosopher of science who I ...

Charles Sanders Peirce, a practicing scientist and proponent of philosophical pragmatism, began the gravity program of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in the early 1870s, at a time when his father ...

Along with gravimeters and torsion balances, pendulums can be used to measure gravitational force. The period oscillation of the pendulum can be used to measure gravitational acceleration, and in turn ...

Why is gravity so pathetically weak compared to other forces? An elaborate version of a very simple device may reveal the answer. While most of us take gravity for granted, physicists have a big ...

Despite more than 200 years of experiments, the best laboratory determinations of the force of gravity have yielded no better than a ballpark figure. Adding to the haziness, metrologists have scarcely ...