The ups and downs of gravity
Six things we learned about gravity (and one about chicken nuggets).
In , Jake Yapp has a lot of apples dropped on his head. He also reveals some fascinating facts about the thing that holds us down every day – not a glass ceiling, but gravity itself. Here are six of them, and one about chicken nuggets…
1. In the 4th Century Aritstotle thought that heavy things wanted to migrate to the centre of the earth, and that’s why they fell down.
2. Without the ability to create a vacuum, there was no way of testing gravity in isolation so it was incredibly hard to prove anyone’s theories.
3. In 1666, Robert Hooke gave a sensational Royal Society lecture entitled On Gravity, in which he stated that all bodies fell in a straight line unless diverted.
4. In the same year, Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree in his mother’s garden, and came to a similar conclusion as Hooke – a squabble between them ensued.
5. In 1907, Einstein claimed to have the “happiest thought” of his life. He noticed that someone falling off a roof of a house experiences no gravitational field, and this became part of Einstein’s theory of relativity.
6. A clock on earth will run slower than in orbit.
And... Chicken nuggets were invented in the 1950s. Okay, that may not be a fact about gravity. Watch the video and Jake will explain how it’s relevant...
Gravity
The history of everything we ever thought we knew about gravity, in four minutes.
And why not watch some outtakes of apples falling on Jake Yapp's head?
How not to drop an apple on Jake Yapp's head
In an outtake, apples are dropped on Jake's head. A lot.
