ScienceScienceDailyScientists opened a sealed envelope after 10 years. Gravity still didn’t make sense
A decade-long US experiment measuring the strength of gravity produced a result that still doesn't match other leading measurements, deepening a 225-year-old physics puzzle.
A decade-long NIST experiment has produced a new measurement of the universal gravitational constant that differs unexpectedly from another leading result, deepening a 225-year-old physics puzzle. The discrepancy is tiny, but for one of nature’s most fundamental constants, it is large enough to keep scientists wondering whether hidden experimental errors or something more surprising is involved.
Scientists at NIST unsealed a decade-long experiment measuring big G, the universal gravitational constant, and found it still disagrees with other leading results.
The discrepancy between measurements is tiny, roughly one part in 10,000, but it has persisted across generations of increasingly sophisticated experiments since the 1700s.
Gravity remains the least precisely measured of nature's four fundamental forces, and scientists still cannot explain why their best experiments keep producing slightly different answers.
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