Understanding Gravity

This week, we learned about gravity. We investigated the history of our understanding this force and followed that to our current understanding of the concept. The interesting thing about gravity is that we understand that it works. We can calculate it incredibly accurately using a law written by Isaac Newton 400 years ago! We understand how to change the gravitational pull of an object. But, we have no idea how objects naturally possess this force. This means, we don't really understand what this force is!

We then ran qualitative experiments with ramps, cars, and tennis balls to see how height of a ramp effected the acceleration of an object traveling on that ramp. The students originally stated that a taller ramp would always result in the object travelling further. After their experimentation, they realized that this was only true to a point. We looked at the force diagram to explore this concept further. We will review this again before our next lesson.