Would This Gravity Demo Actually Work?
Yes, it’s a TikTok video — and obviously from some old science video source. But it looks cool. Here’s the basic idea for this physics demonstration.
- A small lead mass (they call it a pyramid) is suspended from a scale. It reads 152.166 grams.
- Next, a large lead sphere is placed right under the hanging weight. Now the scale reads 152.167 grams.
One quote from the video.
“When the mass under the pyramid got bigger, the force of attraction did too.”
I’m just going to comment — it’s not that the mass below got bigger, but that a large mass was very close to the pyramid.
Gravity and Universal Gravity
OK, what’s going on here. Really, this is a demonstration of the universal law of gravity. This says that there is a gravitational force between objects that have mass. The magnitude of this force depends on the value of both masses as well as the distance between them. As an equation, it would look like this:
Where G is the universal gravitational constant with a value of G = 6.677 x 10^-11 Newtons*m²/kg². Notice that…
