On the various forces of nature and their relations to each other - Michael Faraday

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not sufficiently pointed out to you the more important circumstances connected with this force of Gravitation, especially the law which governs its attraction (for which, I think, I must take up a little time at our next meeting), still I will put that word on the board, and hope you will now remember that we have in some degree considered the force of gravitation—that force which causes all bodies to attract each other when they are at sensible distances apart, and tends to draw them together.

       GRAVITATION—COHESION.

       Table of Contents

      Do me the favour to pay me as much attention as you did at our last meeting, and I shall not repent of that which I have proposed to undertake. It will be impossible for us to consider the Laws of Nature, and what they effect, unless we now and then give our sole attention, so as to obtain a clear idea upon the subject. Give me now that attention, and then, I trust, we shall not part without your knowing something about those Laws, and the manner in which they act. You recollect, upon the last occasion, I explained that all bodies attracted each other, and that this power we called gravitation. I told you that when we brought these two bodies [two equal sized ivory balls suspended by threads] near together, they attracted each other, and that we might suppose that the whole power of this attraction was exerted between their respective centres of gravity; and furthermore, you learned from me, that if, instead of a small ball, I took a larger one, like that [changing one of the balls for a much larger one], there was much more of this attraction exerted; or, if I made this ball larger and larger, until, if it were possible, it became as large as the Earth itself—or, I might take the Earth itself as the large ball—that then the attraction would become so powerful as to cause them to rush together in this manner [dropping the ivory ball]. You sit there upright, and I stand upright here, because we keep our centres of gravity properly balanced with respect to the earth; and I need not tell you that on the other side of this world the people are standing and moving about with their feet towards our feet, in a reversed position as compared with us, and all by means of this power of gravitation to the centre of the earth.

      I must not, however, leave the subject of gravitation, without telling you something about its laws and regularity; and first, as regards its power with respect to the distance that bodies are apart. If I take one of these balls and place it within an inch of the other, they attract each other with a certain power. If I hold it at a greater distance off, they attract with less power; and if I hold it at a greater distance still, their attraction is still less. Now this fact is of the greatest consequence; for, knowing this law, philosophers have discovered most wonderful things. You know that there is a planet, Uranus, revolving round the sun with us, but eighteen hundred millions of miles off; and because there is another planet as far off as three thousand millions of miles, this law of attraction, or gravitation, still holds good—and philosophers actually discovered this latter planet, Neptune, by reason of the effects of its attraction at this overwhelming distance. Now I want you clearly to understand what this law is. They say (and they are right) that two bodies attract each other inversely as the square of the distance—a sad jumble of words until you understand them; but I think we shall soon comprehend what this law is, and what is the meaning of the “inverse square of the distance.”

      Fig. 11.

      I have here (fig. 11) a lamp A, shining most intensely upon this disc, B, C, D; and this light acts as a sun by which I can get a shadow from this little screen, B F (merely a square piece of card), which, as you know, when I place it close to the large screen, just shadows as much of it as is exactly equal to its own size. But now let me take this card E, which is equal to the other one in size, and place it midway between the lamp and the screen: now look at the size of the shadow B D—it is four times the original size. Here, then, comes the “inverse square of the distance.” This distance, A E, is one, and that distance, A B, is two; but that size E being one, this size B D of shadow is four instead of two, which is the square of the distance; and, if I put the screen at one-third of the distance from the lamp, the shadow on the large screen would be nine times the size. Again, if I hold this screen here, at B F, a certain amount of light falls on it; and if I hold it nearer the lamp at E, more light shines upon it. And you see at once how much—exactly the quantity which I have shut off from the part of this screen, B D, now in shadow; moreover, you see that if I put a single screen here, at G, by the side of the shadow, it can only receive one-fourth of the proportion of light which is obstructed. That, then, is what is meant by the inverse of the square of the distance. This screen E is the brightest, because it is the nearest; and there is the whole secret of this curious expression, inversely as the square of the distance. Now, if you cannot perfectly recollect this when you go home, get a candle and throw a shadow of something—your profile, if you like—on the wall, and then recede or advance, and you will find that your shadow is exactly in proportion to the square of the distance you are off the wall; and then if you consider how much light shines on you at one distance, and how much at another, you get the inverse accordingly. So it is as regards the attraction of these two balls—they attract according to the square of the distance, inversely. I want you to try and remember these words, and then you will be able to go into all the calculations of astronomers as to the planets and other bodies, and tell why they move so fast, and why they go round the sun without falling into it, and be prepared to enter upon many other interesting inquiries of the like nature.

      Let us now leave this subject which I have written upon the board under the word Force—Gravitation—and go a step further. All bodies attract each other at sensible distances. I shewed you the electric attraction on the last occasion (though I did not call it so); that attracts at a distance: and in order to make our progress a little more gradual, suppose I take a few iron particles [dropping some small fragments of iron on the table]. There, I have already told you that in all cases where bodies fall, it is the particles that are attracted. You may consider these then as separate particles magnified, so as to be evident to your sight; they are loose from each other—they all gravitate—they all fall to the earth—for the force of gravitation never fails. Now, I have here a centre of power which I will not name at present, and when these particles are placed upon it, see what an attraction they have for each other.

      Fig. 12.

      Here I have an arch of iron filings (fig. 12) regularly built up like an iron bridge, because I have put them within a sphere of action which will cause them to attract each other. See!—I could let a mouse run through it, and yet if I try to do the same thing with them here [on the table], they do not attract each other at all. It is that [the magnet] which makes them hold together. Now, just as these iron particles hold together in the form of an elliptical bridge, so do the different particles of iron which constitute this nail hold together and make it one. And here is a bar of iron—why, it is only because the different parts of this iron are so wrought as to keep close together by the attraction between the particles that it is held together in one mass. It is kept together, in fact, merely by the attraction of one particle to another, and that is the point I want now to illustrate. If I take a piece of flint and strike it with a hammer, and break it thus [breaking off a piece of the flint], I have done nothing more than separate the particles which compose these two pieces so far apart, that their attraction is too weak to cause them to hold together, and it is only for that reason that there are now two pieces in the place of one. I will shew you an experiment to prove that this attraction does still exist in those particles, for here is a piece of glass (for what was true of the flint and the bar of iron is true of the piece of glass, and is true of every other solid—they are all held together in the lump by the attraction between their parts), and I can shew you the attraction between its separate particles; for if I take these portions of glass, which I have reduced to very fine powder, you see that I can actually build them up into a solid wall by pressure between two flat surfaces. The power

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