力学专业英语05.docVIP

Lesson 5 Gravitation in the universe We are so used to our life on the surface of the earth that it can be quite an effort for our minds to break free of all the ideas that we take for granted. We talk about ‘up’ and ‘down’ , but we know that what is ‘down’ for us is ‘up’ for someone else on the other side of the world. We can feel that things are heavy, and we often think of ‘weight’ as being a fixed quality in an object, but it is not really fixed at all. If you could take a one-pound packet of butter 4,000 miles out from the earth, it would weigh only a quarter of a pound. Why would things weigh only a quarter as much as they do at the surface of the earth if we took them 4,000 miles out into space? The reason is this : all objects have a natural attraction for all other objects, this is called gravitational attraction. But the power of attraction between tow objects gets weaker as they get farther apart. What about the weight of our one-pound packet of butter on the surface of the moon? On the moon there will be an attraction between the butter and the moon, but the butter will weigh only about one sixth as much as it does on the earth. This is because the moon is so much smaller than the earth. The amount of gravitational pull that a body produces depends on the amount of material in it. So this is one of the first things we need to remember: that the weight of an object in space is not the same as its weight on the surface of the earth. Gravitation is a very important force in the universe. Every object has a gravitational pull, which is rather like magnetism. But ,unlike magnetism, gravitation is not found only in iron and steel, it is in every object large or small. But large objects, such as the earth, have a stronger pull than small ones. Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist of the seventeenth century, first studied gravitation. When he was a boy, he often saw apples falling to the ground. He wondered why they fell towards the earth, and why they did not