The Grip of Gravity The Quest to Understand the Las of Motion and Gravitation [Hardcover]

This book tells the story of how we have arrived at our current understanding of the laws of motion and gravitation.This book tells the story of how we have arrived at our current understanding of the laws of motion and gravitation. It traces both the historical progress and explain s the central scientific ideas. Aimed at a 'non-technical' reader this book has an anecdotal approach with a number of thumb-nail sketches of the personalities involved. The book describes experiments to further understand gravity and natural phenomena in which it plays a central role, deepening our understanding and raising profound questions about the real nature of gravity which is still a mystery.This book tells the story of how we have arrived at our current understanding of the laws of motion and gravitation. It traces both the historical progress and explain s the central scientific ideas. Aimed at a 'non-technical' reader this book has an anecdotal approach with a number of thumb-nail sketches of the personalities involved. The book describes experiments to further understand gravity and natural phenomena in which it plays a central role, deepening our understanding and raising profound questions about the real nature of gravity which is still a mystery.Gravity is one of the most inexplicable forces of nature, controlling everything, from the expansion of the Universe to the ebb and flow of ocean tides. The search for the laws of motion and gravitation began more than two thousand years ago, a quest that Prabhakar Gondhalekar recounts in The Grip of Gravity. Beginning with Aristotle and concluding with Planck, Gondhalekar outlines a 'genealogy' of gravity and lucidly explains how previous explanations have shaped the most recent development in the field, string theory. In this work, physicist and astronomer Gondhalekar describes experiments, both planned and proposed, and clearly explains natural phenomena like ocean tides, seasons, ice ages, the formation of planets, stars, ls/