Thursday April 16, 2009
Does gravity change with the seasons?
Marcus Chown
New Scientist
Everyone has heard of Newton's apple. He watched it drop to the ground in the autumn of 1666, prompting him to ask a series of questions. "Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?" Newton wondered. "Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the Earth's centre?"
One question Newton didn't ask is whether apples or oranges fall differently. Or whether an apple would fall differently in the spring. They might seem peculiar concerns, but Alan Kostelecký, a physicist based at Indiana University in Bloomington, thinks they are important. He and his graduate student Jay Tasson have found that such flagrant violations of our best theory of gravity could easily have evaded detection for centuries.
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