
How do we measure the gravitational constant?
Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe
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Newton's Law of Gravity
The first measurements of big G come from holding a pendulum near a mountain in Scotland and seeing how it deflected. It wasn't until a couple hundred years later that I started being called big G. This was done in the 1770s. There's a whole team of people that spent years making very precise measurements of pendula with heavy masses on them.
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