Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The natural phenomenon of attraction between physical objects with mass; the weakest of the four fundamental forces of nature.
- noun The act or process of moving under the influence of this attraction.
- noun A movement toward a source of attraction.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The act of gravitating or tending toward a center of attraction.
- noun That attraction between bodies, or that acceleration of one toward another, of which the fall of heavy bodies to the earth is an instance. See
gravity , 1. - noun In philology, the tendency of sounds and syllables having little or no stress to become merged in the accented syllable, or to fall away entirely; the absorption of weaker elements.
- noun Figuratively, a prevailing tendency of mental or social forces or activities toward some particular point or result.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The act of gravitating.
- noun (Pysics) That species of attraction or force by which all bodies or particles of matter in the universe tend toward each other; called also
attraction of gravitation ,universal gravitation , anduniversal gravity . SeeAttraction , andWeight. - noun that law in accordance with which gravitation acts, namely, that every two bodies or portions of matter in the universe attract each other with a force proportional directly to the quantity of matter they contain, and inversely to the squares of their distances.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun physics The
fundamental force ofattraction that exists between allparticles withmass in theuniverse . It is theweakest of the four forces, and possesses agauge boson known as thegraviton .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun movement downward resulting from gravitational attraction
- noun (physics) the force of attraction between all masses in the universe; especially the attraction of the earth's mass for bodies near its surface
- noun a figurative movement toward some attraction
Etymologies
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Examples
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He carried on the work of earlier astronomers by the application of higher mathematics, and proved that the force of attraction which we call gravitation was a universal one, and that the sun and the moon and the earth, and all the heavenly bodies, are attracted to one another inversely as the square of the distance.
An Introduction to the History of Western Europe James Harvey Robinson 1899
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The facts of what we call gravitation are obvious, and any attempt to disregard them would result in disaster, yet no satisfactory explanation of gravitation has yet been discovered: many theories have been suggested, but no theory has yet been proved to be true.
Hormones and Heredity J. T. Cunningham 1897
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To this spiritual world we may refer the marvellously complex forces which we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and electricity, without which the material universe could not exist for
Darwinism (1889) Alfred Russel Wallace 1868
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Jules Galdea explained to us that these revolving fan-like wheels on top of the cars destroyed atmospheric pressure, or what is generally understood by the term gravitation, and with this force thus destroyed or rendered nugatory the car is as safe from falling to one side or the other from the single rail track as if it were in a vacuum; the fly wheels in their rapid revolutions destroying effectually the so-called power of gravitation, or the force of atmospheric pressure or whatever potent influence it may be that causes all unsupported things to fall downward to the earth's surface or to the nearest point of resistance.
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The analogy is not exact because, in gravitation, there is no analogy to a magnetic field and negative gravitational “charge” does not exist (it would violate the TCP theorem).
Matthew Yglesias » Cato’s David Boaz Joins George Will in Peddling Bogus “Global Cooling” Stories 2009
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The “universal” theory of gravitation is also coming under increasing fire as critics point out that the force of gravity is by no means universal.
Matthew Yglesias » Washington Post Editorial Writers Should Read Their Paper’s Opinion Section 2010
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From personal experience, I participated in many friendly design-like discussions in science class, and enjoyed contemplating (at the time, as an unbeliever) comments from science professors about, for example, how "lucky we are" that the law of gravitation is an inverse square law.
Cleaning Up The Mess 2007
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From personal experience, I participated in many friendly design-like discussions in science class, and enjoyed contemplating (at the time, as an unbeliever) comments from science professors about, for example, how "lucky we are" that the law of gravitation is an inverse square law.
Cleaning Up The Mess 2007
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General Relativity tells us that gravitation is essentially curvature due to the energy contained in a region, so the condensation of enough vacuum energy over a region of space effectively convertes this energy to the positve mass density of real particles, and so this 'departure' is maintained in this manner.
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What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream for which we have yet no name.
Representative Men 2006
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