Acceleration Due To Gravity Essay Sample

According to Newton’s universal gravitational law, gravitational force between any bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses. He further established that there is an inverse proportionality between the gravitational force and the square distance between the bodies.
I am interested in conducting two experiments to prove that the gravitational pull is 9.8m/s2. Velocity is the rate of change of displacement with time thus I will be interested to drop an object and measure both the height of drop and the time it took the object to reach the ground. After I have calculated velocity I will be interested to know if this velocity changes with time or not. It is interesting to note that objects fall faster as they approach the ground. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with time. The SI unit of acceleration is M/s2 since the SI unit of distance is meters and that of time is seconds.
It is established from the first experiment which involves a free falling object that the acceleration of the object is 9.453m/s2 for a 1kg object and 8.87m/s2 for a 0.25kg object. There are many factors that could have contributed to the difference and this may include dumping effect due to air resistance and friction. Compared to the expected values however, the errors are 0.0003541 and 0.0009489 for the 1kg and 0.25kg respectively. The values of the errors are very small and could be neglected.
The second experiment which involves a simple pendulum is based on the assumption that the pendulum is modelled like a simple harmonic oscillator. I am able to calculate gravitational pull from the formulae T= 2*3.14242 multiplied by the square root of L/g where T is the period of the pendulum pie=3.14242, L is the length of the oscillator and g is the gravitational pull. This formulae is only true under small oscillations or when the period of the pendulum is not dependent on the amplitude of oscillation. Rearranging the formulae g can be obtained by rearranging the formulae when all the other values are known.