| Gravitational Physics Timeline | ||
Home Gravitational Wave Observatories
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1640 : Ismael Bullialdus suggests an
inverse-square gravitational force law 1665 : Isaac Newton deduces the inverse-square gravitational force law from the ``falling'' of the Moon 1684 : Isaac Newton proves that planets moving under an inverse-square force law will obey Kepler's laws 1686 : Isaac Newton uses a fixed length pendulum with weights of varying composition to test the weak equivalence principle to 1 part in 1000 1798 : Henry Cavendish measures the gravitational constant 1845 : Urbain Leverrier observes a 35'' per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit 1876 : William Clifford suggests that the motion of matter may be due to changes in the geometry of space 1882 : Simon Newcomb observes a 43'' per century excess precession of Mercury's orbit 1887 : Albert Michelson and Edward Morley do not detect the ether drift 1889 : Roland von Eötvös uses a torsion fiber balance to test the weak equivalence principle to 1 part in one billion 1893 : Ernst Mach states Mach's principle---first constructive attack on the idea of Newtonian absolute space 1905 : Albert Einstein completes his theory of special relativity and states the law of mass-energy conservation 1907 : Albert Einstein introduces the principle of equivalence of gravitation and inertia and uses it to predict the gravitational redshift 1915 : Albert Einstein completes his theory of general relativity 1916 : Albert Einstein shows that the field equations of general relativity admit wavelike solutions 1918 : J. Lense and Hans Thirring find the gravitomagnetic precession of gyroscopes in the equations of general relativity 1919 : Arthur Eddington leads a solar eclipse expedition which claims to detect gravitational deflection of light by the Sun 1921 : T. Kaluza demonstrates that a five-dimensional version of Einstein's equations unifies gravitation and electromagnetism 1937 : Fritz Zwicky states that galaxies could act as gravitational lenses 1937 : Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, and Banesh Hoffman show that the geodesic equations of general relativity can be deduced from its field equations 1957 : John Wheeler discusses the breakdown of classical general relativity near singularities and the need for quantum gravity 1960 : Robert Pound and Glen Rebka test the gravitational redshift predicted by the equivalence principle to approximately 1% 1962 : Robert Dicke, Peter Roll, and R. Krotkov use a torsion fiber balance to test the weak equivalence principle to 2 parts in 100 billion 1964 : Irwin Shapiro predicts a gravitational time delay of radiation travel as a test of general relativity 1965 : Joseph Weber puts the first Weber bar gravitational wave detector into operation 1968 : Irwin Shapiro presents the first detection of the Shapiro delay 1968 : Kenneth Nordtvedt studies a possible violation of the weak equivalence principle for self-gravitating bodies and proposes a new test of the weak equivalence principle based on observing the relative motion of the Earth and Moon in the Sun's gravitational field 1976 : Robert Vessot and Martin Levine use a hydrogen maser clock on a Scout D rocket to test the gravitational redshift predicted by the equivalence principle to approximately 0.007% 1979 : Dennis Walsh, Robert Carswell, and Ray Weymann discover the gravitationally lensed quasar Q0957+561 1982 : Joseph Taylor and Joel Weisberg show that the rate of energy loss from the binary pulsar PSR1913+16 agrees with that predicted by the general relativistic quadrupole formula to within 5%
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