Week 13: True Love (!!!)

Physics can (supposedly) explain everything. But can it explain love??? Maybe not, but it can definitely explain attraction.

Roses!

To explain (gravitational) attraction, I turn to the cutest couple in my world: my parents. This also seems fitting seeing as we just celebrated my parents' anniversary on the 14th of November, a mere week ago. Ever since I was a little girl, I have always believed that no two people in the world could be more in love with each other than my mom and dad (awww!).

Newton's law of gravitation states that the attractive force of gravity between two particles is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (In this case, the two particles are my mom and dad--because, um, well, um, they're attracted to each other.)

Using the gravitational constant, the known masses of the two particles (i.e. my mom and dad), and the distance between the two, we can measure the (gravitational) attraction between the two (F-sub-G).

I literally had to take two pictures and put some distance between them just so I would have a magnitude for r because I don't have a picture of my mom and dad in which they at least have a foot between them--awww!)

And, voila, the Physics of love. I mean, attraction. Um, gravitational attraction.

P.S. My mom bought a new salad spinner this weekend and I was like, "Why couldn't you have bought this earlier, Mom?! This spinner is a more Physics blog-worthy topic than the Lazy Susan!" Haha. =D