When driving up a quiet lane close to the border between Switzerland and Liechtenstein, you’d be forgiven if you glossed over an unassuming wooden shed on the side of the road bearing a sign that reads “Festung Furggels.” Nearly 300 feet under the surface, however, physicists are performing a battery of physics experiments inside a military fortress built during World War II. Their tests aim to nail down the value for a basic yet elusive constant—those in the know call it simply “Big G.”
That’s a reference to the gravitational constant, a fundamental value that possesses the rare and powerful characteristic of not varying across space or time. The speed of light in a vacuum and the magnitude of the charge carried by a single electron are two other examples of these unchanging constants, the values of which can only be determined experimentally and not from other known numbers.
The importance of fundamental constants can’t be overstated: Big G plays a key role in both Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, from which mounds of other physical calculations and applications spring up (like our ability to use GPS to navigate).
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