After ten years of experimentation, physicist Stephan Schlamminger and a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have produced a new measurement of the universal gravitational constant, ‘big G,’ that unexpectedly differs from a leading existing result. This discrepancy continues a 225-year-old physics puzzle regarding the precise strength of gravity.
Physicist Stephan Schlamminger of NIST spent a decade attempting to measure big G, the fundamental number determining the strength of gravitational attraction. The result of his team’s work was contained in a sealed envelope, opened on September 20, 2026. The new measurement does not align with another prominent determination of big G, deepening the long-standing mystery surrounding its value.
Gravity, while familiar, remains one of the least precisely understood fundamental forces. Scientists have been trying to measure big G for over 225 years, beginning shortly after Isaac Newton introduced his law of universal gravitation. Despite increasingly sophisticated experiments, the gravitational constant is less precisely known than constants associated with electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
The difficulty in measurement stems from the weakness of gravity itself. A small magnet can easily overcome the gravitational pull of the Earth on a paperclip, demonstrating the relative feebleness of gravitational force. Laboratory experiments are similarly challenging, requiring the measurement of attraction between objects far smaller than planets, approximately 500 billion trillion times smaller than Earth, resulting in incredibly faint forces to detect.
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