This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Clara Moskowitz.

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Houston, this is Mission Specialist Ryan Stone.

I am off-structure and I'm drifting, you copy.

A scene from the movie Gravity.

In real life, gravity is always bringing us down,

particularly scientists who attempt to measure gravitational force.

Try as they might, physicists cannot agree on a precise value of the constant called

Big G, which denotes the strength of gravity.

It's tough to measure because gravity is incredibly weak

compared to other fundamental forces.

Big G is a fundamental constant of nature, as such I think it is important to measure its value precisely.

Stephen Schlaminger of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The world's best experiments keep turning up different answers

that are incompatible with one another and diverge by about 40 times the

uncertainty of the most precise experiment. The discrepancy is not just embarrassing. Knowing the true

value of Big G is important in various fields. For example, in efforts to

unify general relativity with quantum mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity.

Aiming to solve the problem, Schlaminger is organizing an ideas lab gathering

under the auspices of the National Science Foundation in July.

Scientists from numerous disciplines will brainstorm new strategies for measuring Big G.

First, I hope for a really good and new idea on how to measure Big G.

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