Of great importance, (from United Press International (UPI)):
“Newton’s gravitational constant G changes with the orientation of test masses by at least 0.054 per cent, according to Gershteyn’s experiments, a remarkable and unprecedented finding that has landed his paper on the subject in the journal Gravitation and Cosmology. “The existence of such an effect requires simply a radically new theory of gravitation, because the magnitude of this effect dwarfs any of Einstein’s corrections to Newtonian gravity.” Isaac Newton first described G in 1687 as a fundamental component of his universal law of gravity. Two masses, Newton said, attract one another with a force proportional to their mass that falls off rapidly as the bodies move farther and farther apart. Albert Einstein later used G in his own field equations that fine-tuned Newton’s original laws. The constant G puts precise limits on gravity’s attractive force and appears in equations that describe any gravitational field, whether the field is between planets, stars, galaxies, microscopic particles or rays of light. Centuries of measurement have firmly fixed the value of G at 6.673 x 10 raised to the power minus 11 cubic meters per kilogram per square second.
If G varies under any circumstances, scientists would have to rewrite virtually every physical law and a long-accepted feature of the Universe isotropy, or the condition that a body’s physical properties are independent of its orientation in space. “Gershteyn and his co-workers lay an extraordinary and very interesting claim which if proven true would change our view of the universe,” Lev Tsimring, a research physicist with the Institute for Nonlinear Science at the University of California San Diego, told UPI. The experiment, he said, would seek to detect gravitational anisotropy the condition that the attractive force between bodies would vary with respect to their spatial orientation, not their separating distance.”