Simple T-shirt Gravity Table

The Utah State office of education publishes standards each year concerning what they believe each student of each class should be able to accomplish at the end of the year. After reviewing these standards with regards to physics it was determined that the demonstration which I could create that would satisfy the largest number of these standards was a gravity table.

In order to make the idea of a gravity table more accessible I chose a simple "T-shirt" gravity table becasue of the cheapness of materials and simple assembly process.

4 * ½” right angle PVC elbows

4 * 15” straight ½” PVC sections

Athletic T-shirt (I used men's Medium)

2 1” Binder clips (Needle and yarn) or heavy weight

Something to roll along the time-space membrane

For this activity we began by looking for a membrane material that is easily accessible,cheap, and didn’t require any scissors whatsoever. For this reason we avoided looking towards neoprene or other more flexible traditional materials and settled on athletic material t-shirts.

Typically you can buy PVC in ½” diameter 10 foot lengths. Each ten foot length can then be used to make 2 laptop gravity tables. All that is necessary is to mark of the PVC at 15” increments and then cut it either using PVC cutters or a hack saw.

Assembly of the gravity table is fairly simple all that is required is to assemble the 4 pvc lengths and 4 pvc elbows into a square and then insert that into the athletic t-shirt with the sides of the square running parallel with the seams of the t-shirt. The t-shirt is then pulled tight at both the neck and bottom and then secured with the two binder clips

A gravitational well can be simulated by one of two methods; either placing an object of great mass in the center of the t-shirt, or using the yarn and needle to stitch a simple pull string in the middle of the membrane which can then be pulled to various depths depending upon student choice.