Chute (gravity)

A chute is a vertical or inclined plane, channel, or passage through which objects are moved by means of gravity.

Landform

A chute, also known as a race, flume, cat, or river canyon, is a steep-sided passage through which water flows rapidly.

Akin to these, man-made chutes, such as the timber slide and log flume, were used in the logging industry to facilitate the downstream transportation of timber along rivers. These are no longer in common use. Man-made chutes may also be a feature of spillways on some dams. Some types of water supply and irrigation systems are gravity fed, hence chutes. These include aqueducts, puquios, and acequias.

Building chute

Chutes are in common use in tall buildings to allow the rapid transport of items from the upper floors to a central location on one of the lower floors or basement. Chutes may be round, square or rectangular at the top and/or the bottom.

Gravity

Gravity or gravitation is a natural phenomenon by which all things with energy are brought toward (or gravitate toward) one another, including stars, planets, galaxies and even light and sub-atomic particles. Gravity is responsible for many of the structures in the Universe, by creating spheres of hydrogen — where hydrogen fuses under pressure to form stars — and grouping them into galaxies. On Earth, gravity gives weight to physical objects and causes the tides. Gravity has an infinite range, although its effects become increasingly weaker on farther objects.

Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915) which describes gravity not as a force but as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass/energy; and resulting in gravitational time dilation, where time lapses more slowly in lower (stronger) gravitational potential. However, for most applications, gravity is well approximated by Newton's law of universal gravitation, which postulates that gravity is a force where two bodies of mass are directly drawn (or 'attracted') to each other according to a mathematical relationship, where the attractive force is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This is considered to occur over an infinite range, such that all bodies (with mass) in the universe are drawn to each other no matter how far they are apart.