Gravity and Isaac Newton A great man was born on Christmas Day in 1642 near, Nottingham, England. That man’s name was Sir Isaac Newton. He led science into another era. He pioneered the crossover from science and math. Newton even invented calculus! There are so many achievements made by Sir Isaac Newton, only some of which include: the discovery of and qualities of gravity, gravity is proportional to the distance between two bodies. He wrote these ideas down in a book called Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The story that occurs most often about how Newton discovered gravity would be that one day young Newton pondered why apples only fall downward. The man who really started this story would be the great mathematician Gauss. …show more content…
It says that he sourced his ideas one night as he was looking at the moon and compared its orbit to the Earth’s and then the “eureka moment” happened. Newton frantically wrote down his ideas in a book that was first published on July 5, 1687, and later published in English in 1729. That book was Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The title literally means Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Since the subject of the book was primarily math he had theorems and propositions rather than chapters. He mentions in his book, that the Inverse Square of Gravity is true up to about a millimeter (csep10.phys.utk.edu). He expresses this equation in his book: F=G (M1M2/R^2). F is the force between the masses, G is the gravity, M1 is the first mass, M2 is the second mass, and R is the distance between the center of the masses (Newton 956). The article “Qualities, Properties, and Laws in Newton's Induction” states this point about Newton’s book: “Newton explicitly denies that the Principia makes any claim about ‘gravity’ as a universal property in an emendation of Rule III’s elaboration that appeared in the third edition ”. We can see here that Newton was smart enough to say that gravity is not a universal property and his book does not say anything of that