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Chapter 7 - UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION AND CIRCULAR MOTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Steven C. Frautschi ,
Richard P. Olenick ,
Tom M. Apostol  and
David L. Goodstein
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Summary

Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power. This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of the sun and planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force; that operates not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts (as mechanical causes used to do), but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides to immense distances, decreasing always as the inverse square of the distances.

Isaac Newton, Principia (1686)

THE GENESIS OF AN IDEA

The year was 1665; the month was August; and England was besieged by bubonic plague. Isaac Newton, then a 23-year-old Cambridge University student, retired to the solitude of his family's farm in Lincolnshire until the plague subsided and the university reopened. Not given to inactivity, Newton composed 22 questions for himself ranging from geometric constructions to Galileo's new mechanics to Kepler's planetary laws. During the next 18 months, he immersed himself in the search for answers and along the way discovered calculus, the laws of motion, and the universal law of gravity.

Type
Chapter
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The Mechanical Universe
Mechanics and Heat, Advanced Edition
 , pp. 141 - 162
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1986

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