February 17, 2008
Gravity
I was reading a book today and read that Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discovered the law of gravity when he was ONLY 23 years old.
In reality, he was a very smart man. In fact, he was quite a genius in his day. He invented Calculus (concurrently with Gottfried Leibniz) and was the first to study obtics. He took the idea of gravity and put science behind it, explaining the gravitational forces of nature. His law of universal gravitation is: Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. He also pioneered work in the laws of motion. He discovered three laws of motion: an object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, the sum of all the forces (F) that act on an object is equal to the mass (M) of the object multiplied by the acceleration, or F = M A, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
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Updated February 17, 2008
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So I pondered, I paused right there and began to think, as scary as that may be. I'm thinking, it took him 23 years to figure out gravity? I'm sorry, he was the first scientist ever to be knighted because it took him that long to discover what every person on this planet discovered when they were 6 months old.
We all learned to crawl on all fours as a baby because our legs weren't quite strong enough to combat the force of gravity to keep us upright. We stood up, we fell down. It hurt. We stayed down for about the first 12 months for a reason, Isaac! Geeze, I guess he was walking the day he was born and couldn't understand why others were crawling as an infant.
I think that apple fell out of the tree and hit him upside his head before he figured it out.
Am I out in left field here?
Newton's law of gravity withstood two centuries, until it was finally challenged by a guy named Albert Einstein. Einstein developed his theory of relativity in 1905.
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