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Before Newton’s law of gravity, there were many theories explaining gravity. Philoshophers made observations about things falling down − and developed theories why they do – as early as Aristotle who thought that rocks fall to the ground because seeking the ground was an essential part of their nature.
The appearance of the comet in 1759, now named after him, within a month of predictions based on Newton's gravity greatly improved scientific opinion of the theory. [106] Newton's theory enjoyed its greatest success when it was used to predict the existence of Neptune based on motions of Uranus that could not be accounted by the actions of the ...
Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity at any single moment, [223] acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the apocryphal version that the ...
Newton did not offer any reasons or causes for his law of gravity, and was therefore publicly criticised for introducing "occult agencies" into science. [5]Newton objected to Descartes' and Leibniz's Scientific method of deriving conclusions by applying reason to a priori definitions rather than to empirical evidence, and famously stated "hypotheses non fingo", Latin for "I do not frame ...
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I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
Newton firmly rejected such criticisms and wrote that it was enough that the phenomena implied gravitational attraction, as they did; but the phenomena did not so far indicate the cause of this gravity, and it was both unnecessary and improper to frame hypotheses of things not implied by the phenomena: such hypotheses "have no place in ...
Before the advent of general relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation had been accepted for more than two hundred years as a valid description of the gravitational force between masses, even though Newton himself did not regard the theory as the final word on the nature of gravity. Within a century of Newton's formulation, careful ...