The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

by Edward Dolnick

The ship, the sailors, the passengers, the rock falling from the mast, are all in horizontal motion, all of them moving together. The rock lands at the base of the mast because mast and rock are both moving horizontally, in unison, at the same time as the rock is hurtling downward. “Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship,” Galileo wrote. Bring in some butterflies, a fishbowl with some fish swimming around, a leaky jug dripping water into a pan on the floor. No matter how closely you looked for something out of the ordinary (the fish clustered against one side of their bowl, for instance, or the drops of water missing the pan), Galileo went on, “you could not tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or standing still.” The same holds for the Earth itself, and all its passengers, as it speeds along on its voyage.