Much of modern physics and all of modern astronomy had arisen from Newton’s epic struggles to derive a law of gravity that was universal. In his Principia, published in 1687, Newton met Plato’s challenge to find the calculations on paper that matched the motions in the heavens. The telescope had given astronomers the physical tool to chronicle more and more of those motions. But it was Newton’s math that had given them the intellectual tool to make sense of them. The law of universal gravitation was what made cosmology-as-science possible.
