To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science

by Steven Weinberg

Copernicus had placed the Earth among the planets, Tycho had shown that there is change in the heavens, and Galileo had seen that the Moon’s surface is rough, like the Earth’s, but none of this related the motion of planets to forces that could be observed on Earth. Descartes had tried to understand the motions of the solar system as the result of vortices in the ether, not unlike vortices in a pool of water on Earth, but his theory had no success. Now Newton had shown that the force that keeps the Moon in its orbit around the Earth and the planets in their orbits around the Sun is the same as the force of gravity that causes an apple to fall to the ground in Lincolnshire, all governed by the same quantitative laws. After this the distinction between the celestial and terrestrial, which had constrained physical speculation from Aristotle on, had to be forever abandoned. But this was still far short of a principle of universal gravitation, which would assert that every body in the universe, not just the Earth and Sun, attracts every other body with a force that decreases as the inverse square of the distance between them.