Further, he calculated that the solar system will remain stable for an “immense tract of time.”31 Newton’s analysis implies that the solar system does not require any singular divine “intervention” to compensate for perturbations. In other words, the often repeated story of Newton’s God-of-the-gaps blunder is completely false.32 Given the number of times that I’d heard the story about Newton periodically invoking divine intervention to fix the solar system, I was stunned upon reading and rereading these most relevant sections of the Principia.33 Yet those who are interested can read these
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