Yet the law of gravity as proposed by Newton had no such mechanistic basis. Instead, it involved mysterious “action at a distance,” in which the mass of one material body somehow transmitted a force through empty space attracting the mass of another material body without any physical contact between the two. Thus, Newton attributed—as we do today—the tidal action in the earth’s oceans to the movement of the moon as it orbited around the earth, even though the moon and the earth do not have any direct physical contact.
