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Even before Sir Isaac Newton was born, roughly 8 out of every 23 people had already

noticed that when they jumped out of bed, their feet went to the floor, and that when

they dropped something, it fell to the ground. Gravity was already quite universally known,

whether or not that's what anybody called it, and it didn't need to be discovered.

All Newton did was to accurately describe how it works. He published his explanation in 1690.

But Newton's breakthrough was to realise that gravity is not just that well known constant force that gives people their weight, but it also acts between the Sun and the planets. The force between two objects is proportional to their masses and inversely to the square of the distance between them. Nobody jumping out of bed could ever have worked that one out.

What the discovery allowed Newton to do was to explain how the planets move in elliptical orbits under the force of gravity, all the details. It allowed the mass of the Sun and planets to be calculated and it confirmed that the planets all move in stable orbits so that we don't have to worry about falling into the Sun ever - not for a couple billion years anyway.

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10y ago

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