JohnMax's BLOG

British mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton is said to have been inspired to study gravity when he saw and apple fall from a tree sometime around 1666. Although the story is entrenched in scientific and popular lore, no such thing seems to have happened.

   Newton's study of gravity was largely inspired by the findings of the French thinker Rene Descartes and German astronomer Johannes Kepler. It culminated in 1687 with the publication of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy").

   The Principia set forth innovative theries of physics and celestial mechanics, including Newton's law of universal gravitation, which states that any two objects attract each other with a force directly propotional to the product of thrie masses and inversely propotional to the square of the distance between them.