To be fair, if you don't know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.
I think the more interesting thing is that a moving object will keep moving at constant speed unless a force is applied to it.
Like, um, the friction against the ground that the object is moving on. Isaac Newton observed commonplace phenomena then figured out the scientific reasoning behind the phenomena then put it all into words that we now quote as time-tested & true scientific dogma.
It was his math contributions people liked. Particularly his invention of calculus which could be used to solve a plethora of unsolved math problems. It's not because he said things fell.
On the other hand, spontaneous generation was very much still a thing at this point, so a lot of the basic rules of the world around us were really not worked out yet
I love that Newton had to invent calculus twice, because he was trying to teach it to someone else and they weren't getting it, so Isaac got frustrated and threw the only copy of his notes into the lit fireplace.
It turned out in his favour, because he then discovered that if you throw things in a fire, they burn.
TBF, that's actually a pretty profound insight.
Most, if not all, of us take certain concepts for granted until someone points out that it's more complex than we realise. Examples like Dark Energy & Matter, entropy, the placebo effect, the nature of mathematical objects, etc. are proof of this.
we also live in a world which has now known that premise and used it for 300 years, which makes it seem much more trivial than it was at the time.
It's not unless. It's until, which has more implications.
That's not Newton's contribution. Aristotle already said that an object only moves if a force acts upon it.
In fairness, at the time, many Europeans believed in faries nd other creatures, including these guys:
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/720095/view/mythical-horned-beasts-17th-century
So, not much has changed then....
"Your Grace, he has sinned against the church!"
If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.
Xenophon of Athens: he who talks shit will therefore get hit.
I prefer the biblical version:
"Hear ye, hear ye, if he who is not humbled before the Lord shall fucketh around, surely I tell you that he shall findeth out."
-DudeYou'reOntoMe 33:16 (Lebron James version)
This is so bad.
This actually wasn’t obvious at all. If I let go of an apple in midair, it falls. Why? Nothing appeared to be acting on it. The “common sense” explanation is that things naturally fall. Their “default” action is to move toward the earth. That’s why there are explanations from ancient myths about the sun and stars being “hung” in the sky. Cause otherwise, they would fall to earth too, right? Everything does.
What Newton did was to show that there is a force acting on the apple, and without that force, it wouldn’t move. He also came up with an equation that could predict what that force would be between any two objects at any distance, and what motion or lack of motion would result from that force.
Can someone put this guy next to monkey Jesus?
its like how the idea of putting one number in front of another for a tens or hundreds figure seems so obvious but took forever to invent
Yeah, it really feels like every toddler figures this out for themselves. He just said it succinctly.
how many memes came from Peruvian television
Two. This one and the one of him looking awkward.
