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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index L > Category: Law Of Gravity

Law Of Gravity Quotes (16 quotes)

Children are told that an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and he was led to state the law of gravity. This, of course, is pure foolishness. What Newton discovered was that any two particles in the universe attract each other with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This is not learned from a falling apple, but by observing quantities of data and developing a mathematical theory that can be verified by additional data. Data gathered by Galileo on falling bodies and by Johannes Kepler on motions of the planets were invaluable aids to Newton. Unfortunately, such false impressions about science are not universally outgrown like the Santa Claus myth, and some people who don’t study much science go to their graves thinking that the human race took until the mid-seventeenth century to notice that objects fall.
In How to Tell the Liars from the Statisticians (1983), 127.
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From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Concluding paragraph in The Origin of Species (1859), 490. In the second edition, Darwin changed “breathed” to “breathed by the Creator”.
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In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the Method of approximating series & the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Bionomial into such a series. The same year in May I found the method of Tangents of Gregory & Slusius, & in November had the direct method of fluxions & the next year in January had the Theory of Colours & in May following I had entrance into ye inverse method of fluxions. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to ye orb of the Moon & (having found out how to estimate the force with wch [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere) from Keplers rule of the periodic times of the Planets being in sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces wch keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about wch they revolve: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, & found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665-1666. For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks & Philosophy more then than at any time since.
Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), 143.
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In the celestial spaces above the Earth’s atmosphere; in which spaces, where there is no air to resist their motions, all bodies will move with the greatest freedom; and the Planets and Comets will constantly pursue their revolutions in orbits … by the mere laws of gravity.
In 'General Scholium' from The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1729), Vol. 2, Book 3, 388.
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Is it not true that the doctrine of attraction and gravity has done nothing but astonish our imagination? Is it not true that all chemical discoveries have done only the same?
Letter to Jean le Rond D'Alembert (7 Jan 1768). Collected in Correspondence: Letters Between Frederick II and M. D’Alembert (1789), 79, as translated by Thomas Holcroft.
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It seems as though no laws, not even fairly old ones, can safely be regarded as unassailable. The force of gravity, which we have always ascribed to the “pull of the earth,” was reinterpreted the other day by a scientist who says that when we fall it is not earth pulling us, it is heaven pushing us. This blasts the rock on which we sit. If science can do a rightabout-face on a thing as fundamental as gravity, maybe Newton was a sucker not to have just eaten the apple.
In 'Talk of the Town,', The New Yorker (3 Apr 1937). As cited in Martha White (ed.), In the Words of E.B. White (2011), 175.
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People do more talking than listening: under the law of gravity, it takes more energy to shut one's mouth than to open it.
Anonymous
In Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips and Quotes, 267.
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Artificial Intelligence quote: twas an apple fell from a tree
Perhaps ’twas an apple fell from a tree,
That inspired young Isaac, to see.
  The law of gravity it sparked,
  A breakthrough, it marked,
And physics was changed, eternally!
Text tweaked from an original limerick by Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT. Newton image imagined by AI: midjourney. Both had prompts formed by Webmaster. (10 Feb 2023). The original limerick as output by AI was: “There was an apple, plucked from a tree,/That inspired Sir Isaac, to see,/The laws of motion it sparked,/A breakthrough, with a mark,/And physics was changed, eternally!” Webmaster made some edits for accuracy. “Perhaps 'twas…” since the falling apple story is likely just myth. Newton was indeed young at the time; not yet “Sir”. He realized that gravity crucially affects both a falling apple and the Moon falling around in orbit. The words “it marked” scan better. The rhyming, and clever final line are entirely from AI.
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Simple as the law of gravity now appears, and beautifully in accordance with all the observations of past and of present times, consider what it has cost of intellectual study. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, all the great names which have exalted the character of man, by carrying out trains of reasoning unparalleled in every other science; these, and a host of others, each of whom might have been the Newton of another field, have all labored to work out, the consequences which resulted from that single law which he discovered. All that the human mind has produced—the brightest in genius, the most persevering in application, has been lavished on the details of the law of gravity.
in The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (1838), 57.
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Some men who call themselves pessimists because they cannot read good into the operations of nature forget that they cannot read evil. In morals the law of competition no more justifies personal, official, or national selfishness or brutality than the law of gravity justifies the shooting of a bird.
…...
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The child which overbalances itself in learning to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity.
In ‘Experimental Legislation’, Popular Science (Apr 1880), 16, 754.
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The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche.
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1883 to October 1883 (1883), 26, 539.
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The motions of the Comets are exceeding regular, are govern’d by the same laws with the motions of the Planets,… with very eccentric motions through all parts of the heavens indifferently.
In 'General Scholium' from The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1729), Vol. 2, Book 3, 387.
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Thus far I have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the force of gravity, but I have not yet assigned a cause to gravity. Indeed, this force arises from some cause that penetrates as far as the centers of the sun and planets without any diminution of its power to act, and that acts not in proportion to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles on which it acts (as mechanical causes are wont to do) but in proportion to the quantity of solid matter, and whose action is extended everywhere to immense distances, always decreasing as the squares of the distances.
The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999), General Scholium, 943.
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Thus the system of the world only oscillates around a mean state from which it never departs except by a very small quantity. By virtue of its constitution and the law of gravity, it enjoys a stability that can be destroyed only by foreign causes, and we are certain that their action is undetectable from the time of the most ancient observations until our own day. This stability in the system of the world, which assures its duration, is one of the most notable among all phenomena, in that it exhibits in the heavens the same intention to maintain order in the universe that nature has so admirably observed on earth for the sake of preserving individuals and perpetuating species.
'Sur l'Équation Séculaire de la Lune' (1786, published 1788). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 11, 248-9, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 145.
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Without tracing back to the Tower of Babel, one can observe that the very idea of building a very tall tower has long haunted human imagination. That kind of victory over the formidable law of gravity that tethers man to the ground has always appeared to him a symbol of the force and the challenges overcome.
From the original French, “Sans remonter à la Tour de Babel, on peut observer que l’idée même de la construction d’une tour de très grande hauteur a depuis longtemps hanté l'imagination des hommes. Celle sorte de victoire sur cette terrible loi de la pesanteur qui attache l’homme au sol lui a toujours paru un symbole de la force et des difficultés vaincues.” First sentences of Chap. 1, in Travaux Scientifiques Exécutés à la Tour de 300 Mètres de 1889 à 1900 (1900), 1. English translation by Webmaster using online resources.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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