"Hooke is amazing in the number, the variety and the ingenuity of his experiments as well as for his extraordinary fertility in hypothesis. He followed Bacon in his attempt to demonstrate that the effects of gravity on a body must diminish as the body was sunk into the bowels of the earth. He sought to discover how far the effects were altered at great heights or in the region of the equator; and he threw light on the problem by observations and experiments on the pendulum. From the globular shapes of the heavenly bodies and the stable conformations of the ridges on the moon he deduced that the moon and the planets had gravity; and by 1666 he saw the motion of a comet (for example) as incurvated by the pull of the sun... and suggested that the motion of the planets might be explicable on the kind of principles that account for the motion of a pendulum. In 1674 he was suggesting that by this route one could arrive at a mechanical system of the planets which would be "the true perfection of astronomy." He pointed out that... account must be taken of the force which all heavenly bodies must be presumed to be exerting on one another."
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Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke
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Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke (July 18, 1635 – March 3, 1703) was an English polymath, to include inventor, microscopist, architect, surveyor, professor of geometry, natural philosopher and chemist. He was the first Curator of Experiments for the and is noted for Hooke's law, his contributions to the development of the vacuum pump, the improved accuracy of the portable watch through the invention of the balance spring, for his microscopy, as author and illustrator of Micrographia, being the first to use the term
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