Gravity

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Dr. Ryan Stone
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Matt Kowalski
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aprile 10, 2026

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aprile 10, 2026

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"However commodious the term attraction may be, to avoid an useless and tedious circumlocution, yet because it was used by the school-men to cover their ignorance, the adversaries of Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy have taken an unjust handle from his use of this term, after all his precautions, to depreciate and even ridicule his doctrines; by which they only convince us that they neither understand them, nor have impartially and duly considered them. Mr. Leibnitz made use of this same term, in the same sense with Sir Isaac Newton, before he set up in opposition to him; and it is often to be met with in the writings of the most accurate philosophers, who have used it without always guarding against the abuse of it, as he has done. A term of art has been often employed by crafty men, with too much success, to raise a dislike against their opponents, and mislead the unwary, and to disgust them from enquiring into the truth; but such disingenuity is unworthy of philosophers. No writer hath appeared against Sir Isaac Newton, of late, by whom this argument, tho' altogether groundless, is not insisted on at great length; and sometimes adorned with the embellishments of wit and humour; but if the reader will take the trouble to compare their descriptions with Sir Isaac Newtons own account, he will easily perceive how little it was minded by them; and that the sum of all their art and skill amounts to this only, that they were able to expose a creature of their own imagination. Possibly some unskilful men may have fancied that bodies might attract each other by some charm or unknown virtue, without being impelled or acted upon by other bodies, or by any other powers of whatever kind; and some may have imagined that a mutual tendency may be essential to matter, tho' this is directly contrary to the inertia of body described above; but surely Sir Isaac Newton has given no ground for charging him with either of these opinions: he has plainly signified that he thought that those powers arose from the impulses of a subtile ætherial medium that is diffused over the universe, and penetrates the pores of grosser bodies. It appears from his letters to Mr. Boyle that this was his opinion early; and if he did not publish it sooner, it proceeded from hence only, that he found he was not able from experiment and observation to give a satisfactory account of this medium, and the manner of its operation, in producing the chief phænomena of nature."

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"So may the gravitating attraction of the earth be caused by the continual condensation of some other such like ethereal spirit, not of the main body of phlegmatic ether, but of something very thinly and subtilely diffused through it, perhaps of an unctuous or gummy, tenacious, and springy nature, and bearing much of the same relation to ether, which the vital aereal spirit, requisite for the conservation of flame and vital motions, does to air. For, if such an ethereal spirit may be condensed in fermenting or burning bodies, or otherwise coagulated in the pores of the earth and water, into some kind of humid active matter, for the continual uses of nature, adhering to the sides of those pores, after the manner that vapours condense on the sides of a vessel; the vast body of the earth, which may be every where to the very centre in perpetual working, may continually condense so much of this spirit, as to cause it from above to descend with great celerity for a supply; in which descent it may bear down with it the bodies it pervades, with force proportional to the superficies of all their parts it acts upon; nature making a circulation by the slow ascent of as much matter out of the bowels of the earth in an aereal form, which for a time constitutes the atmosphere; but being continually buoyed up by a new air, exhalations and vapours rising underneath, at length, (some part of the vapours which return in rain excepted,) vanishes again into the ethereal spaces, and there perhaps in time relents, and is attenuated into its first principle: for nature is a perpetual worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, and volatile out of fixed, subtile out of gross, and gross out of subtile; some things to ascend, and make the upper terrestrial juices, rivers, and atmosphere; and by consequence others to descend for a requital to the former."

- Gravity

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"The truth is, my notions about things of this kind are so indigested, that I am not well satisfied myself in them; and what I am not satisfied in, I can scarce esteem to fit to be communicated to others; especially in natural philosophy, where there is no end of fancying. But because I am indebted to you... I could not forbear to take the opportunity of conveying this to you... I shall set down one conjecture more... it is about the cause of gravity. For this end I will suppose aether to consist of parts differing from one another in subtilty by indefinite degrees; that in the pores of bodies there is less of the grosser aether, in proportion to the finer, than in open spaces; and consequently, that in the great body of the earth there is much less of the grosser aether, in proportion to the finer, than in the regions of the air; and that yet the grosser aether in the air affects the upper regions of the earth, and the finer aether in the earth the lower regions of the air, in such a manner, that from the top of the air to the surface of the earth, and again from the surface of the earth to the centre thereof, the aether is insensibly finer and finer. Imagine now any body suspended in the air, or lying on the earth, and the aether being by the hypothesis grosser in the pores, which are in the upper parts of the body, than in those which are in its lower parts, and that grosser aether being less apt to be lodged in those pores than the finer aether below, it will endeavour to get out and give way to the finer aether below, which cannot be, without the bodies descending to make room above for it to go out into."

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"In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating Series and the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series. The same year in May I found the method of tangents of Gregory and Slusius, and in November had the direct method of Fluxions, and the next year in January had the Theory of Colours, and in May following I had entrance into the inverse method of Fluxions. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how to estimate the force with which [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler's Rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their orbs I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since. What Mr Hugens has published since about centrifugal forces I suppose he had before me. At length in the winter between the years 1676 and 1677 I found the Proposition that by a centrifugal force reciprocally as the square of the distance a Planet must revolve in an Ellipsis about the center of the force placed in the lower umbilicus of the Ellipsis and with a radius drawn to that center describe areas proportional to the times. And in the winter between the years 1683 and 1684 this Proposition with the Demonstration was entered in the Register book of the R. Society. And this is the first instance upon record of any Proposition in the higher Geometry found out by the method in dispute. In the year 1689 Mr Leibnitz, endeavouring to rival me, published a Demonstration of the same Proposition upon another supposition, but his Demonstration proved erroneous for want of skill in the method."

- Gravity

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