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Isaac Newton's apple tree at Woolsthorpe Manor [1] [2] represents the inspiration behind Sir Isaac Newton's theory of gravity.While the precise details of Newton's reminiscence (reported by several witnesses to whom Newton allegedly told the story) are impossible to verify, the significance of the event lies in its explanation of Newton's scientific thinking.
Before Newton's law of gravity, there were many theories explaining gravity. Philoshophers made observations about things falling down − and developed theories why they do – as early as Aristotle who thought that rocks fall to the ground because seeking the ground was an essential part of their nature.
Sir Isaac Newton (/ ˈ nj uː t ən /; 4 January [O.S. 25 December] 1643 – 31 March [O.S. 20 March] 1727) [a] was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. [5] Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. [6]
Newton's cannonball was a thought experiment Isaac Newton used to hypothesize that the force of gravity was universal, and it was the key force for planetary motion. It appeared in his posthumously published 1728 work De mundi systemate (also published in English as A Treatise of the System of the World ).
Based on the principle of relativity, Henri Poincaré (1905, 1906), Hermann Minkowski (1908), and Arnold Sommerfeld (1910) tried to modify Newton's theory and to establish a Lorentz invariant gravitational law, in which the speed of gravity is that of light. As in Lorentz's model, the value for the perihelion advance of Mercury was much too low.
Coulomb's law and Newton's law of universal gravitation are based on action at a distance. Historically, action at a distance was the earliest scientific model for gravity and electricity and it continues to be useful in many practical cases. In the 19th and 20th centuries, field models arose to explain these phenomena with more precision.
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Unification of theories about observable fundamental phenomena of nature is one of the primary goals of physics. [1] [2] [3] The two great unifications to date are Isaac Newton’s unification of gravity and astronomy, and James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electromagnetism; the latter has been further unified with the concept of electroweak interaction.