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> Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton. It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like i
by david927 5y ago
> Imagine that nobody figured out the truth about gravity until Newton.
It was only one hundred or so years between Copernicus and Newton. And it looks like in that time Hooke and possibly others figured out that the movement of the new planetary model was because of gravity but it was Newton who mathematically proved it. That's pretty fast, really.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThey were too busy not dying of starvation to think about gravity.
- wolverine876 5y ago> That's pretty fast, really. Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out.
- david927 5y agoYou know that Newton didn't "discover gravity," right? He discovered how it explained planetary motion. And it's not fair to start the clock before we got the heliocentric theory (although Aristarchus of Samos gets an honorable mention).
- wolverine876 5y agoAs I said, I'm simplifying a great deal. I imagine people before Newton noticed that if you don't hold things up, they fall.
- david927 5y ago> Our ancestors 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out. Newton had to invent calculus to make the proof. You're not simplifying anything; you just got confused. And that's ok, honestly. There is literally not a person on this planet, now or ever, who didn't have holes in their knowledge or had something confused. It happens.
- hutzlibu 5y agoCome on, you know what he meant. Newton was the first to discover the laws of gravity, even though we still do not understand how gravity works and even though primitive animals can "discover" gravity.
- david927 5y agoWhat he said: not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out. What I said: what Newton formulated was not “things fall down”. And you’re taking the time to correct.. me?
- Talanes 5y agoThe tone implies that you think the first statement is wrong in some way, but it's still not clear why. Their comment was bring it back around to the original topic of the thread: the entire scope of homo sapiens sapiens existence and how long it took us to figure things out in relation to that. You're trying to limit the scope to just the time period where the rest of the necessary knowledge had been discovered, while everyone else is counting the discovery of that background knowledge as part of the process.
- Igelau 5y agoBabies like to play that game where they'll drop a spoon or something from their highchair as many times as you'll keep handing it to them. I like to call this "gravity testing".
- Digit-Al 5y agoMost parents like to call it "patience testing" :-)
- Telemakhos 5y agoThe Orphics had a heliocentric model of the universe before Aristarchus; in fact, the Derveni Papyrus, one of the oldest witnesses to Orphic thought, is actually a commentary on Orphic literature that interprets it all as physical allegory. Only Dionysus knows where the Orphics got that stuff, along with what we now call astrology: from the Phoenicians perhaps? Someone synthesizing Babylonian and Egyptian observations?
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- nobody9999 5y ago>Pretty fast if you start the clock at Copernicus, not so fast if you start it 200,000 years ago when our first ancestors had the brains to figure it out. Until the invention of writing, all knowledge was conveyed via oral traditions. As such, the work of Copernicus and Newton would have been impossible for the humans of 10-15,000 years ago, since both required both recorded knowledge and thinking about planetary bodies as well as centuries of recorded planetary movements. Without the benefit of recorded history of science, technology and the natural world, those folks would never have been able to accomplish their good works, as Newton himself (as well as many others prior to him) put forward[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
- yongjik 5y agoWhen you think about it, the amount of necessary prior knowledge is massive. You have to know that planets have an elliptical orbit. Except for Mercury, all five classically known planets (and the Earth) have eccentricity of only a few percents (and Mercury is pretty hard to observe), so you need someone (that is, Tycho Brahe) who could spend years looking at the night sky, recording the precise location of each planet, enough math for someone to match it to an elliptical orbit observed from another (= Earth's) elliptical orbit, and a society that can support such a "useless" hobby.
- wolverine876 5y agoSomeone else brought up planetary orbits as a prerequisite. Is there no other way to work out the laws of gravity? Again, we're talking about 200,000 years. But yes, there's the larger point that Newton also needed mathematics and other things. And the laws of gravity might not be the perfect example of my point, but my point isn't about Newton or gravity.
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- simonh 5y agoI think there's no other way. You have to observe the fact that the attractive force obeys the inverse square law. That's not measurable with experiments here on earth without extremely advanced modern instruments, so that makes it's effects only really observable on the motion of astronomical bodies. Historically this was the observation that orbits follow elliptical paths. Absent that you'd need some other observation that would lead you to the same conclusion.
- wolverine876 5y agoVery insightful hypothesis, thank you.
- HeckFeck 5y agoI often wonder how close the ancients were to all the knowledge we take for granted. So much lost forever in all those burned libraries.
- wolverine876 5y agoYou can see societies that lack the knowledge even today. You can see that even in 'scientific' societies, many people lack that knowledge ...