this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
499 points (97.5% liked)
memes
10450 readers
3826 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This wasn’t at all obvious. Hold a pencil out with your hand. Let go. Did the pencil just stay there in midair?
The fact that things fall because earth imparts an invisible force on everything around us, and that in fact, every massive object imparts that same invisible force on everything else around it, was pretty revolutionary.
It’s hard to overstate how unintuitive this would be to someone who had grown up at that time. Believing that something sufficiently far from earth would just float around and not fall was probably too much for most people at the time.
It's also a bit incomplete because he also said a object keeps the same speed, even if it's not zero (not moving). And the speed also has to keep the same direction. This does explain a lot about gravity, orbits etc...
And that's only the first law, it's a premise to the other even more helpful laws.
He also said definitely, not probably.