• Dave@lemmy.nz
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    8 months ago

    To be fair, if you don’t know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.

    • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Like, um, the friction against the ground that the object is moving on. Isaac Newton observed commonplace phenomena then figured out the scientific reasoning behind the phenomena then put it all into words that we now quote as time-tested & true scientific dogma.

  • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    It was his math contributions people liked. Particularly his invention of calculus which could be used to solve a plethora of unsolved math problems. It’s not because he said things fell.

  • Einar@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    TBF, that’s actually a pretty profound insight.

    Most, if not all, of us take certain concepts for granted until someone points out that it’s more complex than we realise. Examples like Dark Energy & Matter, entropy, the placebo effect, the nature of mathematical objects, etc. are proof of this.

    • niartenyaw@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      we also live in a world which has now known that premise and used it for 300 years, which makes it seem much more trivial than it was at the time.

  • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    That’s not Newton’s contribution. Aristotle already said that an object only moves if a force acts upon it.

      • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com
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        8 months ago

        Yeah interesting thought there actually. In absolute numbers I wager more people believe in mythical beings of some form today in Europe than the 1700s. But as a share of the total population it’s going to be a lot lower, of course.

        • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          Is it going to be a lower percentage of the total population though? There’s a lot about ye olde days that kinda gets generalised, and hand-waved. Like people’s ability to read in medieval times. Sure it wasn’t as prevalent as today, but reading was probably a lot more common than most people think.

          As for belief in mythical beings, who knows, religious belief was a lot stronger in the 1700s, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everyone believed in the fae.

      • dudinax@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        Gibson said “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

        The future was there with Newton, but it’s still not evenly distributed 400 years later.

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Gödel: “Using logic ive shown that there will always be true statements can not be proven/falsifiable within any formal system of logic”

    Mathematicians:

    • WldFyre@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Is that one as intuitive, though? I haven’t ever heard an intuitive explanation for it.

    • splatt9990@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      If anything was going to get Newton in trouble with the Church, it would have been his lifelong obsession with alchemy, not his three laws.

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This actually wasn’t obvious at all. If I let go of an apple in midair, it falls. Why? Nothing appeared to be acting on it. The “common sense” explanation is that things naturally fall. Their “default” action is to move toward the earth. That’s why there are explanations from ancient myths about the sun and stars being “hung” in the sky. Cause otherwise, they would fall to earth too, right? Everything does.

    What Newton did was to show that there is a force acting on the apple, and without that force, it wouldn’t move. He also came up with an equation that could predict what that force would be between any two objects at any distance, and what motion or lack of motion would result from that force.

    • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      I prefer the biblical version:

      “Hear ye, hear ye, if he who is not humbled before the Lord shall fucketh around, surely I tell you that he shall findeth out.”

      -DudeYou’reOntoMe 33:16 (Lebron James version)

  • Jeom@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    its like how the idea of putting one number in front of another for a tens or hundreds figure seems so obvious but took forever to invent

  • MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Yeah, it really feels like every toddler figures this out for themselves. He just said it succinctly.