This is damn interesting.

In the late 17th century.

In the late 17th century, natural philosopher Isaac Newton was deeply uneasy with a new scientific theory that

was gaining currency in Europe. Universal gravitation. In correspondence with a scientific

contemporary, Newton complained that it was, quote, an absurdity to suppose that, quote,

one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum.

The scientist who proposed this preposterous theory was Isaac Newton.

He first articulated the idea in his widely acclaimed magnum opus, Principia, wherein he explained,

I have not yet been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from

phenomena, and I feign no hypotheses. It is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according

to the laws I have explained. Newton proposed that celestial bodies were not the sole

sources of gravity in the universe. Rather, all matter attracts all other matter with a force that

corresponds to mass and diminishes rapidly with distance. He had been studying the motions

of the six known planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. And by expanding

upon the laws of planetary motion developed by Johannes Kepler about eight decades earlier,

he arrived in an equation for gravitational force

that seemed to match decades of data. Newton found that the attractive force between two objects

is the product of their masses, divided by the square of the distance between them, multiplied

by the gravitational constant. The gravitational constant is a zero, followed by a decimal,

ten more zeros than 667408.

But this is only an approximation.

Humanity may never know the precise value because it is impossible to isolate any measuring apparatus from all of the gravity in the universe.

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