The question of why things fall has puzzled our species since we crawled out from the darkness of our primitive ignorance. Aristotle was the first to offer a serious theory. He proposed that each of the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) had a natural place to which it innately wanted to return. Fire and air rise because their place is in the heavens, whereas earth and water return to the Earth.
Aristotelian philosophy had such a profound impact on human thought that this view prevailed for nearly 2,000 years. Only with the Renaissance and the ideas of Kepler and Galileo was it finally challenged; and only by standing on the shoulders of these giants was Isaac Newton able to make probably the greatest intellectual leap ever. It is often assumed that with the publication of his Principia, the curtain was pulled back and the great mysteries of the universe were reduced to a trick. Gravity, and by extension the motion of everything in the universe, could be described by a simple equation.
But this is a mistake. What Newton did, rather, was emphasise a distinction first made by Descartes, namely between what we know and what we understand. That gravity should be ‘innate and act, seemingly without any mediation, over great distance within a vacuum’ was, to Newton, ‘so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it’.
These words of Newton end the introduction of the theoretical physicist Claudia de Rham’s The Beauty of Falling, which begins with a description of gravity as ‘such a familiar concept, present in every language and culture, yet one that scientists have struggled to understand for millenia’.
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