Cruise your radio dial today and try to nd any popular song that |
would have been imaginable without Louis Armstrong. By introduc- |
ing solo improvisation into jazz, Armstrong took apart the jigsaw puzzle of popular music and t the pieces back together in a dif- ferent way. In the same way, Newton reassembled our view of the universe. Consider the titles of some recent physics books written for the general reader: The God Particle, Dreams of a Final The- ory. When the subatomic particle called the neutrino was recently proven for the rst time to have mass, specialists in cosmology be- gan discussing seriously what e ect this would have on calculations of the ultimate fate of the universe: would the neutrinos’ mass cause enough extra gravitational attraction to make the universe eventu- ally stop expanding and fall back together? Without Newton, such attempts at universal understanding would not merely have seemed a little pretentious, they simply would not have occurred to anyone. |
a / Johannes Kepler found a mathematical description of the motion of the planets, which led to Newton’s theory of gravity. |
This chapter is about Newton’s theory of gravity, which he used |
to explain the motion of the planets as they orbited the sun. Whereas |