Isaac Newton discovered it. If you don't like the word "Newton", then let's say Isaac discovered it. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayGravity is a unique look into the history of human thought. Never before Isaac Newton, no one in his wildest dreams had thought that there could be a single mathematical law that united the celestial bodies and the earth and quantitatively described the tides, the seasonal changes, the variations in the size of the moon, the movement of comets… the list is endless. ., all expressed in a simple mathematical package, which you can use to predict a HUGE class of phenomena with incredible accuracy! Never before had anything remotely similar happened! From almost total nothingness, Isaac Newton single-handedly changed the face of knowledge forever. This was completely new and had no precedence. That material bodies can influence each other at a distance is a much older thought. Even older than Bhaskara! These speculations had nothing to do with science or gravity. People, before the time of Newton or Galileo, had no/foggy understanding of causality. None of their ideas or thoughts were motivated by causal requirements. These were various random/astrological speculations without any empirical basis. For example, in the 6th century, a philosopher (probably 'Dionysius the Areopagite (pseudo)') wrote something like this: 'All bodies should attract every other body since they are all filled with the love of God.' Would you say he discovered gravity? Even if you do, I ask what value did it add? Can the orbit of a comet be calculated? Does it predict seasonal changes? Can you explain why the orbits of celestial bodies are conic sections? You can't. It's useless. It adds no value to knowledge. Newton's motivation came from a scientific need. It was supposed to explain Kepler's laws of planetary motion. People, real experts, were grappling with the problem. Descartes proposed his model of the vortex. But he didn't succeed. Christiaan Huygens made some changes. But once again he failed. Newton demonstrated that the solar system problem was a central force problem. The problems of the central force were known to then specialists such as Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke or Isaac Barrow. But since differential calculus had not been discovered then, these problems were extremely difficult to solve. Isaac Newton invented the entire branch of calculus to solve these central force problems (well, Leibniz did it independently too)! He then discovered that if the force field were inversely squared the orbit would be a conic section! During a casual discussion with Halley, Newton informed him of all this. When Halley asked Newton what the orbit of a particle would be according to the inverse square force law, satisfying certain energy conditions, Newton casually replied "an ellipse". A surprised Halley asked Newton, "how do you know?" Once again came the random response “I calculated it”! No guesswork, no guesswork! Halley, extremely stunned, immediately asked Newton to show him the proof. Newton, for some time, searched his tables and drawers but found nothing. Halley, completely amazed, wondered: "here is a man, he has solved the ancient mystery of the solar system, he has lost his notebook!" Newton then promised Halley to send the proof by performing the calculations again from scratch and so he did. Most importantly, Isaac Newton postulated the universality of gravity. This was perhaps the most crucial insight. The same force that makes the solar system work is responsible for apples falling. The laws"..