Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I’ve always wondered how Newton figured that the force acting on the moon is the same as the one that caused, I don’t know, the apple to fall on his head. Remember, back then, the Greek view of the universe prevailed: one set of laws on earth, another set for the heavens. So how did Newton hit upon a common law for entire universe? Carlo Rovelli answered that question in his page-turning history of physics, Reality is not What it Seems . He talks of Galileo who dropped a lot of objects and realized that their speed increases (during the early part of their fall). But he then noticed that the rate at which the speed of the falling object increases is constant: “Its value is approximately 9.8 meters per second.” Decades later, Newton imagined the earth having multiple moons, like Jupiter (something that Galileo had discovered). Newton assumed that one of those extra (and tiny) moons orbiting earth just above the mountain peaks. Newton wonders at what speed it would travel? ...

Sir Isaac Newton, he of the falling apple fame (and oh yeah, gravity too), is supposed to have said these famous lines as a sign of humility: “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Mario Livio pointed out in his book, Is God a Mathematician? , that those lines may just have been Newton’s way of saying that he owed absolutely nothing to one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, since Hooke was quite short! Then there’s Nick Selby, an upperclassman at Georgia Tech who told incoming freshmen during a memorable welcome speech recently (it’s gone viral on YouTube): “Our mission as students is NOT to follow in the footsteps of the astronauts, Nobel Prize Laureates, and president who graduated before us, but to EXCEED their footsteps, CRUSH the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand!” Continuing in the Obama vein of “Yes, we can”, Selby thundered: “If you want to change the world, you're at Georgia Tech, you can do that! If you want to build th...