To be fair, if you don’t know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.
Mystic forces surround us!
Clearly it’s buoyancy and something something equilibrium.
You mean luminiferous aether, right?
And that objects in motion will stay in motion, but our experience with friction tells us otherwise. Ask any kid and they’ll say from intuition that the object will stop
No one really understands anything about Physics until you hear Fenyman explain it.
This actually wasn’t obvious at all. If I let go of an apple in midair, it falls. Why? Nothing appeared to be acting on it. The “common sense” explanation is that things naturally fall. Their “default” action is to move toward the earth. That’s why there are explanations from ancient myths about the sun and stars being “hung” in the sky. Cause otherwise, they would fall to earth too, right? Everything does.
What Newton did was to show that there is a force acting on the apple, and without that force, it wouldn’t move. He also came up with an equation that could predict what that force would be between any two objects at any distance, and what motion or lack of motion would result from that force.
I think the more interesting thing is that a moving object will keep moving at constant speed unless a force is applied to it.
Like, um, the friction against the ground that the object is moving on. Isaac Newton observed commonplace phenomena then figured out the scientific reasoning behind the phenomena then put it all into words that we now quote as time-tested & true scientific dogma.
Then Einstein comes in and says everything is moving at a constant spacetime velocity, and that friction isn’t a real force.
Friction is real, it’s the “force” of gravity that is an illusion.
In fairness, at the time, many Europeans believed in faries and other creatures, including these guys:
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/720095/view/mythical-horned-beasts-17th-century
It was his math contributions people liked. Particularly his invention of calculus which could be used to solve a plethora of unsolved math problems. It’s not because he said things fell.
I love that Newton had to invent calculus twice, because he was trying to teach it to someone else and they weren’t getting it, so Isaac got frustrated and threw the only copy of his notes into the lit fireplace.
TBF, that’s actually a pretty profound insight.
Most, if not all, of us take certain concepts for granted until someone points out that it’s more complex than we realise. Examples like Dark Energy & Matter, entropy, the placebo effect, the nature of mathematical objects, etc. are proof of this.
we also live in a world which has now known that premise and used it for 300 years, which makes it seem much more trivial than it was at the time.
![[gasp]](https://i.imgur.com/GyNGamC.png){kind=link}