"Theory of gravitation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... If Galileo had not happened to be walking in a garden in Florence where certain workmen asked him a question about a pump, he would not, according to Helvetius, have discovered the weight of the atmosphere. It was the fall of the apple which gave Newton his theory of gravitation. Such puerilities as these disgust us in the book; yet the theory that greatness is but the result of an inconsiderable accident, was not unnatural in one who had probably hit on an idea which struck him ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... state of modern times—such our modern friendship; and since, gentle reader, it is so, who, possessing one grain of common sense, would not duly attend to the theory of gravitation, by taking care of a friend while he has him, especially if he be so portable as to be placed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... that the earth was the centre of the solar system. But this deep-set theoretic notion had to give way, and the helio-centric theory may, in its turn, have to give way also. This is just as reasonable as the first argument. Wherein consists the strength of the present theory of gravitation? Solely in its competence to account for all the phenomena of the solar system. Wherein consists the strength of the theory of undulation? Solely in its competence to disentangle and explain phenomena a hundred-fold more complex than those of the solar system. Accept if you will the scepticism ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... irregularities in the unseen Neptune. In all these cases, and in many others which might be mentioned, the mathematician has been stimulated by the laudable anxiety to clear away some blemish from the theory of gravitation throughout the system. The blemish was seen to exist before its removal was suggested. In that application of mathematics with which we have been concerned in these lectures the call for the mathematician has been of quite a different ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... covered by the present book: for example, the Copernican theory of the solar system, the true doctrine of planetary motions, the laws of motion, the theory of the circulation of the blood, and the Newtonian theory of gravitation. The labors of the investigators of the early decades of the eighteenth century, terminating with Franklin's discovery of the nature of lightning and with the Linnaean classification of plants and animals, bring us to the close of our second great epoch; or, to put it otherwise, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... theory. Bacon, Descartes and Locke made their way extremely slowly and only after a long time; as the reader may see by d'Alembert's celebrated Preface to the Encyclopedia. Newton was not more successful; and this is sufficiently proved by the bitterness and contempt with which Leibnitz attacked his theory of gravitation in the controversy with Clarke.[1] Although Newton lived for almost forty years after the appearance of the Principia, his teaching was, when he died, only to some extent accepted in his own country, whilst outside England he counted scarcely ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... move in orbits which cannot be sensibly discriminated from parabolae, and any body whose orbit is of this character can only be seen at a single apparition. The theory of gravitation, though it admits the parabola as a possible orbit for a comet, does not assert that the path must necessarily be of this type. We have pointed out that this curve is only a very extreme type of ellipse, and it ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Neptune, the outermost known planet of the solar system. It was a rich reward to the watchers of the sky when this new planet swam into their ken. This discovery was hailed by astronomers as "the most conspicuous triumph of the theory of gravitation." Long after Copernicus even, the genius of philosophers was slow to grasp the full conception of a spherical earth and its relations with the heavenly bodies as presented by him. So it was also with the final acceptance of Newton's demonstration of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne |
