32 Laws of Motion
for common truths and for errors. Newton was amazingly good at sifting through this mountain of ideas for the few that held truth.
Newton was not much of an experimenter. He thought about problems, conducting
mind experiments as did Einstein. Newton thought about things intently for a long time until he formed the answers he needed. In his own words, he “kept the subject constantly before him and waited until the first dawnings opened little by little into full light.”
Solving the mystery of the forces that create motion quickly became an obsession with
Newton. He focused his attention on Galileo’s laws of falling bodies and on Kepler’s laws
about the motion of planets. He often went without sleep or food, to the edge of physical
breakdown.
Newton developed his three laws of motion in early 1666. They were the essential
building blocks for his creation of calculus and his discovery of gravity. However, Newton
did not publish these laws until Halley coaxed him to write Principia 20 years later.
In 1684 Jean Picard produced the first accurate figures for the size and mass of Earth.
This finally gave Newton the numbers he needed to prove that his laws of motion combined
with his equation for gravity correctly predicted the actual orbits of the planets. Even after
completing this mathematical proof, Newton only published Principia in 1687 because
Halley begged and cajoled him to—mostly because Robert Hooke claimed (falsely) to have
developed universal laws of motion himself. Principia became one of the most revered and
most used publications in the history of science.
Fun Facts: For every motion, there is a force. Gary Hardwick of
Carlsbad, California, created enough force to set a skateboard speed record (standing position) of 100.66 km/h (62.55 mph) at Fountain Hills,
Arizona, on September 26, 1998.
More to Explore
Boorstin, Daniel. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and
Himself. New York: Random House, 1997.
Christianson, Gale. Isaac Newton and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
Gale, Christeanson. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times. New
York: Collier Macmillan, 1994.
Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Vintage, 2004.
Maury, Jean. Newton: The Father of Modern Astronomy. New York: Harry Abrams,
1996.
Peteson, Ivars. Newton’s Clock. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995.
Westfall, Richard. The Life of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Jackson, TN: Perseus Books, 1999.