Newton’s Laws of Motion

Newton¡¯s Laws of Motion

¡°If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on

the shoulders of giants.¡±

-Sir Isaac Newton

Newton¡¯s Law of Universal Gravitation

Newton¡¯s Law of Universal Gravitation

In 1666, some 45 years after Kepler did his work, 24-year-old

Isaac Newton used mathematics to show that if the path of a

planet were an ellipse, then the magnitude of the force, F, on

the planet must vary inversely with the square of the distance

between the center of the planet and the center of the sun.

Newton wrote that the sight of a falling apple made him think

about the problem of the motion of the planets.

He recognized that the apple fell straight down because Earth

attracted it.

Newton was so confident that the laws governing motion on

Earth would work anywhere in the universe that he assumed

that the same force of attraction would act between any two

masses, mA and mB.

Any two objects attract each other with a gravitational force,

proportional to the product of their masses and inversely

proportional to the square of the distance between them.

The force acts in the direction of the line connecting the

centers of the masses.

Newton¡¯s Law of Universal Gravitation

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