Insights from the ScienceEtonnante episode “Du canon à la Lune : la découverte de la gravité”, published December 5, 2025.
Isaac Newton’s breakthrough was not the apocryphal falling apple, but a thought experiment involving a cannon. By visualizing how a projectile could orbit Earth if fired fast enough, he unified terrestrial ballistics with celestial mechanics, proving that the Moon is essentially a falling cannonball governed by the same inverse-square law of gravity.
Topics: gravity, Newton, Galileo, physics, orbital mechanics