Question 19
Both Aristotle and Galileo studied the movements of falling objects, but it was Brahmagupta who first described gravity. Brahmagupta was a mathematician and astronomer in India. He wrote that every object would fall to the ground due to Earth’s force of attraction. About 1000 years later, in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton (Figure 10.11) published the Law of Universal Gravitation. “If I have seen further,” Isaac Newton wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” What did he mean by this?
