This actually wasn’t obvious at all. If I let go of an apple in midair, it falls. Why? Nothing appeared to be acting on it. The “common sense” explanation is that things naturally fall. Their “default” action is to move toward the earth. That’s why there are explanations from ancient myths about the sun and stars being “hung” in the sky. Cause otherwise, they would fall to earth too, right? Everything does.
What Newton did was to show that there is a force acting on the apple, and without that force, it wouldn’t move. He also came up with an equation that could predict what that force would be between any two objects at any distance, and what motion or lack of motion would result from that force.
It was his math contributions people liked. Particularly his invention of calculus which could be used to solve a plethora of unsolved math problems. It's not because he said things fell.
On the other hand, spontaneous generation was very much still a thing at this point, so a lot of the basic rules of the world around us were really not worked out yet
I love that Newton had to invent calculus twice, because he was trying to teach it to someone else and they weren't getting it, so Isaac got frustrated and threw the only copy of his notes into the lit fireplace.
Like, um, the friction against the ground that the object is moving on. Isaac Newton observed commonplace phenomena then figured out the scientific reasoning behind the phenomena then put it all into words that we now quote as time-tested & true scientific dogma.
Most, if not all, of us take certain concepts for granted until someone points out that it's more complex than we realise. Examples like Dark Energy & Matter, entropy, the placebo effect, the nature of mathematical objects, etc. are proof of this.
Yeah interesting thought there actually. In absolute numbers I wager more people believe in mythical beings of some form today in Europe than the 1700s. But as a share of the total population it's going to be a lot lower, of course.
Is it going to be a lower percentage of the total population though? There's a lot about ye olde days that kinda gets generalised, and hand-waved. Like people's ability to read in medieval times. Sure it wasn't as prevalent as today, but reading was probably a lot more common than most people think.
As for belief in mythical beings, who knows, religious belief was a lot stronger in the 1700s, but that doesn't necessarily mean everyone believed in the fae.
To be fair, if you don't know about how gravity works, you would just hold up a rock, drop it, and say obviously things can move without someone moving it.
And that objects in motion will stay in motion, but our experience with friction tells us otherwise. Ask any kid and they'll say from intuition that the object will stop
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