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But it was actually Newton's willingness to embrace the spiritual and the occult that primed his mind for coming up with the law of universal gravitation. Newton was born in 1642, and by the time he was an adult, every major scientist of the day was trying to distance himself from the superstitious nonsense of the Middle Ages. The ages of alchemy and astrology were over, and every illness, fart, and Jesus-shaped birthmark could be explained rationally, even if the actual science wasn't known yet. So when it came to explaining the motions of the planets, there had to be a physical explanation that you could measure or see or taste.

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So, in the same way that the stars couldn't shape the personal lives of humans on Earth, the rational minds said that the sun couldn't magically influence the planets a kabillion miles away. No more invisible magic, damn it! So tons of theories from respected scientists were put forward: Maybe the universe was filled with tiny particles moving the planets around, or maybe each planet was emitting waves, or space was actually filled with water and the planets were just bobbing around.



We've always been big proponents of the "drunken juggling giant" theory.

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Newton wasn't bound by such notions. For him, the idea of an "invisible force" pushing the planets around was as natural as using the Bible to figure out when the world would end or learning how to change lead into gold. So when he tested all the other theories of how the planets moved and nothing checked out, Newton decided to strike out on his own with a new idea. Maybe a non-physical spirit was doing all the work. Here's what he came up with:

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Only instead of calling what we'd eventually know as gravity a "spirit," he switched to "force" and gave gravity a name derived from the Latin word for weight. But he never could explain what it was that made gravity work. This made some contemporary scientists attack his theory with a vengeance, because to them it just seemed like magic.

But it wasn't magic, it was the work of somebody who was, once again, just crazy enough to stumble across the mind-blowing truth.

Related Reading: To keep your science and crazy mixed together, check out this article. You'll learn about mad science's earnest attempts to discover how sex affects the weather. Follow up with some exploding lakes and nuclear tanks, because nothing says "crazy" like a weapon of mass destruction. End your tour of technological madness by reading about the scientific experiments that just might end the human race.