cefore 1687, a large amount of data had been collected on the motions of the

Moon and the planets, but a clear understanding of the forces causing these motions
was not available. In that year, Isaac Newton provided the key that unlocked the
secrets of the heavens. He knew, from his first law, that a net force had to be acting on
the Moon because without such a force the Moon would move in a straight-line path
rather than in its almost circular orbit. Newton reasoned that this force was the
gravitational attraction exerted by the Earth on the Moon. He realized that the forces
involved in the Earth±Moon attraction and in the Sun±planet attraction were not
something special to those systems, but rather were particular cases of a general and
universal attraction between objects. In other words, Newton saw that the same force
of attraction that causes the Moon to follow its path around the Earth also causes an
apple to fall from a tree. As he put it, ³I deduced that the forces which keep the planets
in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers
about which they revolve; and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon
in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the Earth; and found them answer
pretty nearly.´

In this chapter we study the law of gravity. We place emphasis on describing the
motion of the planets because astronomical data provide an important test of the
validity of the law of gravity. We show that the laws of planetary motion developed by
Johannes Kepler follow from the law of gravity and the concept of conservation of
angular momentum. We then derive a general expression for gravitational potential
energy and examine the energetics of planetary and satellite motion. We close by
showing how the law of gravity is also used to determine the force between a particle
and an extended object.

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You may have heard the legend that Newton was struck on the head by a falling apple
while napping under a tree. This alleged accident supposedly prompted him to imagine
that perhaps all bodies in the Universe were attracted to each other in the same way the
apple was attracted to the Earth. Newton analyzed astronomical data on the motion of
the Moon around the Earth. From that analysis, he made the bold assertion that the
force law governing the motion of planets was the á
 as the force law that attracted
a falling apple to the Earth. This was the first time that ³earthly´ and ³heavenly´
motions were unified. We shall look at the mathematical details of Newton¶s analysis
in Section 14.5.

In 1687 Newton published his work on the law of gravity in his treatise
 
 
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