PBS/Nova ran a show on Sir Isaac Newton the other night entitled Newton's Dark Secrets. Interesting though it was, for years I have claimed that Sir Isaac's true "dark secret" was that he learned how to travel through time. Yep. Right up to the 1970's. He wanted to be a rock legend...
"Newton, Lake and Palmer" just doesn't cut it though.
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We kicked off our countdown to Newton's birthday with his equations of motion, so it seems fitting to close out the section on classical mechanics with another of Newton's equations, this time the Law of Universal Gravitation:
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And all this time I thought he surreptitiously invented the fig. Oh well...
He had the ego for it.
Had he traveled through time to be a rock star, he could have gotten laid, which would have been nice for him.