This was astounding – like someone saying he had found a cure for cancer but couldn’t remember where he had put the formula. Sr Isaac looked among his papers but could not find it. ‘Why,’ saith he, ‘I have calculated it,’ whereupon Dr Halley asked him for his calculation without farther delay. The Doctor, struck with joy & amazement, asked him how he knew it. Sr Isaac replied immediately that it would be an. This was a reference to a piece of mathematics known as the inverse square law, which Halley was convinced lay at the heart of the explanation, though he wasn’t sure exactly how. “In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of attraction towards the Sun to be reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.
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