Apart from rare and generally regrettable moments of free-fall, we spend our entire lives under the influence of the Earth's gravity, yet rarely, if ever, do we experience the universal nature of gravitation. It's a tremendous philosophical leap from "stuff falls" to "everything in the universe attracts everything else". That leap, made by Isaac Newton in the 17th century, not only allowed understanding the motion of the Moon and the planets, but inoculated in Western culture the idea that the universe as a whole was governed by laws humans could discover. This realisation fueled the Enlightenment and the subsequent development of science and technology.
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