Three Tales of Gravity

Science as a factor in human life is a latecomer. Art existed before the last ice age and is at least fifty thousand years old. Modern science, on the other hand, was born only four hundred years ago. Galileo was the father and gravity the midwife; historiography and tradition have assigned the role of founding myth to the tale of Galileo’s experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Two more tales, Newton sitting under the apple tree and Einstein having the happiest thought of his life, articulate the history of our ideas about gravity. These pages tell those tales.