The power of gravity is of such a nature as to penetrate to the very centres of the sun and planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force.
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"I shall not mingle conjectures with certainties."
"If I am anything, which I highly doubt, it is due to hard work."
"It is possible that gravity may be essential to matter."
"I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily."
"Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy."
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Gravity's reach is absolute and unlimited — it acts through all matter down to the very cores of celestial bodies, losing none of its strength along the way. Unlike forces that weaken when blocked, gravity penetrates everything completely. This expresses universal gravitation: every particle of mass attracts every other particle regardless of what lies between them, with no shielding, no attenuation, and no diminishment possible at any depth or distance.
Newton published this in Principia Mathematica (1687), the work that unified terrestrial and celestial mechanics under one law. During his plague-year solitude at Woolsthorpe (1665–66), he first conceived gravity as a universal force — not a surface effect. His inverse-square law required gravity to act through any medium at any depth, which this quote directly states. He wrestled throughout his career with how gravity could act across empty space without a physical carrier.
In Newton's late-17th-century Europe, natural philosophers fiercely debated whether forces required a medium — Descartes' vortex theory explained planetary orbits through swirling fluid, not invisible pulls. Aristotelian physics treated Earth's center as cosmologically special. Newton's claim that gravity penetrated planetary cores uniformly demolished both frameworks, asserting a purely mathematical universal law. This was radical: it replaced mechanical and theological explanations with abstract force-at-a-distance, igniting controversy that lasted decades even among Newton's admirers.
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