Isaac Newton — "What goes up must come down."
What goes up must come down.
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More from Isaac Newton
"The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of Nature."
"The causes of gravity are not yet discovered. It is by experiments and observations that we are to know them."
"The great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
"He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who thinks seriously will believe in God, and will not doubt that God is the author of the world."
"He that in the study of natural philosophy shall resolve to proceed upon nothing but demonstrations and sound knowledge, hath a very large field of materials of all sorts to divert and employ him."
Details
A popular simplification of his law of universal gravitation, not a direct quote from his writings in this exact phrasing.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
This saying expresses the universal principle that gravity pulls everything earthward — anything launched upward will inevitably return. It captures the intuitive truth that upward momentum is temporary while gravity is constant and inescapable. In modern terms it describes projectile motion: no matter how forcefully something is thrown skyward, Earth's gravitational pull continuously decelerates it until it reverses course. It also works as a metaphor for ambition and fortune — nothing rises without eventually falling.
Relevance to Isaac Newton
Newton formalized gravitational laws after, legend holds, observing a falling apple at Woolsthorpe Manor around 1666. His Principia Mathematica (1687) mathematically quantified why projectiles follow parabolic arcs and return to Earth. Ironically, his equations also revealed escape velocity — the threshold at which objects permanently leave Earth's pull — showing the saying has limits. Still, this simple observation of falling bodies was the seed of his universal law of gravitation, his most transformative contribution to science.
The era
In 17th-century Europe, natural philosophy was dismantling Aristotelian physics, which held that earthly and celestial motion obeyed entirely separate rules. Galileo's experiments and Kepler's planetary laws had fractured the old framework. Newton's era demanded mathematical, empirical explanations for nature. Unifying terrestrial falling bodies with planetary orbits under one gravitational law was genuinely radical — the claim that a cannonball and the Moon obey identical mathematics challenged scholastic tradition and helped define the Scientific Revolution's core ambition.
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