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Article: GRAVITY'S HARMONY.
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- July 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IN CERTAIN UNFINISHED NOTES which have only recently been published, Issac Newton asserted that one of his laws of gravity was known to Pythagoras twenty-two centuries before him. Newton claimed that one of the laws which made him famous had been known in a quite different way at the very beginning of our era. He explained how he came to this view:
For Pythagoras, as Macrobius avows, stretched the intestines of sheep or
the sinews of oxen by attaching various weights, and from this learned the
ratios of the celestial harmony. Therefore, by means of such experiments he
ascertained that the weights by which all tones on equal strings [were
produced] ...