“Universal” Gravitation?

In the most daring argument of the Principia, Isaac Newton asserted that the inverse-square force that explains the centripetal motions of celestial bodies applies to “all bodies universally.” Not just celestial bodies attract, but also all the parts that compose them. In the first part of my talk, I show how this generalization was then persistently tested across more than 200 years of research in physical geodesy and laboratory physics. In the second part of my talk, I identify a form of evidential reasoning latent in these tests – which I dub “evidential prospecting” – and argue that it led to a form of evidence for Newtons law that, contra Kuhn, remained stable across subsequent theory-change.

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