Newton, particles and concepts of force

From apples to gravity and the realization of force is the Newtonian generalization with which most who read this magazine are familiar. But, as dominant, far reaching and scientifically enigmatic as the concept of an attractive force affecting all matter whether large or small was to Newton’s contemporaries, for Newton himself that idea could be said to represent a beginning. The clue to his more insightful attitude towards force concepts lies in the fust preface to his most profound work, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathernatica, in which he expresses the hope that ‘mechanical principles’, by which he means forces, may serve to explain all natural phenomena. For, concerning natural phenomena, he writes: ‘I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the