Today we're going to talk about how awesome Isaac Newton was, and I want to get one thing out of the way right off the bat.

He coined the word gravity.

Gravity. Gravity. The force that we all know and love was coined by Newton.

He took it from the Latin gravitas, which means weight or heaviness, so it's not exactly a big

stretch of an imagination to use this word for that force. But he applied it to this force. And the force, he basically

invented the force of gravity too, but we'll get to that in a little bit. So not only did he invent

gravity and gravity invented the word for gravity. The word could have been anything. But Newton

picked gravity and gravity it is.

And speaking of gravitas, if you were to make a list of the top five scientists of all time,

Newton is always in the running and often has the top spot.

I mean, Newton.

His work is so important that you have to learn it in high school. You can't say the same for Einstein, can you? Who's learning general relativity in junior level physics? Okay? No,

you're learning Newton's stuff. And yet comparing scientists is always a tricky game.

There's certainly something special about Einstein and it's why I devoted three episodes

to his invention of general relativity and a couple more to special relativity.

He was undoubtedly a genius who thought like nobody else did, and perhaps nobody since, it's

quite possible that without Einstein we still

wouldn't have relativity.

But Einstein was a full-time scientist.

His work on general relativity itself took over seven years, kind of frustrating years, seven

years, and he worked on many problems before that and many problems after that,

but all in physics. Einstein's whole life was devoted to science, and it shows he's up there.

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