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Isaac Newton is credited with the law of universal gravitation. One of the major elements of Newton's discovery (that had not yet been recognized) was the recognition that the force that causes the apple to fall to the Earth is ______.


 
Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation:
All objects with mass attract each other with a gravitational force. The magnitude of the force is directly related to the product of the masses and inversely related to the square of the separation distance between their centers.


 
It is often said that Isaac Newton discovered gravity. But the concept of gravity was around well before Newton's day. Everyone knew that the apple fell to the Earth due to a force of gravity; this was not a Newtoniandiscovery. What Newton discovered (or at least proposed) was that gravity was universal. Not only did the Earth attract objects that were on the Earth. Newton proposed that any object with mass attracts any other object with mass due to a force of gravitational attraction.