Hi Paul,

: RE; Isaac Newton: A commedian once asked: "Ever wonder what the world
: was like before Newton discovered gravity?"

Wasn't it flat?

: Everybody knew that things fell, but he was the one who told them why.

: Newton's work on tides was not just a compilation of of musty old data. He
: noticed differences in tide heights and times of tides, and was able to
: use that to show that the moon had an elliptical orbit, to measure the
: distance from the earth to the moon, to factor in the added influence of
: the sun's position on tides, and in the meantime he developed his theory
: of gravitation--which relied heavily on the accumulated data. I don't
: think he set out to figure why apples regularly fell from tress, he was
: trying to figure why oceans irregularly rise from their beds.

I didn't mean "musty old data" when I said 'common knowledge'. What I was meaning was the kind of casual knowledge that one gets living with, and off, the sea constantly. Spring tides were predicted by moon phase, they knew the timing of the tides and knew from experience that high tides occured at different times in different ports.
What Newton did, more power to him, was figure the why, as you put it, and formalise it so that anyone with some math could do work it out as well without knowing the sea.

: Interestingly, the wikipedia bio of Newton
: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton) doesn't mention his works on
: tides, which played a memorable part in the bio I listened to. Oh, and the
: wikipedia bio corrects me. It wasn't Descartes who also invented calculus,
: it was Leibniz. My bad.

: PGJ

I did calculus is school and I hadn't even heard of Leibniz. No worries. I don't think he minds.

If you had the inclination, you could edit the wikipedia entry on Newton if you have the information from the audio and if it isn't copyrighted.

Mike Savage
South West Cork