Cambridge seems frozen in time with its ancient universities, its canals and students dressed in academic gowns...
In these surroundings, Serge Brunier and astronomer Jean-Pierre Luminet can well picture Isaac Newton, the man who in the 17th century had this extraordinary intuition that the moon always falls towards Earth at a sufficiently high speed that keeps it in orbit around our planet. What he discovered was the theory of gravity. It would revolutionize our knowledge of the mechanics of the planets and open the universe to an infinite horizon.
Although Newton’s triumph was somewhat tarnished by Einstein's theories, even today, some 350 years later, rocket launches are always calculated according to the laws of Newtonian mechanics.
AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING: original French version only.