section_path: History/Force and the second law
section_name: Force and the second law
paragraph_text: Force and the second law
  
  Christiaan Huygens, in his Horologium Oscillatorium (1673), put forth the hypothesis that "By the action of gravity, whatever its sources, it happens that bodies are moved by a motion composed both of a uniform motion in one direction or another and of a motion downward due to gravity." Newton's second law generalized this hypothesis from gravity to all forces.
  
  One important characteristic of Newtonian physics is that forces can act at a distance without requiring physical contact. For example, the Sun and the Earth pull on each other gravitationally, despite being separated by millions of kilometres. This contrasts with the idea, championed by Descartes among others, that the Sun's gravity held planets in orbit by swirling them in a vortex of transparent matter, aether. Newton considered aetherial explanations of force but ultimately rejected them. The study of magnetism by William Gilbert and others created a precedent for thinking of immaterial forces, and unable to find a quantitatively satisfactory explanation of his law of gravity in terms of an aetherial model, Newton eventually declared, " I feign no hypotheses ": whether or not a model like Descartes's vortices could be found to underlie the Principia 's theories of motion and gravity, the first grounds for judging them must be the successful predictions they made. And indeed, since Newton's time every attempt at such a model has failed.