Aristotelian physics laws of physics". The Persian polymath Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (973-1048) was the first to realize that acceleration is connected with non-uniform motion (as later expressed by Newton's second law of motion). During his debate with Avicenna, al-Biruni also criticized the Aristotelian theory of gravity firstly for denying the existence of levity or gravity in the celestial spheres; and, secondly, for its notion of circular motion being an innate property of the heavenly bodies. In 1121, al-Khazini, in "The Book of the Balance of Wisdom", proposed that the gravity and gravitational potential energy of a body varies depending on its distance
Newton's laws of motion way one can consider the laws to be a definition of these quantities. Newtonian mechanics has been superseded by special relativity, but it is still useful as an approximation when the speeds involved are much slower than the speed of light. The first law states that if the net force (the vector sum of all forces acting on an object) is zero, then the velocity of the object is constant. Velocity is a vector quantity which expresses both the object's speed and the direction of its motion; therefore, the statement that the object's velocity is constant is a statement that