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
Speed of gravity to explain the perihelion advance of Mercury, but they could not provide exact values. One exception was Maurice Lévy in 1890, who succeeded in doing so by combining the laws of Weber and Riemann, whereby the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light. So those hypotheses were rejected. However, a more important variation of those attempts was the theory of Paul Gerber, who derived in 1898 the identical formula, which was also derived later by Einstein for the perihelion advance. Based on that formula, Gerber calculated a propagation speed for gravity of 305 000 km/s, i.e. practically