Ask the Professor: Especially One Who Knows the Answer

Isaac Newton’s stunning success, the theory of gravity, seemed disturbing to many contemporaries; it required one to accept that heavenly bodies could act on one another at a distance with nothing intervening. To some, Newton’s “gravity” was a step backwards to a time when conceptual inventions like “instincts” and “humours” were invoked as explanations of scientific phenomena—explanations that explained nothing. Newton replied, “I feign no hypotheses,” hypotheses non fingo. But many of us never got beyond this stumper in physics and we would like know how action at a distance is possible. So we asked an Oakland expert.