Newton built on the ideas of those before him explaining many different phenomena in his life time. He explained centrifugal force where anything moving in a circle tries to move away from the centre. A ball on a string will try to fly away but the string stops it.
He also observed free floating objects would be drawn together. It occurred to him that it was these opposing forces that, when balanced, kept the Moon in orbit around the Earth and similarly kept planets in orbit around the Sun. He called this force gravity.
Newton had found a means by which Copernicus’s system could work.
The evidence for the sun centred system was now so strong that it was impossible to return to Ptolemy’s view but it took another 300 years for the church to admit mistakes had been made in Galileo’s trial.
