It is much more natural to be surprised by unusual phenomena like eclipses than ordinary phenomena like falling bodies or the succession of night into day and day into night. Many cultures invented gods to explain these eclipses that shocked, frightened, or surprised them; but very few imagined a god of falling bodies ― to which they were so accustomed that they did not even notice them. But the reason for eclipses is ultimately the same as that of the succession of night and day: the movement of celestial bodies, which itself is based on the Newtonian law of attraction and how it explains why things fall when we let them go. For the physicist, understanding the ordinary, the habitual, and the frequent thus allows us to account for the frightening and the singular. As such, it was thus necessary to ask “Why do things fall?” and to have Newton’s response to understand a broad range of much more bizarre phenomena occurring at every level of the universe.
* eclipse: 일식, 월식 ** celestial: 천체의 *** bizarre: 이상한