Newton Realized That, According To His Theory Of Gravity, The Stars Should
Attract Each Other, So It Seemed They Could Not Remain Essentially Motionless.
Newton realized that, according to his theory of gravity, the stars should
attract each other, so it seemed they could not remain essentially motionless.
Would they not all fall together at some point? In a letter in 1691 to
Richard Bentley, another leading thinker of his day, Newton argued that this
would indeed happen if there were only a finite number of stars distributed
over a finite region of space. But he reasoned that if, on the other hand,
there were an infinite number of stars, distributed more or less uniformly
over infinite space, this would not happen, because there would not be
any central point for them to fall to.
This argument is an instance of the pitfalls that you can encounter in
talking about infinity...
-- Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time"
