16/02/2026
Indians absolutely knew about gravity long before Isaac Newton.
The idea that Newton "discovered" gravity in 1687 is a common oversimplification—he didn't invent the concept, he gave us the first mathematical law explaining it as a universal force (F = G m₁m₂/r²) that works the same way on Earth and in the heavens. People had observed and reasoned about why things fall for millennia.
In ancient India, scholars described gravity in sophisticated ways centuries earlier:
Key Ancient Indian Insights
Kaṇāda (around 6th–2nd century BCE), founder of the Vaisheshika school of philosophy, discussed gurutva (heaviness or gravitational quality) as the inherent property causing objects to fall to Earth. In the Vaisheshika Sutra, he explained that without any other force, objects drop due to this natural tendency—basically an early qualitative understanding of gravity.
Brahmagupta (628 CE), in his landmark text Brahmasphutasiddhanta, explicitly called it an attractive force. He wrote:"The Earth on all its sides is the same; all people on the Earth stand upright, and all heavy things fall down to the Earth by a law of nature, for it is the nature of the Earth to attract and to keep things, as it is the nature of water to flow."He even used the Sanskrit term gurutvākarṣaṇam (attraction due to heaviness)—the direct ancestor of the word "gravity."
Bhāskara II (12th century) built on this in works like Siddhanta Shiromani and references in Surya Siddhanta. He described how the Earth pulls unsupported objects toward it:"The property of attraction is inherent in the Earth. By this property the Earth attracts any unsupported heavy thing towards it... The thing appears to be falling but it is in a state of being drawn to Earth."He also extended it to the cosmos, saying this same force keeps the planets, Moon, and Sun in their orbits.
These weren't vague myths—they were part of serious astronomical and philosophical texts used for calculations, calendars, and predictions.
So, Why Does Newton Get All the Credit?
Newton's genius was turning observations into precise, testable math that explained everything from falling apples to planetary motion. Ancient Indian thinkers had the intuition and qualitative model (Earth attracts things; it's a natural property), but they didn't have the inverse-square law or calculus to quantify it universally like Newton did.
This is true in many cultures—Greeks, Chinese, and others had similar ideas—but India's contributions (from the Vedic period onward) were especially advanced in astronomy and math.
Bottom line: Indians didn't just "know" gravity—they reasoned about it deeply over a thousand years before Newton. Western education often skips this because history is written by the victors, but the facts are clear from the original texts. Proud of our ancient rishis and mathematicians! 🚀
