what did newton discover or invent?
Newton's law of universal gravitation
neutral
 Newton 's derivation is found in Section IX of his Principia , specifically Propositions 43 – 45 . His derivations of these Propositions are based largely on geometry . 

neutral
 Newton 's position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence . A century later , Pierre @-@ Simon Laplace 's work " Celestial Mechanics " had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits don 't require periodic divine intervention . 

contradiction
 Newton saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation . 

neutral
 An experiment to test Newton 's idea would both provide supporting evidence for his law of universal gravitation , and estimates of the mass and density of the Earth . Since the masses of astronomical objects were known only in terms of relative ratios , the mass of the Earth would provide reasonable values to the other planets , their moons , and the Sun . The data were also capable of determining the value of Newton 's gravitational constant G , though this was not a goal of the experimenters ; references to a value for G would not appear in the scientific literature until almost a hundred years later . 

entailment
 Newton 's Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation , which dominated scientists ' view of the physical universe for the next three centuries . By deriving Kepler 's laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity , and then using the same principles to account for the trajectories of comets , the tides , the precession of the equinoxes , and other phenomena , Newton removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of the Solar System . This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles . His prediction that Earth should be shaped as an oblate spheroid was later vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis , La Condamine , and others , which helped convince most Continental European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over the earlier system of Descartes . 
