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NOVA: And if you succeed in making the philosophers' stone, you'll let us know?

NEWMAN: [laughter] If I succeed, I'll disappear.

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-His gravity law was almost certainly stolen from Robert Hooke, now Hooke is remembered with the crappiest law in all of physics namely the elasticity law, while Newton takes credit for one of the most elegant laws.

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Newton refused to correspond with Hooke any further, Hooke had written a third letter to Newton, that Newton refused to answer. And it is this third letter that is of particular interest. This letter was written January 6, 1680, and in it, Hooke spoke of his theory of gravity. Hooke wrote; "But my supposition is that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocal, and Consequently that the Velocity will be in a subduplicate proportion to the Attraction and Consequently as Kepler supposes Reciprocal to the Distance." This was the main letter Hooke used as evidence when he claimed Newton had robbed him of his theory, but Hooke had no answer from Newton acknowledging Hooke's theory.

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Hooke corresponded with Newton regularly, but was not enough of a mathematician to formulate gravitation in the Newtonian sense. When Newton published his work on gravity in Principia, Hooke felt that he had not been given enough credit for his earlier work, a view that Newton never forgave. Newton wrote to Halley (who was paying for the publication of Principia) in strong terms over the argument. The relationship became more and more acrimonious, such that Hooke became secretive in his work and Newton is said to have delayed the publication of Opticks until after Hooke's death. It has even been suggested that Newton destroyed Hooke's portrait

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