Dr Christian Böhmer from UCL Mathematics took to the stage for this instalment of the popular UCL Lunch Hour Lectures to tell us all about gravity.

The lecture opened on a history of gravity, or rather how humans through the ages have looked at what we call gravity.

It started with the ancient Greeks, who refined what the Babylonians and others had observed before.

Just before the years started counting upwards (BCE to CE), there was Ptolemy, who took what was known and made a model of the solar system which – all things considered – was not too shabby.

Previous ideas had all looked a bit too neat and circular, and didn’t take into account the rather inconvenient fact that the planets don’t just travel one way across the sky.

(more…)