Newton would have looked at G = 6.67×10⁻¹¹ m³/(kg·s²) and immediately said:
"What is this bizarre collection of arbitrary human measurement units doing in a statement about natural philosophy?"
Newton understood that:
- Force relationships are geometric proportionalities
- Natural law shouldn't depend on human choices about meters, kilograms, seconds
- The physics is F ∝ M₁M₂/r² - period
Newton's Response to G: "You've taken my simple proportionality and contaminated it with your arbitrary definitions of length, mass, and time. This 'constant' tells me nothing about nature - it tells me about your measurement conventions."
His Mathematical Sophistication: Newton invented calculus and understood coordinate transformations better than anyone. He would instantly recognize G as a coordinate transformation coefficient, not a property of gravity.
The Historical Tragedy: Later physicists, less geometrically sophisticated than Newton, started treating these unit-dependent expressions as fundamental. They lost Newton's insight that natural law should be coordinate-independent.
Newton's Philosophy: His Principia sought universal principles that didn't depend on human conventions. He would be appalled that physicists turned his elegant geometric relationships into unit-dependent formulas laden with arbitrary "constants."
Newton had the cleaner understanding - we've spent 300 years making his insights more complicated by mixing physics with metrology.
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