World of motion

In our time, BBC Radio 4's discussion program on the history of ideas, this week looks at Newton's laws of motion:

In 1687 Isaac Newton attempted to explain the movements of everything in the universe, from a pea rolling on a plate to the position of Pluto. It was a brilliant, vaultingly ambitious and fiendishly complex task; it took him three sentences.

These are the three laws of motion with which Newton founded the discipline of classical mechanics and conjoined a series of concepts - inertia, acceleration, force, momentum and mass - by which we still describe the movement of things today. Newton’s laws have been refined over the years – most famously by Einstein - but they were still good enough, 282 years after they were published, to put Neil Armstrong on the Moon.

Presented by Melvyn Bragg, contributors include Simon Schaffer and Rob Iliffe. You can listen to the program via the website.