Reading Paul Murdin’s Full Meridian of Glory, which I thought was quite reasonable then I came across this:
Since he [René Descartes] was philosophically unconvinced by the notion of “action at a distance,” or the Newtonian concept of the force of gravity, [my emphasis] he developed a theory of vortices in the Universe and this theory carried the planets on their motions around the Sun.
Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica containing his “concept of the force of gravity” in 1687. René Descartes died 1650. Enough said!
P.S. I think it was the vortices rather than the theory, which carried the planets but we don’t want to be too picky do we?
The vortices were vortexes in time. Obviously.
time doesn’t exist