This wasn't the revolutionary part about Newton's conception of inertia. It was the counterpart: that an object in motion will tend to keep going forever unless acted upon by a force. This was pretty staggering in a world where an arrow fired from a bow (below escape velocity, you snitty little pedants) will slow down and fall to the ground as though getting tired on its own.

I mean living on Earth where things fall for seemingly no reason at all, that’s pretty damn revolutionary

These are the same people that believed in spontaneous generation - that life just popped into existence from nonliving matter, such as dirt, grain, or dirty clothing. It wasn't considered fully disproven until the 19th century.

As uneducated as many people are now, they're practically savants compared to your average person just 200 years ago.

There is a subtle genius in establishing the concept of "net force" as something that can be treated mathematically, and that fully predicts an object's motion. He framed the problem

That's a pretty gross oversimplification of inertia. The more mass an object has, the more energy that's required to accelerate it.

The genius lies in the understanding that a heavy object, once moving, will prefer to continue moving than come to a rest. This is why an 18-wheeler needs more distance to stop than a small car. Some people's intuition tells them that a heavy object will come to a rest quickly.

I feel like this when hearing about "art of war"

"Have some sort of strategy"
"If at all possible have a larger army than the enemy"
"If step two is not possible, see step one"

This is basically the whole book.

I'm looking at a copy of Newton's principia and it's pretty obvious from the first chapter that y'all are fucking idiots. (Except OP, OP is cool).

Try reading it sometime. Imagine leveling this kind of critique at any other book you've never read.

holds up stone

let's go of stone

stone starts moving to the floor

Explain this, Isaac!

The World is suffering a Dunning - Kruger epidemy.