130. Entirely new ground is broken in the _Dialogue_ when Galilei’s discoveries of the laws of motion of bodies are applied to the problem of the earth’s motion. His great discovery, which threw an entirely new light on the mechanics of the solar system, was substantially the law afterwards given by Newton as the first of his three laws of motion, in the form: _Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled by force applied to it to change that state._ Putting aside for the present any discussion of _force_, a conception first made really definite by Newton, and only imperfectly grasped by Galilei, we may interpret this law as meaning that a body has no more inherent tendency to diminish its motion or to stop than it has to increase its motion or to start, and that any alteration in either the speed or the direction of a body’s motion is to be explained by the action on it of some other body, or at any rate by some other assignable cause. Thus a stone thrown along a road comes to rest on account of the friction between it and the ground, a ball thrown up into the air ascends more and more slowly and then falls to the ground on account of that attraction of the earth on it which we call its weight. As it is impossible to entirely isolate a body from all others, we cannot experimentally realise the state of things in which a body goes on moving indefinitely in the same direction and at the same rate; it may, however, be shewn that the more we remove a body from the influence of others, the less alteration is there in its motion. The law is therefore, like most scientific laws, an abstraction referring to a state of things to which we may approximate in nature. Galilei introduces the idea in the Dialogue by means of a ball on a smooth inclined plane. If the ball is projected upwards, its motion is gradually retarded; if downwards, it is continually accelerated. This is true if the plane is fairly smooth—like a well-planed plank—and the inclination of the plane not very small. If we imagine the experiment performed on an ideal plane, which is supposed _perfectly_ smooth, we should expect the same results to follow, however small the inclination of the plane. Consequently, if the plane were quite level, so that there is no distinction between up and down, we should expect the motion to be neither retarded nor accelerated, but to continue without alteration. Other more familiar examples are also given of the tendency of a body, when once in motion, to continue in motion, as in the case of a rider whose horse suddenly stops, or of bodies in the cabin of a moving ship which have no tendency to lose the motion imparted to them by the ship, so that, _e.g._, a body falls down to all appearances exactly as if the rest of the cabin were at rest, and therefore, in reality, while falling retains the forward motion which it shares with the ship and its contents.