Newton formally linked the ideas of mass, acceleration, and weight, as well as the idea that weight and force are the same thing, and also linked force to the idea of changing momentum. He did all of this within a unifying theory of mathematics that relied on his fancy new tool that we would call calculus.

Now, there were other scholars in his day that had achieved bits and pieces of this already, but he brought it all together under a single unifying scheme and added significant portions of mathematical analysis to it (that allowed us to make novel predictions about the world and other worlds), so he's the one we remember. (It also helps his fame in the Western world that he wrote it in Latin, which was the scholarly gold standard of the day)

But the truth is we more or less understood how gravity works (mechanically, that is) since roman times, and newton didn't answer the "why" for us really anyway. What Newton really did was give us a formal mathematic definition of gravity that could be applied robustly to most physical situations humans can observe under one very large tent of mathematics. He allowed us to agnostically apply one set of laws to a whole host of situations that were not obviously connected. This, more than anything else, was his contribution to science.

Well yeah, I think I remember that happening actually, and at the time they were correct: a lot of work had to go into lithium batteries to get them to the commercially viable state that they're at today. I'm glad that work was done, and that people were excited about it, but I am slightly concerned about the broader trend of the public/journalists not being able to simultaneously a) be excited and b) understand that even a big breakthrough is more than nothing but less than everything.

Also I'm actually gonna be working on that exact technology and I'm extremely excited about it!!

I'm going into battery tech as a mechanical engineer and I also keep seeing novel new chemistries show up all over the place with people fawning over it being the next big thing. I saw the same thing with some vanadium redox flow battery, and obviously the fine print was that it was a redox flow battery, and was only really suitable for maybe large scale power grid batteries.

I think the truth is probably just that we need to use whatever a) works decently b) has useful properties (durability, stability, form factor, cheap to produce etc.) And c) we have a lot of. There are tons of metals that are theoretically (or more recently, practically) decent for battery technologies if you can squeeze multiple ionization states out of them, it's just a matter of implementation

Yeah, there was also a thing called an ice-pick lobotomy. It was very popular throughout the mid 1900s (think 40s and 50s) as a way of (if we're being cynical) making peoblematic mental illness cases go away, as well as a way of treating seizures.

The procedure was pretty simple and "safe": it's just a small tool they inserted through the eye socket on the inner side of your eye (your eye would be fine) to reach the connective tissue between your hemispheres, and they'd swich it arround until large portions of this connective tissue (and also your frontal lobe) were severely damaged.

This was done in essentially outpatient settings, and the doctor that invented it was highly prolific, and did like thousands of these procedures over the years: most to people who shouldn't be treated with brain surgery. It usually left people halfway between mildly impared and vegetable, but it did frequently "cure" the worst symptoms of a lot of mental illnesses by essentially erasing half their personality.

I'm grossly oversimplifying here but it was nasty business. Not medicine's best chapter

Edit: more ethical versions of this survived the ice pick lobotomy era, for specifically only seizure treatments that had fewer adverse side effects, although it's a very radical treatment for pretty severe cases as I understand it