F = ma
Force = Mass × Acceleration
The formula looks almost too simple to matter. Just three letters and an equals sign. And yet, Isaac Newton distilled the entire machinery of the universe into these symbols in the seventeenth century. He discovered that force is defined by how much mass is present in a body and how quickly that mass changes its motion.
Double the push and the acceleration doubles. Double the mass and the response halves. This single principle governs every collision, every launch, every stumble, and every flight, from an apple leaving a branch to a rocket leaving Earth.
Metonymy refers to a figure of speech in which a word that is associated with something is used to refer to the thing itself, as when crown is used to mean “king” or “queen.”
