Not lava?

Seems to be the fate of every good ruler: They leave behind shitty kids.

That's actually a fair point, and, I'll admit, I occasionally fall into the habit of believing in the light of a single genius still: That's pretty much never true. Thank you for the correction.

I got into physics because of Einstein, but I'm pretty well convinced Newton now was the real boss. If he were here today, he'd still be making groundbreaking contributions. Also worth mentioning his eureka moment was not realizing gravity was responsible for apples falling to the ground, but realizing that one and the same thing could explain that, the orbits of planets and ocean tides. The popular picture we have of him doesn't do him any justice at all.

Best understanding of gravity that exists today is it's a warping of space and time around a massive object that causes objects moving around it to deviate from straight line motion when seen from an observer far away. Not sure how you could massage that into an Aristotelian explanation. I'm also not an expert of Aristotelian physics, which is why I left it at that, but one of the consequences I understand from it was that heavier objects should fall faster than lighter ones, which is the thing Galileo disproved.

There was for a long time the Aristotelian nonsense about objects seeking out their natural resting place, but, by the time of Newton, Galileo had dealt a pretty lethal blow to that. Probably the fairest answer is that we were at the beginning then of a modern scientific understanding of the world, and that a coherent model of what caused things to fall to the ground as we understand it now probably didn't really exist then. I could be wrong-- particularly with respect to the advances that were taking place outside of Europe-- but it seems like science before this period was largely about illustrating a beautiful, rational order ordained by God, rather than finding rigorous models that could explain natural phenomenon: Science was still a branch of philosophy. People like Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, etc, aren't giants simply because they corrected long-running misperceptions about things, but because they introduced a fundamental paradigm shift into how we think about the world and ask questions about it.