As a person that learn stuff through memes: funny but not really. The concept of Inertia was in discussion for a long long time before Newton: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Inertia?lang=en
The big Newtonian conceptual shift was the removal of the idea of “natural motions” (fire wants to go up, earth wants to go down, the stars want to go in circles), which permitted a unified explanation of terrestrial and celestial motion.
The monkey may be surprised because they had previously thought that motion was intrinsic to matter, instead of contingent.
As a person that learn stuff through memes: funny but not really. The concept of Inertia was in discussion for a long long time before Newton: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Inertia?lang=en
The big Newtonian conceptual shift was the removal of the idea of “natural motions” (fire wants to go up, earth wants to go down, the stars want to go in circles), which permitted a unified explanation of terrestrial and celestial motion.
The monkey may be surprised because they had previously thought that motion was intrinsic to matter, instead of contingent.