“Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.”

—  Stephen Hawking , book A Brief History of Time

Source: A Brief History of Time (1988), Ch. 2

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Stephen Hawking 122
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018

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