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|Criticism=Newton's theories provoked immediate and wide interest in Britain, and became accepted there by the first decade of the eighteenth century. [[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015) p. 210]] In continental Europe, acceptance came more slowly. To proponents of the mechanical philosophy, it was methodologically necessary that all motion be given a cause involving direct physical contact of bodies. Many of Newton's continental contemporaries, in particular Leibniz and Huygens, strongly objected to the idea that forces could act at a distance. Leibniz regarded the theory of gravitation as a regression in natural philosophy and accused Newton of treating gravity as an 'occult quality' beyond philosophical understanding. After an intense debate in the early eighteenth century. [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Newtonian gravitation theory became accepted through much of continental Europe by the mid-eighteenth century [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015) pp. 211-212]][[CiteRef::Aiton (1958) p. 172]][[CiteRef::Frangsmyr (1974) p. 35]]
More than two centuries after Newton published the ''Principia'', a new theory of motion and gravitation was formulated by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who was inspired by new developments in non-Euclidean geometry and by problems with James Clerk Maxwell's (1831-1879) theory of electromagnetic radiation. The new theory replaced Newton's theory as the accepted theory of motion and gravitation by about 1920. Einstein's '''General Theory of Relativity''' explained the success of its predecessor by showing that its equations reduce to those of Newton in the limit of weak gravitational fields and velocities that are an insignificant fraction of that of light. Einstein's theory eliminated the problem of action at a distance by postulating that massive objects warp space-time, and that this local curvature influences bodies. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015) p. 125]][[CiteRef::Isaacson (2007)]]
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