Newton is from the 17th century, before electricity, Faraday and Coulomb. Before the microscope and Pasteur, bacterial infections was explained with miasma theory, people understood wind, they could see garbage rotting away, so they used the best model they could come up with. So too with Newton, he understood mass, he could feel the weight of objects, and approximated Coulombs law with

Nikola Tesla, born in 1856, believed that gravity was electromagnetic, a force between electric charges as described by Coulombs law , and made early concepts for flying machines that used magnetic repulsion to fly.

Nikola Tesla was extraordinary in the way Leonardo Da Vinci was extraordinary, Da Vinci conceptualized the helicopter in the 1500s, two centuries or so before Newton developed a proto-science to explain the Earth as a magnet, and was like Tesla dreaming up flying machines that were far ahead of his time.

Jung's collective unconscious, inheritance of memes by genetic bias

Why would Newton's old law of universal gravitation, , still be so common and even dominant?

Humans are mediated beings, and use external mediators like shamans, indian chiefs, a government or a dApp, to coordinate and focus attention, which means that inheritance of memes is a result of multi-level selection, both through the individual as well as a society itself selecting for certain meme pools, including religious memes that act as reference points within a consensus trance.

In other words, memes are selected for by a number of factors, where consensus is broadly selected for, to have memes broadly reflected within a society, leading to that whatever is the lowest common denominator, be it a monopoly on violence or a religious myth, has strong positive selection, which can lead to an idea from the 16th century being favored simply because it is very easy to relate to.

Everyone can feel that objects have weight, and very few can perceive magnetic fields the way Nikola Tesla could, but that is beginning to change with the connected humans who rely on smart phones and electromagnetism in their every day life, as anatomical extensions.