The mindset that created Brexit was not the first time a subculture in Britain ran with wishful thinking and wrecked havoc in the process. To be fair to the theorists in the early 20th century, previous generations of mathematicians had conjured up the idea of 3D=1t so the original intent of Newton's absolute/relative time or indeed his space/motion had long been lost -

"This absolute time can be measured by comparison with no motion; it
has therefore neither a practical nor a scientific value; and no one
is justified in saying that he knows aught about it. It is an idle
metaphysical conception." Mach, Analyse der Empfindungen, 6th ed


In short, the damage had been done long before Mach made that remark so the early 20th century folk were,in themselves, inheriting a mess with its origins in the late 17th century.

The theorists today are the weakest of the lot as they have conditioned themselves to ignore technical and historical details which would row back the damage. I actually wish physics to succeed but they insist in cutting their own throats by sticking with a notion on attraction bundled up to look like planetary motions.

Edgar Allan Poe took a peek in at the mathematical 't' party and asked a rhetorical question -

"To explain: The Newtonian Gravity -- a law of Nature -- a law whose existence as such no one out of Bedlam questions -- a law whose admission as such enables us to account for nine-tenths of the Universal phaenomena -- a law which, merely because it does so enable us to account for these phaenomena, we are perfectly willing, without reference to any other considerations, to admit, and cannot help admitting, as a law -- a law, nevertheless, of which neither the principle nor the modus operandi of the principle, has ever yet been traced by the human analysis -- a law, in short, which, neither in its detail nor in its generality, has been found susceptible of explanation at all -- is at length seen to be at every point thoroughly explicable, provided we only yield our assent to -- what?" Edgar Allan Poe

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/poe/eureka.html

I have traced Newton's reasoning as a side product of productive and creative astronomy along with the works and methods of the original Sun centered astronomers and further back in history. The dismay is that nobody is around to accept the analysis nor willing to make the effort to put these important affairs in context.