As professor of mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy at Leiden University, he helped to propagate Isaac Newton's ideas in Continental Europe.

He presented his work before audiences that included Voltaire, Albrecht von Haller, and Émilie du Châtelet (the translator of Newton's Principia whose later commentary incorporated 's Gravesande's 1722 experimental discovery of kinetic energy).

's Gravesande's book was soon translated into English by John Theophilus Desaguliers, curator of experiments for the Royal Society.

[4] In 1721, 's Gravesande became involved in a public controversy over whether the German inventor Johann Bessler, known as Councillor Orffyreus, had created a genuine perpetual motion machine.

's Gravesande at first argued for the feasibility of perpetual motion based on the conservation of the scalar quantity mv (mass multiplied by speed), which he erroneously believed was implied by Newtonian mechanics.

[5] However, in 1722 he published the results of a series of experiments in which brass balls were dropped from varying heights onto a soft clay surface.

Similar views were defended at the time by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Bernoulli, and others, but the modern consensus is that Bessler was perpetrating a deliberate hoax.

The interpretation of 's Gravesande's and Poleni's results led to a controversy with Samuel Clarke and other Newtonians that became a part of the so-called "vis viva dispute" in the history of classical mechanics.