The moon could have simply departed.
The pendulum would have swung 360 degrees without any particular tendency to reverse direction.
on and on and on and on......
Note that the question DOES NOT ask you to disprove the theory. It asks you for evidence that WOULD refute the theory. Anonymous has provided succinct points that WOULD refute the theory.
BTW, the theory of gravity was not one of the topics I studied when I took years of chemistry. I would have thought physics would have been a better topic for naming the question. I do remember (a little, not much) of that coming up in the physics courses I took.
To refute the theory of gravity before it was proven to be a law, you would have needed to gather experimental evidence that contradicted its predictions. For instance, if you could present an observation or measurement that defied the expected gravitational behavior, it could potentially challenge the theory and prompt further investigation. However, since gravity has now been widely accepted as a law, it cannot be easily refuted based on the evidence currently known to us.
