Newtonian Revolution In Science And Its Intellectual Significance

Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the same year of the death of Galileo and 25 years after the death of Shakespeare. He died in 1727, an old man in his eighties, 50 years before the Declaration of Independence. Who was he? What was the nature of the revolution that he produced in science? In what sense was the revolution so profound that a century later it figured prominently in political thought? This essay provides answers to these questions and shows how Newton was the author of not only one, but at least two -- and maybe even three or four -- great revolutions. One was in mathematics and the others were in physical sciences. All of these achievements were the fruit of only a very small part of his early creative life. Illustrations.

This volume presents Professor Cohen's original interpretation of the revolution that marked the beginnings of modern science and set Newtonian science as the model for the highest level of achievement in other branches of science. It shows that Newton developed a special kind of relation between abstract mathematical constructs and the physical systems that we observe in the world around us by means of experiment and critical observation. The heart of the radical Newtonian style is the construction on the mind of a mathematical system that has some features in common with the physical world; this system was then modified when the deductions and conclusions drawn from it are tested against the physical universe. Using this system Newton was able to make his revolutionary innovations in celestial mechanics and, ultimately, create a new physics of central forces and the law of universal gravitation. Building on his analysis of Newton's methodology, Professor Cohen explores the fine structure of revolutionary change and scientific creativity in general. This is done by developing the concept of scientific change as a series of transformations of existing ideas. It is shown that such transformation is characteristic of many aspects of the sciences and that the concept of scientific change by transformation suggests a new way of examining the very nature of scientific creativity.

From 1687, the year when Newton published his Principia, to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application.

them in his cheat-preface to Copernicus De Revolutionibus, but the main change in their import has been that whereas Osiander defended Copernicus, Mach and Duhem defended science. The modem conception of hypothetico deductive science is, again, geared to defend the respectability of science in much the same way: the physical interpretation, it says, is merely and always hypothetical, and so the scientist is never really committed to it. Hence, when science sheds the physical interpretation off its mathematical skeleton as time and refutation catch up with it, the scientist is not really caught in error, for he never was committed to this interpretation in the first place. This is the apologetic essence of present day, Popper-like, versions of the idea of science as a mathematical-core-cum-interpretational shell. This is also Cohen's view, for it aims to free Newton of any existential commitment to which his theory might allegedly commit him. It will be readily seen that Cohen regards this methodological distinction between mathematics and physics to be the backbone of the Newtonian revolution in science (which is, in its tum, the climax of the whole Scientific Revolution) for a very clear reason: it enables us to argue that Newton could use freely the new concept of centripetal force, even though he did not be lieve in physical action at a distance and could not conceive how such a force could act to produce its effects". ([3] pp.

Seventeenth-century Europe witnessed an extraordinary flowering of discoveries and innovations. This study, beginning with the Dutch-invented telescope of 1608, casts Galileo's discoveries into a global framework. Although the telescope was soon transmitted to China, Mughal India, and the Ottoman Empire, those civilizations did not respond as Europeans did to the new instrument. In Europe, there was an extraordinary burst of innovations in microscopy, human anatomy, optics, pneumatics, electrical studies, and the science of mechanics. Nearly all of those aided the emergence of Newton's revolutionary grand synthesis, which unified terrestrial and celestial physics under the law of universal gravitation. That achievement had immense implications for all aspects of modern science, technology, and economic development. The economic implications are set out in the concluding epilogue. All these unique developments suggest why the West experienced a singular scientific and economic ascendancy of at least four centuries.

Unique among celebrated scientists, Newton was equally gifted at theoretical physics, experimental physics and pure mathematics. He was also exceptional in another, less well-recognised sense. No one has come near to equalling his extraordinary analytical power.Analytically-derived truths are controversial because such truths can only be established by extended experimental verification or by their success in generating further truths by systematic development. While Newton's optics was ultimately established by the first method and his theory of gravity by the second, much of his work on other subjects, though equally powerful and innovative, has never been totally established as part of this analytical context. This book discusses why the innovations matter today and why they were, and sometimes still are, controversial.Published as the third of a three-part set for Newtonian scholars, historians of science, philosophers of science and others interested in Newtonian physics.All Titles: 1.Newton and Modern Physics 2.Newton and the Great World System 3.Newton — Innovation and Controversy