Lesson 8: Newton and Newtonianism
This lesson covers the career and influence of Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
Introduction
Introduction
The single most important figure of the scientific revolution was the Englishman Isaac Newton, who set the frame of reference for physics and general science until the emergence of relativity and quantum physics in the early twentieth century. He made fundamental contributions to mechanics, optics, and mathematics.
Our idea of Newton tends to focus on those ideas, particularly that of universal gravitation, for which he is most famous. But Newton also devoted tremendous intellectual energies to areas which are remote from what we now think of as science. He studied alchemy. In the last few decades of his life, his principal object of interest was biblical prophecy and trying to figure out the date for the second coming of Christ.
Newton did not make the same distinctions most people now make between science and non-scientific study. He saw his science and numerous other intellectual exertions as part of a single effort to understand the mind of God, which is truth.
Newton was more religious in his approach to natural philosophy than Galileo or even Descartes. He claimed his masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, helped demonstrate the existence of God.
“When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had an eye on such principles as might work with considering men, for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose."Newton’s religion affected his science, as can be seen in the enormous emphasis he placed both on the universe as law-governed and on God as a lawgiver. The whole modern idea of science as a search for mathematically expressible "laws" of nature, such as the law of gravity or Newon’s three laws of motion, claims Newton as one of its most important progenitors. Newton’s God, however, did not simply create the universe, set up the laws and let a "clockwork" universe run itself, but God sustained it as well.
Newton criticized Cartesianism and other purely mechanical philosophies for exiling God from creation. If everything in the universe acted mechanically, like a clock, how did God act in it?
As Newton saw it, given universal gravitation, divine intervention was necessary both to keep the slight irregularities in planetary orbits from accumulating until the solar system broke down as well as to keep all the matter in the universe from clumping together in one place. This was not in his mind a weakness of his system, but a strength.
Newton was open to a wide range of beliefs and systems of thought, all of which he thought of as diverse ways of getting at truth. He initially accepted mechanical philosophy and studied both the vortices of Descartes and the atomism of Gassendi.
