Newton's Contribution to Science

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was one of the greatest scientists in history and, after an initial period of resistance, his discoveries, theories, and methods proved to be a major force in the emergence of modern science. Newton became the best-known scientist in the world and, even though most of the eighteenth-century public understood little of his work, his fame eventually provided the impetus to elevate scientific research to a new level of respectability. Other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists participated in the general move away from the Aristotelian paradigm of science that had dominated the Western world for two millennia. But Newton's inspired work resulted in what has justly been called the Newtonian Revolution in science. Ironically, however, Newton's progress in mathematizing science and opening it up to the full play of scientific method meant that his own revolution only reigned for about 200 years. Though much of his work remains vital to scientists today a great deal of it has subsequently been replaced by scientists who proceeded along the innovative path where he had been the first to lead. Newton was "the great synthesizer," as one of his biographers put it, "everything we do--riding in a car, sitting in a plane--operates within the Newtonian universe" and only when "we approach the speed of light [do] we have to turn to Einstein."

One of the basic ideas in the Aristotelian view of the world was that the behavior of physical objects

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truggle for discovering the laws of nature." Newton's immense achievement consisted of combining his "tremendous erudition and as innate ability to perform practical experiments" with mathematical analysis of a kind never employed before. Newton, unlike many other scientists of the time, kept his work primarily to himself. But when the astronomer Edmond Halley asked him what he believed must be the shape of the planet's orbits--a problem in the calculation of the effect of gravity--Newton immediately replied that they would move elliptically and that he had performed the calculations that proved Kepler's claim that this was true. On receiving Newton's reworked calculations, the amazed Halley "recognizing the tremendous importance of Newton's accomplishment," urged him to publish his work on gravity and the movements of the solar system. In the Principia Newton expounded his three laws of motion, the universal law of gravitation, and various ideas on the motion of solids in resisting media, hydrostatics, and sound waves. But the "crowning achievement" of this work was "the application of his abstract mathematical laws of motion to the real universe." According to the three laws of motion, in the "Newtonian universe" eve

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