be something wrong with the method being used to study the world.
In 1628 William Harvey, who explained the body's circulatory system, demonstrated that the experimental approach to physiology produced just the kind of results that had been lacking. When Harvey, for example, cut off his own circulation with a strap in order to observe what happened, "he was imposing on nature a set of artificial conditions dictated by his question." He also showed that some organic processes could be reduced to mechanical systems that followed laws that had more general applications. The experimental method was the focus of theoretical writing by many of the most important thinkers of the century: Francis Bacon, RenT Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and others. And scientists such as Galileo and Johannes Kepler began to look at the universe as if it was subject to laws that human beings could discover. The new method devised by these men was primarily experimental, based on induction, as well as "quantitative and not merely observational and so could lead to mathematical laws and principles."
As scientists began to insist that their goal must be "to understand the real external world, and that this required the possibility of predicting testable results and retrodicting the data" resulting from their experiments and observations, they began to produce a body of factual knowledge that they were eager to share. The lonely investigator working almost in secret was replaced by "science as an organized social activity." National academies, were formed, for example, and the scientific method began to flourish. Despite the work of so many men, however, it was Newton who became "the culmination of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution" and, thereby, the originator of the next revolution.
As a young man Newton had quickly converted to the mechanical view of scientists and he was convinced, like the members of the Royal Society that, a...