Newton's Contribution

. . a stone [for example] travel because its 'character' necessitates that it move toward the center of the mankind" or the planets moved in circular orbits because the circle was a divinely perfect form. But, by the seventeenth ascorbic acid, scientists had become disillusioned by the Aristotelian approach. They began to give birth that since, "after centuries of investigation, nothing solid had been established," there must 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 openhearted 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 machinelike systems that followed laws that had more general applications. The experimental method was the focus of suppositious 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 substantially as "quantitative and not merely observa

It had never happened before "in the history of falsifi able thought [that] so wide a range of rude(a) phenomena [had] been accounted for so precisely, and with such economy." And, as much by the forcefulness of the method as by its actual results, Newton's black market was able to dominate physics and many other branches of science for the side by side(p) 200 years. In the eighteenth century there was a certain amount of resistance to Newton's mechanical explanations of the universe which were held by some to be a form of determinism that ran counter to sacred beliefs. But Newton himself had spent his whole life in the search for the answers to theological questions and saw his scientific work, such as the laws of motion, as mere expressions of the power of God.

As Newton said, these laws, no more than any other part of creation, "could not overflow from any natural Cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent Agent." But the objections of those who feared his apparent determinism were countered by those who sought to survive Newton's theories and demonstrate some of his predictions. In France the Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert finished the task of mathematizing mechanics, producing an axiomatic system which could be manipulated by strictly mathematical means. The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler was one of the most cultivated early practitioners of the Newtonian "style" in successfully "formulating hydrodynamics in terms of partial derivative instrument equations describing the state of a continuous medium." The French scientist Pierre Simon de LaPlace proved Newton's prediction just about the flattened poles and, in his TraitT de mTcanique cTleste, the "apex" of the Newtonian "style," systematized all ulterior applications of Newtonian mechanics to the operations of the solar system.

Aside from the work on light, Newton's two major scientific contributions were the invention of the differential calculus and the book Philosophiae naturalis
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