ABSTRACT
Newton’s work was not perfect, nor was it complete; neither the Principia nor the Opticks were ever to be, in any edition, absolutely finished treatises. In the ground he had surveyed he left many blank areas for his successors to fill up, and indeed a number of important mistakes for them to correct. Nevertheless, with his work the scientific revolution reached its climax, and a model for future natural philosophers had been created. Galileo’s and Kepler’s confidence in the mathematical structure of nature was by it fully justified and ‘mechanical principles’ were proved to be a sufficient basis for explanation universally throughout physical science. Thus the unity of nature was made manifest in a grand synthesis revealing the applicability of the same laws, the same prin ciples of explanation, in the heavens and on the Earth. The planetary revolu tions of Copernicus, Kepler’s laws, the discoveries made by Galileo and Huygens relating to the phenomena of gravity and motion, were all shown to follow from these laws and principles, and to be embraced within the same synthesis. In a new form, reshaped by Newton’s concept of force, the mechan ical philosophy was vindicated; shown now to be capable of mathematical development, its range was extended to include the theory of wave-motion and even light itself. Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) was the culmination of the scientific endeavour of the seventeenth century, of its efforts to experiment and mathematize, of its reaction against tradition and its search for new and firmer conceptual foundations. Newton proved that the world was much as the ‘new philosophers’ had suspected it of being: the giants on whose shoulders he stood had been looking in the right direction, though he had seen further than they.
