ABSTRACT
In showing that Kepler’s and Galileo’s laws were but special cases of more general laws true everywhere and always, Newton not only explained why their laws obtained, he also undercut the basic metaphysical conviction that the realm of the heavens was somehow different than that of the Earth. As Chapter 7 sketched, along with Galileo’s telescopic discovery of the craters and other imperfections of the Moon and the Sun, Newton’s revolution had a profound intellectual influence far beyond the formal derivation that he provided to unify physical theory. The power of Newton’s unification was further increased in the ensuing 200 years as more and more phenomena came to be explained (or explained in more precise quantitative detail) by it: eclipses, the period of Halley’s Comet, the shape of the Earth-a slightly squashed sphere, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, buoyancy and aerodynamics, parts of thermodynamics, were unified and shown to be “the same underlying process” through the derivation of laws describing these phenomena from Newton’s four fundamental laws.
