![]() The world looks complex, chaotic and unpredictable…so clearly it can have nothing to do with the elegance and simplicity of mathematics. But in those days, 'rational' people tended to assume the exact opposite. ![]() What then seemed to be a bizarre and mystical notion – that the universe obeys simple mathematical laws – is now seen as the 'rational' view. The situation in Newton’s time was, in a sense, the mirror image of the present day. A similar attitude prevailed towards the Hermetic philosophers of mediaeval Europe – a small and secretive minority who believed that, with sufficient diligence, it would be possible to discover a simple set of rules capable of explaining the complexities of the natural world. More often than not such ideas were dismissed as the musings of crackpots or mystical dreamers. Some of the pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophers – notably Pythagoras and his followers – did believe in a fundamentally mathematical world, but over time their views had fallen out of favour. ![]() The basic idea, however, was not a new one. Newton’s genius lay in the fact that he looked for a mathematical key to the universe and found it. After Principia they would be tied together by a bond that has become more and more powerful in the intervening centuries. Before 1687, Mathematical Principles and Natural Philosophy were two completely different branches of knowledge, poles apart. The book was a revolution, and the essence of that revolution is summed up in the title. But when Newton published his masterpiece in 1687, he called it Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. To most of his contemporaries, Aristotle’s two-thousand-year-old system of ‘natural philosophy’ still provided the standard picture of the physical world – and Aristotle’s theory contains no mathematics. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern, high-tech world we live in today wouldn’t exist without it.įor Newton, mathematics was the key that unlocked the secrets of the universe. The implications of this discovery reach beyond theoretical physics into all branches of engineering and technology. It was an even more fundamental discovery: that it is possible to predict the behaviour of the physical world by representing it in the form of mathematical symbols and equations. Newton made the single greatest breakthrough in the history of physical science…but it wasn’t his discovery of the law of gravity. In the course of time, this equation would allow his successors to discover new planets, to predict the reappearance of comets and to travel to the Moon. He came up with a precise mathematical equation to describe that force. Newton did more than just wave his hands in the air and say ‘look, there’s a universal force of attraction between all material things’. But obvious as these things are, the ultimate explanation – that they are all due to the same universal force – is far from obvious. Anyone who has spent any time gazing up at the night sky knows that the Moon and planets follow regular, predictable orbits. Everyone knows that an apple falls vertically downwards, as if drawn towards the centre of the Earth. Of all the forces of nature, gravity is the one whose effects are most obvious to us, and have been since prehistoric times. Most people associate Isaac Newton with gravity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |