Intro
Isaac Newton was a famous English physicist and mathematician who is most known for inventing modern calculus and the foundational theories on gravity he outlined in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which is widely considered to be the most influential physics book ever written. Most importantly, Newton helped shift the dominant scientific approach at the time from qualitative inquisition to quantitative analysis.
Newton has become a household name most commonly associated with the “apple myth.” As the story goes, he was inspired to explore gravity by noticing the direction a falling apple took after it hit his head. While the details of this story are contested, Newton’s foundational contributions to the fields of mathematics, astrology, physics, and optics are not. Understanding their influence and Newton’s role in transforming the nature of scientific inquiry is essential to grasping the backstory of science today.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
– Isaac Newton in a letter to Gaston Pardies, a French Jesuit
