Isaac Newton
The British Genius who Explained Motion and Gravity
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
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
