QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

2.3.3. Isaac Newton’s synthesis
On the basis of Kepler’s and Galilei’s laws, it was not yet possible to conclude why the planets
and bodies moved in the way they did. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) collected together and
systematised the traditional mechanistic explanations influenced by ancient thinking and put
them into a uniform axiomatic form. He took vague terms like force and mass and inertia and
found them a precise meaning in mathematical terms, so that by their use the major phenomena
of physics became amenable to mathematical treatment. Newton also gave new meanings to the
old terms space, time and motion which were now becoming the fundamental categories in
men’s thinking. 228
With his concept of the attraction between masses, Newton succeeded in uniting Kepler’s
planetary laws and Galilei’s research on motion. His monumental work Philosophiae naturalis
principia mathematica 229 , published in 1687, came to justify belief in the adequacy of the
mechanistic description of natural phenomena. In the background of Principia, it is possible to
distinguish both Descartes’ idea of mathematics as a universal science and Galilei’s cosmology
of the world as a machine made by God that is coloured with secondary properties by man. In his
synthesis, Newton united these ideas with the hypothesis by the English physician and physicist
William Gilbert (1540-1603) of a universal attraction between bodies that was in inverse
proportion to the distance between them that was already known at that time. The seamless
combining of all these elements by Newton was an achievement that would nowadays be
considered as significant as unifying the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. 230
It was generally believed that Newton had revealed the true structure of the world, and nature
began to be regarded as a perfectly organised machine ruled by mathematical laws. His
achievement was celebrated as a victory which surpassed those of both antique and mediaeval
times. Voltaire, for example, regarded Newton as the greatest man that had ever lived.
Newtonian mechanics became a paradigmatic ideal and model for scientific theory, and even
though Newton himself regarded simple mechanistic philosophy as inadequate to explain the
active and living phenomena of nature, the mechanical conception of the world was to wield its
228 Burtt 1980, 32-33.
229 Newton 1972.
230 Collingwood 1960, 107.White 1998, 216. Burtt 1980. 31-32.
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