Quotes About Newton

The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as "stone dolls." He waved poetry aside as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." He rejected opera after a single encounter. "The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.

Newton had been the first to learn how to pin down the mysterious infinitesimals that held the key to explaining motion.

Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside of the latest circle that imagination has drawn. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that imagination holds the primacy.

Newton divided the spectrum into seven colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet – the choice of seven to accord with the seven notes of the diatonic music scale and the seven heavenly spheres.

Newton, as we have said, was the promoter of a Design Argument based upon the precision and universality of the laws of motion and gravitation that he had discovered.

It is the cosmological vacuum energy that contributes a repulsive lambda force to the gravitational force of Newton.

Whatever the ultimate Theory of Everything is found to be, it will have a limiting form which describes motion at speeds far less than that of light in weak gravity fields where quantum wavelike features of mass are negligible. This form will be the one that Newton found.

Throughout his life Newton must have devoted at least as much attention to chemistry and theology as to mathematics.

approximately 1200 and 1600 that proved conducive for the emergence of the Scientific Revolution. Without the level that medieval natural philosophy attained, with its overwhelming emphasis on reason and analysis, and without the important questions that were first raised in the Middle Ages about other worlds, space, motion, the infinite, and without the kinds of answers they gave, we might, today, still be waiting for Galileo and Newton.

I trust Winsor and Newton and I paint directly upon it.

I am delighted just to work on a good movie, no matter what the medium is.

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation .

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?

May God us keep From simple vision and Newton's sleep. —William Blake[xxvii]

These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton's laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second law of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future.

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

Isaac Newton was hardly the person people would pick to be the cultural guru of his age. Everyone recognized that this son of a clergyman from northwestern England (born the same year Galileo died, in 1642) was an incredible math prodigy.

And every minute Newton didn't spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.

By separating body from mind and spirit, Descartes was denying the dependence of the material world on God's will and His providence. "A God without dominion, providence, and final causes," Newton later wrote, "is nothing else but Fate.

The intellectual tyranny that Newton had seen in the darkest chapters in the history of the medieval Church, he saw repeated in the tyranny of a godless, soulless science. He intended to correct that view and free men's minds for the future.

The fact that the study of nature proved beyond refutation the existence of a perfect and benevolent Creator was for Newton both exhilarating and liberating.