Quotes About Newton

Rocky Kolb has put it, "To compare the accomplishment of Newton to that of the first manned flight, one would have to imagine Orville and Wilbur Wright pulling up on the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, behind the controls of a modern jetliner and flying off to New York."[*]

Newton blew away any dusty talk of natures and purposes, revealing what lay underneath: a crisp, rigorous mathematical formalism with which teachers continue to torment students to this very day.

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.

For Newton and the scientists of his time, God had set up the universe and set it in motion. Newton's laws simply governed the running of the universe. That is how Newton saw the workings of God and the workings of God's universe.

It is rather his mind has so wide a range, and so rich a retention, that he simply cannot understand that ordinary folk do not always follow him. 'I little imagined,' he said, 'that I should find you in the posture of Sir Isaac Newton.' Oh dear, I thought, here it comes again. What on earth was the meaning of *that*? So I just said No... and went fiddling with the oil-squirter, trying to remember things about Newton.

Against the mutability of dream, the natural laws advocated by our bewigged Enlightenment forebears are powerless. Newton, for instance, insists on gravity and other prohibitions of the physical world, from which (while we are awake) we are never free. But we can fly in dreams.

Oh, and what about the nurse? She was fired and charged as a criminal. That's Newton, too. If there are really bad effects, there must have been really bad causes. A dead patient means a really bad nurse. Much worse than if the patient had survived. So much worse, she's got to be a criminal. Must be. We can't escape Newton even in our thinking about one of the most difficult areas of safety: accountability for the consequences of failure.

To the Master's honor all must turn, each in its track, without a sound, forever tracing Newton's ground.

La condena de Galileo es emblemática de la posición anticientífica de las religiones. Más tarde, en cambio, los protestantes adoptaron una actitud positiva frente a la ciencia, así la teoría de Isaac Newton fue reconocida por la Inglaterra y la Alemania protestantes, en tanto Roma la rechazó como herejía protestante. Esa actitud divergente marcó la separación drástica entre el progreso científico de las sociedades protestantes y el atraso de las católicas.

They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.' And?' Chaos theory throws it right out the window.

Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.

The main interest of Fermat, who shares the credit for inventing calculus with Newton and analytic geometry with Descartes, was number theory —"the higher arithmetic.

Perhaps the most important contribution to science that the Royal Society has made in its three centuries of existence is its early role in publishing Newton 's masterful account of his discoveries.

I am very distressed, as I assume you are, over the Oppenheimer matter. I feel that it is somewhat like inquiring into the security risk of a Newton or a Galileo.

There's a large oak tree in the Newton Centre park playground that is legendary because only a few humans have hit it with a baseball from home plate, and B.J. Novak is among them. And I was there that day.

For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.

Newton's laws aren't fundamental, they are emergent; that is, they are what happens when quantum matter aggregates into macroscopic fluids and objects. It is a collective organizational phenomenon.

Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the existence of God.

Commenting on the importance of Maxwell's equations, Einstein wrote that they are the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.

Evidence in support of general relativity came quickly. Astronomers had long known that Mercury's orbital motion around the sun deviated slightly from what Newton's mathematics predicted. In 1915, Einstein used his new equations to recalculate Mercury's trajectory and was able to explain the discrepancy, a realization he later described to his colleague Adrian Fokker as so thrilling that for some hours it gave him heart palpitations.

The art of science, of which Newton was the master, lies in making judicious simplifications that render problems tractable while retaining enough of their essence to ensure that the conclusions drawn are relevant.

Figure 3.3 Newton's drawing of a cannon on a mountain In Newton's famous cannon-on-a-mountain sketch, the dropped cannonball falls straight downward, while those fired with larger

There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.

Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived.