All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers.
Yet, like most universities in Europe, Cambridge was steeped in Aristotelian philosophy and a view of nature resting on a geocentric view of the universe, dealing with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.ĭuring his first three years at Cambridge, Newton was taught the standard curriculum but was fascinated with the more advanced science. Philosopher René Descartes had begun to formulate a new concept of nature as an intricate, impersonal and inert machine. The heliocentric view of the universe-theorized by astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and later refined by Galileo-was well known in most European academic circles.
#Isaac newton inventions full
When Newton arrived at Cambridge, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was already in full force. 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.” Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after, then to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.” “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.” “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. “I do not know what I may appear to the world but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.” “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” “It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity.” “Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.” “I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy.” “The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.” “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age.
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