Experimental Blog #99

Quotations from "Newton's Gift" - How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World by David Berlinski

The copyright year of this book is 2000.

"{Newton's} definitions have now spread and enlarged themselves so that they cover and explain virtually every aspect of material behavior that is larger than the atom and smaller than the universe."
"The law of gravitation constitutes the frame of the universe because its sphere of application is every material object, whether large or small, here or there, to the uttermost ends of the cosmos."
"We are acquainted with gravity through its effects; we understand gravity by means of its mathematical form. Beyond this, we understand nothing."
"Newtonian mechanics is now complete. Almost all problems that can be posed within the structures that it provides have been solved. It is only turbulence that remains a significant and baffling question."
"There have been in the tide of time four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics, of course, Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, Einstein's theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics."
"The attempt to explain the biological world in terms of the laws of physics has not been a notable success."
"There is much in nature that cannot be explained in terms of purely mechanical forces - electricity and magnetism, to take one example, the behavior of light, to take another."
"Within the Newtonian universe, the laws governing the behavior of particles in motion hold dominion over the past, the present, and the future."
"Newton's discovery that very significant aspects of the physical world behave in ways that would appear to have nothing to do with the exercise of any will is, when properly understood, deeply disconcerting...."