Abstract
IN a paper entitled “El Tricentenario De Newton”, Mario Bunge examines five different aspects of Newton's work (Buenos Aires: Universidad Obrera Argentina Institute Cientifico, Seminario De Filosofia, November 1942. Pp. 8). The first of these is his discovery and application of the infinitesimal calculus, a discovery which unfortunately caused some unpleasant feeling with Leibniz, though, as is pointed out, each represented a distinct school so that their contributions can be regarded as complementary. Secondly, Newton was responsible for the introduction of the deductive method in the natural sciences and so rendered signal service to mankind as the founder of mathematical physics, which has been the basis of so much in science for two and a half centuries. Then, his rational mechanics had a profound influence for many generations. Newton's differential equations showed how the state of the universe today is the result of all its past history, and its future history could be determined by its present. This required a strict determinism which obsessed the minds of men of science for a long period, though in comparatively recent times there has been a strong reaction against it. His work on optics showed his ability as an experimental physicist. Newton's subordination of optics to mechanics, far from enhancing progress, was a principal cause of the lack of progress in optics during the eighteenth century. An ironical result of his experiments with diffraction and interference was the death-knell a century later of his corpuscular theory of light. Lastly, Newton's philosophical work must not be forgotten. Space and time were objective and independent of our perception of them, according to Newton, and were not a priori representations which served for the foundations of all external intuitions. Force, energy, mass, motion, as well as space and time, were all objective entities for Newton. His work must be considered a model of the systematic application of scientific method- a model of the power of reason to investigate the natural, controlling and ruling it, by placing it at the service of progress, material, cultural and moral, of humanity.
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A South American Review of Newton's Work. Nature 152, 719–720 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152719c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152719c0