His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
Interpretation
This quote honors Isaac Newton's groundbreaking contributions to understanding the universe.
This quote reflects on the lasting impact of Isaac Newton's intellectual achievements, highlighting his ability to comprehend and explain complex natural phenomena, such as planetary motion, comet orbits, and ocean tides. It serves to celebrate the legacy of a mind that significantly advanced human knowledge and laid the groundwork for modern science.
In practice
This quote could be used in a scientific presentation to emphasize Newton's influence on modern science.
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.
Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.
It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.
But when I wasn't working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.
Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.
Simplification of modes of proof is not merely an indication of advance in our knowledge of a subject, but is also the surest guarantee of readiness for farther progress.
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