The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
Interpretation
Isaac Newton emphasizes the connection between mathematics and the natural world, suggesting that both ancient and modern thinkers sought to understand nature through mathematical principles.
In this quote, Isaac Newton highlights the enduring pursuit of knowledge among both contemporary and historical authors to comprehend the complexities of nature by applying mathematical laws. He suggests that mathematics serves as a foundational framework for understanding natural phenomena, illustrating a timeless quest for intellectual clarity and scientific insight.
In practice
This quote can be used in a science seminar discussing the contributions of mathematics to scientific discovery.
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.
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.
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.
In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.
In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.
I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification.
You have to test your hypothesis against other theories. Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by observation. So he reasons, compares facts, puts questions to them, and by the answers which he extracts, tests one by another. This sort of control, by means of reasoning and facts, is what constitutes experiment, properly speaking; and it is the only process that we have for teaching ourselves about the nature of things outside us.
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