This first volume is particularly rich in matters of concern to the historian of science. It shows the young Newton in the plenitude of his powers; he himself wrote of the period at Woolsthorpe, which ended before any surviving letters of real consequence were written, 'for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematics and Philosophy more than at any time since'. The main scientific topics with which these letters deal are the reflecting telescope; the early mathematical work; and the fundamental work on the decomposition of white light by the prism.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered one of the most influential people in human history.
Newton remains influential to scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was deemed the more influential.[8]
Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature.
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