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.
The economists will have to revise their theories of value.
although science could pinpoint the exact spot in the brain that ignites rage, they had yet to identify the location that produces love.
Science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.
Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.
By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.