The Enlightenment Vision of Science and Religion #7: Newton and His Approach to Science

God has conferred upon and added to man a distinctive power — the faculty of intellectual investigation into the secrets of creation, the acquisition of higher knowledge — the greatest virtue of which is scientific enlightenment.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá’

Dec 10, 2012. The core teachings of Bahá’u'lláh – and the Bahá’í Faith – seem almost as if they were an Enlightenment manifesto, although they are of vastly wider range and of more universal scope. According to `Abdu’l-Bahá, they

lay the foundation of the oneness of the world of humanity and promulgate universal brotherhood. They are founded upon the unity of science and religion and upon investigation of truth.

They uphold the principle that religion must be the cause of amity, union and harmony among men. They establish the equality of both sexes and propound economic principles which are for the happiness of individuals. They diffuse universal education, that every soul may as much as possible have a share of knowledge. They abrogate and nullify religious, racial, political, patriotic and economic prejudices and the like.

Few more epitomize the “unity of science and religion” and the “investigation of truth” than Isaac Newton, the founding father of modern science and the greatest of the great Enlightenment thinkers.

Alexander Pope capture his significance in his famous epitaph:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.

Isaac Newton – Scientist

Newton (1642–1727) (also see Wikipedia) was an immensely gifted scientist, mathematician, and scholar. The impact of his thought is so great that all of modern science is under its spell. Even the sciences of the 20th century – quantum mechanics and relativity theory – are built on Newtonian foundations.

Newton’s many contributions include major discoveries in optics, the invention of calculus, the discovery of the universal laws of motion (“Newton’s” three laws of mechanics), and the discovery of the universal inverse square law of gravitation. Any one of these on its own would have marked him out as one of the world’s greatest scientists. That he produce all of them is simply astonishing.

Optics

Newton’s work in optics, carried out at the beginning of his career, drew on the English empirical tradition of Bacon. He engaged in a precisely controlled series of experiments with light – usually sunlight in a darkened room – and invented much of modern optics in the process. Among his discoveries was the dispersion of light into colors, illustrated on the left by white light being split into colors by a prism. This showed that white light was composed of many colors. He also showed that colored light kept its color.

He proposed that light was made from “corpuscles” – now called photons – of light, although he admitted that experimental proof was not yet available. This proposal presaged the modern understanding of light by 250 years.

The systematic investigation of light that he deployed has become the model of how empirical science is to be done.

Gravity

Newton’s law of universal gravitation, learned by heart by almost every high school student in the world, states that:

… every point mass in the universe attracts every other point mass with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Separately it was shown that large spherically symmetrical masses attract and are attracted as if all their mass were concentrated at their centers.

Newton formulated this in 1666, age 24, shortly after finishing his university courses. He published it in 1687 in Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – the Principia – where he also stated his three universal laws of motion:

1st law: If an object experiences no net force, then its velocity is constant: the object is either at rest (if its velocity is zero), or it moves in a straight line with constant speed (if its velocity is nonzero).

2nd law: The acceleration a of a body is parallel and directly proportional to the net force F acting on the body, is in the direction of the net force, and is inversely proportional to the mass m of the body, i.e., F = ma.

3rd law: When a first body exerts a force F1 on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force F2 = −F1 on the first body. This means that F1 and F2 are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

These simple statements – which Newton then used to explain Kepler’s laws of planetary motion – became the basis of the science of physics and many of the laws of engineerin. Formulated as mathematical statements extraordinary in their compactness and simplicity, and used with calculus and other powerful mathematical tools, they gave mathematical form and power to a wide range of modern science and engineering techonologies. These in turn, gave rise to continually expanding success, not only explaning the motions of the planets, but also explaining a multitude of previously unexplained problems and providing a method to explain a continually expanding realm of new problems.

Newton’s laws made it possible to understand – and to predict – the behaviour of the material universe. Later, they were copied to model electrical forces, and then many of the other forces we know exerted by matter on matter.

The Calculus

Newton also developed calculus – the mathematics of change – to explain the dynamics of systems. Calculus, according to an MIT website on the topic, works by

giving engineers and you the ability to model and control systems, [thus giving] them (and potentially you) extraordinary power over the material world. The development of calculus and its applications to physics and engineering is probably the most significant factor in the development of modern science beyond where it was in the days of Archimedes. And this was responsible for the industrial revolution and everything that has followed from it including almost all the major advances of the last few centuries.

Without his invention of calculus, Newton’s laws of motion would have only applied to a limited set of behaviors (i.e., static systems).

Isaac Newton – Empiricism and Mathematical Law

Newton worked in two different ways. One – epitomized by his studies in optics – was to carry out careful and rigorous empirical investigations of phenomena, scrupulously rejecting hyphotheses as to the cause of things excepting those that emerged from his experiments. The other – epitomized by his famous laws – was based on mathematical theory derived from empirically observed phenomena. Both are central to all aspects of modern science and engineering.

Newton saw empirical reality as driving the development of science, in contrast to Leibnitz, his great European rival (and co-inventor of calculus). Here is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Newton’s approach:

The most important element … was Newton’s deep commitment to having the empirical world serve not only as the ultimate arbiter, but also as the sole basis for adopting provisional theory. Throughout all of this work he displayed distrust of what was then known as the method of hypotheses – putting forward hypotheses that reach beyond all known phenomena and then testing them by deducing observable conclusions from them. Newton insisted instead on having specific phenomena decide each element of theory, with the goal of limiting the provisional aspect of theory as much as possible to the step of inductively generalizing from the specific phenomena. …

Newton’s commitment to having phenomena decide the elements of theory required questions to be left open when no available phenomena could decide them.

Newton himself contrasted his style with Leibnitz’s. He saw himself as proceeding “upon the Evidence arising from Experiments and Phenomena, and stops where such Evidence is wanting.” Leibnitz, he saw, was “taken up with Hypotheses, and propounds them, not to be examined by Experiments, but to be believed without Examination.”

Next Week:

Next week, we will look at the Enlightments reception – and sometimes glorification – of Newton’s thought, as well as its later appropriation of it as a decidedly “materialistic,” “mechanistic,” or “reductionistic” approach frequently called the “the Newtonian world view.” {This despite its foreignness to the deeply religious Newton.)

The excellent Principia Cybernetica Website describes the “Newtonian World View” thus:

The world view underlying traditional science may be called “mechanistic” or “Newtonian”. It is based in reductionism, determinism, materialism, and a reflection-correspondence view of knowledge. Although it is simple, coherent and intuitive, it ignores or denies human agency, values, creativity and evolution.

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This is the 7th in a series of blogs on the Enlightenment Vision of Science. The author, Stephen Friberg, is a Bahá’í living in Mountain View, California. A research physicist by training, he wrote Religion and Evolution Reconciled: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Comments on Evolution with Courosh Mehanian. He worked at NTT in Japan before joining the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley.

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