The 17th century was a time of intense religious feeling, and nowhere was that feeling more intense than in Great Britain. There a devout young man, Isaac Newton, was finally to discover the way to a new synthesis in which truth was revealed and God was preserved.

Newton was both an experimental and a mathematical genius, a combination that enabled him to establish both the Copernican system and a new mechanics. His method was simplicity itself: “from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena.” Newton’s genius guided him in the selection of phenomena to be investigated, and his creation of a fundamental mathematical tool—the calculus (simultaneously invented by Gottfried Leibniz)—permitted him to submit the forces he inferred to calculation. The result was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, usually called simply the Principia), which appeared in 1687. Here was a new physics that applied equally well to terrestrial and celestial bodies. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were all justified by Newton’s analysis of forces. Descartes was utterly routed.

Newton’s three laws of motion and his principle of universal gravitation sufficed to regulate the new cosmos, but only, Newton believed, with the help of God. Gravity, he more than once hinted, was direct divine action, as were all forces for order and vitality. Absolute space, for Newton, was essential, because space was the “sensorium of God,” and the divine abode must necessarily be the ultimate coordinate system. Finally, Newton’s analysis of the mutual perturbations of the planets caused by their individual gravitational fields predicted the natural collapse of the solar system unless God acted to set things right again.

The diffusion of scientific method

The publication of the Principia marks the culmination of the movement begun by Copernicus and, as such, has always stood as the symbol of the scientific revolution. There were, however, similar attempts to criticize, systematize, and organize natural knowledge that did not lead to such dramatic results. In the same year as Copernicus’s great volume, there appeared an equally important book on anatomy: Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (“On the Fabric of the Human Body,” called the De fabrica), a critical examination of Galen’s anatomy in which Vesalius drew on his own studies to correct many of Galen’s errors. Vesalius, like Newton a century later, emphasized the phenomena—i.e., the accurate description of natural facts. Vesalius’s work touched off a flurry of anatomical work in Italy and elsewhere that culminated in the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey, whose Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise Concerning the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) was published in 1628. This was the Principia of physiology that established anatomy and physiology as sciences in their own right. Harvey showed that organic phenomena could be studied experimentally and that some organic processes could be reduced to mechanical systems. The heart and the vascular system could be considered as a pump and a system of pipes and could be understood without recourse to spirits or other forces immune to analysis.

In other sciences the attempt to systematize and criticize was not so successful. In chemistry, for example, the work of the medieval and early modern alchemists had yielded important new substances and processes, such as the mineral acids and distillation, but had obscured theory in almost impenetrable mystical argot. Robert Boyle in England tried to clear away some of the intellectual underbrush by insisting upon clear descriptions, reproducibility of experiments, and mechanical conceptions of chemical processes. Chemistry, however, was not yet ripe for revolution.

In many areas there was little hope of reducing phenomena to comprehensibility, simply because of the sheer number of facts to be accounted for. New instruments like the microscope and the telescope vastly multiplied the worlds with which humans had to reckon. The voyages of discovery brought back a flood of new botanical and zoological specimens that overwhelmed ancient classificatory schemes. The best that could be done was to describe new things accurately and hope that someday they could all be fitted together in a coherent way.

The growing flood of information put heavy strains upon old institutions and practices. It was no longer sufficient to publish scientific results in an expensive book that few could buy; information had to be spread widely and rapidly. Nor could the isolated genius, like Newton, comprehend a world in which new information was being produced faster than any single person could assimilate it. Natural philosophers had to be sure of their data, and to that end they required independent and critical confirmation of their discoveries. New means were created to accomplish these ends. Scientific societies sprang up, beginning in Italy in the early years of the 17th century and culminating in the two great national scientific societies that mark the zenith of the scientific revolution: the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, created by royal charter in 1662, and the Académie des Sciences of Paris, formed in 1666. In these societies and others like them all over the world, natural philosophers could gather to examine, discuss, and criticize new discoveries and old theories. To provide a firm basis for these discussions, societies began to publish scientific papers. The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, which began as a private venture of its secretary, was the first such professional scientific journal. It was soon copied by the French academy’s Mémoires, which won equal importance and prestige. The old practice of hiding new discoveries in private jargon, obscure language, or even anagrams gradually gave way to the ideal of universal comprehensibility. New canons of reporting were devised so that experiments and discoveries could be reproduced by others. This required new precision in language and a willingness to share experimental or observational methods. The failure of others to reproduce results cast serious doubts upon the original reports. Thus were created the tools for a massive assault on nature’s secrets.

Even with the scientific revolution accomplished, much remained to be done. Again, it was Newton who showed the way. For the macroscopic world, the Principia sufficed. Newton’s three laws of motion and the principle of universal gravitation were all that was necessary to analyze the mechanical relations of ordinary bodies, and the calculus provided the essential mathematical tools. For the microscopic world, Newton provided two methods. Where simple laws of action had already been determined from observation, as the relation of volume and pressure of a gas (Boyle’s law, pv = k), Newton assumed forces between particles that permitted him to derive the law. He then used these forces to predict other phenomena, in this case the speed of sound in air, that could be measured against the prediction. Conformity of observation to prediction was taken as evidence for the essential truth of the theory. Second, Newton’s method made possible the discovery of laws of macroscopic action that could be accounted for by microscopic forces. Here the seminal work was not the Principia but Newton’s masterpiece of experimental physics, the Opticks, published in 1704, in which he showed how to examine a subject experimentally and discover the laws concealed therein. Newton showed how judicious use of hypotheses could open the way to further experimental investigation until a coherent theory was achieved. The Opticks was to serve as the model in the 18th and early 19th centuries for the investigation of heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and chemical atoms.

Mechanics

Just as the Principia preceded the Opticks, so too did mechanics maintain its priority among the sciences in the 18th century, in the process becoming transformed from a branch of physics into a branch of mathematics. Many physical problems were reduced to mathematical ones that proved amenable to solution by increasingly sophisticated analytical methods. The Swiss Leonhard Euler was one of the most fertile and prolific workers in mathematics and mathematical physics. His development of the calculus of variations provided a powerful tool for dealing with highly complex problems. In France, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Joseph-Louis Lagrange succeeded in completely mathematizing mechanics, reducing it to an axiomatic system requiring only mathematical manipulation.

The test of Newtonian mechanics was its congruence with physical reality. At the beginning of the 18th century it was put to a rigorous test. Cartesians insisted that the Earth, because it was squeezed at the Equator by the etherial vortex causing gravity, should be somewhat pointed at the poles, a shape rather like that of an American football. Newtonians, arguing that centrifugal force was greatest at the Equator, calculated an oblate sphere that was flattened at the poles and bulged at the Equator. The Newtonians were proved correct after careful measurements of a degree of the meridian were made on expeditions to Lapland and to Peru. The final touch to the Newtonian edifice was provided by Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, whose masterly Traité de mécanique céleste (1798–1827; Celestial Mechanics) systematized everything that had been done in celestial mechanics under Newton’s inspiration. Laplace went beyond Newton by showing that the perturbations of the planetary orbits caused by the interactions of planetary gravitation are in fact periodic and that the solar system is, therefore, stable, requiring no divine intervention.

Chemistry

Although Newton was unable to bring to chemistry the kind of clarification he brought to physics, the Opticks did provide a method for the study of chemical phenomena. One of the major advances in chemistry in the 18th century was the discovery of the role of air, and of gases generally, in chemical reactions. This role had been dimly glimpsed in the 17th century, but it was not fully seen until the classic experiments of Joseph Black on magnesia alba (basic magnesium carbonate) in the 1750s. By extensive and careful use of the chemical balance, Black showed that an air with specific properties could combine with solid substances like quicklime and could be recovered from them. This discovery served to focus attention on the properties of “air,” which was soon found to be a generic, not a specific, name. Chemists discovered a host of specific gases and investigated their various properties: some were flammable, others put out flames; some killed animals, others made them lively. Clearly, gases had a great deal to do with chemistry.

The Newton of chemistry was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. In a series of careful balance experiments Lavoisier untangled combustion reactions to show that, in contradiction to established theory, which held that a body gave off the principle of inflammation (called phlogiston) when it burned, combustion actually involves the combination of bodies with a gas that Lavoisier named oxygen. The chemical revolution was as much a revolution in method as in conception. Gravimetric methods made possible precise analysis, and this, Lavoisier insisted, was the central concern of the new chemistry. Only when bodies were analyzed as to their constituent substances was it possible to classify them and their attributes logically and consistently.

The imponderable fluids

The Newtonian method of inferring laws from close observation of phenomena and then deducing forces from these laws was applied with great success to phenomena in which no ponderable matter figured. Light, heat, electricity, and magnetism were all entities that were not capable of being weighed—i.e., imponderable. In the Opticks, Newton had assumed that particles of different sizes could account for the different refrangibility of the various colours of light. Clearly, forces of some sort must be associated with these particles if such phenomena as diffraction and refraction are to be accounted for. During the 18th century, heat, electricity, and magnetism were similarly conceived as consisting of particles with which were associated forces of attraction or repulsion. In the 1780s, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was able to measure electrical and magnetic forces, using a delicate torsion balance of his own invention, and to show that these forces follow the general form of Newtonian universal attraction. Only light and heat failed to disclose such general force laws, thereby resisting reduction to Newtonian mechanics.