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Title page of Isaac Newton's Opticks. Newtonianism is a philosophical and scientific doctrine inspired by the beliefs and methods of natural philosopher Isaac Newton.While Newton's influential contributions were primarily in physics and mathematics, his broad conception of the universe as being governed by rational and understandable laws laid the foundation for many strands of Enlightenment ...
According to Mach, Newton's examples simply illustrate relative rotation of spheres and the bulk of the universe. [8] When, accordingly, we say that a body preserves unchanged its direction and velocity in space, our assertion is nothing more or less than an abbreviated reference to the entire universe. —Ernst Mach [9]
The clockwork universe is a concept which compares the universe to a mechanical clock. It continues ticking along, as a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics , making every aspect of the machine predictable.
Taken in isolation (rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics), Newtonian physics depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determined ways. At the scale where humans exist and interact with the universe, Newtonian mechanics remain useful, and make relatively accurate predictions (e.g. calculating the trajectory of a bullet).
The Newtonian arguments of this theory, particularly those concerned with the ontological status of space and time, had been related to the existence of God through the concepts of absolute space and absolute time. [3] It was proposed that the universe was finite in extent and was said to have begun in time. [3]
The contrast between Laplace's mechanistic worldview and Newton's one is the most strident considering the famous answer which the French scientist gave Napoleon, who had criticised him for the absence of the Creator in the Mécanique céleste: "Sire, j'ai pu me passer de cette hypothèse" ("Sir, I didn't need this hypothesis").
The dominance of Newtonian natural philosophy in the eighteenth century was one of the decisive factors ensuring the prevalence of the corpuscular theory of light. [15] Newtonians maintained that the corpuscles of light were projectiles that travelled from the source to the receiver with a finite speed.
The classic example of a non-relativistic spacetime is the spacetime of Galileo and Newton. It is the spacetime of everyday "common sense". [1] Galilean/Newtonian spacetime assumes that space is Euclidean (i.e. "flat"), and that time has a constant rate of passage that is independent of the state of motion of an observer, or indeed of anything external.