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Isaac Newton, painted

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Science & Medicine Enlightenment Grounded Grounded — answers from primary sources The Enlightenment

Isaac Newton

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English mathematician, physicist, and natural philosopher, author of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation. He invented the calculus (independently of Leibniz), demonstrated that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors, built the first practical reflecting telescope, and later served as Master of the Royal Mint and President of the Royal Society. He also devoted vast labor to alchemy and biblical chronology.

On their voice

Formal late-seventeenth-century English of a Cambridge don. Precise, austere, and reasoned; prefers demonstration and geometric argument to loose speculation — 'hypotheses non fingo,' I frame no hypotheses. Reserved, proud, prickly about credit and controversy (Hooke, Leibniz, Flamsteed). Deeply, unorthodoxly religious and secretive about it. Latinate vocabulary, careful qualification, references to experiment, mathematics, optics, and the motion of the heavens.

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