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PrimarySecondaryScience

It’s Not Just Physics, Virtually All Subjects Owe A Huge Debt To Isaac Newton

Why all teachers should be excited about having a Merry Christmas and a Happy Newton Year!

Gareth Sturdy
by Gareth Sturdy
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Christmas is coming, the time when we celebrate the birthday of one of the most important figures from history.

That’s right, Isaac Newton.

Born on 25 December 1642, Newton was accorded almost divine status by the time he died in 1727.

His stupendous tomb was placed in the very centre of Westminster Abbey, and Alexander Pope’s epitaph ran, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.”

The importance of this man was such, his contemporaries proclaimed, that we should rewrite the first lines of the Bible around him.

Next year will be a double anniversary for Isaac Newton, and it’s not just physics teachers who should be planning a party in his honour. I can’t think of a single subject taught in the school curriculum which doesn’t owe a massive debt to Newton and his physics. Let me explain why.

As well as 2017 being the 375th anniversary of his birth, it will also mark 290 years since the publication of his ‘rules of philosophy’ which he completed as he was dying.

These laws of reasoning, written as two sections within his masterwork, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, are less well-known than his famous laws of motion, which include the well-worn (but often fuzzily understood) “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. These words will be familiar to every secondary school pupil as they’re a bedrock of every GCSE physics course.

But I would argue that science teachers should be hammering home Newton’s Method for thinking whether it features in an exam or not. No other document has done more to shape the distinctive way we understand the world today.

What are the rules?

The first: simple explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is because it is easier to establish if a theory is false if it is based only on a small number of assumptions.

The second: phenomena of the same kind are likely to have the same causes.

The third: if a property can be shown to be present in all experiments that can be done, then it is assumed to be present in all possible objects.

The fourth: a general theory is considered true if it based on particular results.

These simple guidelines were not all Newton’s own work; they are a magnificent and beautiful synthesis of the pioneering ideas of Bacon, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler and Descartes. But by embodying them into a coherent programme for organising ideas, Newton provided a new way of obtaining knowledge of the world.

This knowledge was systematic and derived from hard mathematical logic. By following the same principles, others could seek to achieve the same results, providing a level platform for further discussion and analysis.

Science as we know it was born.

In fact, it’s the basis for modern culture’s whole approach to the rational understanding of the world, be it in medicine, history, social science, geography, economics, psychology – the list is endless.

Even the arts have had to deal with Newton’s legacy, from the Romantics railing against his ‘sleep of reason’, to Cezanne’s abstraction and the Futurists’ mechanisation.

In the words of Newton’s biographer James Gleick, “We have assimilated Newtonianism as knowledge and as faith. We believe our scientists when they compute the past and future tracks of comets and spaceships. What is more, we know that they do this not by magic but by mere technique….We deem the universe solvable.”

Enlightened thinking The power unleashed by this fresh paradigm of thought totally transformed the world. As Kieron O’Hara puts it in his introductory book on the Enlightenment, Newton showed “the exercise of reason could produce mastery of nature.”

Within a generation of Newton setting down his rules, the Industrial Revolution began, and 150 years later the first powered flight had taken off.

Of course, as that first foray into the skies was happening, one Albert Einstein was busy proving that Newton’s ideas about gravity were not entirely perfect. But we should remember that he was using Newton’s ideas about how to do science to prove it.

If you’re a teacher, then maybe you might want to print out Newton’s principles for thinking as an end-of-term present for your pupils. It won’t mean much to them now, but if you explain the reason behind it to them they might just look back and thank you one day.

Why? Because, like all good teaching, you’ll be giving them the tools to understand why the world is as it is and why we think the way we do. And I can’t think of any better Christmas present than that.

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