Related papers: Isaac Newton's sinister heraldry
Isaac Newton is usually associated with the idea of absolute space and time, and with ballistic light-corpuscle arguments. However, Newton was also a proponent of wave/particle duality, and published a "new" variable-density aether model in…
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and…
In 1693, Isaac Newton answered a query from Samuel Pepys about a problem involving dice. Newton's analysis is discussed and attention is drawn to an error he made.
Newton's Principia, when it appeared in 1687, was received with the greatest admiration, not only by the foremost mathematicians and astronomers in Europe, but also by philosophers like Voltaire and Locke and by members of the educated…
A 17th-century oil painting by an unknown artist, once owned by the Tayler family and now in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge, is currently identified as a portrait of a young Isaac Barrow. The sitter is shown pointing to a…
The work done by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, continues being a path to increase our knowledge of Nature. To better understand all the ideas behind it, one of the finest ways is to generalize them to wider situations. In…
Celebrating 170th anniversary of the discovery of Neptune, I review the story of the discovery that startled the world. The story is an interplay of scientific triumph and human weakness and an example of how science works in a…
Einstein in 1905, his year of miracles, wrote five papers which mark a watershed between classical physics and modern physics. They dealt with problem of reality of atoms, theory of special relativity which overthrew Newtonian conceptions…
The law of centripetal force governing the motion of celestial bodies in eccentric conic sections, has been established and thoroughly investigated by Sir Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica. Yet its profound implications on the…
In his Chronology, Newton uses astronomical "evidence" to support its extreme rejuvenation of ancient times. These elements, having a scientific varnish, provide some credibility to the work. They have been fiercely debated for a century,…
The Scientific Revolution sweeping through seventeenth-century Europe led to unprecedented intellectual and scientific insights and high-profile technological developments. Combined with a significant worldwide increase in naval commerce,…
Part 1 : For more than two millennia, ever since Euclid's geometry, the so called Archimedean Axiom has been accepted without sufficiently explicit awareness of that fact. The effect has been a severe restriction of our views of space-time,…
With each passing year, the young Albert Einstein's achievements in physics in the year 1905 seem to be ever more miraculous. We describe why the centenary of this remarkable year is worthy of celebration.
Einstein's blackboard is a well-known exhibit at the History of Science Museum at Oxford University. However, it is much less well known that the writing on the board provides a neat summary of a work of historic importance, Einstein's 1931…
The Einstein tile is a novel type of non-periodic tile that can cover the plane without repeating itself. It has a simple shape that resembles a fedora. This research paper unveils the aperiodicity of the newly discovered Einstein tile…
Einstein was in many ways like a detective on a mystery trail, though in his case he was on the trail of nature's mysteries and not some murder mystery! And like all good detectives he had a style. It consisted of taking facts that he knew…
The manuscripts that presumably contained Newton's early development of the fundamental concepts that led to his Principia have been lost. A plausible reconstruction of this development is presened based on Newton's exchange of letters with…
The purpose of this note consists of discrete rational reconstruction which took place during the years 1609-1630 and 1630-1666, ie, the year of the publication of their Astronomia Nova and the year of death of the great German astronomer…
Newton seems to have stated a quantitative relationship between the position of a body in relative space and the position of the body in absolute space in the first scholium of his Principia. We show that if this suspected relationship is…
The feud between Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton has remained ongoing even after 300 years, over whether Newton should have acknowledged Hooke's influence on his graphical method of constructing planet orbits, the celebrated Proposition 1,…