70 The Poetry of Physics and The Physics of Poetry
We have so far traced the development of the influence of scientific
thinking on the humanities prior to the appearance of Newton’s Principia
Mathematica in 1687. The work of Newton brilliantly completed the
scientific revolution begun by Copernicus. He was an intellectual hero of
his time as the following lines of Pope reveal:
Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in Night!
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was Light.Newton’s laws of motion explained both the movement of the planets
about the Sun and that of projectiles in the Earth’s gravitational field. As
a result his work was almost immediately accepted by both the scientific
and lay communities. His precise mathematical description of both
heavenly and earthly motion had a tremendous effect on subsequent
thinkers in all fields of human endeavor. The entire world now seemed
capable of being described rationally, mathematically and mechanically.
All were eager to imitate Newton’s success in the description of all
phenomena including such diverse things as human behaviour.
Mechanical models were used to describe everything from the solar
system to the human mind, from the economics of the market place to
the creation of the universe by the deity.
This new attitude towards science is probably best expressed by
the poet John Dryden (1684) in his essay Of Dramatic Poesie in which
he wrote:
Is it not evident in these last hundred years (when the study of
philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in
Christendom) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to
us? — that more errors of the school have been detected, more
useful experiments in philosophy have been made, more noble
secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy discovered,
than in all those credulous and doting ages from Aristotle to
us? — so true is it that nothing spreads more rapidly than
science, when rightly and generally cultivated.We devote the remainder of this chapter to sketching the effect of
the Newtonian revolution in physics on the thinkers in other fields of
human endeavor. One of the great impacts of the new science was the
influence on religious thinking. The scientists themselves such as
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Hooke and Newton were rather