II.—The Fundamental Concepts of Natural Philosophy

Abstract

From the time of Galileo, experiment has been the core of Natural Science. Before him, of course, observation alone had in the development of astronomy played a fundamental part. Besides the great workers of the ancient civilisations, who knew the path of the sun amongst the fixed stars and could predict eclipses, and besides the fruits of Greek astronomy associated with the names of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the more modern observational work of Tycho Brahe, analysed by Kepler, had vindicated the self-consistency of the Copernican theory of the solar system and had led to its remarkable refinement in the form of Kepler's three quantitative laws—the law of the ellipse, the law of areas, and the law connecting periodic times and major axes. This was a triumphant example of the execution of the programme then being put forward by Francis Bacon for discovering all natural laws—the method of induction from a number of instances. But it was reserved for Galileo to make a start with the process of ascertaining as far as might be, by controlled experiment, the particular nature of motion. The metaphysical questions associated with motion had not escaped the attention of the Greeks; but Zeno was apparently content with stating paradoxes, and did not resolve them. Galileo, first, experimented with moving bodies; and established that in falling they received equal increments of velocity in equal times—a kinematic theorem, like Kepler's laws. Huyghens was perhaps the first person to establish dynamical-theorems; that is to say, to infer a kinematic result from a stated physical principle—as, for example, his proof of the approximate isochromism of the pendulum based on the principle of vis viva, or, as we should now say, the conservation of energy. Huyghens, together with some of the early Restoration men of science in this country, dealt also with the collisions of bodies. The peerless Newton went further. Assuming outright three primitive “laws of motion,” he showed how the results of Galileo, Huyghens, and their contemporaries could be actually deduced; and by the addition of a fourth law, the law of universal gravitation, already conjectured by some thinkers, he arrived at the laws of Kepler as inferences. Not only so, but the four highly general and abstract laws introduced by Newton have been found sufficient to deduce an enormous complex of dynamical theorems, to express their relationships in the subsequent beautiful systems of Lagrange and of Hamilton, and to derive all but every detail in the motions both in the solar system and in distant binary stars. The basic principles laid down by Newton remained unaltered till our own day, when Einstein modified simultaneously the laws of motion, the law of gravitation, and the background of space and time which had been explicitly adopted by Newton as the scene in which his laws were to play their parts.