Newton

Summary

Dominique Pagani presents Newton as the culmination of the scientific revolution and of classical physics. He returns above all to the law of universal attraction: a law of "a line and a half" through which the human mind takes hold of almost all the movements of the universe1. Its notions, mass and distance, are measurable, which he considers "democratic". For him, gravitation is the emblem of natural necessity: the moon "has no choice", and freedom is "Newton in reverse", a movement upward2. He rejects the legend of the apple, which gives a false idea of how knowledge comes about: the law presupposes thousands of equations and the whole mathematical tradition since Euclid. He links Newton to Kant, whose question would be "how is Newton possible?", and recalls that Kant sees Rousseau as "the Newton of morality"3. He specifies that this law remains valid within its field of application but loses its claim to universality with relativity and quantum physics4. He also mentions the prism, which turns colours into quantitative differences of frequency, and the infinitesimal calculus, invented at the same time as Leibniz.

1. 1M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (1987)23 Aug 2019 · 1:45:37
2. 2#3.6 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 33:52
3. 3#9.11 How can sciences of history be real?7 Jan 2021 · 10:01
4. 4#9.17 The geopolitical metaphor: Planck, Descartes, Clouscard17 Mar 2021 · 25:39

Summary produced automatically from 127 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.