This fifth volume presents the surviving correspondence from the period of almost four years which is, from a bibliographical point of view, the most important time in Newton's life: with Roger Cotes, Newton revised his Philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathematics and saw it through the press. Considered as a single group of letters, the Newton-Cotes correspondence is the largest and most important section of Newton's scientific correspondence that we have. Nowhere else can one witness Newton in a detailed debate about scientific argument and scientific conclusions - a debate from which he did not always emerge victorious. Nowhere else does Newton write in detail about the text of the Principia. And all scholars agree that this text which was hammered out between Cotes and Newton was the most important of all versions, printed and unprinted; this was (to all intents and purposes) the Principia of subsequent history.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered one of the most influential people in human history.
Newton remains influential to scientists, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein. Newton was deemed the more influential.[8]
Newton also wrote on Judaeo-Christian prophecy, whose decipherment was essential, he thought, to the understanding of God. His book on the subject, which was reprinted well into the Victorian Age, represented lifelong study. Its message was that Christianity went astray in the 4th century AD, when the first Council of Nicaea propounded erroneous doctrines of the nature of Christ. The full extent of Newton's unorthodoxy was recognized only in the present century: but although a critic of accepted Trinitarian dogmas and the Council of Nicaea, he possessed a deep religious sense, venerated the Bible and accepted its account of creation. In late editions of his scientific works he expressed a strong sense of God's providential role in nature.
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