Eighteen short nonfiction works in the public domain, independently chosen by the readers. Topics include a woman in Alaska, Cuban folklore, and hunting peccaries on the Nueces; Max Planck's Quantum Theory and Newton's world view; church bells and chocolate cake; naval flag signals, rocket life-saving apparatus, and seashore plants and pebbles; also many literary and philosophical figures including Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Edwards, Johann Fichte, Joseph Butler, George Sand, Marie Corelli, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc. (summary by Sue Anderson)
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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