The Great Paradox of Science by Singham Mano;

Author:Singham, Mano; [Singham, Mano;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190055059
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Newton’s theory of gravitation also seemed, by the standards of that time, to be bordering on the occult since he was arguing that space consisted of a vacuum and that inanimate objects like the Sun and Moon and anything else that had mass exerted invisible forces on each other that could span vast distances of empty space and act instantaneously. His invoking of gravity as an innate force that was just there and did not have a mechanical explanation was reflective of an earlier way of thinking that had been rejected by his contemporaries and was seen by them as a reversion to older, borderline heretical ideas that attributed occult properties to matter (Butterfield 1957, 157). That would have been a difficult idea to stomach and indeed Newton was accused by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of abandoning the goal of specifying a completely mechanical universe and reintroducing occult principles (Shapin 1996, 63). By saying that he had no choice in the matter and that he was forced to his conclusions by the data, Newton could deflect the charge that he was indulging in mere hypothetical speculations or the occult and claim that his knowledge was certain, thus implying infallibility and inevitability.

Even if Newton’s assertions of the inevitability and thus uniqueness of his theories were merely a rhetorical strategy on his part to overcome opposition to his theory, he would not be the last to adopt it. Andre Ampere (1775–1836) said in his treatise on electricity that he had followed Newton’s example and that his own laws were also deduced only from observed facts. Here are Ampere’s own words as quoted by Duhem:

To observe the facts first, to vary their circumstances as far as possible, to make precise measurements along with this first task in order to deduce from them general laws based only on experience, and to deduce from these laws, independently of any hypothesis about the nature of the forces producing the phenomena, the mathematical value of these forces, i.e., the formula representing them—that is the course Newton followed. It has been generally adopted in France by the scientists to whom physics owes the enormous progress it has made in recent times, and it has served me as a guide in all my research on electrodynamic phenomena. I have consulted only experience in order to establish the laws of these phenomena, and I have deduced from them the formula which can only represent the forces to which they are due; I have made no investigation about the cause itself assignable to these forces, well convinced that any investigation of this kind should be preceded simply by experimental knowledge of the laws and of the determination, deduced solely from these laws, of the value of the elementary force. (Duhem 1906, 196)

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