Science is the Knot Tying it all together

The creation was a concept—a connected set of concepts. There was the concept of a universal gravitation-reaching beyond the tree tops and the air to the ends of space. There was the concept of other universal forces in space, which ti to pull the moon away as a whirling stone pulls away fro: its string. And there was the concept which put an end to the four elements of Aristotle: the concept of mass, alike in t apple and the earth and the moon, in all earthly and heavenly bodies.** All t...

 It Wasn't the Apple that Newton Used to Discover Gravity

Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Camb] idge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for k...