Newton, Aristotle, and Plato

The Newtonian universe is a revolutionary hybrid of both Aristotle and Plato, with important differences from either. Like Plato’s universe, it contains a domain of items we will never see: gravity, capacitance, voltage, natural selection, the law of supply and demand etc. These items are not perceptible, but they are intelligible i.e. we learn about them by using the set of reasoning and observing processes known as the scientific method. This method relies very heavily on mathematics. One of Galileo’s most famous statements, which was controversial in his time, was that the book of nature is written in…