As of 1887, the bicentennial of the first edition of Newton’s Principia, no scientific theory had been subjected to more extensive and more stringent testing than his theory of gravity. The intervening two centuries of gravity research, in consequence of this, had produced evidence in support of this theory of a quality, as well as an extent, far beyond anything that had emerged in any other area of scientific research. Newton’s theory was theexemplar of science at its best, or at least at its most successful. Nevertheless, three decades after the bicentennial, Newton’s theory was in the process of being replaced by the new theory of gravity in Einstein’s general relativity. The fundamental questions of philosophy of science have always concerned the nature, scope, and limits of the knowledge that can be achieved in science when it is most successful. The need to replace Newton’s theory with Einstein’s put such questions into an entirely new light, even to the point of prompting some to insist on shudder-quotes around the word ‘knowledge’ in those questions. Newton himself had expressly pointed out that his theory was open to revision in ongoing research, and hence provisional, if only because it was reached through inductive generalization. The worries about the nature, scope, and limits of scientific knowledge provoked by the switch to Einstein’s theory, however, went beyond the mere non-finality of induction. For, if a theory that had been stringently tested for 200 hundred years and had by far the strongest evidence supporting it could still be overturned so abruptly, how can any theoretical claims of science amount to knowledge? Indeed, what does a stringent test of a theory really amount to, and what does strong evidence supporting it really show, if the most stringently tested, most strongly supported theory can fall so quickly?
...MoreBook Zvi Biener (2014) Newton and Empiricism.
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