It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins. Quantitative scientific reasoning had never really disappeared, and by Newton’s time it had already been revitalized, most notably by Galileo. But Newton was able to explain so much with his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation, from the orbits of planets and moons to the rise and fall of tides and apples, that he must for the first time have sensed the possibility of a really comprehensive explanatory theory.
