Even after the glorious discoveries carved out by Newton’s narrowly empirical method were published in the Principia in 1687, it was far from inevitable that his strategies would be universally adopted by other natural philosophers. In that case, the Newtonian opus might have stood alone, towering over the subsequent centuries as Aristotle’s philosophy did for so long, admired but unparalleled. That is not what happened: thinkers took up Newton’s project, continuing to deepen its fundamentals and to extend its range—developing theories of heat, light, electricity, and the structure of
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