Christmas Day, 1942, was the three hundredth birthday of Isaac
Newton. I was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Since Newton was our most famous fellow, the college organized a
meeting to celebrate his birthday. Since it was war...
“How big” is almost always an easier question to answer than
“how old.” Though we can measure the sizes of animals and plants
easily enough, we can often only guess at their ages. The same was
long true of the cosmos. The ancient Greeks Eratosthenes...
If the eighteenth century is to be seen as the “Age of Reason,”
then one of the crucial stories to be told is of the trajectory of
philosophy from one of the most ardent proponents of the powers of
human reason, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)...
The stability of the solar system is one of the oldest problems
in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton. After Newton
discovered his famous laws of motion and gravity, he used these to
determine the motion of a single planet around the...
