---
title: "History of physics"
chunk: 7/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:00:08.451736+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Newton's principles (but not his mathematical treatments) proved controversial with Continental philosophers, who found his lack of metaphysical explanation for movement and gravitation philosophically unacceptable. Beginning around 1700, a bitter rift opened between the Continental and British philosophical traditions, which were stoked by heated, ongoing, and viciously personal disputes between the followers of Newton and Leibniz concerning priority over the analytical techniques of calculus, which each had developed independently. Initially, the Cartesian and Leibnizian traditions prevailed on the Continent (leading to the dominance of the Leibnizian calculus notation everywhere except Britain). Newton himself remained privately disturbed at the lack of a philosophical understanding of gravitation while insisting in his writings that none was necessary to infer its reality. As the 18th century progressed, Continental natural philosophers increasingly accepted the Newtonians' willingness to forgo ontological metaphysical explanations for mathematically described motions.
Newton built the first functioning reflecting telescope and developed a theory of color, published in Opticks, based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours forming the visible spectrum. While Newton explained light as being composed of tiny particles, a rival theory of light which explained its behavior in terms of waves was presented in 1690 by Christiaan Huygens. However, the belief in the mechanistic philosophy coupled with Newton's reputation meant that the wave theory saw relatively little support until the 19th century. Newton also formulated an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound, investigated power series, demonstrated the generalised binomial theorem and developed a method for approximating the roots of a function. His work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals. Most importantly, Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, which were neither capricious nor malevolent. By demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his own theory of gravitation, Newton also removed the last doubts about heliocentrism. By bringing together all the ideas set forth during the Scientific Revolution, Newton effectively established the foundation for modern society in mathematics and science.

=== Other achievements ===
Other branches of physics also received attention during the period of the Scientific Revolution. William Gilbert, court physician to Queen Elizabeth I, described how the earth itself behaves like a giant magnet. Robert Boyle (1627–1691) studied the behavior of gases enclosed in a chamber and formulated the gas law named for him; he also contributed to physiology and to the founding of modern chemistry.
Another factor in the Scientific Revolution was the rise of learned societies and academies in various countries. The earliest of these were in Italy and Germany and were short-lived. More influential were the Royal Society of England (1660) and the Academy of Sciences in France (1666). The former was a private institution in London and included John Wallis, William Brouncker, Thomas Sydenham, John Mayow, and Christopher Wren (who contributed not only to architecture but also to astronomy and anatomy); the latter, in Paris, was a government institution and included as a foreign member the Dutchman Huygens. In the 18th century, important royal academies were established at Berlin (1700) and at St. Petersburg (1724). The societies and academies provided the principal opportunities for the publication and discussion of scientific results during and after the scientific revolution. In 1690, James Bernoulli showed that the cycloid is the solution to the tautochrone problem; and the following year, in 1691, Johann Bernoulli showed that a chain freely suspended from two points will form a catenary, the curve with the lowest possible center of gravity available to any chain hung between two fixed points. He then showed, in 1696, that the cycloid is the solution to the brachistochrone problem.

==== Early thermodynamics ====