Seeing further: the story of science & the Royal Society — 5 REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

1. 1. The Royal Society's founders aimed to combine mathematical and experimental approaches into a unified scientific method.
2. 2. The old Aristotelian system explained all natural phenomena through teleology, or purpose-driven causation, using human action as a metaphor.
3. 3. Galileo argued that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, and without it we wander in a dark labyrinth.
4. 4. Francis Bacon advocated for an activist empiricism that tortures nature through experiments to extract facts, contrasting with passive Aristotelian observation.
5. 5. Both rationalists and empiricists shared the belief that subjective experience veils objective reality, requiring special treatment to extract reliable knowledge.
6. 6. The Royal Society's early Fellows were temperamentally more aligned with Bacon's experimentalism and practical humanitarian goals than with Continental rationalism.
7. 7. Robert Boyle sensed a unified methodology but lacked the mathematical skill to fully integrate rationalist and empiricist approaches.
8. 8. Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica finally fused mathematical deduction with experimental verification, rejecting hypotheses untethered to experience.
9. 9. Newton's denunciation of 'hypotheses' emphasized that mathematical truth becomes physical truth only when made manifest through experiment.
10. 10. The union of rationalism and empiricism in Newton's method is the most successful experiment in human thought, enabling theories that challenge common sense.