ISAAC NEWTON

During the years before his death in August 1995, Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked through the mathematical propositions in Isaac Newton's Principia and formulated them into a book entitled Newton's Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar (1995), Oxford University Press. This is reviewed by D. Hughes in "On the shoulders of giants,'' Nature 376, p 395 (1995). The Principia is entirely unchallenged as the greatest scientific achievement in history.

Even science's greatest theoretician, however, required his theories to conform to experiment. Newton is quoted in Science 255, p 693 (1991) as saying, about his work on pendulums and inertial and gravitational mass, "I tried the thing in gold, silver, lead, glass, sand, common salt, wood, water, and wheat. I provided two equal wooden boxes. I filled the one with wood, and suspended an equal weight of gold (exactly as I could) in the center of oscillation of the other. The boxes, hung by equal threads of 11 feet, made a couple of pendulums perfectly equal in weight and figure, and equally exposed to the resistance of air: and, placing the one by the other, I observed them to play together forwards and backwards for a long while, with equal vibrations. And therefore the quantity of matter [inertial mass] in the gold was to the quantity of matter in the wood as the action of the motive force [gravitational mass] upon all the gold to the action of the same upon all the wood; that is, as the weight of the one to the weight of the other.'' When Newton invented the reflecting telescope, he first built a brick oven. In that oven he carried out metallurgical experiments to formulate the composition of the mirror. Then he made the mirror with which he constructed the telescope. Technology has changed, but this is still the sort of activity that characterizes real scientists in 1995.

Compare this with the nitwitted, tax-funded apparitions, hands unsullied by honest work, who appear at press conferences today to howl that the sky's ozone is falling and its temperature is rising - when the experimental data shows that both are only fluctuating in a normal way and neither has changed significantly.