VII - THE TWO CENTURIES AFTER NEWTON

Summary

We now approach an era which, if not so strikingly brilliant as its great predecessor, was at least one of solid and steady progress. It produced no second Newton, but provided an abundance of first-class investigators. The studious and talented amateur could still accomplish scientific work of the highest value, for a single mind could carry a good working knowledge of a substantial part of science; the days of immense stacks of literature and teams of experts, each understanding only one corner of a subject of research, had not yet arrived. They were, however, on the way, for there was already a tendency for the various sciences to unite into one, to lose their identity as detached units, and become merged into one single field of knowledge which was too vast for anyone to comprehend the whole, or even a large fraction of it. We note the appearance of such words as thermodynamics, astrophysics and electrochemistry.

MECHANICS

Mechanics looms large in the story of eighteenth-century progress. Galileo and Newton had opened the road, but a lot remained to be done in extending their gains and filling up lacunae. Newton's laws of motion were applicable only to particles, i.e. to pieces of matter which were small enough to be treated as points, and so could have definite positions, velocities and accelerations unambiguously assigned to them.