Gravitation

Extract

To our modern minds it seems obvious that scientific progress must be based upon alternate induction and deduction. The first inductive step is, indeed, not always evident. It was only in the nineteenth century that the emergence of non-Euclidean Geometry made it clear that even a purely deductive science like Geometry must be’ based upon a preliminary induction—often subconscious, and the result of generations of tacit acceptance of intuition. Modern classical dynamics commences with the Galilean induction in the form of Newton’s Laws of Motion, thus discarding the old Greek view of motion and its causes. In some branches of human knowledge, e.g. the sociological, the first induction is hardly yet accomplished.