Burtt’s Newton and the Debate over the Rationality of Early Modern Science

Abstract

When Burtt read Newton’s works, available in print,¹ in the early 1920s, including Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries Of Sir Isaac Newton (1885), he had no way of knowing that the conception of Newton he derived from his research would come to teeter precariously on the edge of a body of controversial scholarship several decades later. In the decades following Burtt’s penetrating study, Newton, along with Galileo, came to represent high stakes for professional historians of science who saw themselves as the first line of defense in a battle to preserve and defend the mathematical realism of early modern science. The most prominent members of the newly evolving profession imagined the Scientific Revolution to be a complete break with the superstitions, religious beliefs, and magic of the past. For them the era of modern scince was enlightened by true and certain knowledge delivered by the work of science heroes. Central to the success of the heroes had been the mathematical method used to frame and confirm hypotheses by experiment. The key figures of the method were Galileo and Newton, with Copernicus and Kepler playing notable roles.