NEWTON AS AN EXPERIMENTER

Abstract

THE duty has been assigned to me of telling you something about Newton as an experimentalist. As the result of a study of what is known of his history, it seems to me that among his various intellectual pursuits experiment was his first love and the love to which he was most constant. Strange though it be, he seems in some moods to have doubted whether his theoretical studies were worth while, and I do not recall any case where he expressed himself enthusiastically about them. On the other hand, he speaks of his optical work as “The oddest, if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operation of nature”.