Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton
	Newton at 46, in 1689, by Godfrey Kneller
Born	25 December 1642 (OS); 4 January 1643 (NS); Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
Died	20 March 1727 (aged 84); Kensington, Middlesex, England
Resting place	Westminster Abbey
Nationality	English
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Laws of motion, Universal gravitation, Calculus, Optics, Principia
	Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Natural philosophy, Mathematics, Astronomy, Alchemy, Theology
Institutions	University of Cambridge, Royal Society, Royal Mint

Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727, Old Style) was an English natural philosopher and mathematician, author of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), and the founder of the mechanical description of nature that governed physics for two centuries.

For many of the researchers collected on this wiki, Newton is not a historical figure who was later superseded but the correct starting point. Among them is an identifiable group who make a strong claim — that the universe is Newtonian at every scale — which puts them directly at odds with the physics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

That is not the position of the wiki as a whole. The critical tradition documented here is varied, and Newtonian mechanics is one strand within it rather than a consensus.

This page gives his life briefly and then documents that tradition. The standard biography is exhaustively covered elsewhere; what follows concentrates on what is contested.

Life and work in brief

Newton was born prematurely at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, three months after his father's death. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1661, and it was during the plague years of 1665–67, when the university closed and he returned home, that he laid the foundations of the calculus, of his theory of colour, and of his thinking on gravitation — the period later mythologised through the falling apple.

He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1669. His Opticks work established that white light is a mixture of the spectral colours rather than a modification of pure light, and he built the first practical reflecting telescope. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1672 and served as its President from 1703 until his death.

His Principia (1687) set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, and showed that the same inverse-square law governs a falling body on Earth and the orbit of the Moon and planets — unifying terrestrial and celestial mechanics in a single system. It is generally regarded as the most influential book in the history of physical science.

He spent his later career as Warden and then Master of the Royal Mint, sat twice as a Member of Parliament, was knighted in 1705, and died in 1727. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Alongside the physics he devoted decades to alchemy and to theological study, writing more on scripture and chronology than on natural philosophy, and holding privately antitrinitarian views he could not safely publish. Both bodies of work were long minimised; they are now taken seriously by historians as part of a single search for the underlying order of things.

For a full biography, see the Wikipedia article on Isaac Newton.

The Newtonian universe

A substantial body of the work gathered here is not merely critical of twentieth-century physics but positively Newtonian: it seeks to account for the same experimental record using absolute space and time, Galilean transformations, Euclidean geometry, and forces transmitted by contact through a medium. Where mainstream physics treats Newtonian mechanics as a low-velocity approximation to relativity, these researchers treat relativity as a wrong turning and Newton's framework as the one to be extended.

Within that body, a good number go further, and it is worth stating their claim plainly: the universe is Newtonian. Not Newtonian up to some velocity, or across some range of scales with other physics taking over elsewhere — but Newtonian everywhere, from the subatomic to the cosmological. On this view there is one kind of thing in the universe, matter, and one kind of happening, matter in motion; everything else is a description of how matter moves.

How widely is this held?

It should not be assumed that everyone documented on this wiki holds it. Critics of relativity disagree among themselves at least as sharply as they disagree with the mainstream, and several well-represented positions here are not strictly Newtonian:

Neo-Lorentzian researchers — Franco Selleri, Joseph Levy, Simon J Prokhovnik, Ronald R Hatch — keep the Lorentz transformation and reinterpret it against a preferred frame. They recover Newton's absolute simultaneity but not his mechanics.
Aether theorists such as Ionel Dinu treat the aether as a continuous fluid, which is a mechanical picture but not a Newtonian particle mechanics.
Emission theorists such as Edward Henry Dowdye, Jr. use Galilean transformations in Euclidean space, yet their light model departs from anything Newton proposed.
Plasma and Electric Universe researchers locate the missing physics in electrodynamics and plasma behaviour rather than in mechanics at all.
Others still — Halton C Arp on redshift, the expanding-earth researchers, the cycle analysts — dispute particular observational interpretations without committing to any general mechanics.

What follows documents the Newtonian strand specifically: those who hold that the framework itself, not merely a preferred frame or a medium, is the right one at every scale.

One universe, one physics

This is a direct rejection of the structure of modern physics, which accounts for the world by introducing additional fundamental entities that are not matter in motion and are not reducible to it:

Charge as an intrinsic property of particles rather than a pattern of motion;
Fields with independent physical existence, capable of propagating through empty space;
Spacetime as a substance that curves, stretches and expands;
Quantum mechanics as a separate physics for the small, with wave–particle duality, intrinsic randomness and non-locality;
Massless particles, dark matter and dark energy introduced to close the gaps between them.

Modern physics, on this reading, is not one theory but several mutually unreduced ones, each with its own ontology, stitched together at the boundaries. The Newtonian dissidents regard that as the symptom of a wrong turning rather than the deep structure of nature, and each of the major frameworks on this wiki dispenses with the extra entities:

The Four Universal Motions (Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster) holds that gravity, magnetism, light and electricity are one particle moving in four different ways. There are no fields, no charge — the particles carrying electric current are explicitly stated to have none — and no wave–particle duality, since a wave is a pattern in how particles move.
Neomechanics (Glenn Borchardt) states the ontology as a slogan: matter exists; motion occurs. Energy "neither exists nor occurs"; it is a calculation. Time is the motion of all things with respect to all other things, not a dimension. Fields and spacetime are objectifications of motion — Einstein's error, on Borchardt's account, being to treat motion as if it were a thing, as heat was once treated as the fluid caloric.
Energy Wave Theory (Jeff Yee) derives particles, forces and mass from four constants of a medium plus one property of the electron, using classical mechanics throughout, with no quantum formalism.
Modern Mechanics (Steven Bryant) is offered as a single model covering ground that currently requires three separate theories — classical mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics.
Extinction Shift Principle (Edward Henry Dowdye, Jr.) treats gravitational light bending as ordinary refraction in a plasma, requiring no curvature of spacetime.

The shared claim is one of parsimony: that a single mechanical ontology, consistently applied, can do the work currently divided among relativity, quantum mechanics and the Standard Model — and that the entities modern physics adds are the price of having abandoned mechanism, not discoveries about the world.

Newton's own objection to action at a distance

The starting point for much of this work is that Newton did not believe in action at a distance — a fact his modern defenders on this wiki press hard, since the "attraction" in his gravitational equation is routinely read back into him as a physical commitment he never made. Writing to Richard Bentley in 1693, Newton was emphatic:

That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action or force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.

He added that gravity "must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws," leaving the nature of that agent to his readers. Much of the work below is an attempt to take up that invitation: Newton gave the equation and declined to invent the mechanism, and these researchers are supplying candidate mechanisms rather than contradicting him.

Neo-Newtonian mechanics

Several complete alternatives to relativity documented here are explicitly Newtonian or Galilean-Newtonian in structure:

Glenn Borchardt — neomechanics, defined as classical mechanics adapted to the assumption of infinity. His central book is titled The Scientific Worldview: Beyond Newton and Einstein, and his position is symmetrical: Newton over-emphasised the macrocosm as Einstein over-emphasised the microcosm, and univironmental determinism corrects both.
Curtis E Renshaw — Galilean-Newtonian relativity, developed in Newton's Revenge, which argues that a correct model of light removes the entire basis for special relativity and restores Newtonian distance, time, velocity and mass.
Steven Bryant — Modern Mechanics, presented in Disruptive, holding that time dilation, length contraction and the twin paradox are artefacts of applying a length-based model to wavelength-based observations.
Edward Henry Dowdye, Jr. — the Extinction Shift Principle, an emission theory using Galilean transformations of velocities in Euclidean space geometry.
Ronald R Hatch — a Modified Lorentz Ether Theory retaining absolute simultaneity, argued in "Gravitation: Revising Both Einstein and Newton" (1999).
Dennis P Allen — "Neo-Newtonian Theory" (2013), which retains Newton's three laws in their original momentum form while allowing variable inertial mass, in order to accommodate anomalous gyroscopic data.

Others working in the same direction include Lee Coe ("Galilean-Newtonian Relativity versus Einsteinian Relativity"), Paul E Rowe ("A Newtonian Response to Special Relativity"), Zifeng Li ("Rejecting Einstein Relativity & Developing Newton Physics"), Nizar Hamdan, Reiner Georg Ziefle, Robert Enzmann and Marco Mamone Capria.

The Principia continued

The most direct claim of descent is made by Robert de Hilster and David de Hilster, whose book Principia Mathematica 2 is offered as a sequel to Newton's Principia and sets out the Particle Model and the Four Universal Motions.

That model is Newtonian in a specific and unusual way. It supplies mechanisms where Newton described behaviour: gravity becomes the net push of a flux of small fast particles rather than an unexplained attraction, and inertia — which Newton's first law asserts without explaining — becomes the sustaining effect of random impacts from the surrounding gravitic field. The authors keep Newton's inverse-square law and his refusal of true pulls, and add the agent he declined to name.

Push gravity: Newton's unfinished business

The push or shadow theory of gravitation is the largest single Newtonian research programme on this wiki, and it begins inside Newton's own circle. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier — the Swiss mathematician who was Newton's close friend, mentioned in the biography above — proposed a mechanical cause of universal gravitation in exactly the spirit of the Bentley letter. Georges-Louis Le Sage developed the idea, and the tradition is documented here at Push Gravity and Pushing Gravity.

Contributors include Matthew R Edwards ("Le Sage's Theory of Gravity: the Revival by Kelvin and Some Later Developments"), Halton C Arp ("The Observational Impetus for Le Sage Gravity"), Harold Aspden ("A Case for Pushing Gravity"), Barry Mingst and Paul A Stowe ("Derivation of Newtonian Gravitation from LeSage's Attenuation Concept"), Clarence L Dulaney, Janos Rohan, Xavier Borg, John V Milewski and Nainan K Varghese. Glenn Borchardt and Stephen J Puetz's Neomechanical Gravitation Theory belongs to the same family, replacing discrete particles with an aether pressure gradient.

Related work on Newtonian gravitation includes David F Roscoe ("On the Nature of Newtonian Gravitation"), Domina Eberle Spencer and colleagues ("The 21st Century Form of Newton's Gravitational Equation"), Richard Benish ("Empirical Gap in Newtonian Gravity"), William F Wolff ("A Modified Newtonian Treatment of Gravity"), Pari Spolter, Tolga Yarman and Peter F Browne ("Newtonian Cosmology with Renormalized Zero-Point Radiation").

Newtonian electrodynamics

A second major programme holds that electromagnetism should be built on Newtonian foundations — instantaneous forces between current elements in the manner of Ampère and Weber, rather than fields propagating through empty space.

Peter Graneau and Neal Graneau are the central figures, arguing in "The Need for Newtonian Electrodynamics in Modern Physics" and "The Evidence and Consequences of Newtonian Instantaneous Forces" that Ampère's original force law survives experimental test where the modern Lorentz-force formulation does not. Thomas E Phipps ("Ampere Tension and Newton's Laws", "Back to Newtonian Time?"), Patrick Cornille, James Carter ("Newtonian Electrodynamics") and Sankar Hajra work in the same area.

Newton's third law

A recurring and specific charge is that modern electrodynamics violates Newton's third law — that the forces between two current elements are not equal and opposite in the standard formulation, whereas in Ampère's they are. Patrick Cornille argues in "Why Newton's Third Principle is the Most Important Principle in Physics" and "Derivation of the Ether from Anomalies in Newton's Third Law" that the anomaly is itself evidence for a medium; Chiharu Sano and Ernest Geoffrey Cullwick ("Electromagnetic Momentum and Newton's Third Law") pursue related lines.

Absolute space and time

Newton's absolute space and time — abandoned by relativity and defended by much of the work here — remains a live subject, from his rotating-bucket argument onward. Neo-Lorentzian researchers documented on this wiki, including Franco Selleri, Joseph Levy and Ronald R Hatch, argue for a preferred frame in which simultaneity is absolute, which is Newton's position recovered by a different route.

The neo-Newtonian revival

That a revival exists at all has itself been documented here: Georg Galeczki and Peter Marquardt surveyed it in "The Turn of the Tide: Recent Newtonian Physics in Europe," and Neil E Munch in "Recent Neo-Newtonianism in Russia; New Global Strategies."

Where this wiki parts from Newton

The tradition is not uncritical, and the disagreements are as instructive as the agreements.

Glenn Borchardt holds that Newtonian classical mechanism erred by over-emphasising the macrocosm, treating things as passive recipients of external forces, just as later systems philosophy erred in the opposite direction. He also rejects Newton's finite, created universe in favour of infinity in both directions, and with it Newton's absolute space as an empty container rather than a material medium. Dennis P Allen retains Newton's three laws but abandons the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass. The push-gravity researchers keep the inverse-square law while discarding attraction as a primitive.

What unites them is a judgement about where physics went wrong: not with Newton, but with the decision to abandon mechanism in favour of formalism. On that reading Newton's refusal to feign hypotheses was a statement of caution about what he had not yet explained — and the work collected on this wiki is the attempt to explain it.

External links

The Newton Project (University of Oxford) — Newton's complete writings, including the letters to Bentley
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at Wikisource