SIMPLICITY IN SCIENTIFIC THEORIZING
"Like all the fundamental laws that govern science, Newton’s Laws of Motion may seem simple—almost simplistic. The deepest insights of the human mind often have this characteristic.”
Page xvii—“Science is organized around certain central concepts, certain pillars that support the entire structure. There are a limited number of such concepts (or “laws”), but they account for everything we see in the world around us.”
Page 1: “The universe is not random. The sun comes up every morning, the stars sweep across the sky at night. The universe moves in regular, predictable ways. Human beings can grasp the regularities of the universe & can even uncover the basic, simple laws that produce them. We call this activity ‘science’.”
Page 1: “Science is one way of knowing about the world. The unspoken assumption behind the scientific endeavor is that general laws, discoverable by the human mind, exist and govern everything in the physical world.”
Modern science can be said to have started with the work of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) in England. According to Newton, the universe is something like a clock. In a clock, the external appearance—the slow sweeping of the hands—is a result of the motion of internal gears. In the same way, all of the natural phenomena we see in the world around us are the result of a few natural laws working beneath the surface of things.”
Page 6: “Newton, building on results from centuries of experiments on moving objects, wrote down a compact set of laws that describes the nature of all motion. That these laws apply to such an immense assortment of situations illustrates the power behind thinking of nature as regular & predictable. Newton’s three Laws of Motion provide a cornerstone of physics & a model for what a science is supposed to be.”
“Like all the fundamental laws that govern science, Newton’s Laws of Motion may seem simple—almost simplistic. The deepest insights of the human mind often have this characteristic.”
Page 187—“Newton opened the eyes of scientists to the fact that the fundamentals of the Universe might be simple and understandable, in spite of its surface complexity.”
Page 298: Marquis de Laplace in the Exposition: “The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our concepts. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complication, by means of a small number of general laws.
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