Celebrating Isaac Newton's Birthday

In this age of ours, where we’re all rightfully fascinated with the paradigm shifts that are occurring far more frequently than they did in antiquity, perhaps it’s not a bad time to celebrate the birthday (yesterday) of Isaac Newton.  According to the Writer’s Almanac:  “At the age of 43, Newton published his Principia, which overturned nearly everything humankind had believed about the universe up to that point.”

That’s a hard accomplishment to overstate, isn’t it?  Can anyone imagine anything like this happening today?

Personally, I’m most impressed that Newton (contemporaneously with the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz) developed the branch of mathematics we now call calculus, for no other reason than, without it, he wouldn’t have been able to solve the problems he faced in developing his Three Laws of Motion. 

Though there are dozens of great British thinkers whose bodies lie under the floors of Westminster Abbey, I remember being most taken by the fact that, on my first visit to London, I stood just a few feet from the bones of Newton, who, just a few hundred years before, had turned the whole world on its head.