I was wondering if anyone could help me out with a question. I'm working on an essay for school, and part of the essay question is "What were the central elements of Sir Isaac Newton's scientific vision?" I don't expect anybody to write a huge response, but a few ideas would be nice.
Thanks!
Newton's entire body of scientific work was basically secondary, for him, to his body of religious work. Fundamentally, he was a deist, though he had rather unorthodox views about Christ and Christianity. He knew his views were different, and he knew that if the world at large ever found out, he would in all likelihood be executed. Therefore, he kept his religious views relatively hidden, and this somewhat influenced his career - for example, the Lucasian Chair was invented solely for the purpose of allowing Newton to not be ordained as a priest, which he would otherwise have had to do to hold a conventional Professorship at a University.
In terms of his non-religious work, from what I know Newton believed that his work with Newtonian mechanics and optics were merely an adjunct; in short, he believed in magic. While his work in physics provided great understanding to a universe that was at that time rather mysterious, he was also an alchemist, and spent a great deal of time trying to find codes and secret meanings in things (especially in the Bible). Newton didn't really distinguish between physics and everything else; science was barely a formal concept at that time, and much of his work was influenced by his belief in alchemy.
In short, I'm not sure that you could say Newton had a "scientific vision" the way that Einstein had such - in his case to find a grand unification theory. I'm not even sure that Newton would have thought of himself as a scientist. His beliefs of the physical world were very integrated with things that most people (even non-scientists) would readily hold as pseudoscientific, outdated, or incorrect.
