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Newtonian   Listen
adjective
Newtonian  adj.  Of or pertaining to Sir Isaac Newton, or his discoveries.
Newtonian philosophy, the philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton; applied to the doctrine of the universe as expounded in Newton's "Principia," to the modern or experimental philosophy (as opposed to the theories of Descartes and others), and, most frequently, to the mathematical theory of universal gravitation.
Newtonian telescope (Astron.), a reflecting telescope, in which rays from the large speculum are received by a plane mirror placed diagonally in the axis, and near the open end of the tube, and thrown at right angles toward one side of the tube, where the image is formed and viewed through the eyeplace.
Newtonian theory of light. See Note under Light.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Newtonian" Quotes from Famous Books



... considers that, by an inductive determination, on the strict Newtonian basis, he has proved that the SOLE foundation of our regard to justice is the support and welfare of society: and since no moral excellence is more esteemed, we must have some strong disposition in favour ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... Cirey. In this retirement he pursued his studies of Newton, and a few years later produced an exact and brilliant summary of the work of the great English philosopher. Once more the authorities intervened, and condemned Voltaire's book. The Newtonian system destroyed that of Descartes, and Descartes still spoke in France with the voice of orthodoxy; therefore, of course, the voice of Newton must not be heard. But, somehow or other, the voice of Newton was heard. The men of science were converted to the new doctrine; ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... overstepping his constitutional, Newtonian limits, might propose laws, Congress might acquiesce in them, but the Supreme Court, after listening to lawyers like Grolier (and he bowed to the attorney), made them: made them, he might have added, without responsibility to any man in our ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... occurs even so late as in Sir Thomas Brown, just at the dawn of the Newtonian system, and after Kepler. What a lesson of ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge

... of space and time he proceeds to build up motion, matter, repulsion, attraction, weight, and inertia. He then goes on to logically evolve the solar system. In doing this he widely diverges from the Newtonian theory; reaches by syllogism the conviction that the planets are the most perfect celestial bodies; and, not being able to bring the stars within his theory, says that they are mere formal existences and not living matter, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... of body, or of something that by an improvement of our organs might become visible or tangible, I must acknowledge, that I find no very decisive arguments on either side; though I am inclined to the contrary opinion, as being more suitable to vulgar and popular notions. If THE NEWTONIAN philosophy be rightly understood, it will be found to mean no more. A vacuum is asserted: That is, bodies are said to be placed after such a manner, is to receive bodies betwixt them, without impulsion or penetration. The real nature ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... the solar spectrum are represented in the order in which they occur between A, and B, this exhibits the limits of the Newtonian spectrum, corresponding with Fig. 1. Sir John Herschel and Seebeck have shown that there exists, beyond the violet, a faint violet light, or rather a lavender to b, to which gradually becomes colorless; similarly, red light exists beyond the assigned limits of the red ray to a. The greatest ...
— American Handbook of the Daguerrotype • Samuel D. Humphrey

... particles of the envelope to be the active force in carrying the earth round the sun, we may remember that Newton himself assumed an aether for somewhat similar purposes. The great argument on which the Cartesians founded their opposition to the Newtonian doctrine was that attraction was an occult quality, not wholly intelligible by the aid of mere mechanics. The Newtonian theory is an analysis of the elementary movements which in their combination determine the planetary orbits, and gives the formula of the proportions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... proficients in those languages and those sciences will generally be the flower of the youth, the most acute, the most industrious, the most ambitious of honourable distinctions. If the Ptolemaic system were taught at Cambridge instead of the Newtonian, the senior wrangler would nevertheless be in general a superior man to the wooden spoon. If, instead of learning Greek, we learned the Cherokee, the man who understood the Cherokee best, who made the most correct and melodious Cherokee ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... retreat at Cirey, varied with flying visits to Paris, and kept awake by multifarious Correspondences, the quantity of Literature done by the two was great and miscellaneous. By Madame, chiefly in the region of the pure sciences, in Newtonian Dissertations, competitions for Prizes, and the like: really sound and ingenious Pieces, entirely forgotten long since. By Voltaire, in serious Tragedies, Histories, in light Sketches and deep Dissertations:—mockery getting ever wilder with him; the satirical ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle

... The consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist. See Sir W. Drummond's "Academical Questions", chapter 3.—Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation; but surely it is more consistent with the good faith of philosophy to admit ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... then, repeat: Man needed to be an animal before he knew that he was a spirit; he needed to crawl in the dust before he ventured on a Newtonian flight through the universe. The body, therefore, is the first spur to action; sense the first step on the ladder ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... a magnetic current and convert rotary magnetic current into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate the daylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction," I said. "I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math got a little complicated after that, and I started reading ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper

... Vortices; whilst only forty years previously, this same Cartesian philosophy had been forbidden in the French schools; and now in turn d'Agnesseau, the Chancellor, refused Voltaire the Imprimatur for his treatise on the Newtonian doctrine. On the other hand, in our day Newton's absurd theory of color still completely holds the field, forty years after the publication of Goethe's. Hume, too, was disregarded up to his fiftieth year, though he began very early and wrote in a thoroughly ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... nuclear physics, the invention of the telectroscope is impossible. The lack of opportunity to watch the stars that might teach them something would delay their knowledge of atomic structure. They might learn a great deal about chemistry and Newtonian physics, and go quite a ways with math, but even there they would be handicapped. Morey, for instance, would never have developed the autointegral calculus, to say nothing of tensor and spinor calculus, which were developed two hundred years ago, without ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell

... gravity, elasticity and other such existed only by the perpetual leave and agency of the Deity, it may be argued he is in all places where matter is. Space, empty space will still exist without him. In this mode of proof Dr. Priestley must, contrary to the Newtonian system argue for a Plenum, before he proves the ubiquity. He cannot exclude space from his mind, nor can he exclude gravity from matter. Yet can he admit matter as well as space to be eternal, because ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner

... affirmative fact is the rise of physical science. Or rather, perhaps, one should say that it was the grand fact until some fifty years ago. Science is still making progress; indeed, leaving out of sight one or two great Newtonian steps, we may say that it is advancing more rapidly than ever. But now at length its spiritual correlative begins to emerge, and a new epoch forms itself, as we fully believe, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... hopelessness of physics, without the hyperphysical idea of force, to render itself intelligible.[254] What account can be rendered of planetary motion if the terms "centrifugal force" and "centripetal force" are abandoned? "From the two great conditions of every Newtonian solution, viz., projectile impulse and centripetal tendency, eject the idea of force, and what remains? The entire conception is simply made up of this, and has not the faintest existence without it. It is useless to give it notice to quit, and pretend ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... dominion of early prejudice, could not credit the existence of antipodes; were unable to conceive, in opposition to old association, the force of gravity acting upwards instead of downwards. The Cartesians long rejected the Newtonian doctrine of the gravitation of all bodies towards one another, on the faith of a general proposition, the reverse of which seemed to them to be inconceivable—the proposition, that a body cannot act where it is not. All the cumbrous machinery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... wonderful men, Bringing new miracles into our ken. EINSTEIN upset the Newtonian rule; EPSTEIN demolished the Pheidian School. EINSTEIN gave fits to the Royal Society; EPSTEIN delighted in loud notoriety. EINSTEIN made parallels meet in infinity; EPSTEIN remodelled the form of Divinity. Nature exhausted, I hopefully sing, Can't have more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various

... right about natural selection—the discovery of this vera causa sets him to my mind in a different region altogether from all his predecessors—and I should no more call his doctrine a modification of Lamarck's than I should call the Newtonian theory of the celestial motions a modification of the Ptolemaic system. Ptolemy imagined a mode of explaining those motions. Newton proved their necessity from the laws and a force demonstrably in operation. If he is only right Darwin ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... NEWTONIAN, adj. Pertaining to a philosophy of the universe invented by Newton, who discovered that an apple will fall to the ground, but was unable to say why. His successors and disciples have advanced so far as to ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... succeeding numbers had reference to politics, but room was found for excursions in other fields: "Monier's Advertisement for a School," and "Newtonian Philosophy," served as pegs from which to hang rhymed jests, and the writers would very likely have taken a wider range if there had been a wider range in public interests. But politics dominated thought, and the wits were as ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder



Words linked to "Newtonian" :   follower, newton



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