Book Title: Microcosmology Atom in Jain Philosophy and Modern Science
Author(s): Jethalal S Zaveri, Mahendramuni
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati
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Atom in Modern Science
SECTION II
MODERN SCIENCE
A. MECHANICS AND ELECTRODYNAMICS
CLASSICAL PHYSICS
As we have seen, Philosophy and Science were not separate until the first half of the seventeenth century when Rene Descartes based his view of nature on a fundamental division into two realms - mind and matter. The Cartesian division helped the scientists to study the physical universe as an independent objective reality. And they treated the material world as a huge machine composed of different objects. It was Isaac Newton who constructed his mechanics on its basis and his laws became the foundation of the classical physics. From the second half of the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century, scientific thinking was very largely dominated by the Newtonian model of the universe which supported all of science as well as Natural Philosophy for almost three centuries.
Newton was the first person to discover "Laws of nature" which unify many aspects of common experience. Newton's Laws of Motion were, in fact, based upon sound experimental evidence and nothing else. They predict and depict events which are simple to understand and easy to picture, because they pertain to ordinary objects of daily experience. Besides the laws of motion, Newton's great contribution to science was the law of gravity'-a remarkable Natural phenomena, though it is generally taken for granted. It is the same force which pulls objects downwards and also keeps the celestial bodies like the moon and the planets rotating in the orbits. The laws of motion not only give us a foreknowledge of eclipses, seasons etc., but we can also know precisely where the moon will be in relation to the earth, and the earth in relation to the sun at any given moment. Without Newtonian physics, the space-programmes might not have been possible.
