Probably the most celebrated controversy in all of the history of science was that between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of the calculus. The argument ranged far beyond a mere priority dispute and took on the character of a war between two different philosophies of nature. Newton was the first to devise the methods of the calculus, but Leibniz (who independently discovered virtually identical methods) was the first to publish, in 1684. Mutual toleration passed into suspicion and, at last, denunciation of each by the other as a fraud and a plagiarist. The affair became a scandal, as British mathematicians asserted Newton's claims before the public while their Continental colleagues hotly defended Leibniz's priority. Professor Hall analyzes the situation out of which the dispute arose, the circumstances that caused it to become embittered, the dispositions of the chief actors, and the shifts in their opinions of each other.

Product Description: Henry More (1614-87) was the greatest English metaphysical theologian and the most perplexing; he was also perhaps the most distinguished member of the group of divines known as the Cambridge Platonists. An admirer of Galileo, Descartes and Boyle, he rejected their detailed applications of mechanical philosophy to the explanation of natural phenomena...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Opticks, Newton's most popular book, is a complex work of genius and the fruit of forty years of thought and investigation. Newton devoted various periods of experimentation to this final expression of his life's work and drew on the results of successive interactions with other scientists and thinkers...read more

Traces the life and work of the theologian, set within the intellectual and scientific climate of the seventeenth-century

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Product Description: Book by Smith, Norman