ed at the political power of the church by providing alternative explanations and ideas. Previously people had looked to the religious “authorities” and taken their words “as the gospel”, but science was teaching them to “question everything”—including the clergy.Extensibility was one of the great attributes of modern science, and none knew this better than Sir Isaac Newton. As noted above, he realized it when he said he stood “on the shoulders of Giants.” just as Kepler had sought to make sense of Brahe’s vast amount of data, Newton sought to make sense of all the recently discovered science. While Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and others had achieved a piece of the puzzle, they had done more to destroy the old “universal” theory of Aristotle than arrive at a new one. It was Isaac Newton who finally published in his Principia the “Universal Gravitation Theory” and other laws of motion which explained the motion of every item and object in the universe, from Kepler’s elliptical orbits to Galileo’s metal balls. By combining the observation and theories from those before him, he was able to use the scientific method to mathematically derive this “synthesis”, which led some to call him the “Supreme genius of the scientific revolution....
