The Nature of Newton's “Holy Alliance” between Science and Religion: From the Scientific Revolution to Newton (and Back Again)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is time for another look at the Scientific Revolution and Newton. The immediate occasion for further discussion of this perennial issue is Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs's 1994 essay in Isis and Richard S. Westfall's reply, both appearing in this volume. These two giants in the modern-day history of science, both now sadly deceased, disagreed about the meaningfulness of the concept of “the” Scientific Revolution – the “big one” that happened between Copernicus and Newton. Dobbs was conspicuously critical of the generalizations of historians who emphasized the notion of the Scientific Revolution at the expense of the particularity and uniqueness of the individuals crushed beneath the weight of this venerable, grand theory. She didn't buy into the concept except with reservations. It was too anachronistic, she claimed, following Cohen. It was also too metaphorical and, therefore, problematic, to talk – along with Whiggish historians such as Butterfield and a host of others – about a revolution that portrays “a change that is sudden, radical , and complete .” Worst of all, exponents of the Scientific Revolution, distorted the highly individualized genius of Newton and appropriated him into their theory as either the heroic “First Mover” of the great change or as the heroic “Final Cause” of the Scientific Revolution. In his typically gallant manner, Richard S. Westfall politely disagreed and firmly continued to align himself with the “Final Cause” school of the mid to late twentieth century, a position he outlined in his first major book and which he maintained until his death.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".