"Hypotheses non jingo," wrote Isaac Newton 300 years ago in the second edition of his Principia Mathematica, It has been variously translated as "I do not make hypotheses" or "I do not feign hypotheses". Instead, Newton established laws of nature such as his theory of universal gravitation -simple, economical equations of broad explanatory power able to account for diverse phenomena both known and yet to be observed. His natural philosophy became the dominant paradigm of the mechanical world-view and, more generally, what we call the scientific method.
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