By about 1640, despite the efforts of the church, the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo had been largely accepted by the scientific community. But the new findings failed to explain what forces controlled the movement of the planets and objects on earth. That challenge was taken up by English scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727).

Newton was born into the lower English gentry in 1642, and he enrolled at Cambridge University in 1661. A genius who spectacularly united the experimental and theoretical-mathematical sides of modern science, Newton was an intensely devout, albeit non-orthodox Christian. Newton was also fascinated by alchemy. He viewed alchemy as one path, alongside mathematics and astronomy, to the truth of God’s creation. Like Kepler and other practitioners of the Scientific Revolution, he studied the natural world not for its own sake, but to understand the divine plan.

Newton’s towering accomplishment was a single explanatory system that could integrate the astronomy of Copernicus, as corrected by Kepler’s laws, with the physics of Galileo and his predecessors. Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) laid down Newton’s three laws of motion, using a set of mathematical laws that explain motion and mechanics. The key feature of the Newtonian synthesis was the law of universal gravitation. According to this law, every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe in a precise mathematical relationship, whereby the force of attraction is proportional to the quantity of matter of the objects and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The whole universe was unified in one coherent system. The German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton contested the invention of calculus, was outraged by Newton’s claim that the “occult” force of gravity could allow bodies to affect one another at great distances. Newton’s religious faith, as well as his alchemical belief in the innate powers of certain objects, allowed him to dismiss such criticism.