"William Gilbert published a famous book on the magnet in 1600 and laid himself open to the gibes of Sir Francis Bacon for being one of those people so taken by their pet subject of research that they could only see the whole universe transposed into terms of it. Having made a spherical magnet called a ', and having found that it revolved when placed in a magnetic field, he decided that the whole earth was a magnet, that gravity was a form of magnetic attraction, and that the principles of the magnet accounted for the workings of the Copernican system as a whole. Kepler and Galileo were both influenced by this view, and with Kepler, it became an integral part of his system, a basis for the doctrine of almost universal gravitation."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Force_field_(physics)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Force field (physics)
52 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Force field (physics) →
Related Quotes
"The subject of electric oscillation announced in a remarkable paper of Henry in 1842 and threshed out in its main fea…"
"Based on Faraday's earlier work, Maxwell stressed the notion of fields, in contrast to Newton's emphasis on the direc…"
"One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force…"
"Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ever-widening range of …"
"We shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration…"
"If de Sitter's solution were valid everywhere, then it would be thereby shown that the purpose which I pursued with t…"
"If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be purely atomic, it still remained for the time being purely mechanist…"
"I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality. We are … all aware o…"
"What led me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force…"
"He was little interested mathematics or theory; for example, when his ideas on magnetic fields were extensively devel…"