"The seventeenth century witnessed the birth of modern science as we know it today. The science was something new, based on a direct confrontation of nature by experiment and observation. But there was another feature of the new scienceāa dependence on numbers, on real numbers of actual experience. ...The ancients knew a few numerical laws... But prior to the Scientific Revolution, the goal of science (or the study of nature) was not to seek laws of nature expressed in terms of numbers or number relations. ...the new science ...not only found laws based on numbers but they were also willing to express these laws in terms of higher powers of numbersāsquares and cubes."
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I. Bernard Cohen
I. Bernard Cohen (1 March 1914 ā 20 June 2003) was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the history of science at Harvard University and the author of many books on the history of science and, in particular, Isaac Newton.
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