Bøker av J.B. Shank

Before Voltaire traces how the development of mathematical physics in the eighteenth-century, following the publication of Newton's Principia, was part and parcel of French culture generally. It offers, for the first time, a cultural history of how Newton's ideas were first read and received in France and how their reception influenced French science and society.

Nothing is considered more natural than the connection between Isaac Newton's science and the modernity that came into being during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. This study challenges the claim that Isaac Newton's solitary genius is the reason for his iconic status as the father of modern physics and the philosophe movement.