David Harriman on "Isaac Newton and the Inductive Method"
Isaac Newton is famous for his laws of motion and gravitation. Yet his most important discovery has never been fully appreciated: he discovered and fought to establish a new method of understanding the physical world. In order to illustrate the nature of this method, Mr. Harriman will discuss Newton's reasoning in his legendary comparison of the falling apple and the orbiting moon. In this lecture, Newton's inductive method will be presented in the context of history, contrasting it to earlier approaches and to recent developments in physics.
Mr. Harriman has worked as a physicist for the U.S. Department of Defense and taught philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. He is the editor of Journals of Ayn Rand. He has lectured on the scientific revolution, the concept of "space," and the influence of Kantian philosophy on modern physics. He is currently writing two books, the first on "The Anti-Copernican Revolution and the Fall of Physics," and the second presenting Leonard Peikoff's theory of induction in "Induction in Physics and Philosophy."