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The Origins of Newtonian Natural Philosophy
In the 1840s it was still absolutely the case that if you wish to show that your science, your physical science made sense, you showed the way that it came out of Newton's ideas. But in the Scottish University curriculum, Newtonian natural philosophy remained at the core of one key aspect of the physical sciences. The idea that by building up from what Newton had done in the theory of light and colour, as well as the theory of gravitation, you could bring more and more phenomena, under the remit of physical explanation were still some of the dominant themes.