It is commonly accepted – and with good reasons for that matter – that the modern science starts with Newton. However, seeing what Newton has followed in his Principia and, most of all, the way in which he has built and followed his working philosophy, it is only fair to start not with him but with Copernicus. What urged Copernicus to replace the old world system of Ptolemy? The answer can be found in many sections of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, because Copernicus follows the very same idea everywhere, like every man who has one. But this answer is nowhere quite as explicit as in his letter of dedication to pope Paul III: the lack of harmony of the world system of Ptolemy. The astrometry performed from Earth does not allow a unitary scale of measuring the distances of the planets in the Ptolemaic system. This common scale can be achieved only if we refer the distances to the only source of light in the Universe – the Sun – so it is just natural to think that the Sun is located in the center of the Universe. And so Copernicus did. The general philosophy at the basis of this whole thinking is the harmony as reflected by human body. Quoting:

 However, Your Holiness will perhaps not be greatly surprised that I have dared to publish my studies after devoting so much effort to working them out that I did not hesitate to put down my thoughts about the earth’s motion in written form too. But you are rather waiting to hear from me how it occurred to me to venture to conceive any motion of the earth, against the traditional opinion of astronomers and almost against common sense. I have accordingly no desire to from Your Holiness that I was impelled to consider a different system of deducing the motions of the universe’s spheres for no other reason than the realization that astronomers do not agree among themselves in their investigations of this subject. For, in the first place, they are so uncertain about the motion of the sun and moon that they cannot establish and observe a constant length even for the tropical year. Secondly, in determining the motions not only of these bodies but also of the other five planets, they do not use the same principles, assumptions, and explanations of the apparent revolutions and motions. For while some employ only homocentrics, others utilize eccentrics and epicycles, and yet they do not quite reach their goal. For although those who put their faith in homocentrics showed that some nonuniform motions could be compounded in this way, nevertheless by this means they were unable to obtain any incontrovertible result in absolute agreement with the phenomena. On the other hand, those who devised the eccentrics seem thereby in large measure to have solved the problem of the apparent motions with appropriate calculations. But meanwhile they introduced a good many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe and the true symmetry of its parts. On the contrary, their experience was just like some one taking from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very well depicted, it may be, but not for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them. Hence in the process of demonstration or “method”, as it is called, those who employed eccentrics are found either to have omitted something essential or to have admitted something extraneous and wholly irrelevant. This would not have happened to them, had they followed sound principles. For if the hypotheses assumed by them were not false, everything which follows from their hypotheses would be confirmed beyond any doubt. Even though what I am now saying may be obscure, it will nevertheless become clearer in the proper place (our Italics).

The heliocentric system was not new in the times of Copernicus. As a matter of fact it had a history of almost two millennia if we refer it to Aristarchos of Samos. But as far as religion goes, the classical Greek religion was populated with scores of monsters, that offered to the human spirit a liberty that it is always ready to take. No one, therefore could think to make from the human body a criterion of harmony. This could only be a criterion of Judaeo-Christian origin. For according to the second of the ten commandments of the Bible:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. (Exodus, 20: 4 – 6)

 However, the human body is nether graven image nor likeness with any thing, because it was created by God himself, according to the Book of Genesis. And it is the only thing the man had at his disposal in order to create the society. In this the human body discovered its atitudes as a response to external or internal solicitations as represented by force. And the force is the basis of the whole modern science. Now here comes the New Testament. Here the human body is holy, and as such it is the ground of everything, as it should indeed be by its creation and achievements: it is the Temple and the men should consider it as such!

 Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body. (John, 2: 18 – 21)

As Temple, the human body is the embodiment of harmony of the world, and this is how Copernicus took it. As the foundation of society it is the the mean of knowledge of the force, and this is how the science took it in the first place. Here the science comes at odds with the New Testament, inasmuch as the New Testament teaches us that it is not the force the principle, but the harmony in the way of Copernicus. Fact is that the modern science was founded by Newton based on this very idea of harmony. Indeed, the forces invented by Newton are by and large the expression of harmony, a principle totally lost today in the details of technology. And if we are to give the science a hope that can only be found in the New Testament.

Using a word of Mircea Eliade, one can say that Newton desecrated the force bringing it to the understanding and use of man, exactly the way Prometheus of the old desecrated the fire in order to be used by man. This process had tremenduous consequences upon social man. The first – and the most significant one – among these is obviously the technological development. If this can be regarded positively, there are, however consequences manifestly negative. And we don’t mean here necessarily those consequences that made the late Professor Albert Tarantola, for instance, to have second thoughts about science, but some deeper ones. Indeed, desecrating force means desecrating many other concepts, and we are not sufficiently prepared for these, a fact acutely perceived by Newton himself.

In the science created by Newton the human body found out itself connected with the whole Universe, and it is only as such that the Universe was filled with matter, in the form of the bodies falling under our senses. Only as such the science describes Nature as “objective”. Speaking from a religious point of view, this connection of the body sustaining the life with the wole Universe is in fact foretold in many of the creation myths of different people on Earth. The well-known archetype of these is the Babylonian myth of creation Enûma Elish, in which the god Marduk kills the sea goddess Tiamat, in order to create from her body the earth and the heaven (One doesn’t kill a god just like that!). Furthermore Marduk also killed Tiamat’s husband Kingu, from whose blood he created the men, so that they should accomplish the works of gods. In such myths the body is always preceding the matter.

The matter in the modern acceptance is however a purely human concept, created by Newton in order to offer an objective base to the force. Empirically our senses tell us that the bodies outside ours too suffer the same consequences under similar conditions. And those similar conditions are unveiled in motion. In motion we experience with our body a centrifugal force and assign it as a cause of centrifugal motion of inert bodies; at the sudden stop of motion we experience the inertia as a force, and assign it as a cause of the disintegration or of changing the form of an inert body suddenly stopped. Even the eagle uses nowadays this property (one wonders for how long, and by what practical observation – if any?!) which helps him peck the marrow of a bone, by raising it in the sky and leaving it fall over a cliff, in order to break it. In a word we always notice the force as a mean of destruction and external changing.

The New Testament, considered as philosophy, is the only philosophy totally opposed to the scientific one. Implicitly – by acts – or explicitly – in teachings – the New Testament carries the idea that the attitudes of the human body reveal especially the harmony, without which one cannot even think to make a concept out of force. The harmony is that allowing a human body to assume the attitudes of response to the external and internal actions upon it, consequently also to forces. Therefore not the force – to which the science stopped in chosing its principles – is primary, but the harmony, allowing us to notice the force in the first place. This idea is continuously iterated by Jesus, and opposed to the human concept of force at the risk of His own peril.

And so it comes that, due to the uniqueness of the matter, the planets in the heavens of the Copernican Universe can be assumed to be permanently acted upon by a centrifugal force, like our body in the vehicle turning in a circle. As the planets are forever there, completing their orbits according to the Copernican idea, and as we know, for instance from a stone hurled by a slinger, that if a centripetal force wouldn’t exist they would go free in the Universe, Newton invented the centripetal force. This was supposed to be opposite to the centrifugal force in order to keep the planet in place.

Newton resolved that this centripetal force is the same as our daily gravity. For this he first assumed that the gravity is universal and that the acceleration of the fall of bodies is determined by it. One of the hard proving facts of the theory is that the centripetal acceleration of the Moon is to the gravitational acceleration on Earth in the correct ratio given by the assumption of the universality of gravitational forces.

Newton’s procedure of calculation of the forces he invented, consists of comparing two centripetal forces giving the same orbit in the same time period, but acting in different directions. The ratio of these forces can then be algebraically expressed only in terms of the elements of orbit. Whence, if one of the forces is known, the other can readily be found by algebraic procedures. This way not only the motion of the planets can be accurately described, but also the magnetic action and even the light, in a manner which may be termed dual to that of Fresnel.

One of the strange things coming out of this Newtonian calculation, is that the motion revealed by this calculation is somehow degenerate – to use a modern term. More to the point the eccentricity, considered as a vector is not determined in direction but only in magnitude, assuming that the motion has unique initial conditions. It’s like saying that the attraction point is not where it was supposed to be, but in a small region around that point, meaning that when it is assumed to be universal the gravitation does not pull towards the center of the Earth, but is somehow biased.

This result of the positive science takes us two millennia back to the great Greek philosopher Epicurus, who imagined the atoms as falling under the action of gravity. However, in order to account for grouping of the atoms into matter formations, he accepted that there is always an unpredictable and undetectable swerving from the straight line of motion of atoms, a declination of the direction of motion. Karl Marx, in more recent times, in his doctoral dissertation, was the one who attached this speculation to the Hegelian philosophy, and he seems to be right.

Indeed, the old Epicurean idea of motion of the atoms is of the same degree of generality as the Newtonian idea of action of gravitation. However, the Newtonian idea, sustained by the modern mathematics, proved by calculations what Epicurus just speculated: the center of gravity is never in the point where it is supposed to be! Instead of looking for its correct placement, it seems that we have to accept this indetermination of the center of attraction as a law. It is described by the hyperbolic geometry, the very same describing the contemporary atomic nucleus by Skyrmions. It seems impossible to describe the gravitation as universal, if this universality is not referred somehow to the structure of the matter.

On the other hand that definition might have rightfully been the motto in Newton’s times when the modern science was born – especially because we didn’t know what we were doing and wanted to know. If someone, after three centuries of evolution, is entitled to utter such a definition then we must admit that the science did not achieve its vocation. Then again, one must recognize that such a definition confuses the issues: our guy, defining the science, might have been thinking of technology, not science. This is certainly not what Newton had in mind, considering the fact that he was inspired by the works from old!