Yesterday, people around the globe celebrated the birth of someone whose new perspective and radical ideas changed history, perhaps more than any other.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaac Newton.

Ho ho ho!

Born on December 25, 1642, Newton is justly famed as one of history’s greatest scientists. By relating gravity on Earth to the force that holds the planets in orbit, Newton arguably created physics as we know it.

However, like many prominent scientists, Newton’s greatness was not so much in what he discovered as how he discovered it. Others had already had similar ideas about gravity. Robert Hooke in particular had written to Newton mentioning a law much like the one Newton eventually wrote down, leading Hooke to accuse Newton of plagiarism.

Newton’s great accomplishment was not merely proposing his law of gravitation, but justifying it, in a way that no-one had ever done before. When others (Hooke for example) had proposed similar laws, they were looking for a law that perfectly described the motion of the planets. Kepler had already proposed ellipse-shaped orbits, but it was clear by Newton and Hooke’s time that such orbits did not fully describe the motion of the planets. Hooke and others hoped that if some sufficiently skilled mathematician started with the correct laws, they could predict the planets’ motions with complete accuracy.

The genius of Newton was in attacking this problem from a different direction. In particular, Newton showed that his laws of gravitation do result in (incorrect) ellipses…provided that there was only one planet.

With multiple planets, things become much more complicated. Even just two planets orbiting a single star is so difficult a problem that it’s impossible to write down an exact solution.

Sensibly, Newton didn’t try to write down an exact solution. Instead, he figured out an approximation: since the Sun is much bigger than the planets, he could simplify the problem and arrive at a partial solution. While he couldn’t perfectly predict the motions of the planets, he knew more than that they were just “approximately” ellipses: he had a prediction for how different from ellipses they should be.

That step was Newton’s great contribution. That insight, that science was able not just to provide exact answers to simpler problems but to guess how far those answers might be off, was something no-one else had really thought about before. It led to error analysis in experiments, and perturbation methods in theory. More generally, it led to the idea that scientists have to be responsible, not just for getting things “almost right”, but for explaining how their results are still wrong.

So this holiday season, let’s give thanks to the man whose ideas created science as we know it. Merry Newtonmas everyone!