Galileo’s Two New Sciences and Newton’s Mechanics

Newton’s famed Principia Mathematica (1687) is often hailed as the text that created physics. But more than half a century earlier, Galileo Galilei had already laid down the essential principles of motion in Two New Sciences (1638). Galileo explored inertia, the parabolic trajectories of projectiles, and the mathematics of acceleration — core insights that Newton later claimed as his own.

For instance, Galileo described the principle that bodies in motion remain in motion unless acted upon — Newton’s “First Law of Motion.” Galileo also showed, through thought experiments and rudimentary mathematics, how falling bodies accelerate under gravity, foreshadowing Newton’s “Second Law.” Even Newton’s theory of parabolic trajectories owed its foundation to Galileo’s descriptions of compound motion. Newton’s role was not invention but codification: he gave these principles a more formal mathematical language, but the seed was planted by Galileo.

Yet Newton never credited Galileo as the originator of these ideas. Instead, he postured as if mechanics sprang wholly from his mind, erasing Galileo’s foundational role and allowing posterity to credit Newton with laws already articulated decades earlier.

Calculus: Stolen from Alhazen and Beyond

Newton’s most notorious theft concerns calculus. The standard narrative pits Newton against Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who independently developed the same method of infinitesimals in the 17th century. But both of these Europeans were drawing on much older traditions of mathematical analysis, particularly from the Islamic Golden Age.

Centuries earlier, Ibn al-Haytham (known in the West as Alhazen, d. 1040) had already developed methods that closely resemble integral calculus. In his Book of Optics and Treatise on Analysis and Synthesis, Alhazen explored summations of series, infinitesimal geometry, and techniques for calculating areas under curves. He derived what we now recognize as integral formulae to compute volumes and surfaces of revolution, and his “Alhazen’s problem” in optics required the solving of quartic equations — a feat that presupposed a proto-calculus mindset.

Nor was Alhazen the only precursor. In India, the Kerala school of mathematics (14th–16th c.) had already developed infinite series expansions for trigonometric functions, effectively laying the groundwork for calculus long before Newton. Jesuit missionaries carried these results back to Europe, where they quietly resurfaced in the hands of Newton and Leibniz.

Newton’s calculus, then, was not a miraculous creation but a culmination of centuries of non-European work, repackaged without acknowledgment.

Hooke and the Law of Gravitation

Newton also claimed sole credit for the universal law of gravitation, the very heart of the Principia. But Robert Hooke, his bitter rival, had already proposed that planetary motion could be explained by a force of attraction that diminishes with the square of distance. Hooke even wrote directly to Newton about this idea. Newton, while privately admitting Hooke “guessed the truth,” later dismissed him publicly and published the law as his own.

This was not an innocent oversight. Newton wielded his authority as President of the Royal Society to diminish Hooke’s reputation, exclude him from recognition, and ensure that Hooke’s name disappeared from the record.

Optics: Erasing Alhazen and Attacking Hooke

Newton’s reputation in optics is similarly tainted. His famous prism experiments, which showed that white light is composed of colors, were not novel. Ibn al-Haytham had already built the foundations of geometric optics centuries earlier, and Kepler and Descartes advanced it further. Robert Hooke too had competing theories of light that emphasized its wave-like nature.

Newton, instead of acknowledging this lineage, proclaimed his experiments as revolutionary. When Hooke criticized him, Newton retaliated by destroying Hooke’s credibility and blocking his contributions from being remembered. The result: Newton as “the discoverer of optics,” while Alhazen and Hooke were buried in the footnotes of history.

Binomial Theorem and Series Expansions

Newton’s generalization of the binomial theorem, used to expand fractional exponents, is presented as one of his mathematical triumphs. Yet again, precedents exist. Indian mathematicians of the Kerala school had already developed sophisticated infinite series for sine, cosine, and arctangent functions centuries earlier. Their work was transmitted westward, but Newton erased the lineage and portrayed the results as his own invention.

Calculus and the Leibniz Affair

The Newton–Leibniz calculus dispute is the most infamous example of Newton’s intellectual dishonesty. Not only did he refuse to acknowledge Leibniz’s independent discovery, but as President of the Royal Society, Newton stacked the investigative committee, ghostwrote the official report in his own favor, and permanently slandered Leibniz as a plagiarist. It was academic fraud disguised as patriotism.

The Cult of Newton

Newton’s fraud was not merely theft but also the deliberate construction of a myth. He carefully guarded his work, withheld credit from rivals, and curated his public image to appear as the solitary genius who singlehandedly created modern science. Meanwhile, he spent vast amounts of his life on pursuits he hid from the public — alchemy, astrology, and biblical prophecy — disciplines that contradicted the rational image later painted of him.

The myth of Newton as the singular father of science is therefore not the story of a man but of a system: the systematic erasure of earlier traditions, especially non-European, to consolidate the glory of one figure at the center of the scientific revolution.

Conclusion

Newton was no doubt intelligent, but intelligence does not excuse dishonesty. His mechanics leaned heavily on Galileo’s Two New Sciences. His calculus drew from Alhazen, the Kerala school, and ultimately Leibniz. His optics recycled Alhazen and Hooke. His gravitation was foreshadowed by Hooke’s inverse-square proposal. Even his mathematical theorems had precedents in Indian series. What Newton excelled at was not discovery, but appropriation, suppression, and self-promotion.

The reality is far less flattering than the textbook myth: Newton was not the titan of genius the Enlightenment imagined, but a consummate fraud — a phony who built his reputation by standing on the shoulders of giants, then erasing their names so that only his remained.