Our first case study encompasses essentially the whole of what can be considered the modern scientific process. Unlike the other case studies, it requires little mathematics but a great deal in terms of intellectual imagination. For me, it is a heroic tale of scientists of the highest genius lying the foundations of modern science. Everything is there – the rôles of brilliant experimental skill, of imagination in the interpretation of observational and experimental data and of the remarkable leaps of the imagination which were to lay the foundations for the Newtonian picture of the world. This achievement may not at first sight seem so remarkable to the twenty-first-century reader, but closer inspection shows that in fact it is immense. As expressed by Herbert Butterfield in his Origins of Modern Science, the understanding of motion was one of the most difficult steps that scientists have ever undertaken. In the quotation by Douglas Gough in Chapter 1, he expresses eloquently the ‘pain’ experienced on being forced to discard a cherished prejudice in the sciences. How much more difficult must have been the process of laying the foundations of modern science, when the concept that the laws of nature can be written in mathematical form had not yet been formulated.

How did our modern appreciation of the nature of our physical Universe come about? I make no apology for starting at the very beginning. In Chapter 2, the first of three chapters that address Case Study I, we set the scene for the subsequent triumphs, and tragedies, of two of the greatest minds of modern science – Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.