Our understanding of the history of forces
In order to explore some of the thinking processes involved in the current dialogue between science and religion, I have imagined the following fable. The characters in my fable are modern-day versions of Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz. Also included is a lesser known historical figure, theologian Richard Bentley, with whom Newton corresponded. Galileo is pictured as a modern-day experimental physicist, performing increasingly precise experiments with falling bodies at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I imagine him rapidly communicating his results by e-mail to Newton in Cambridge, who is contemporaneously developing his laws of motion and gravity. Of course, Galileo preceded the other characters by two generations, so this interchange is obviously not historical. Furthermore, although both men were brilliant theorists and experimentalists, I am going to impose a modern division of labor and have Galileo be strictly an experimentalist and Newton a theorist. Galileo will have the best modern equipment at his disposal, and I will imagine each as if he thought like a scientist of today, not one of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
