If you understand gravitation (and I don’t mean are simply able to reproduce the emperical relationship of attraction of massive bodies to each other) then you need to call up the Physics department at Caltech and talk to Kip Thorne about introducing you to some people in Sweden who have a cash prize for you. Nobody understands gravitation, even–or perhaps, especially–in the context of other fundamental “force” interactions. Oh, sure, we can describe the effects of gravity in some pretty wild situations, and the general Newtonian explanation works well enough to give us reasonably accurate results in most terrestrial scenerios, but all this business about “mass-energy curving the fabric of spacetime” doesn’t actually clue us in on what spacetime is and why it is so amenable to being warped.
This is not to denegrate the work of Newton, who, in addition to his work on gravity and mechanics, also did some minor work in areas of calculus and optics that you may have heard of in passing. He also layed out the first theory on the corpuscular nature of light, which while not bearing much of a resemblence to the modern explanation of QED, could be credibly described as the first precursor to quantum theory. (The actual beginnings of quantum theory really begin with Boltzmann’s work with statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, and given evidentiary form by Planck’s work with blackbody radiation.) But Newton’s revelation–forces could act on bodies without direct, mechanical contact, and that bodies in motion have an inertia the requires force to change–is just another in a long string of fundamenal discoveries in natural science.
As for other scientific revelations with equivilent impact, there have been plenty, and most can be understood–at least, on the same level as gravitation–by anyone with a high school education. Special relativity isn’t all that complex in the overall theory, and general relativity only slightly moreso; the behavior it describes is outside everyday experience, but the concepts are (for the most part) easily illustrated. Maxwell’s (and later people, like Heavyside’s) groundbreaking work on electrodynamics gives us the ability to generate electricity. John Ambrose Fleming’s development of the kenotron (the precursor to the vacuum tube) allowed electronic digital computing, which has had a bit of an impact upon civilization and scientific development. Various people, among them John Ericsson (Ericsson cycle, Brayton cycle), Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron (Carnot cycle), and Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci (Otto cycle) did work on the application of thermodynamics to the heat engines which essentially drive every chemical-to-mechanical energy machine process on the planet. I’ll shy away from the major players in quantum mechanics, since you want to keep the focus on developments simple enough to be understood by the layperson, but if we can deviate our tour slightly from the physical sciences we can take a look at Darwin’s development of natural selection, which fundamentally altered the understanding of biological development, Louis Pasteur’s work on bacteriology, vaccination, and infecteous disease, and of course Watson and Crick (and the largely unmentioned Maurice Wilkins and the totally unrewarded Rosalind Franklin)'s discovery of the structure of DNA which has since allowed us to map, identify, and even modify or fix defects in the genetic code.
Newton gets a lot of play 'cause his basic stuff finds its way into the front of every physics text (rightfully so, since he essentially formalized physics as a field of study) but he’s hardly the last one to forment a massive revolutionary change in science as it applies to everyday life.
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