SOURCE: "Newton Tercentenary," in Science, Vol. 240, No. 4855, May 20, 1988, pp. 1069-70.

In the review below, Parker discusses the essays contained in Three Hundred Years of Gravitation.

[Three Hundred Years of Gravitation] is a collection of 16 solicited contributions published in association with a Newton Tercentenary Conference held last summer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and summarizing the state of gravitation 300 years after the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia. The initial essays by Stephen W. Hawking and Steven Weinberg discuss Newton's greatest achievements. These include his development of the laws of mechanics, the universal inverse square law of gravitation, and the calculus. Weinberg feels that at the heart of the greatness of the Newtonian achievement is the fact that "mankind for the first time saw the glimpse of a possibility of a comprehensive quantitative understanding of all of nature." Hawking points out that the Newtonian universal law of gravitation is inconsistent with...