Oh, so Laplace explained *why* the law of gravitation is what it is? Now, *that* would be quite a feat.
Laplace sounds a lot like modern scientists who confuse discovery with invention. They think that because they discovered something about nature, they invented it.
Newton, on the other hand, was intelligent enough to realize that he didn’t invent the laws of physics. I’ll take Newton’s humility over Laplace’s arrogance any day.
By the way, I’m not a physicist, but I have read credible claims that Newton’s physics was actually more sophisticated than he is given credit for today. The conventional wisdom is that Newtonian physics was “superceded” by Einstein’s theories. But some physicists contend that Newton’s actual formulations (as opposed to modifications and interpretations by others) were consistent with relativity. I am not competent to debate the matter, but I do find it interesting.
I’m not a physicist, merely an engineer, but I presume to think that I understand the Newton-Laplace kerfluffle. A somewhat simplified narrative runs like so:
Newton posited simple laws that accounted for “first order effects”, - they predicted keplerian orbits as one solution to the two body problem, for instance. This was no mean feat, and one that Kepler, accounted the greatest mathematician of his day, tried and failed to do. Galileo never even tried.
The problem for Newton was that the real solar system has considerably more than two bodies. The three body problem of the sun-moon-earth was one that Newton found daunting. What would be the long term effects of Jupiter on the orbit of the earth was a problem that Newton never tackled.
Laplace did not in any way refute the work of Newton, he showed that it was possible to describe a stable solar system within the constraints of Newtonian mechanics - to a “second order”. In this sense, Laplace is Newton’s greatest disciple.
Einstein’s contribution came in accounting for an unstated assumption of Newtonian mechanics, namely that there was a prefered reference coordinate frame in which his laws applied. Maxwell’s Equations required an agreed upon coordinate frame. It was assumed that electromagnetic waves propagated through a medium, the ether, which was stationary with respect to Newton’s reference coordinates. Sensitive experiments failed to find any such reference frame. The speed of light was measured with great accuracy to be the same in morning when the observator was moving towards the sun as in the evening when he was moving away.
Einstein made some simplifying, if counter-intuitive assumptions, that modified Newtonian dynamics (and “our” understanding of space and time) in a manner that were consistent with observations of both the speed of light and the course of the planets.
Without Newton, there would be Einstein or Laplace. In fact, there is a continous flow from the ancient Chaldeans to the Greeks, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, to Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Laplace to Einstein.