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Newton, the 17th-century English scientist most famous for describing the laws of gravity and motion, beat Einstein in two polls conducted by eminent London-based scientific academy, the Royal Society. More than 1,300 members of the public and 345 Royal Society scientists were asked separately which famous scientist made a bigger overall contribution to science, given the state of knowledge during his time, and which made a bigger positive contribution to humankind. Newton was the winner on all counts, though he beat the German-born Einstein by only 0.2 of a percentage point (50.1 percent to 49.9 percent) in the public poll...

When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1687, he could have only hoped we'd be discussing them three centuries later. Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length. But according to a philosopher of language and mathematics, we might have been interpreting Newton's precise wording of his first law of motion slightly wrong all along. Virginia Tech philosopher Daniel Hoek wanted to "set the record straight" after discovering what he describes as a "clumsy...

January's Physics World features a fanciful re-imagining of the 10-year period in the life of the medieval Muslim polymath, written by Los Angeles-based science writer Jennifer Ouellette... In 11th-century Egypt, Aristotle's ancient thought that visible objects and our own eyes emit rays of light to enable our vision still held... As Ouellette writes, "This is a work of fiction -- a fanciful re-imagining of a 10-year period in the life of Ibn al-Haytham, considered by many historians to be the father of modern optics. Living at the height of the golden age of Arabic science, al-Haytham developed an early version...