When did Isaac Newton finally fail?
It took hundreds of years for Einstein to dethrone him, and even then, he was off by less than 1% of a spectacular prediction.
“To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ’Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.” -Isaac Newton
When Isaac Newton put forth his universal theory of gravitation in the 1680s, it was immediately recognized for what it was: the first incredibly successful, predictively powerful scientific theory that described the one force ruling the largest scales of all. From objects freely falling here on Earth to the planets and celestial bodies orbiting in space, Newton’s theory of gravity captured their trajectories spectacularly. When the new planet Uranus was discovered, the deviations in its orbit from Newton’s predictions allowed a spectacular leap: the prediction of the existence, mass and position of another new world beyond it: Neptune. The very night the Berlin Observatory received the theoretical prediction of Urbain Le Verrier — working 169 years after Newton’s Principia — they found our Solar System’s 8th planet within one degree of its predicted position. And yet, Newton’s laws were about to prove insufficient for what was to come.
