Well, we have to jump back again to our own century and a person named Thomas Kuhn who wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Newton's work began a scientific revolution. There are two major misconceptions about science. People tend to think of science as some huge, scary, gigantic thing. Actually, it is really very simple.
Science is nothing more than disciplined observation of anything that happens.
Science gives us certain, indubitable, firm, precise knowledge. No, it doesn't. This is what Kuhn's book is about. A paradigm is a central, unifying insight that then orients how we understand things. What Newton did was initiate a change in paradigms.