who were the Newtonians?

[AntonioLao]

They are the ones who in spite of mounting evidence believed till the end that Newton’s laws with instantaneous action-at-a-distance is the only game in town. Most of them were influential people who held authoritative positions in academia, responsible for indoctrinating future generation with their growing outdated knowledge of physics based on a clockwork universe, deterministic and reversible.

They opposed Faraday’s lines of force and the idea of field completely permeating space and time.

The most notorious which include natural philosophers and mathematicians were Gauss, Riemann, Weber from Germany; Lagrange, Laplace, Ampere, Poisson from France. Some of them didn’t have any choice in term of a selection of opposing theories. Or they were too old to want to make any difference belonging to an earlier generation of physical researchers. They would certainly changed their affiliations into Maxwellians if they were reading by electric lamps not gas or by the flickering candle flame of vacillating shadow and light, dim and bright.

[Guille]

Although they didn't have an alternative theory, just if, say, Poisson, Laplace and Lagrange agreed to develop an alternative physics, with the help of alternate ideas to Newton's, then i would have chaned history. Einstein's SR wouldn't be a solution to the newton-maxwell probelm, it would be a solution to this new theory vs maxwell problem. This theory could have had, for example, Leibniz's Vis Viva, Descartes's plane instead of Gaussian and Riemannian geometries, and Lagrange's wave propagation idea of maxima-minima.

In general, what I mean is that newtonians not only were so because of the spacetime points they lived in, but also that they weren't conditioned to be so, and the fact that they assumed Newton's work might have been a not so good decision when one look sat how many good physics ideas were left out as they opposed the theories of this great.

[AntonioLao]

what I mean is that newtonians not only were so because of the spacetime points they lived in

The available technologies for each era affect the full acceptance of any paradigm shift. Without the technology of interferometer Michelson-Morley could not have performed the null experiment for special relativity.