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The American Revolution’s Overlooked Influence? Physics. How ‘Common Sense’ Spelled Out Astronomical Expectations for a New Nation
The manifesto leaned heavily on Isaac Newton’s theories in making a case for independence, and fellow founders drew on the notion to build a new system of government
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In politics, as in nature, tensions can take years to build, but it takes just one stone to unleash an avalanche, one spark to ignite a wildfire. For many historians of the American Revolution, that spark was a pamphlet of fewer than 100 pages written by a newly arrived English immigrant named Thomas Paine. Throughout 1775, violent clashes between British troops and colonist rebels protesting onerous taxes inspired little talk of outright revolution. Most rebels aimed to force better terms with Britain, not sever the link. Then, in January 1776, Paine changed everything with Common Sense, a manifesto so radical that at first he didn’t even dare to sign it. It was an immediate sensation, selling 120,000 copies in three months, in Paine’s estimation, in a colonial population of just two and a half million—and that was not counting handwritten copies and knockoff editions that swept not only through America but all over Europe.
In his plea for American independence from Britain, Paine made vivid appeals to nature. Strikingly, he envisioned global politics as an astronomical system, arguing that America, rather than orbiting the central sun of England, was large and mature enough to provide its own center of gravity. “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet,” he wrote, “and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems.” He described the “gravitating” force binding Americans, urging them to work together to determine their own fate. “We have it in our power,” he wrote, “to begin the world over again.”
Paine’s astronomical vision was taken further that April in a remarkable response published in the weekly newspaper the Pennsylvania Ledger. The writer, whose identity is lost to time, imagined taking a trip with Paine into outer space. Leaving the solar system and the “dull beaten tracks of monarchy” far behind, the space travelers discovered a vast cosmos not ruled by one dominant sun but studded with innumerable suns. The universe thus revealed the blueprint for a different kind of nation: “a republic amidst the stars.”
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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
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This was the first known expression of a symbol now instantly recognizable around the world: the United States of America as a constellation of equal stars. The imagery has since become so ubiquitous as to be almost drained of meaning. But it was born from a radical and unprecedented shift in cosmology, a revolutionary system of the universe that Americans didn’t just picture on their flag but wove deep into the framework of their republic. Many historical threads contributed to the making of the United States, from the democracies of ancient Greece to the religious rebels of the Protestant Reformation. But one idea—often overlooked today, despite hiding in plain sight—was completely new. In building their government, the founders aimed to mirror the equality, balance and unifying laws that they saw in the heavens.
Cosmology has always shaped politics. For millennia, from the dawn of written history and probably before, people looked up to the shining orbs in the sky and saw an eternal realm populated by spirits and powerful gods. Rulers consolidated their power by cloaking themselves in celestial imagery. In imperial China, the emperor was the “Son of Heaven,” responsible for keeping society in harmony with the sky. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II styled himself as the earthly representative of the planet Jupiter (known as Marduk, king of the gods). The Maya chief Lord Chac identified himself with the planet Venus, whose appearance coincided with the rainy season, thus crediting him with bringing the rains that kept everyone alive. Many rulers associated themselves with our nearest star, in a practice dating at least as far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, who were seen as the sun’s embodiment on Earth. In ancient Rome, Nero was portrayed wearing a crown that emanated sun rays. A few centuries later, Constantine adopted a solar persona with a new religious spin—the sun as a channel for the Christian God.
Did you know? A brief timeline of astronomical discovery leading to Newton
- 1543: Nicolaus Copernicus published Six Books on the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which established a comprehensive heliocentric model of the universe.
- 1609-1619: Johannes Kepler described major new laws of planetary motion, including elliptical and varied orbits.
- 1610: Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius kicked off the era of telescopic discovery, describing new observations such as Jupiter’s moons and many stars not visible to the naked eye.
- 1687: Isaac Newton published Principia.
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The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus began to rewrite the principles that ruled the universe in 1543, when he argued that the Earth, rather than being the fixed center of the cosmos, hurtles perpetually around the sun. He used royal imagery to support this radical idea: “As though seated on a royal throne,” he wrote, “the sun governs the family of planets revolving around it.”
At first, Europe’s kings used this heliocentric revolution to boost their standing. “There is basically no European monarch during the 16th and 17th century who is not seen as a sun or depicted in solar metaphors,” Eran Shalev, a historian of ideas at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the author of last year’s The Star-Spangled Republic, a cultural history of early America, told me recently. That tradition continued into the 18th century with Britain’s kings George II and III (described as “shining sovereigns” spreading their “superior rays”). Even after Copernicus, the heavens still seemed to support divinely mandated rulers. But a revolution in understanding planetary motion would blow this view apart.
In 1687, Isaac Newton, in Principia, still perhaps the most influential scientific work ever written, had used mathematics to show that everything in the universe—from apples and planets to grains of sand and the sun itself—is governed by the attracting force of gravity. “Yes, the sun is in the center, but every other body attracts back on the sun and on each other body as well,” explains Mordechai Feingold, a historian of science at Caltech and the author of The Newtonian Moment.
Newton revealed the workings of the universe as a finely balanced and interdependent system, bound by rational, predictable laws, and he did it not by appealing to the authorities of the past—ancient scholars or the church—but through his own observations and ingenuity. The physicist’s ideas swept through Enlightenment Europe. He was seen as an almost divine messenger, able to unlock the mysteries of the natural world. “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote around 1730. “God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.”
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Newton’s ideas transformed not only his scientific field but also society as a whole. His discovery of the law of gravity meant “everything is equal, everything operates according to the same law,” Nicholas Campion, a historian of cosmology and culture at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, says. Philosophers and political theorists, considering what these natural laws might mean for human affairs, began to ask: Shouldn’t people—even kings—be bound by common laws, too?
As this new, unifying order in the universe was emerging, with it came a new idea: that through laws and logic, people might glean the best way to govern themselves. In Europe, this still largely meant tinkering with existing structures by defining or limiting the monarch’s power. It was thousands of miles away, in America, that a new cosmic system would take flight.
Thomas Paine, the son of a corset maker in Norfolk, England, had already failed at several careers—tax collector, tobacconist, teacher—before he set sail for Philadelphia in November 1774. When he arrived in December, he was carrying little more than a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he’d met in London, and a bad case of typhoid fever. He found work as editor of the new Pennsylvania Magazine. With Common Sense, he soon became one of the best-selling authors the world had ever seen.
Paine’s ideas were not wholly original: Franklin, John Adams and Samuel Adams were already discussing American independence in private. But Paine brought revolution to the masses, giving the idea a shape and precision it had lacked. “It made clear to people that a choice was available to them,” says Mark Philp, a historian at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and a Paine biographer. In clear, persuasive language, Paine told his fellow colonists that they could control their own future. “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us,” he wrote, “to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.”
Most colonists had been reluctant to rebel; they still saw themselves as English, regardless of which side of the Atlantic they lived on. Paine reframed the conflict, “working a powerful change in the minds of many men,” as George Washington put it. The revolutionaries weren’t traitors or tax avoiders; they were building a better kind of nation. As the Boston minister Andrew Eliot wrote to an acquaintance in London: “Independence, a year ago, could not have been publicly mentioned with impunity. Now nothing else is talked of, and I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.”
Paine wasn’t the type to cite his sources, but biographers have seen Newtonian influences. He became hooked on astronomy as a young man in London, when Newton’s science (and its political implications) were widely discussed in coffeehouses and debating clubs. Paine later wrote that when he returned from six months aboard a privateer in 1757, he spent his earnings on “a pair of globes”—representing the Earth and the sky—and set about mastering their use. He attended lectures on astronomy, and he met Franklin, a fellow Newtonian, who encouraged him to sail to America.
In Philadelphia, Paine attended lectures at the American Philosophical Society and drank and debated at an intellectual club called the Indian Queen. And he began to write. He would have had many influences, from John Locke’s discussions of natural rights to Martin Luther’s rejection of papal authority. But, Philp says, “there’s no doubt that he’s aware of that Newtonian picture, and that it shapes the way he thinks and writes.” At the time, America was often described as a planet or satellite orbiting the central sun of England. Now Paine used that same Newtonian imagery to argue that America was better understood as its own gravitational system.
Americans announced their independence that July, invoking the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” in the Declaration originally drafted by Thomas Jefferson. Scholars endlessly debate the sources of the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths: equality and the universal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In addition to Locke in England, the founders certainly drew on French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu and Voltaire; classical authors including Aristotle and Cicero; the 13th-century Magna Carta; and England’s 1689 Bill of Rights. Several historians have pointed out that principles of limited government and citizens’ rights were compatible with Protestant Calvinism; others that Franklin and other founders were keen observers of Native American self-governance, as demonstrated by the Iroquois Confederacy.
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But scholars familiar with Newton’s work say the Declaration’s debt to physics is often overlooked. The founders “internalized the legacy of Newton into something much more pragmatic and political,” Feingold, of Caltech, argues. Every Western philosopher of the time was working in Newton’s shadow, and many founders were immersed in Newtonian thought. John Adams had an education in celestial mechanics. Franklin and Jefferson were prominent scientists in their own right: Franklin, who as a young man frequented Newton’s favorite London tavern in the hope of meeting him, was famous for his investigations of electricity; Jefferson, who pioneered everything from archaeological excavations to meteorological studies, had an evident and deep knowledge of Principia, and he declared Newton one of the “greatest men that have ever lived.”
Joyce Chaplin, a historian of early America at Harvard University, says that while the founders may not have been divining mathematical laws of motion, they saw themselves as continuing the search for universal principles of nature. “If you were arguing from nature,” she says, “you were arguing truth.”
After the Revolution had been won, the same Newtonian ingenuity that helped the founders conceive of independence became woven into the new American government. In the 1780s, representatives to the Continental Congress debated how the newly independent states should be bound together. It was an unprecedented challenge for such a large, populous and regionally heterodox territory. Democracy had thrived in ancient Greece, but only in small city-states. “And this is not a country of small city-states,” Philp says.
Instead, America’s founders imagined a new system, combining a strong collective identity with the autonomy of independent states. Seeking a balanced structure that would prevent weak bonds (and thus disintegration) on the one hand and collapse toward a tyrannical center on the other, the delegates drew on the celestial mechanics seen in nature. Delaware’s John Dickinson argued that the states, like the planets, “ought to be left to move freely in their proper orbits,” whereas James Madison worried they would “continually fly out” of those orbits without stronger ties. John Adams, commenting from London as the U.S. ambassador to Britain, feared that without a properly balanced government, America would resemble a chaotic sky filled with fiery comets. Citing Newton’s third law of motion—to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction—he argued that a firm constitution was needed to control “those attractions and repulsions by which the balance of nature is preserved.” For Adams, that meant dividing the government into independent branches, with executive, legislative and judicial arms that would prevent any single entity from dominating the whole.
The resulting separation of powers and legislature are still at the heart of American governance, a model of democracy inspired in no small part by scientific principles of equality and interconnectedness. And the founders’ federal system has since been implemented in countries from Canada and Australia to Switzerland, Malaysia, India and Brazil. As the Australian constitutional historian Winston McMinn once put it: “All modern federal polities, whether their people like to be reminded of it or not, are the spiritual children of the founding fathers of the Philadelphia Convention.”
The new political cosmology wasn’t yet complete, however. As Shalev writes in The Star-Spangled Republic, the early Americans would ultimately transcend the old celestial imagery of planets orbiting a massive sun, at last replacing it with a new symbolism. To do it, the founders combined Newtonian principles with another astronomical innovation—the telescope. Throughout the 18th century, as astronomers focused increasingly powerful lenses on the sky, more stars and galaxies kept coming into view. Space stretched deeper and farther than they had ever imagined, revealing that the sun was not in fact the center of the universe. It was one star among many.
This was the idea expressed by the anonymous correspondent who wrote to the Pennsylvania Ledger in 1776. The writer mused that although the sun might seem to mortals in its immediate orbit as “the grand monarch of the heavenly bodies,” zooming out to a wider view revealed that the sky was filled with such stars, forming constellations “united upon the principles of perfect equality.” Instead of conceiving the universe—and, in microcosm, the nation—as arranged around a single gravitational center, this view showed a system governed by laws that spread authority among balanced, equal actors. For Shalev, that symbolism represents “a remarkable intellectual reconfiguration.”
This stellar architecture was most strikingly expressed, of course, in the new nation’s flag. A resolution of the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777, had decreed that the states were to be shown as “13 stars, white in a blue field.” Today, around half of the world’s national flags include cosmic imagery, mostly five-pointed stars. America was the first.
The very word “revolution,” long before it was applied to human affairs, was an astronomical concept, derived from the cycles of stars. Newton’s ideas traced the same journey, first rewriting physics and astronomy and then helping reshape politics, too. And it was in the American Revolution that these ideas came to fruition, cultivated on a new understanding of the principles that should govern heaven and earth, and inspiring a model of democratic republicanism that has since been exported around the world.
A quarter of a millennium on, our gaze has narrowed. We see the stars on the flag but perhaps forget what they once meant. For citizens of the 18th century, living before the harnessing of electric power, the starry sky would have been a magnificent nightly reminder of the grander order and harmony of existence. Today, earthly lights have dimmed the sky. And science has moved on from the universal truths of the Newtonian cosmos, too. Charles Darwin transformed our conception of living beings from fixed creatures to mutable species. Albert Einstein showed that even space and time depend upon our perspective. Quantum physics has cast doubt on whether there is any solid landscape beyond us at all.
These are the cosmological currents that now surround us. We live in a messier, more dynamic and more unpredictable reality than Jefferson and Franklin hoped for, and the consequences of these intellectual changes are still playing out. But the challenge for society, in America as elsewhere, remains the same: to maintain a stable path, without hurtling apart into anarchy or collapsing toward a draconian center. How do we balance our creativity, our chaos, our plurality of truths and realities with our collective humanity and a shared vision that makes us more than the sum of our parts? The founders anticipated such a challenge, and they crafted a government—with its checks and balances, its safeguards and separations—that has, so far, proved uniquely well prepared to face it.
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