Date/Time 02 Sep 2015 7:40:45am
This is a trivial and rather uninformed comment.

Newton himself was actually quite dissatisfied with his understanding of gravity because it was more an empirical quantification with great predictive capacity than a theoretical understand of how one body can influence another without any physical contact. There was much the same gap in his understanding of light.

I think Maxwell, Planck, FitzGerald and a few other notable physicists were also hanging around the same fringe from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Well before Einstein published the special theory of relativity in 1905 the Newtonian paradigm was already in deep trouble. because this gap in the Newtonian legacy could no longer be pushed aside.

In any case Einstein's work did not change the motion of the planets or the rest of physical universe. Nor did it argue that the Newtonian paradigm did not, for most purposes, gave robust predicted outcomes. it proposed a theoretical understanding of the relationship between matter and space-time and demonstrated at the cosmological level, as did quantum theory at the atomic level, that the picture was a great deal more complex.

Newton and Maxwell were amongst Einstein's greatest heroes.