Robert Russell Newton (July 7, 1918 – June 2, 1991) was an American physicist, astronomer, and historian of science.
Newton was Supervisor of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.
In Newton's view, Ptolemy was "the most successful fraud in the history of science".
Newton claimed that Ptolemy had predominantly obtained the astronomical results described in his work The Almagest by computation, and not by the direct observations that Ptolemy described.
Newton was also known for his work on change of the rotation rate of the earth, and historical observations of eclipses; however, his results “are simply meaningless.”[1] His steps were rarely detailed, his reasoning rarely explained.