Individual scientists' beliefs Christian Scholars and Scientists have made noted contributions to science and technology fields, as well as Medicine, Many well-known historical figures who influenced Western science considered themselves Christian such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton Robert Boyle, Francis Bacon, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alessandro Volta, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Antoine Lavoisier, André-Marie Ampère, John Dalton, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday, and J. J. Thomson. Isaac Newton, for example, believed that gravity caused the planets to revolve about the Sun, and credited God with the design. In the concluding General Scholium to the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, he wrote: "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." Other famous founders of science who adhered to Christian beliefs include Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Blaise Pascal. Prominent modern scientists advocating Christian belief include Nobel Prize–winning physicists Charles Townes (United Church of Christ member) and William Daniel Phillips (United Methodist Church member), evangelical Christian and past head of the Human Genome Project Francis Collins, and climatologist John T. Houghton. According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes a review of Nobel prizes award between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Overall, Christians have won a total of 72.5% in Chemistry between 1901 and 2000, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics. Eastern Christianity Byzantine science was essentially classical science, and played an important and crucial role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and to Renaissance Italy. Many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Therefore, Byzantine science was in every period closely connected with ancient-pagan philosophy, and metaphysics. Despite some opposition to pagan learning, many of the most distinguished classical scholars held high office in the Church. The writings of antiquity never ceased to be cultivated in the Byzantine empire due to the impetus given to classical studies by the Academy of Athens in the 4th and 5th centuries, the vigor of the philosophical academy of Alexandria, and to the services of the University of Constantinople, which concerned itself entirely with secular subjects, to the exclusion of theology, which was taught in the Patriarchical Academy.