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Could Isaac Newton Get a Faculty Job?
An anonymous reader writes "Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity? That's one of the questions that Glenn Reynolds asks Neal Stephenson in this interview over at TechCentralstation. Others involve the changing nature of fame in an age of fragmented media, the role of the Seventeenth Century in shaping the modern world, and what it's like to write a book with a fountain pen, in the twenty-first century."
If anyone's interested, James Gleick recently released a wonderful biography of Sir Isaac. It's a very entertaining, very fast read.
Disclaimer: I've never read any other Newton biography, so I can't validate the accuracy. ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Um, no. Narcotics are drugs like heroin and morphine that put one into a state of narcosis.
Stimulants like amphetamine or methylphenidate are prescribed for ADD. These drugs increase the ability of one to focus, which means he probably would have come up with even more ideas.
To conclude, stimulants != narcotics. Stimulants -> greater focus -> better ideas.
Kthx.
You're probably right. My father-in-law, a psychologist, was reading about various historical smart people and thought the descriptions of their personalities/habits sounded consistent with people diagnosed as ADD/ADHD.
John Nash was extremely eccentric but held down positions at MIT.
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Now that I think about it.. didn't Newton have a job at Cambridge too?
/.ers won't get it.
I'm assuming you're joking; I'm also assuming some
Yeah, he had an insignificant little job, sorta equivalent to a modern "Dorm Mother": he was the second Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.
Hell, they give that wheelchair guy a job and he's hanging out with strippers all the time. I'd say Hawking's pretty eccentric.
Stephen Hawking, of course, is the current Lucasian Chair.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Err...Chair? Oxford?
perhaps you are talking about the position of "Lucasian Professor of Mathematics" at Cambridge University.
Sorry to be pedantic, but there is no such thing as the "Nobel Prize for Economics."
Alfred Nobel's will makes provision for four Swedish prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Literature) and one Norwegian prize (Peace.) The reason for the seperation is due to Nobel's analysis of the relative merits of the two cultures - he believed that Norwegian society was more enlightened than Sweden thus better equiped to award the Peace prize.
There is an additional prize called the 'Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel" Which is (as the name suggests) awarded by the Bank of Sweden, NOT by the Swedish or Norwegian Nobel committees. Prestigious as it is, it is not a Nobel Prize.
More information on the prizes is available here
I have met a lot of Profs in Chemical Engineering and not a single one of them is what society would call normal.
Newton would fit right in.
Physics profs are pretty strange also.
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The focus of 'A Beautiful Mind' was NOT to document all of his bizarreness, but to demonstrate what schizophrenia could be like--and it did a decent job of it.
Having worked as a mental health associate in a residential treatment facility that primarily cares for schizophrenics, I think it important to point out a few things.
First, most schizophrenics are bizarre. By definition. Catatonic schizophrenics may not be, but bizarreness of thought is one of the requirements for diagnosis (source: DSM-IV revised). Thus to say that John Nash was sometimes bizarre is redundant. Of course he was.
Second, sexuality is unrelated to the discussion. Why bring it up?
Third, schizophrenia is a very debilitating disease. It is not easily overcome. If you think that the movie was overly romantic, consider this: two-thirds (approximately) of schizophrenics do not get better, regardless of treatment. It is very exceptional that someone with schizophrenia can learn to cope as well as Nash did. His story is exceptional, even if hollywood made it seem "cute" or whatever. I respect him for what he did. The movie, in terms of its treatment of what schizophrenics go through, did a good job of illustrating the nature of thier delusions, hallucinations and paranoia. IF ANYTHING IT UNDERSTATED IT!!!!!
Having worked with a man who truly believed his mother was a leprechaun, another who believed that he invented the Knight Rider car (but the government stole it, and made the show so they could kill his family and cover it all up) (he also believed that demons would throw "fury darts" at him, and that was why he attacked people), and another (blond) man who believed the devil was persecuting him becuase he had red hair, I have a lot of respect for those who manage to overcome this. I also feel that unless you have worked with these people, you cannot rightfully comment on their "bizarreness".
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As an aside (maybe a second rant), I also worked with some who were ADD/ADHD, and it is a strange thing. It is also mostly behavioral (I believe, some will argue), and is very rare outside the US. Ritalin should NEVER be given to children. If you know anything about medicine or psychology, consider this. The test group for Ritalin was adult humans and rats (sometimes different, sometimes not). There has NOT been any solid research on the long-term effects of Ritalin on young children. To generalize the results of studies on adults to children is a good example of bad statistics and medicine.
I know I haven't cited references like I should, but it is late.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I remember seeing an interview once with a man who according to IQ tests was the (or one of the) smartest man currently living. He went on about how he was smarter then Einstein but how no one would hire him without a degree and it was so hard to meet other smart people, etc. He said he was going to write a book that would change how we think about physics or something like that, was a bouncer and frankly from what I heard I probably wouldn't hire him either. It takes more than just brains, it takes the desire to use them and that is what great scientists have. You always hear about the mythical super-genius who doesn't get the great education and suddenly gets it and revolutionizes the world, in reality if they didn't bother learning basic math what makes you thnik they'll bother with string theory.
That's what makes the great scientists, the love of learning, and that's why I think Newton would have made it to Faculty today (assuming he didn't decide to work for a mega-corporation instead). Maybe he wouldn't have flown through school, he could probably find it slow enough to bore him but I feel that modern schooling is dynamic enough from 50 years ago that he would have made it through, remember this is a man who loved to learn, I mean it can't be much less stimulating then 17th century schooling! Now assuming he decides to go into mathematics (or physics) again he goes to university. Now assuming that due to boredom he didn't get great high school marks (I suspect unlikely) Newton wasn't exactly from a poor family and could of probably gone into whatever school he wanted. Once he's in university he's on the path and can pretty much do whatever he wants. If he gets the marks which he could definately do eccentricity would be no obstacle and he would make it into Faculty in no time.
I stole this Sig
Yes, it's true. He was one of the greatest geniuses ever, but he was an asshole. His famous statement, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants", was a sarcastic comment directed at Robert Hooke who was a little hunch-backed guy. When Newton oversaw the moving of the Royal Society to a new location and they were moving the portraits of all the members, Hooke's portrait somehow got lost. So now no one knows what Hooke looked like.
It's not about authoritarianism, you blasted postmodernist. It's about whether or not gifted people actually have an attention deficit, which they clearly do not. They just think faster. See this paper for more serious information about misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis for gifted (in particular ADHD, ODD, and OCD), and why it happens.
Well, he was bipolar. So he could have been an asshole at times... but it was likely due to a genetic condition, not a choice.
No. His father died young and although his family technically belonged to the squirearchy, they were very poor. As a teenager he had to do farm work. He had to work his way through Cambridge as the poorest grade of student. It's believed that this explained his attitude to money (grasping) in later life. He was able to "sit around pondering" because the University was closed by the plague and he had to go home for a while.
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The proper title is Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. The only time I ever found Latin useful was when I had to write an essay on Newton and the only copy of the Principia in the library was the Latin version. Stretching a point, you could say, in fact, that Latin was the first scientific programming language.
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Principia Mathematica.
There has never been a more significant scientific publication
My physics teacher at school regarded it as the second most significant, after 'The Origin of Species'. I'm inclined to agree.
I disagree. While Darwin's work is undoubtedly significant it had more of a social impact than a scientific one. The publication of the Origin helped usher in the modern period; forcing people to re-evaluate their relationship with god and nature. Its effect on religion, social science, and even literature (particularly early science fiction) should not be underestimated.
However, as a scientific publication it pales in comparison to Principia Mathematica. The Origin was really a collection of good observations coupled with interesting (but flawed)hypotheses. The lasting effect of the Origin on the scientific community has largely been negative. People who have no concept of modern genetics will read a few chapters and come to all sorts of bizarre, incorrect conclusions (people are descendants of apes, biological determinism and so on..). This leads to the publication of books based on these conclusions ( see "The Giraffe's Neck" by Francis Hitching).
On the other hand Newton's work has ahd a profound, lasting and positive effect on science. For hundreds of years, his Newtonian mechanics were the only way to understand the physical universe. Even after his gravitational theory has been displaced by relativity and quantum theory, newtonian mechanics are still a useful tool taught to any grade school student.
Good teaching at Cambridge in Newton's day was a even rarer than today. Most professors treated their positions as sinecures, and many didn't do any teaching at all. Westfall's definitive biography of Newton, NEVER AT REST, treats this in detail. So Newton was not atypical in this regard.
With regard to publication and scientific journals, the Royal Society, whose Proceedings can be considered the prototype for the modern scientific journal, was founded in 1640 or thereabouts, and there were similar foreign publications, so scientific journals did exist.
Newton published very little prior to the Prncipia because he got irritated by negative response to his work, and felt he wasted far too much time arguing with people about it.
For example one paper he published described some optical work in which he mentioned that the spectrum from a prism was linear, which ran counter to the prevailing belief that it was circular (empiricism was still very much in its infancy). He was attacked for this claim, even by people who took the trouble to look at such spectra themselves but who saw circles because that is what they expected to see.
Finally, Newton did not publish Principia primarily to further his fights with Leibniz and Hooke, which occupied him much more after the publication of the Principia than before. He published it, famously, at the behest of his friend Edmund Halley, who felt that the results were too important to go unpublished. Self-agrandizement also surely played a role, but it is extremely doubtful it was the primary cause.
Newton was a complex character, subject to fits of melancholy and maddness. In later life he was frequently described as charming--wealth, fame and power probably improved his disposition more than a little.
Given his natural abilities, he would almost certainly find himself a faculty position today at the school of his choice, as modern universities are at least as welcoming to poor but capable students as they were in Newton's day, and being socially disfunctional has rarely been a bar to academic appointment.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.