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."

Comments

Newton shouldn't have been hired.

[bcrowell]

Newton shouldn't have been hired for a faculty job. He was reputed to be the worst teacher ever. He often didn't even pretend to teach, and treated his job as a sinecure. On the occasions when he did pretend to give a lecture, it was generally to an empty hall, because no students would show up.

A better niche for Newton in modern society would have been a research job at a national lab -- no teaching required, just research.

You also have to realize that the research world was a massive disaster back then. People didn't publish their results. There were no scientific journals. Newton invented calculus, found the laws of motion, and analyzed the motion of the planets. Then he sat on his discoveries for decades (and only eventually published the Principia because he wanted to build a claim that Leibniz and Hooke had taken ideas from him, rather than the other way around).

So let's not imagine a golden age when it was OK to be a socially nonconforming geek.