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

sir issac lime

[OwlofCreamCheese]

sir issac lime could!!! I never got that otterpop... it was odviously a pun on sir issac newton, but it didn't make as much sense as the others (which is scary!). it had to be that it was originally green apple and they had it already printed up or something.

I dunno.....

[Brian_Ellenberger]

This the current "publish or perish" environment all those papers establishing the fields of Physics and Calculus may not be enough...

Actually, this is a very good question. Not because of "excessive quirkyness" because many of the great professors I have met are "querky or weird". But I wonder if Newton would have been able to handle Relativism and Quantum Physics. Many physicists of Einstein's time couldn't handle Relativism and Einstein himself had a problem with Quantum Physics. If Newton lived to 1000 years old I wonder if he could have handled the shifts.

Brian

No

[Santa_Clause]

Not with that haircut! hohoho