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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."
I don't think he could get a job, but if he already had one, he could definetely get tenure.
Newton is rumored to have been an uber-asshole. An asshole among assholes. His main trait wasn't that he was eccentric, it was that he was an asshole to each and everyone he met.
It depends on the university and the department chair, but I'm willing to bet that you can find assholes in faculty at any given university.
So yes, Isaac Newton could probably have been hired on despite his assholeness.
The spectre of lawsuits arising from apples to the head would be enough to turn Sir Issac away at the door.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
His eccentricity would no doubt have been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. He would have been drugged with narcotics and told to behave himself.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
The HR blimp would call him "overqualified" and middle management would ignore him because his agency told him to "put his education last."
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
This isn't just science. How many major computer companies were founded by people who never even finished college? Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and so on, these are all companies that would never hire their own founders considering them unqualified. I'm reasonably certain that this problem persists in other industries as well.
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."
Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity?
Modern society might be, and often for good reason, but if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia. I often think that many of the professors are purposefully eccentric. It's almost become something expected of the truly gifted, and many fraudulently flaunt their own eccentricity for the express purpose of making others think they are gifted. They've heard too many stores about Einstein, Turing, and Newton and get delusions of grandeur.
The fact is, most Universities won't care if you wear your underwear outside of your pants if you manage to do something truly brilliant. You won't be hired to teach, you'll be hired simply so the University can advertise that you're on staff.
Sorry to say, I'm not kidding...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
John Nash was extremely eccentric but held down positions at MIT.
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i confess a lack of historical knowledge here, but wasn't Newton wealthy? wasn't he able to sit around and ponder great mathematical/physical questions because he didn't have to worry about a paycheck?
if that was the case, i think the real question is, how many independently wealthy people out there these days sit around and ponder the world? i can only think of Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) and Dean Kamen (dialysis, segway), but even they got wealthy and continue to make money by putting their eccentric thinking towards earning themselves money.
if the schizophrenic, homosexual, and sometimes just downright bizarre John Nash (forget what you saw in the overly romanticized movie 'A Beautiful Mind'), could maintain a presence in academia and eventually win the Nobel Prize for Economics, then it is likely that Sir Issac Newton could have held a position as a tenured professor.
although it must be asked: through what lens are we looking at when we say Sir Issac Newton was eccentric? sure he wrote stuff that may seem wierd today, like treatises that speculated on the geological location of Hell. but one must keep in mind that during his time, most scientists were actually "natural philosophers", who investigated matters of philosophy and religion, as well as pure science.
Newton did make most of his equipment himself, such as grinding his own lenses for Studies in Opticks. I doubt that he would be able to go that today.
-- I hereby announce, on behalf of my great ancester Oog, a retroactive patent on THE WHEEL.
The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.
"Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.
Eccentricity is ok, its the whole dead thing that might make it hard for him to get hired. Then again, with some of the braindead teachers I have had in the past, maybe not.
What do you mean you haven't published anything in over 300 years??
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Q: What would Isaac Newton be doing, if he were alive today?
A: Clawing at the lid of his coffin.
Breakfast served all day!
Ben Franklin would probably get arrested for flying a kite without a license.
The evidence supports your theory: Newton died celibate.
Two words:
Principia Mathematica.
There has never been a more significant scientific publication.
If you published something that important, you could find an appointment just about anywhere...even if you were purple and lived off of pop-rocks.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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.
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.
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It seems there is something missing today in much of communication, and I am guilty of contributing to this, as I'm sure are many of you. Email, telephone, and perhaps worst of all: chat rooms. All of these things contribute to the attitude of raking our discourse in the mud; we treat it as so common and vulgar, as though it is an ugly tool not an art. We must all take an active role in preserving and promoting that grand and noble thing which is rational dialogue between two human persons.
Very few of us have the opportunity to particpate in, for example, discourse through publishing scholarly papers, and even for those who do, the whole processes is necessarily exclusive.
I believe that manual letter writing is perhaps the most rewarding means of communication. Yes, manual letter writing: that thing people do with a real pen and real dead-tree paper, like your mother and aunts and grandmothers did and, if living, probably still do. Our mothers do more to promote an atmosphere affirming the dignity of human dicourse than probably do many of us!
every letter has a greater sense of importance - It could be weeks before you receive a reply, and how the world can change in that time; the letter is an occasion to "put on your best suit and use your finest china", as it were.
it is deliberate - You might take a week to ponder and absorb the thoughts of your interlocutor before evening sitting down to write. Writing your response - what must suffice as the only communication between the two of you for perhaps weeks or more - is a task for more than even a single evening. This is no 30 word email that you bang out in as many seconds.
it necessitates greater attention to quality and clarity - This is a grand occasion. If you do not put forth your best effort, you will regret it immediately. How many of you have thought to yourselves, "I should have said that instead?" Here there is no recourse. You can not call up your acquaintance and offer a clarification or warning before it is read; you can not send off a follow-up email to explain yourself that evening.
it provides for cooler heads - You may be steaming-mad now, but consider how horrible you will feel in many days or even weeks when you receive a reply. Oh, how foolish you will feel when you must read your brash and irrational words quoted to you then!
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in