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The Unknown Newton
An anonymous reader writes "The unknown Newton -- The genius who gave us three laws of motion wrote even more about the Apocalypse and the Whore of Babylon. Eventually, all of his work -- about 10 million words -- will be on the Web.
Quote from the article:
'Yet if we go by sheer word count, physics was only one of Newton's intellectual priorities. He devoted more time to what we would now regard as non-scientific topics such as theology and alchemy, writing treatise after treatise on early church history and biblical prophecy.' An interesting note on Pythagoras and religion too. Should we consider ourselves 'Natural Philosphers' instead of Scientists?" Neal Stephenson fans may find this article a nice adjunct to Quicksilver.
Pantheon published a bio of Newton last year by James Gleick (Chaos, Genius). It's concise and consistently interesting.
Sorry about the double post, but for anyone interested enough to download the book, the discussion of Newton and astrology is in a footnote on p. 143 that carries over onto p. 144. The biography by David Berlinski (which I thought sucked, btw) argues for the gay hypothesis.
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He probably had to do this kind of stuff to appease the church. Scientists in this era lived in fear of the mighty clergy. Just look at what happened to Galileo!
Read the article. His religious writings would have landed him in prison if he hadn't kept them secret.
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He wrote millions of words on alchemy. He wrote almost nothing about astrology, except a brief statement to the effect that he thought it was nonsense.
Indeed, I would have expected Newton's stand on Astrology and Alchemy to have made him many enemies in the Church at that time.
Astrology was widely and openly practiced. Kings and queens used it to decide when to go to war. Only a generation before, in Galileo's time, there had been no clear distinction between astrology and astronomy. People who had the mathematical skill to do astrology/astronomy often worked for the Church on things like calculating the date of Easter (which is based on the phases of the moon).
Alchemy had a tradition of secrecy, but I don't think it had anything to do with religious prohibitions.
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This had interesting implications to the way scientific papers were written. Rather than the modern form (just about 300 old) going like "Theorem-proof-example etc.", it was all heavily interwened with theology, intents of the creator, fabric of the world, etc., whatever the domain of the research in the natural sciences was!
Not in Newton's case. In fact, the impersonal, Olympian modern style of scientific writing basically dates back to him ("hypotheses non fingo"). Theorem-proof-example was exactly the way he wrote. Take a look look at the Principia.
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Actually, it was a different Church and a different kind of philosophy. Aquinas revolutionized the world -- at least the understanding of religion in the West -- with his systematic system of Theology. This kind of systematic exploration made it's way into Astronomy and thus into Physics with Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. (Kepler, incidentally, was a better astronomer than Galileo; Galileo was certain that the obrits of planets MUST be circular because the circle is the perfect shape. Kepler realized (and told Galileo, who still didn't believe him) that the spheres must be elliptical.) Galileo, it turns out, got in trouble with the Church for a couple of reasons. He took a worldview that said that mathematics is reality. The Church contended that mathematics is only a model of reality. This was a time when scientists were still deciding whether observations made by instruments were of the same validity as obesevations made by the senses directly. (Today, imagine if we placed what we see on the news as being of the same credibility as what we see ourselves.) He was taken to trial and then retracted the definitive reality of the Copernican system, saying that it, at best, saved the accidents. This meant that it was a good model, but no one knew the reality. In fact, the stellar parallax, which was the final proof Galileo needed, was not detected until the mid 19th century. Then he only had a (mistaken) proof about the sun causing the tides. Newton, on the other hand, was not a Catholic -- he protested the King giving a chair at University to a Benedictine, which eventually led to a Revolution that removed King James II from his throne because he was a Catholic. In fact, Newton was not an orthodox Christian, believing a variant of the Arian heresy. He wrote quite a bit about the Roman Pontif being the Whore of Babylon and tried to calculate the date of the Second Coming. What we must remember is that philosophy was not so big back then that one man could no master large parts of it. Now, with so many different fields, scientists must diversify and can not be experts in all of philosophy or science. But he was certainly not obligated by any ecclesiastical body to do this or that in order to do his work.
He actually did a lot of his work in theology against the accepted order of the church in England. Newton was heavily into Arianism, which denies the holy trinity, and would surely have been branded a heretic if he had revealed his beliefs. He believed that the church in his time, and throughout most of its history had been corrupted after the Council of Nicea. He kept his most extreme beliefs very secret, somehow managing to weasel out of the declarations of faith that were required of all who attended Cambridge. Newton actually encouraged one of his colleagues who held the same beliefs as he did to go public with them, and this poor guy was booted out of Cambridge and ridiculed for the rest of his life.
what separates alchemy is its lack of scientific method.
It is not a problem that some original asumption turned out wrong. This happens in science all the time. But alchemists believed all kinds of traditional stuff and did not know how to separate ideas that worked from those that did not. Mysticism goes against scepticism - the basis of critical reasoning.
What everyone is ignoring here, including the linked article, is that Physicists and Mathematicians in Newton's era were REQUIRED to be ordained Ministers in the Church of England. This decree was set forth by King Charles II.
The political climate closely tied Religion and Science. (quite evident in the strong tie between Trinity College and the Royal Society) That way they resolved all of the Galileo type problems. Newton disagreed with much of the church's teachings, and refused to be ordained. Thus he had to obtain special permission from the King. By keeping his disidence in his private notebooks, he could continue his scientific/mathematical endevours.
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Quicksilver didn't cover Newton's broader--today we'd call them non-scientific--interests as deeply as The System of the World most likely will. Half-cocked Jack versus Newton The Exchequer ought to be good!
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We care about Newton's "Thermodynamics" because so many of us have tested his science, and agree with it. It's a consensus based on shared experience. That's why science is so popular as a belief system: it requires very little faith to accept facts. Some would say that it requires faith only in "falsifiability", and "consistency". Falsifiablility is a long word for the rigorous principle that any statement worth making is one that could be false, if tested - and the ones that are worth more are the ones that have never tested false, despite much testing. Consistency is the principle that statements that any statement worth making is always true, everywhere - sometimes known as "universality". Newton's science not only used these principles to become popular, but also strengthened them with their effective application.
Everything else people say, including Newton, that is neither falsifiable nor consistent, belongs not to "physics", the science of physical phenomena, but to "metaphysics". It can be fun, or illuminating, or even persuasive, but it's not physics, it's not as reliable, and it's worth saying only if those values aren't important.
Newton is a legend for his contributions to science. His other contributions might also be worthwhile to discuss. Science has changed a great deal since Newton's time, as has metaphysics. Perhaps some of his other investigations were disregarded, as science itself was not yet sophisticated enough to incorporate them. The basic techniques of science can be applied, and perhaps we can derive yet more benefit from the man's work. But it's important to remember that we're not engaged in "scientistism". We like Newton because of the value of his work. If the rest of it, like his hairstyle, is irrelevant today, that doesn't detract from his other contributions. However, as the work of one man who gave so much, it's probably worth testing at least some of his work that hasn't yet made it to the scientific canon.
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Nobody's ignoring it, because it's not true. (Did you have to link to a creationist website?) Physicists and mathematicians were NOT required to be ordained. The requirement was that any fellow of Cambridge or Oxford had to be ordained. If you had a patron or were independently wealthy, then you did not have to be ordained, because you then didn't need a position at a university to do science. AFAICT, what happened with Newton was that he used a loophole - the terms of the Lucasian professorship (which he held) required that the holder not be active in the church (presumably so as to have more time for science). Newton argued that this should exempt him from the normal ordination requirement, and Charles II accepted this argument. Sure, Newton did this because of his scepticism of the trinity, and religion and science were far more intermingled then than they are today, but you are waaaay overstating the amount of control religion had over science.
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nonsense.
newton invented calculus as a tool for his mechanics. Leibnitz for more mathematical and philosophical investigations. neither knew anything about the other, until later.
what separates alchemy is its lack of scientific method. Rubbish. Alchemy is one of the main practices that gave rise to the scientific method. Bacon codified what had been done by alchemists for centuries. Newton sure as hell was scientific in his pursuit of alchemy. It's just that much of the philosophical basis of alchemy was too entangled with magic and religion.
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The situation is slightly more complex than that. The Jesuits had actually come to the same conclusions, but talked about accidents instead of the reality. Furthermore, Copernicus was praised, not persecuted, for the theory that bears his name. The strongest proof, back then, that the earth stood still was that we do not feel it move. In fact, this is the same thing the Michelson-Morley experiment found, at least with regard to light. One of Galileo's friends, a cardinal in Rome, warned him that unless he had more proof that the physical reality reflected his model, he had better lay off saying it was more than mathematics. Galileo devised something about the tides being that proof, an argument that we now know to be in error. The real proof that the earth moves is the stellar parallax: if the sphere if the stars is fixed and the earth stands still, so will the stars, which we see; but if the stars are fixed and the earth moves, the stars will move in small circles. This was not detected until much later, long after Galileo's death. The cause of his trial is probably due to the fact that in "Dialogue" he puts the argument of Pope Urban VIII -- that there are infinite ways to cause any effect, and that effects do not necessarily imply causes; and that there is something between the numbers and the world -- in the (ineffective) mouth of Simplicio, the idiot Aristotelian. There is some evidence that Galileo did, in fact, mean the retraction that he wrote up with Dominican lawyers after his trial; and the myth that he did not recant, but rather whispered "but it moves" as a postscript to his official statement, can be shown to be an invention.