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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.
I thought everyone knew that Newton was intensely interested in Christian theology...
How does it "cheapen" a man to have more than one interest? It does not lessen his scientific achievements that he did not singly devote his life to them.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
Shall we just change the term to "Person who had a brain" instead? I can become a genius and write the next major OS which works well and does everything perfectly for everyone, but my opinion on jellyfish means jack.
You can excel at one point but it doesn't mean you know everything.
I like muppets.
What we think of a person should be based on the sum and whole of his/her works. I'm fascinated by both science and theology, and I hope if I ever write something influential in one category, my works in the other aren't completely ignored or discarded.
... sharing his "non-scientific" ideas? I've noticed while meta-moderating here that people put some very thoughtful posts, containing non-mainstream but on topic views about things like evolution, the big bang, etc... they get modded flamebait. I personally believe evolution, but it's also not such a religious belief with me that I have to moderate down other people who don't believe in it.
I wonder if this is going to lower peoples opinions of Newton here on slashdot?
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
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!
VKh
"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." _ 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!
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Astrology and alchemy as part of Christian theology.
In Newton's day, the Neoplatonists of the Renaisance (typified by Pico della Mirandola, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, John Dee, Jacob Boehme, etc.) were losing favor and in many ways Newton was a throwback to the likes of Francis Bacon, who was not only an empiricist but also a very well known achemist, or John Dee who was at once an astrologer, alchemist, and mathematician (also reputed to have used his occult powers to save England from the Spanish Armada).
Indeed, I would have expected Newton's stand on Astrology and Alchemy to have made him many enemies in the Church at that time.
This is way off topic for Slashdot (though right on-topic for this story), but as these topics interest me greatly, I would like to see what Newton wrote on astrology, alchemy, etc.
Also as a note-- people develop strange reputations after their deaths that might surprise them. For example Michel de Notradame (Nostradamus) was best known in his day as a physician and alchemist.
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Some people are so desperate for heroes, scientific or otherwise, that they want to gloss over the rough spots. Given Newton's times, alchemy and astrology were not that far out of the mainstream and indeed had their part in the development of the sciences as the world moved out of the Medieval Period.
Research into a field that didn't prove fruitful, indeed into what we consider a sham today, doesn't in any way dim Newton's other achievements. It's a mistake to judge by our knowledge today, that was built on Newton's original work.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
That's why you should never put scientists up on a pedestal like they are so unquestionable or let them tell you that their crappy theories are truth just becuase "you can't understand it".
Any scientist that tells you something is "true" has a mountain of evidence to back him or her up.
Understand the theories, _then_ criticize. Most of these kinds of objection I've heard have come from people who either took the dumbed-down high school version as gospel, or who just plain don't understand the field being discussed.
Science doesn't know everything. Any good scientist knows the limits of scientific knowledge in their field. All or nearly all models of reality that science has constructed have areas where they don't apply well, as most of these are simpler approximations to very complex systems. But to use this to say that scientists are talking vapour about the areas where they _do_ apply well is extremely foolish.
The progress of science over the past couple of centuries has not generally been to overturn old theories and models, but to extend scientific knowledge to cover cases where the old models didn't apply. When a new model is proposed, it almost always turns out that it reduces to the old model in domains that the old model was designed to address. This is why Newton's laws of motion still hold, and why you don't need special relativity to find kinetic energy of slow-moving objects, and why general relativity still gives you Kepler orbits and Newton's laws of gravitation in weak gravitational fields, and why you don't need to solve quantum electrodynamics equations to find out how strong an electromagnet is.
In this light, I find it amusing that you use Newton's works as a supporting example for ignoring scientists' statements when we still use his laws of motion and gravitation for engineering today.
Yeah, for many here on slashdot the closest they will get to philosophy will be watching a Star Trek episode. But many others have broader interests.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
William Blake held Isaac Newton up as an example of stale, dry, Atheistic reason. The famous drawing I have linked to here is that of his conception of Newton, sitting in a dry desert, playing with a compass.
What would have been if Blake would have read some of Newton's writings on theology, I wonder?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Oh please. Netwon lived in a time before the scientific method as we know it and before what eventually became the scientific community distanced itself and became aware of pseudo-scientific pursuits like astrology, prophecy, etc.
Its not the 17/18th century anymore and your argument is a pretty weak strawman. Essentially you are saying "Newton's physics were valid (ignoring Einstein) thus his other views are just as valid and deserve the same audience and respect."
Uh no.
All the world's society's gave superstion more than the benefit of the doubt for millenia. It didn't pan out. Move on, don't complain that the book of Revelation or Alchemy or Phrenology deserves a 2nd chance. They have gotten more than their fair share of attention. Its not my fault or anyone else's these theories didn't pan out.
I suggest at least looking at the wikipedia's entries of protoscience and psuedoscience if you are being sincere and not just making a jab at scientific cosmology and the slashdotters who understand it is the most likely explanation of why things are.
I also take slight offense at how you're saying its "hip" to be against these dead philosophies, when in reality its much more hip to be against those eggheads in their ivory towers who challenge traditional beliefs. Its very hip for the religious to cry "Persecution!" when a science teacher mentions evolution or when a social studies teacher mentions different religions other than xtianity. I see it in the paper almost weekly. Yet you can join any religion you want, make your kids believe what you like, and religious organizations enjoy tax-free status, gambling rights, and a power-structure that protects them from criminal investigations (at least for a while).
Ironically, the western world has more religious freedom than ever, thanks to the secularists and western enlightenment.
Also, a decent primer on how what eventually became science is Shapin's The Scientific Revolution.
I wonder if it would "cheapen" our view of Newton by releasing these documents
Newton would be considered a crackpot and a nut by the scientific community if he were alive today. And who inherited Newton's chair? A believer in time travel. I wonder who is the greater crackpot.
A phiolospher is literally one who 'loves wisdom', a 'natural philosopher' is therefore one who craves an understanding of nature and all the stuff whats in it.
So, there's nothing new about calling scientists 'natural philosophers'. It's as much a step forward as calling a car a 'horseless carriage' - we're already there.
He actually believes (as does Kip Thorne, his Caltech buddy of wormhole fame) that relativity allows time travel. He is wrong.
... blah blah blah ... Quantum Gravity will give us the answer.
Relativity does allow time travel, but only with very strong constraints of consistancy.
The spacetime of relativity is frozen
Yes. Spacetime is solved all at once. Everything past and future is set in stone.
from the infinite past to the infinite future, by definition.
No. There is no such constraint. I suggest you do some reading.
Nothing can move in spacetime.
Yes.
It is abstract.
No. No more than anything else.
Hawking is full blown crackpots.
Possibly. His soliton solutions of Quantum Cosmology are highly suspect to me.
In GR you solve everything all at once. All of spacetime: all past and future are all set in stone. That does NOT mean that you cannot travel into the past. Famous people have shown that there are mathematical solutions to Einstein's field equations that allow just that. However the past and future are still set in stone. You can travel into the past, but you cannot alter the past.
You end up with a one of three beliefs
(1) It's rediculous that I can travel into the past but not kill my grandfather, therefore timetravel does not exist.
(2) 12 Monkeys
(3) Something must be wrong
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And yet scholars are still struggling to comprehend how such a rational thinker -- the man who gave us three laws of motion, the law of universal gravitation and so much more -- could have simultaneously immersed himself so deeply in arcane matters. I'll bet theories like gravity were considered arcane at the time as well.
Stuff like Heisenberg or Einstein's relativity are, no offense intended, most quoted as "science doesn't have all the answers" by people who don't understand them at all.
Heisenberg itself doesn't just say "buggrit, you just can't know where the electron is", it gives you a formula there. You can actually calculate stuff and build practical stuff with that knowledge.
(E.g., the Zenner diode. E.g., Heisenberg may well be the reason why CMOS miniaturization comes eventually to a halt. And it offers you the formulas too to know what voltage you need to keep enough electrons there, for a given transistor size and shape. Etc.)
Second, it too can be observed experimentally. It's not used as way to throw up your hands and say "the electron does whatever God wants", but to understand and _predict_ where the electron can go. And within what margin of error.
Is there a ton of stuff we don't know about yet? Most likely. Are there limits to our theories than we don't know about yet? Almost undoubtedly.
But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And then we'll have an even more complete theory, and more advanced experiments to test its limits.
And in the process we'll be a lot more advanced and able to build more useful stuff, than if we had all just thrown our hands up and said "buggrit, it all happens because God wants it to." Well, sure, that may be so, but God's will alone hasn't produced any predictable results so far: you can't build a transistor based on it
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What's "crazier" than claming that there are particles that contain no mass, or objects that come into existence only after someone looks at them.
The references to alchemy need to be understood in terms of the knowlege of the inner-self. Newton, Pythagoras, etc. were not interested in describing such "matters" to those without "eyes to see."
I want to be alone with the sandwich
He took a worldview that said that mathematics is reality. The Church contended that mathematics is only a model of reality.
There are two main world views that my reading has uncovered....those who think that consciousness is a product of the material world. And those who think that the material world is a product of consciousness.
The astrology, alchemy, geometry, references are much older than Newton....they predated him by two thousand years at least. They are meant to be interpreted literally to non-initiates. For those with "eyes to see," these "pseudo-sciences" are allegorical treatments of the nature of the "inner-life." The study of the inner-life was not afforded to the masses....but only to those who were able to make proper use of the information and training....like Perl.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
I don't think alchemy was even as silly as you're making it sound. To study alchemy was to try to understand why matter is what it is and does what it does, what makes one substance different from another, and how one substance can change into another. We've refined our methods and our understanding, and we call it "chemistry" now, but it's pretty much the same undertaking.
People seems to want to think that eveyone from more than 50 years ago was a silly, primitive moron, and that we, now, are finally the "smart" ones who have achieved a "real knowledge" that was utterly inaccessable "back then". However, that's what they thought 50 years ago, too- and fifty years before that, and 50 years before that...
Kepler wasn't a better astronomer in the sense that he understood that planets orbits had to be elliptical. Kepler started out believing the orbits to be circular, but had available huge amount of astronomical measurements from Tycho Brahe and could calculate accurately the path taken by several of the planets. That Galileo was sceptical to Kepler's results is natural since Kepler only found a very small deviation from a circular path and Galileo could not know for sure that Brahe had made good observations and that Kepler had done all his math correctly. In a way, Kepler's big work was an early victory for experimental science and Kepler's laws were one of the results that made it possible for Newton to formulate an universal law of gravity.
We know today that Galileo believed in the Copernican system, but quite wisely saw no need to die defending it. The main proof for Galileo was that with his own build telescope he could see the moons of Jupiter, which meant that the view that the earth was the center of the universe which everything rotated around was clearly false. Since it was easier to fit the planets motion as going around the sun than the earth, this was then clearly the best scientific and metaphysical hypothesis, something Galileo proclaimed until the church silenced him.
bring it on! --- JFK
I'm not sure why you would hold such ideas. I'm not sure even where to begin, because you seem so utterly off-base that I can't formulate how a person would come to say such a thing. Maybe if you explained what you mean by "there arguably wasn't even Physics or Science!" Clearly there was... so I don't know what to say.
As for this: He discovered the laws of motion... Well, he formulated laws of motion that allowed for him to build a physical model of the world we see. I'm not sure "discovered" is the right word. See, many physicists have started with postulates of some kind that allow them to build an accurate model of the universe, but "discovery" implies a sort of independant existence that's very hard to talk about. Often, these amount to "good" or "useful" ways of thinking about things, but "true", independant of human study, is tricky to define, let alone establish. Newton, himself, is very careful about any assertion that the laws of motion, or the model he creates, are "real".
I'm confused and a little annoyed when people talk about the "Scientific Method". I won't accuse you particularly, but most people who use that term have a frightfully bad understanding of the history of science. They think the "Scientific Method", which can be boiled down to observation-hypothesis-experiment-analysis-conclus ion, was something invented a few hundred years ago, and before that, well... people just made stuff up.
In truth, most of what we call "science" traces back to Aristotle, and even then, it may only be because that's as far back as our records go. We don't have records of Aristotle going through the "Scientific Method", but it can hardly be argued that he didn't go through the same process. What part of it do you think he skipped? Examples that he sites clearly indicate both observation and experimentation. In fact, the "Scientific Method" is, at best, a formal characterization of how the human thought process naturally works.