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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.
Fig, Strawberry, Raspberry and Apple... am I missing one?
Every person has their own thoughts on various topics. I wonder if it would "cheapen" our view of Newton by releasing these documents, or would we just discount them due to their age?
Colossians 2:8
Pantheon published a bio of Newton last year by James Gleick (Chaos, Genius). It's concise and consistently interesting.
There's also some interesting speculation as to whether or not he was gay -- here, there's less evidence one way or the other, but his nervous breakdown may have been caused by the ending of his relationship with a much younger man, Fatio de Duiller (?).
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I already voted for The Apocalypse in this poll... Once I read some Newton maybe he can tell me for sure if the Apocalypse comes; maybe I can even decipher a HL2 release date.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Should we consider ourselves 'Natural Philosophers' instead of Scientists.
..but I certainly don't compare to Newton.
Number of physics laws I've come up with: 0
Number of treatises on church history and alchemy: 0
I don't know about the rest of slashdot
PS> On the other hand I do have some cool 0 days to my name.
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
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
and today science is still a major source of philosophical debate, both directly e.g. consequences of quantum mechanics, cosmology... and indirectly e.g. cloning.
;-)
the very meaning of Ph.D. is quite a big hint too.
but I still consider myself a scientist because I think an important thing is that no matter how good your logic is and how nice your explanations are, it doesn't mean a thing if it's inconsistent with ***observations***.
mathematics is the subject for people who have great logic but don't concern themselves with it actually having any relevence to our own universe.
modern "pure philosophers" are people who don't care about their logic being relevent to this universe or any other!
Well it was more that alchemy was still considered a real science back then.
I guarantee there are certain scientific fields that will seem absolutely retarded in another 200, 500 or 1000 years but are taken very seriously today.
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".
If you said "transmuting lead into gold? That sounds kind of retarded!" The alchemist would say "oh you silly little man you don't have the same mathematical talents I do, now just go away!"
I now laugh at all high and mighty alchemists who belittled doubters.
Hopefully in a 400 years when some of the silly bull that some "scientists" spew out is proven nonesense someone will laugh at them on my behalf.
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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Looks like he inspired Mr Stephenson in more ways than one...
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
1) Motion must not harm a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. ...
2) Motion must obey all orders given by a human, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
3) Motion must protect its own existance, except where it would conflict with the first or second laws.
It's possible I'm thinking of robots here. It's been a while since I took Physics.
--AC
Blaise Pascal is often credited as one of many historical figures responsible, in one way or another, for the development of modern computing. His mathematical achievements, similar to those of Newton, were only part of his preoccupation in life. His famous "Pensees" was a powerful treatise on Christian apologetics (i.e. defense of his faith), and as a philosopher he left a rich legacy to this day.
Like most great minds, Newton particulary did not do so well interacting with other people.
Some interesting Newton personality traits and tidbits can be found here.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
If Newton lived and philosophised under todays intellectual property reigeme we may not have calculus, especially since he has been credited as one of the founding fathers of this branch of maths. Would it be considered a patentable algorithm or process under todays US enforced laws? What would the world be like without free access to calculs?
Does it go on forever?
The fact that Newton worked with dozens of subjects outside of math and science is not surprising, since he was an INTP. Quite simply put. Once an INTP personality type masters a subject, it very likely they will move on to something else out of boredom.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
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.
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.
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.
The bigger problem here is that lead is atomic number 82, and gold is atomic number 79 - you need to get the lead to yield up 3 protons - this is going to require an awful large amount of energy.
Some people claim to have pulled it off, however:
These are not chemical reactions though, which have always been the traditional target of the alchemists.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
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.
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.
There's a bit of socio-scientific revisionism in the concept of the 'unknown' side of those like Newton. It's bizarre to see this 'unknown' meme pop up again and again, particularly because this side of Newton was most famously pointed out in the bestselling Holy Blood, Holy Grail" twenty years ago.
There's as much resistance to similar evidence about Boyd and Da Vinci, most of it due to ignorance about the 16th century mindset.
Hopefully the Newton Project will do something towards embedding a bit more realism into our historical perspective.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
If i remember corectly Newton's first book Principia was published by a pornogrphy publisher, who could print it at a lower cost with money from Edmund Halley. All of this because the Royal Society had spent all the money in that year, for a nice fish ecyclopedia.
So \.-ers if you consume pornography you help the human kind to evolve.
Porn is good!
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!
sig semper tyrannis!
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.
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.
--
make install -not war
When you are a pioneer in science and discovery you need to go on roads that sound crazy and that maybe will get you nowhere. What was crazier to think at that time:
That it was possible to change lead into gold?
Or that in 300 years from then a bunch of strange libertarians will be discussing about the nature and validity of is work by using emitting light boxes connected by cables going thousands of kilometers around the globe and some time passing information through thin air?
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
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.
In addition to the problems with the Priory of Sion, he also gets most of the stuff about Opus Dei wrong (they also exist, you can look them up online), and the stuff about the Council of Nicea voting on Jesus divinity (there was a similar vote, but Da Vinci's book claimed it was "close" - it was actually 300 to 2 ). He also claims there were 5 million women burnt as witches, which is an impossibly high figure - even adding every single death (not just burnings) of both genders (and witchcraft was not, as now, a thing necessarily female), 5 million is still absurdly high. The interpretation of Da Vinci's work is also suspect - see the first link I posted for pictures of the Last Supper and commentry. I also was curious, and looked up the Madonna of the Rocks, but I couldn't see anything like what was described in the book.
The Da Vinci Code was an interesting read, but nobody who knows anything about the subject matter actually takes its claims seriously; even Holy Blood, Holy Grail which was intended(unlike TDVC) to be a non-fiction is taken with large amounts of scepticism.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
Were there lots of Gospels and Pseudo-Gospels written in the Early Church? You bet. Did they all have an agenda? Again, you bet. Are they all reliable? Not by a long shot. There were all sorts of people making up gospels, ideas, and other whack things in the Early Church.
I'll admit that I haven't read the Da Vinci Code. I found out about it months after it was released, when I kept running across people that were espousing crazy ideas about the Early Church and those Medieval societies. Eventually, I learned where it was from, but still haven't read it. One thing I have noticed, though, is that every person I've seen who's been espousing the conspiratorial nonsense has also not read much, if any, primary source material on Christian history.
That's where this book comes in handy. It was written in the mid-second century in opposition to the movements that spawned most of those extra gospels. The TOC is here.
Other questions are such that, why are the societies that secretly kept the truth all Medieval? The Knights Templar goes back to the twelfth century. The PoS is a twentieth century group trying to claim its way back to the first century (and they aren't the first frauds to try that). This is a strong problem, because Christianity had already suffered two great divisions. In 481, many bishops and their churches seperated from the rest. These churches, the Non-Chalcedonian Churches, stretch from the Middle East to India, and they continue to exist to this day. In the ninth century, St. Photius and the Pope Nicholas II had an outing, which though repaired was made permanent in events in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and they hardly would have trusted Germanic societies like the KT in that era.
Prior to the First Schism, Christianity not only was not centralized, but could not be. The Pope had no universal jurisdiction. Simply put, it is impossible for a large conspiracy to take place to hide the truth so that secret societies had to take place. A non-centralized Christianity's response to these "gospels" was unified from India to Rome; it rejected them, largely because they were outside the normative teachings and practices (such as making Jesus a schoolyard bully) of the Church.
Proponents of conspiracy theories, such as I have found people getting from the Da Vinci Code must be able to explain how such a thing took place given the nature of early Christendom. And it must do so with sources of the era, sources on both sides of the issue. I can say this, because while I have not read the Da Vinci Code, I have read many Gnostic works, works from the Early Church, several Jewish Works from the centuries BC, pagan works from the era, etc. I haven't read them all, but I've read a good number. Likewise, I know several people, both those who are Christian and those who are not, who have. The single denominator I've seen in all of us is that we all laugh at the conspiracy theory nonsense.
I'm not meaning to be offensive, but the Da Vinci Code has about as much credibility as the National Enquirer. No, I haven't read the book, but I have come across many of its ideas repeated. It may be a good story, fiction-wise, but what I've heard repeated is nonsense factually. Will I read it? Maybe, but there are many more important things for me to read, such as books on computers and more early works, Christian, Gnostic, and pagan.
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
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
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.