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The Greatest And The Luckiest Of Mortals
sgant writes "So says the 18th-century French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange about Sir Isaac Newton. The New York Times has a piece on 'The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture' which is a new exhibit at the NY Public Library. It includes a number of Newton's manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library, including a first edition of his most famous work, "Principia," bearing the author's corrections and additions for the next printing, have never before been shown in the United States."
I know Lucas isn't the most popular round here at the moment, but I still like this line by Sir Alec Guiness: "In my experience, there's no such thing as luck"
Iran has endorsed
I thought Enistein said that his greatest hope was that he would be prooven wrong on his theories? There is never going to be one right answer, Newton and Eintein did great jobs
but weren't Newton's ideas debunked by Einstein's theory of relativity?
Not really. Newton's classic mechanics work fine at the macroscopic level. Same for Galileo's relativity. The model doesn't work at the atomic level, and that's where the relativistic model enters. Both are true in a sense.
Also, it doesn't really matter if one model is wrong or not if it helps understanding how things work. Take for example Bohr's Hydrogen model. It wasn't totally correct, but a necessary step to develop a fully correct atomic model, and he received (and well deserved) the Nobel prize for his work and contributions.
Erlang Smorgreff
He did not "invent" or "discover" the thing by himself. It's like all research: people put brick after brick, and then someone puts the last one and says "here is a building", and gets all the credit. And many years later (30 for Albert, 300 for Isaac) some geeks put posters of the guy in their rooms and suddenly feel illuminated. :)
While some of Newtons ideas were later proven to be incorrect by Einstein
Without the imperfect (but functional) model developed by Newton (which we still use today with some refinements! very few situations require a more complex model of forces and effects) it seems unlikley that Einstein would have been able to develop relativity, indeed many other advances would not have been made until someone else replicated Newton's work.
Newton himself said "If I have seen further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (which is etched onto the Brish pound coin) - and he is definatly one of the giants upon which later physists stood. Science is a process, not a product, and viewing it in terms of right and wrong is foolish - it's a series of advances leading to a more and more accurate understanding of the universe. No step towards that goal is any less worthy than another.
Beep beep.
Newton himself said of his work that he was only "standing on the shoulders of giants" meaning that if he had discovered new knowledge, it was from the ideas put down by euclid, archimedes etc before him.
(This phrase is engraved round the edge of £2 coins in the UK, since Newton also invented milling the edges of coins to prevent people from clipping them.)
However, he was probably being too modest. It wasn't just calc: this guy basically went away at some point in his life and came up with:
His laws of motion, which explained pretty much every physical phenomenom then studied.
His theory of gravity, which relates the movement of celestial bodies back to the laws of motion.
and
The differential calculus, which provided the maths necessary to apply all this.
He also did work in optics and other fields, and invented the catflap.
If anyone surpasses him as a physicist, it must be Einstein.
If anyone surpasses him both as a physicist and a mathematician, it's news to me.
Respect is due.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I think it's fair to say that both Euler and Gauss surpass Newton as mathematicians, as well as some others. But you're right; as a jack of all trades, he is non pareil. In my humble opinion as a physicist and a mathematician :)
To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)
Hawking claims that this was a caustic remark on the shortness of physical build of Robert Hooke.
As far as I know, it is not about his work on Mechanics that Newton said this, but about his work on Optics.
Descartes invented co-ordinate geometry Euclid gave us quite possibly the greatest base for mathematics of anyone, ever There are plenty of mathematical greats. Which is a good thing! :)
I do not know the author of the site, but when reading things like "we present explanations, which are always compatible with conventional wisdom and logic" I become extremely wary. A great deal of the ideas that have changed our perception of the world was, at one time or another, considered at odds with "conventional wisdom".
It was once conventional wisdom that the earth was flat, that black people were stupid and so on. Most people now scoff at such notions, but happily accepts the new "conventional wisdoms". Probably because they are easy to understand and rarely questioned. Sometimes, however, complicated explanations are needed - the simple ones simply won't do.
I do agree that Newton discovered/invented a large part of our mathematics
No he didn't! Elementary calculus may be useful but it's only a teardrop in the ocean of mathematics. Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time and most of which is still relevant, while Newton's formulations have long since been surpassed by more modern constructions.
And Latin. We now know Latin to be a dead language. What real scientist uses Latin?
And the English system of weights and measures. He didn't even use the Metric system, or bother to convert the values!
How the great learned history critics and scientists of the future will scoff at our inaccurate decimal system, our clunky wire-based infosystems, and our use of BASIC.
We use the tools we have. The best of us modify them to fit our own needs. Every once in a while, someone comes up with a mod that everyone agrees is really cool. On that measure, Isaac Newton is the greatest hacker of all time. OK, maybe Edison was greater, or the woman who invented the stick.
I picking on your fine post (a bit unfairly, to be sure) because if someone comes up with a mod, how does that make everything that went before it "incorrect"?
sigs, as if you care.
When making "top ten" lists of physics, usually Newton, Einstein and Maxwell are among the top three physicists of all time. But such lists are in general dubious; for one thing, Einstein needed the results by Newton and Maxwell to do his own work. Beside, the three worked in very different periods of time with different problems facing physics.
What makes Newton unique, is that Newton would in general make the top ten list of all time great mathematicians. Usually the top three would be Archemides, Newton and Gauss. But again, such lists should not be trusted. If you want to rate scientists, learn what they did, and make your own (subjective) rating.
There has always been people claiming Einstein was wrong, often because Einstein's theory are strange to "common sense". And it is well known that you can make any theory fit all available experimental results by making ad hoc extensions to the theory. It is worth nothing that Newton himself would probably not have liked the extensions necessary and Newton himself found parts of his own theories lacking.
This is where you are wrong. Einstein's theories are much simpler than Newton's. To make Newton's theories and Maxwell's theories fit, you need an "ether" with very strange and peculiar properties. This was the state of physics when Einstein came along. And you need to add even stranger properties to fit what has been learned since Einstein.What Einstein did was to show that you could make a nice unified theory of Newton and Maxwell and get rid of this complicated, ad hoc concept of an ether, but you would have to change your concept of time and space in the process. So, Einstein theory of relativity passes the test of Occam. Einstein's theories are much simpler mathematically and physically than any theories that try to preserve Newton's laws and still fit known experimental facts. The only price to pay, is that common sense about time and space has to be updated.
bring it on! --- JFK
You omit his greatest contribution to science, which was establishing that the laws of nature are universal. He saw that the force of gravity which makes things fall to the ground is exactly the same force, obeying the same law, as the force of gravity between celestial bodies. It seems obvious today, but it was not at all obvious in the seventeenth century. Most people took it for granted that the celestial bodies were ruled by quite different laws from those we experienced in our daily lives.
Incorrect might not be the right word, it was not mathematically rigorous. There were instances when he treated an infintesimal as a zero and discarded it, there were instances where he treated it as a non-zero and divided it. Math is rigorous. You need a set of rules that hold in all situations. [Emphasis added]
A set of rules that hold in all situations means that there are no paradoxes.
There is nothing non-rigorous about infintesimals which behave in some cases identically with zero when added to something and in other cases behave like non-zeros when dividing two of them. What is non-rigorous and non-defensible is the attempted distinction between zero and non-zero. Not everything mathematical is a number. In fact most mathematical things are not numbers. It all has to do with functions from spaces to spaces that preserve interesting properties.
Please keep your platonic beliefs to yourself; mathematics is not necessarily discovered. The philosophical reasons for this are numerous, and to say categorically that it must be discovered is naive at best.
I am not disputing your rant, just trying to understand -- why would those Texas rigorists manage to spread their disciples into "numerous universities" if their approach was so disastrous? Isn't the spread of their ideas rather evidence of success?