I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
Aren’t they all?
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
Certainly a lot of his maths stuff was limited and derivative.
Dark Orange said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
Aren’t they all?
Yes, but people talk as though he had a brain the like of which has not been seen before or since.
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’ve often wondered whether the introduction of the Mesoamerican concept of zero of nothing as something in the decades before Newton’s birth played a role in the discovery of Calculus.
Witty Rejoinder said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’ve often wondered whether the introduction of the Mesoamerican concept of zero of nothing as something in the decades before Newton’s birth played a role in the discovery of Calculus.
I’ve never wondered that because I’ve never heard of the Mesoamerican concept of zero of nothing.
I’ll go and look it up.
The Rev Dodgson said:
Dark Orange said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
Aren’t they all?
Yes, but people talk as though he had a brain the like of which has not been seen before or since.
I think it’s because he was such a polymath: optics, calculus, gravity. Leibniz also developed calculus but wasn’t responsible for any other pivotal discoveries IIRC.
The Rev Dodgson said:
Witty Rejoinder said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’ve often wondered whether the introduction of the Mesoamerican concept of zero of nothing as something in the decades before Newton’s birth played a role in the discovery of Calculus.
I’ve never wondered that because I’ve never heard of the Mesoamerican concept of zero of nothing.
I’ll go and look it up.
For others sharing my ignorance:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-origin-of-zer/
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’m going to say no. The breadth of the work and the sharpness of some of his insights set him in a very rare class of mind.
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
He is and he isn’t.
He was quite mad. He really only had a few years of sanity.
Definitely not a case of the right person in the right place at the right time.
More a case of a person who made a rash statement (to Halley) and then found himself in the unenviable position of having to prove it. His genius was in being able to prove it.
He won a lot of Gold Logies.
Peak Warming Man said:
He won a lot of Gold Logies.
Not many people know he got the monicker Moonface because of that time he looked at the moon and wondered why it didn’t fall like an apple.
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
He won a lot of Gold Logies.
Not many people know he got the monicker Moonface because of that time he looked at the moon and wondered why it didn’t fall like an apple.
He was technically right about that, but got the timing wrong, has it happened billions of years earlier.
dv said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’m going to say no. The breadth of the work and the sharpness of some of his insights set him in a very rare class of mind.
I mean he didn’t even pick up Galileo’s big blunder on beam bending, or contribute much on stresses and strains at all (or did he?).
dv said:
Peak Warming Man said:
He won a lot of Gold Logies.
Not many people know he got the monicker Moonface because of that time he looked at the moon and wondered why it didn’t fall like an apple.
LOL
The Rev Dodgson said:
dv said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
I’m going to say no. The breadth of the work and the sharpness of some of his insights set him in a very rare class of mind.
I mean he didn’t even pick up Galileo’s big blunder on beam bending, or contribute much on stresses and strains at all (or did he?).
And his contribution to ornithology was nugatory
He was good at much of what he did but inevitably disappointing as he couldn’t leave superstition behind.
But it was a long time ago.
Wasn’t he the bastard who invented calculus?
Peak Warming Man said:
Wasn’t he the bastard who invented calculus?
Let’s get him!
Peak Warming Man said:
Wasn’t he the bastard who invented calculus?
yes but we don’t use his notation, apparently, but Leibniz’s who invented calculus at the same time.
so we guess scientific progress takes both a confluence of ideas and a brain capable of integrating them
mollwollfumble said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
He is and he isn’t.
He was quite mad. He really only had a few years of sanity.
Definitely not a case of the right person in the right place at the right time.
More a case of a person who made a rash statement (to Halley) and then found himself in the unenviable position of having to prove it. His genius was in being able to prove it.
In order to understand Newton, it helps to place him among his contemporaries, particularly Boyle, Halley, Hook and Leibniz. It also helps to remember his real job, governor of the Royal Mint. As governor of the mint, Newton invented anti-counterfeiting measures.
Newton was more intelligent than I have ever been, and I don’t say that about many people (I definitely don’t say it about Hawking).
I know that because I once tried to duplicate one of Newton’s theorems, the theorem is that the gravity of a spherical shell of matter is: a) outside the sphere identical to the gravity from a single point of the same mass at the exact centre of that sphere, b) at every point inside the sphere the gravity is identically zero. Even knowing calculus, it took me three tries and a lot of effort to get it right. Newton on the other hand had to invent calculus in order to do the calculation, and got it right first time.
Newton’s madness followed that of Boyle. Boyle in his later life became heavily involved in alchemy, and Newton picked up alchemy from Boyle at a quite young age and stayed with it his whole life. Alchemy is not chemistry, it cannot be translated into any meaningful chemistry, or in fact anything meaningful at all. I have seen a little of Newton’s work on alchemy. A major British library was offered a collection of Newton’s papers on alchemy and rejected them because they were rubbish, only accepting them later because of howls of protest from the many fans of Newton.
Newton’s insight and intelligence outside of the mathematical realm can easily be illustrated by a simple example from his work on optics. It was known that white light entering into a prism came out in many directions and in many colours. And there was an argument raging on whether the prism added the colours to the white light (as a dye does) or not. Newton devised the following experiment. Have light through a prism split into colours, and then put a slit and second prism in the path of one of these colours. The result, the second prism didn’t add more colours but retained the exact same colour that entered into it. Proving definitively that all the colours were already present in white light and that the prism merely split them up.
Enter Halley. Halley had shown that the path of his comet is an ellipse, and needed to know which law of gravity would result in an ellipse. Halley asked Hooke, who said that he had already solved that problem and that gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance. Halley asked Hooke for a proof, which was not immediately forthcoming. Halley also asked Newton who said the same thing, that he had already solved that problem and that gravity decreased as the inverse square of the distance. Halley asked Newton for a proof, which started off a whole chain of things, because Newton didn’t yet have a proof.
No doubt Hooke and Newton had both found the inverse square law for gravity in the same way, graphically. Draw an ellipse, and find the direction and magnitude of the force required to cause the observed acceleration of the comet. Simple enough to do, even I could do it.
But it isn’t a proof. The best you can do is to say that, to the accuracy that an ellipse can be drawn on paper, for the specific ellipse eccentricities that you have drawn, the inverse square law of gravity agrees with Kepler’s laws.
Newton thought he could do better, and invented calculus to prove it. This is not an easy proof, either then or now. Newton took a couple of years over it an posted the proof to Halley, who would have been overjoyed. The work grew into Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
Although both Hooke and Newton had that 1% inspiration, it was Newton who put in the 99% perspiration needed.
And Leibniz? Leibniz had invented calculus independently and shortly before Newton. But unlike Newton he hadn’t applied it to any significant real world problem.
So Newton is definitely one of the greatest of all time. But after his Principia he lapsed back into the esoteric madness of his alchemy for the rest of his days. Madness? Yes. Because nothing that Newton ever produced in his work on alchemy has ever had the slightest influence on advancing the science of chemistry.
Newton’s personality is best described as “irrascible”. He was very opinionated and not in a good way.
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
why not both both
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
why not both both
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
Tau.Neutrino said:
SCIENCE said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
I mean be was a pretty smart guy, but he said himself he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
why not both both
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
SCIENCE said:
why not both both
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
I didn’t say there was a dichotomy.
SCIENCE said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
SCIENCE said:
why not both both
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
Isaac Newton would be somewhere between Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
The Rev Dodgson said:
SCIENCE said:Tau.Neutrino said:
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
I didn’t say there was a dichotomy.
perhaps but we suggest that
Wasn’t he just the right person in the right place at the right time?
the use of the “wasn’t … just” motif does often carry such an implication for example the use of “either … or” tends to be exclusive even when it isn’t used so
Tau.Neutrino said:
SCIENCE said:Tau.Neutrino said:
I guess all the other people were in the right place at the right time.
but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
Isaac Newton would be somewhere between Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
You forgot Moll in this compendium of genius.
Witty Rejoinder said:
Tau.Neutrino said:
SCIENCE said:but seriously the right guy to have was someone with brains, at the right time to stand on the shoulders of giants there’s no dichotomy
Isaac Newton would be somewhere between Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.
You forgot Moll in this compendium of genius.
specular and very stable
Have a quick look at this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies
“Isaac Newton produced works exploring chronology, and biblical interpretation (especially of the Apocalypse), and alchemy. Some of this should be considered occult.”
SCIENCE said:
https://twitter.com/ladyhaja/status/1549794712969744387
Tories were always a bag of cnuts, but were they always this daft?
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
https://twitter.com/ladyhaja/status/1549794712969744387
Tories were always a bag of cnuts, but were they always this daft?
You can laugh, but where would we be if that apple hadn’t fallen on Newton’s head?
Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree
https://thetreeographer.com/2017/09/24/newtons-tree/
fsm said:
Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree
https://thetreeographer.com/2017/09/24/newtons-tree/
Interesting, thanks.
The Rev Dodgson said:
dv said:
SCIENCE said:
https://twitter.com/ladyhaja/status/1549794712969744387
Tories were always a bag of cnuts, but were they always this daft?
You can laugh, but where would we be if that apple hadn’t fallen on Newton’s head?
well, we wouldn’t have had to put up with the limitation gravity imposes on us for starters!!!
fsm said:
Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree
https://thetreeographer.com/2017/09/24/newtons-tree/
There are (or were) three in Melbourne. One at my CSIRO site in Highett, one at Monash Uni, and I did see another one somewhere.
I sat under Newton’s apple tree once with an open mind looking for inspiration. The large amount of fungal and insect damage to the leaves forcefully reminded me of the need for biodiversity.
I also ate an apple fro Newton’s apple tree once. Don’t do it! This species is only suitable for stewing.
