How could Isaac Newton believe in nonsense like alchemy, finding biblical codes in the bible, prophecies and all that nonsense, I mean that stuff is just silly
it makes me argue if he was even smart to begin with, I mean the average high school atheist today has more intellect than Newton when it comes to that stuff
Riiiight. That’s why the high school atheist has come up with scientific accomplishments that dwarf Newton’s, right?
I keep telling people, you can’t trust Christian scientists like Mendel and LeMaitre. Listen to atheists like Lysenko, because you KNOW they have no ulterior motives or hidden agenda.
but is Newton that big a scientific giant
someone made the claim before that Newton wasn’t known in the scientific world until the 1980s with the rise of the internet
not even Einstein was aware of him, is this true?
He’s a product of his time. At the time, the scientific method didn’t exist. The scientific method is an idea that could be described as saying “look. if you can’t verify it by experiment in the world today, and get credentialed peers to replicate your result, it’s bullshit. Simpler ideas that full explain all observations are better than more complex ideas. If an idea doesn’t explain all observations, it should be scrapped or reworked until it does or the outlier observations are explained.”
Simple, but in Newton’s time, religious scholars were considered credible. There was basically no knowledge they had at all that had been rigorously examined.
They also lived in a time when the scientific method had been yet to be proven to work. By the mid 19th century onwards, it would have been increasingly clear that the scientific method was the only game in town, as increasingly advanced technology became rapidly available, after thousands of years of relatively small advances. (I’m picking that point in time because electricity, steam ships, and other very obvious and effective bits of machinery were becoming available). Newton was 200 years earlier. The printing press, which is what allows the scientific method to even be conducted since it allows knowledge to be feasibly stored over long periods of time and distributed to collaborators, was just 200 years before Newton.
Even then, the religious nuts were still being heard and have yet to be shut up to this day.
No. Newton’s Principia was widely acknowledged as a hugely important work in his own time.
First of all, being smart–even revolutionarly smart–does not make one immune from believing unproveable or irrational things. Human beings are rationalizing animals, not rational computers, and we tend to believe the ideas which best support how we would like the world to be whether it actually is that way or not. Some of the very smartest physicists have and continue to believe in concepts that are inarguably unprovable; Pauling and his Vitamin C obsession, Bohm and his beliefs in a universal order predicted by Buddhism, Hoyle and panspermia, and Penrose with his Orch-OR microtubules. There is an endless amount of nonsense in the world to believe in even if you are hard-headed about your partiucular field of study.
Second, bear in mind that Newton died in 1727, at the very beginning of the European Age of Enlightenment. Science as we know it today did not exist, and much of what was known about how the world worked was derived from religious doctrine from various scriptural and canonical sources. Newton predates Priestley and Dalton, and indeed nearly all of modern chemistry, he knew nothing of evolution, and lived at a time when it was still not widely believed that stars were other suns in a galactic structure that was one of uncountable billions in the observeable universe. The things we think are “silly” today seemed entirely plausible in a world where religious organizations held powerful sway over the inbred puppets ordained as the leaders of nations in a system organized by lineage rather than merit or competence.
Third, Newton was kind of wack, anyway. He visited the wrath of his position and influence on Robert Hooke (who himself was kind of a legendary asshole); he never married or (as far as we are aware) had any romantic relationships; he had many contentious professional relationships which he damaged or destroyed through apparent (of sometimes justified) paranoia over not receiving primacy; and generally seems to have been a kind of unpleasant person who obsessively focused his energies in excess of science and natural philosophy on studies that were of little general interest.
If you want to question “if [Newton] was even smart to begin with,” that is certainly your prerogative but given his manifest contributions to mathematics and physics that stand in practical application today–he’s one of the very few people to have an entire field of mechanics and the set of governing laws named for him–you’re going to have to make a more substantive argument than you’ve presented here if you want to get any serious traction.
And is still in publication today. In fact, I think it may have been in constant publication since the first issuance. It is one of the few books you can mention–along with The Origin of Species, the Torah, the Christian Bible, the Koran, and the Kama Sutra–that are instantly recognizable to virtually any educated adult.
Stranger
ehhhh Hooke is kind of overrated, he might of had similar ideas to Newton, but he didn’t have anywhere near the mathematical talent to make them a reality
as the french mathematician Claraut said
“One must not think that this idea … of Hooke diminishes Newton’s glory”, Clairaut wrote; “The example of Hooke” serves "to show what a distance there is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated".
similar to how we remember Darwin more so than Wallace when it comes to natural selection/evolution
now on to the rest of your points, i see where your coming from, i guess im still viewing him through a 21st century mindset, and that’s not really a good practice when evaluating past figures
Classic backwards thinking on your part.
You missed several things. For one thing, you assume that if someone is really bright and insightful about one thing, that they will be the same way about everything. That’s absurd on it’s face. Next, you ignored the entire progress of human learning, and assumed that it all happens at once. Next, you failed to show that YOU have ever experienced a significant insight of any importance or uniqueness, because you would have learned from such an experience, that knowledge doesn’t spring instantly into existence, it depends heavily on previous lessons and recognitions. You should have learned that from your own normal life, just realizing that you had to learn to stand up, before you could learn to walk,and so on.
In addition, you equate INTELLECT with KNOWLEDGE. They aren’t the same thing. A person can be brilliant AND ignorant, in fact it’s more common than not. You may be an example of it yourself.
In addition, you missed the most critical fact: that Newton DID so carefully and intensely explore all of those subjects, and tried to corral them into coherence, shows just how energetically brilliant he was. The reason why he accomplished what he did, was because he worked THAT hard on everything that crossed his path.
It’s just weird that when you get to Einstein he didn’t believe any of that stuff
Since I knew of Newton in high school, in the 1980s, before the rise of the internet, I can guarantee this is false.
No, Newton was widely known for centuries. When I was a kid, 50 years ago, every school child was familiar with the legend of Newton sitting under the apple tree and getting bonked on the head. And when I studied science in sixth grade, one of the very first things we were taught was Newton’s three laws of motion.
What stuff? Newton’s laws are still used almost everywhere even today (the International System of Units for force is even called a “Newton”). Einstein realized that they were incomplete under extreme conditions and created his theories of relativity to expand on them but relativity doesn’t have much practical application unless you are designing Global Positioning Systems (GPS) or very long space flights (Newton had no such need nor did anyone else when he was alive).
Now that you brought up Einstein, he didn’t believe in quantum mechanics even though it is known to exist now even though there is absolutely no one in the world that fully understands it. Was he a fool too? Of course not and never will be viewed as such. Science is built in increments and fits and starts on the shoulders of giants. Both Newton and Einstein are among the most well known of those giants.
Not to mention that the Otter Pops characters, which were introduced in the 1970, included Sir Isaac Lime, indicating that he was well known enough to be parodied for children’s treats.
So who, in your self-esteemed position, is not overrated?
Stranger
it’s just usually historical figures are not well known until later
i believe Shakespeare wasn’t as being the “greatest english writer” until the Victorian era
but i guess Newton was known right away after Principia was released
sorry I should of been much more specific, I meant the Hooke-Newton dispute is overrated,
I didn’t mean to imply Hooke was overrated
I have no idea where you got the idea that Newton was only made famous because of the internet. That is like saying that most people never heard of Benjamin Franklin until Google showed up. That is patently absurd. Newton was internationally famous even during his own life and it never stopped. He is one of the most famous scientists that ever lived and is instantly recognizable to almost anyone that attended school before 1800 or so.
Here is a long list of places named after him and books published about him. They span centuries and I am sure there will be more.
You guys realize that people of the future will say similar things regarding scientists today right?
Only uneducated people will say those things.
Is, like, time not a thing in your worldview?