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Newton, the Man (1946)

by pliny on 7/4/20, 10:47 PM with 11 comments

  • by antimetropic on 7/5/20, 3:43 AM

    I recently read Gleick’s biography of Newton and highly recommend it. It’s pretty short, quotes part of this article by Keynes with a lot more context, and paints a portrait both fascinating and disturbing: to come from nothing, to start with nothing, not even having the concepts of velocity or force; to invent them, and calculus, and to develop such a deep understanding of nature to successfully compute the shape of the earth as an oblate spheroid, all from first principles, in the 1600s; to conceal nearly all of these discoveries; and then pursue things that “should all seem a crass and empty ambition once you have written a Principia.”

  • by dang on 7/5/20, 2:09 AM

  • by hermitcrab on 7/5/20, 7:39 AM

    Although rather dysfunctional as a human being, Newton is undoubtedly the greatest physicist of all time. And probably one of the greatest mathematicians. I wonder what else he would have achieved if he hadn't so much of his time and energy on alchemy and bible study.

  • by joe_the_user on 7/5/20, 7:07 AM

    The thing with Newton's Principia is that's an exposition of the laws of his dynamics using proofs from elementary geometry but no calculus as such.

    Newton and Leibniz separately discovered calculus but the calculus they created had no rigorous basis - it took until the middle of 19th century to formulate the axiomatic system that calculus is framed in today.

    So it's natural Newton would want to write his results in a form that was rigorous and unassailable. But this meant that, as Keynes says, the final form didn't bear a relationship to intuition it was taken from.