
Newton, the Man (1946) - pliny
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/
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antimetropic
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.”

~~~
jhbadger
I also like Michael White's "Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer", which stresses
the weird conflict in his character between mysticism and science.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Which only seems like a weird conflict from modern eyes, obviously. The ideas
that, paraphrased, "the world is made of math" and "spirituality and science
are one" are at the heart of western mathematical mysticism, from the 6th
century BC Pythagoreans onward.

~~~
dr_dshiv
BTW, if you want your mind blown, check out Penelope Gouk's "Music, Science
and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England". It deals with the magical
ideas that were present at the formation of the Royal Society.

Note that we consider magic today to be "that which doesn't exist". Natural
magic then was "that which works through unknown forces".

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dang
If curious see also

2019
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415880](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415880)

~~~
pliny
Notable:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421170)
is true this time as well. The catalyst for this submission was
[https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/12792622549830819...](https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1279262254983081985?s=19)
by way of
[https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1279530659753553921?s...](https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1279530659753553921?s=19)

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hermitcrab
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.

~~~
JacobAldridge
I also wonder what benefit the study of alchemy, the Bible etc may have had on
his other discoveries? Sometimes ‘flashes of insight’ come from patterns
developed in other fields.

Gutenberg, for example, made a breakthrough with the printing press because
his earlier career as a goldsmith taught him enough metallurgy to develop
movable type; Charles Babbage credited his work on silk weaving machines with
helping him visualise his adding machine (with Ida Lovelace, creating the
first ‘computer’).

~~~
hermitcrab
I agree that knowledge of a different field can be very useful. I don't think
I would pick alchemy or scripture as that other field though.

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joe_the_user
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.

