On Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:29:58 -0800, Russ P. wrote: >> He might have been a great intellectual but he was no scientist. It's >> only by ignoring the vast bulk of his work -- work which Newton himself >> considered *far* more important and interesting than his work on >> physics and mathematics -- that we can even *pretend* he was a >> scientist. > > The fact that someone studies theology does not mean that he cannot also > be considered a scientist.
He didn't just "study" theology, he considered his work on theology and alchemy vastly more important than his work in natural philosophy. To Newton, perhaps the most important thing a natural philosopher could do was rediscover the wisdom of the ancients -- an attitude diametrically opposed to the rationalist, scientific viewpoint of the Enlightenment. History judges Newton's work completely the opposite he did: his work on mechanics had lasting impact on physics, while his work on eschatology (the end of the world) and the Trinity had little influence on his contemporaries and even less on later generations. > And if the person who discovered the > inverse-square law of universal gravitation is not a "scientist," I > don't know who is. Science is defined by the process followed, not the result. The lone genius toiling away in secrecy is not science. It is anathema to science, *even if the genius turns out to be right*. Newton's secrecy *held back* science and mathematics for decades. The process that we call "science" hadn't been invented while Newton was alive. Newton played an important part of the invention of that process, but that doesn't make him a scientist. Describing him as a scientist is an anachronism: to use an ugly word, it is "presentism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis) Newton was to the science of physics what the alchemists were to the science of chemistry -- an analogy that is especially apt, as Newton was himself an alchemist. Newton was there at the paradigm shift from the old magical ways to the new rationalist ways, and to some extent he straddled the interface, but he was very much a part of the old ways. We do him a disservice to pretend he was something he wasn't. John Maynard Keynes, who bought -- and read -- the largest collection of Newton's writings in the world, described him thusly: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago." Newton was one of the creators of the Enlightenment. But he was a pre- Enlightenment man: he belonged to the world left behind. http://www.slate.com/id/2108438/ We can't understand Newton if we interpret him in post-Enlightenment terms: all that gives us is the 19th Century triumphalist caricature of Newton-as-rationalist-scientist. That's not the man, that's just the image -- and an image that Newton himself would have hated. Unfortunately, there is a tradition in physics of treating that caricature as real. Scientists themselves are especially prone to it: even the hard sciences need their myths. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list