Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton
by James Gleick
Published 1 Jan 2003

PUBLISHED WORKS OF NEWTON There is no such thing as The Collected Works of Isaac Newton. The Newton Project, at Imperial College, London, has long-term plans for the theological, alchemical, and Mint writings. Meanwhile two monuments of scholarship are the collected correspondence and the collected mathematical papers: Turnbull, Herbert W.; Scott, John F.; Hall, A. Rupert; and Tilling, Laura, eds. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (cited as Corres). Seven volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. Whiteside, D. T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (cited as Math). Eight volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967–80.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall. New York: Norton, 1995. The Preliminary Manuscripts for Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, 1684–85. Introduction by D. T. Whiteside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Unpublished First Version of Isaac Newton’s Cambridge Lectures on Optics, 1670–1672.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2001. Manuel, Frank. Isaac Newton, Historian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. ———. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. McGuire, J. E. Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics of Nature. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. McGuire, J. E.; and Rattansi, Piyo M., “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan.’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21-2: 108–42 McKnight, Stephen A. ed. Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. McLachlan, H., ed. Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts.

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI
by Edward Dolnick
Published 8 Feb 2011

See Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 24. 45 “When one . . . compares”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 45 Frederick the Great declared: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 414. 46 “I invariably took”: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 43. 46 His favorite wedding gift: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 582. 46 slept in his clothes: Gale Christianson, Isaac Newton, p. 65. 46 seventeen portraits: Peter Ackroyd, Newton, p. 98. 46 so much time working with mercury: Milo Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” p. 27. 46 “It’s so rare,” the Duchess: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 47 “a Machine for walking on water”: The drawing comes from a 1637 text by Daniel Schwenter, a German mathematician and inventor, titled Deliciae physico-mathematicae.

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Leibniz is dead”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 779. 317 “Nothing could give me a greater”: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 285. 318 “You would have thought it was a felon”: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 306. 318 “The more I got to know Leibniz”: Ibid., p. 117, quoting Eike Hirsch. 319 “stone dolls”: Milo Keynes discusses Newton’s views on art and literature in “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” pp. 26–27. 319 “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons”: from an interview with Huxley in J. W. N. Sullivan, Contemporary Mind (London: Toulmin, 1934), p. 143. 319 “The more I learned”: I interviewed Westfall in connection with an article marking the three hundredth anniversary of the Principia. See Edward Dolnick, “Sir Isaac Newton,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1987. Westfall used the same “wholly other” phrase in the preface to Never at Rest, p. x, where he discussed Newton’s uniqueness in a bit more detail. 320 “He cried out with admiration”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 473. 320 His fellow professors did not know: Ibid., p. 194.

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Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. “Newton and the Scientific Revolution.” In Stayer, ed., Newton’s Dream. ———. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. ———. “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience, 1662 (1).” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18, no. 1 (June 1963), pp. 10–16. White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Perseus, 1997. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1925. Whiteside, D. T. “Isaac Newton: Birth of a Mathematician.”

Money for Nothing
by Thomas Levenson
Published 18 Aug 2020

THE TRICKS THAT SCHOOLMASTERS USED Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 132. THE “GENERATION OF FIGURES BY MOTION” Isaac Newton, in a document written as part of the conflict with Gottfried Leibniz on who first invented calculus, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 55n to chapter 4. THE “INFINITELY LITTLE LINES” Isaac Newton, Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, 1664–1666, D. T. Whiteside, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 382 et seq. AS HE TOLD THE STORY SIXTY YEARS LATER William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752), MS/142, Royal Society Library, London, p. 15r. SUDDENLY, AN APPLE FELL No anecdotes about an apple survive from near the time Newton claims to have been inspired by its fall.

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id=0AzP9WLLJLcC&pg=PA67&dq=zeno+achilles&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFtcvXnurhAhVIwlkKHXQ3CocQ6AEINjAC#v=onepage&q=zeno%20achilles&f=false. BUT NEITHER PHILOSOPHICAL RIGOR NOR COMMON SENSE See Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 42. GALILEO KNEW THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING VITAL Quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 41. NEWTON HIMSELF, IN HIS FIRST MONTHS AT WOOLSTHORPE Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 131. “THE CROOKEDNESS IN LINES” Isaac Newton, “Newton’s Waste Book,” http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/​view/​texts/​normalized/​NATP00221. BUT NEWTON’S THINKING IN THE LAST MONTHS OF 1665 The interplay between mechanical constructions of curves and Newton’s analytic approach is a gloss on Richard Westfall’s more technical exposition in Never at Rest, pp. 126–34.

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I also consulted James Gleick’s treatment of the same material in Isaac Newton, pp. 54–59. My Newton and the Counterfeiter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) also discusses these events on pp. 15–20. HE “FOUND THEM ANSWER PRETTY NEARLY” Isaac Newton, draft of a letter to Pierre des Maiseaux, probably in the summer of 1718, quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Newton produced several drafts of this letter, many of which are cited in the notes to the version in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 6, 1713–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), document 1295 pp. 454–562.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz
Published 31 Mar 2019

Barr Jr., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 7. The Secret Fountain 167 Isaac Newton: For biographical information, see Gleick, Isaac Newton. See also Westfall, Never at Rest, and I. B. Cohen, “Isaac Newton,” in vol. 10 of Gillispie, Complete Dictionary, with amendments by G. E. Smith and W. Newman in vol. 23. For Newton’s mathematics, see Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers, vols. 1 and 2; Edwards, The Historical Development; Grattan-Guinness, From the Calculus; Rickey, “Isaac Newton”; Dunham, Journey Through Genius; Katz, History of Mathematics; Guicciardini, Reading the Principia; Dunham, The Calculus Gallery; Simmons, Calculus Gems; Guicciardini, Isaac Newton; Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History; and Burton, History of Mathematics. 168 “between straight and curved lines”: René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes: With a Facsimile of the First Edition, translated by David E.

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Chapter 7 focuses on Hobbes as would-be geometer. 196 a “scab of symbols”: Quoted in Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History, 164. 196 “scurvy book”: Ibid. 196 not “worthy of public utterance”: Quoted in Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 343. 196 “Our specious algebra”: Ibid. 8. Fictions of the Mind 199 “His name is Mr. Newton”: Letter from Isaac Barrow to John Collins, August 20, 1669, quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, 68. 199 “send me the proof”: Letter 158, from Leibniz to Oldenburg, May 2, 1676, in Turnbull, Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 4. For more on the Newton-Leibniz correspondence, see Mackinnon, “Newton’s Teaser.” Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 354–61, offers a particularly clear and helpful analysis of the mathematical cat-and-mouse game taking place between Newton and Leibniz in the letters.

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The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 2, 1676–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Wardhaugh, Benjamin. “Musical Logarithms in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes, Mercator, Newton.” Historia Mathematica 35 (2008): 19–36. Wasserman, Steven A., and Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. “Biochemical Topology: Applications to DNA Recombination and Replication.” Science 232, no. 4753 (1986): 951–60. Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Whiteside, Derek T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———.

The system of the world
by Neal Stephenson
Published 21 Sep 2004

MacDougall be found, I wonder?” “The Theater Royal, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively. “Say no more, Miss Barton.” Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London LATER THAT DAY “I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton. He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting would best suit the gravity of the occasion, how much time to spend reminiscing about student days in Cambridge, and whether to say anything about their last encounter, which had gone as badly as any social encounter, short of homicide, could go.

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For it seems to me that if such Herculean efforts are to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude anywhere.” Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an excellent sea-going chronometer, which no one knew how to make yet; or by watching the satellites of Jupiter through an excellent sea-going telescope, which no one knew how to make yet; or by looking at the position of the moon and comparing it against calculations derived from his, i.e., Sir Isaac Newton’s, lunar theory, which was not quite finished yet but would be coming out any minute now in a book.

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“Even if I did, my lord, ’twould never stand; for the record now shows that the true butt at which Jack the Coiner aimed his shaft was not the Jewels but the Mint—to be specific, the Pyx. And how would I benefit from some compromise of the Pyx?” “How could anyone conceivably benefit from it?” Bolingbroke wanted to know. “It is of no account,” Isaac Newton broke in, “as the Pyx was never compromised!” “Sir Isaac Newton! We’ve not heard from you yet. For the benefit of those here who have never seen the Pyx, would you be so good as to explain its workings?” “It would be my pleasure, my lord,” said Newton, stepping forward, eluding the hand of the Marquis of Ravenscar who had groped forward, out of some instinct, trying to yank him back from the abyss.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
by Michael Strevens
Published 12 Oct 2020

CHAPTER 2 Human Frailty Scientists are too contentious and too morally and intellectually fragile to follow any method consistently. AS THE MOON’S DISK CREPT across the face of the sun on May 29, 1919, a new science of gravity hung in the balance. Just a few years earlier, Albert Einstein had formulated his theory of general relativity, a conceptually radical replacement for the gravitational theory that made Isaac Newton famous at the beginning of modern science, more than two hundred years before. Whereas Newton held that massive bodies exert upon each other a “force of gravity,” Einstein said that they rather bend the space and time around them, giving it a characteristic curvature. When objects do their best to trace straight lines through this twisted medium, they move in a way that suggests the existence of gravitational force—but there is in fact no such thing.

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Ernst Haeckel embellished his careful drawings of animal embryos around the same time to support his thesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that a human embryo, for example, passes through stages in which it takes on forms more or less identical to those of fish embryos, then amphibian embryos, then bird embryos. Robert Millikan, in pulling together the data from which he inferred the electric charge of a single electron—work that earned him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics—omitted many measurements that did not “look right,” while claiming to have included everything. Even Isaac Newton manipulated certain empirical quantities to better fit his theories, tactics that in one case amounted, wrote his biographer Richard Westfall, to “nothing short of deliberate fraud.” There is one respect, I must note, in which Eddington and other modern scientists are almost exceptionlessly careful and methodical.

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The war in Europe was over. Germany lay in ruins; France was triumphant; England, having executed its king, Charles I, was a republic. Over the silent battlefields settled a peace born of exhaustion. In the universities and learned societies, by contrast, the gravity wars were poised to begin. Isaac Newton was 7 years old. By the age of 11, he was ranked the second worst pupil in his class at King’s School in Grantham, Lincolnshire. At some point, however—possibly in reaction to his bullying by the third worst pupil—he threw himself into his studies, which drew him to Cambridge University’s Trinity College.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

. … This Oeconomy depends on attractive power first discovered by the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton” (Keill, 1708, pp. v–vi, 8). 6 Boerhaave serves as another classic example of the kind of epigone that is instrumental in disseminating the ideas of the true cultural entrepreneurs, in his case Descartes and Newton. Famous and celebrated in his own days, his original contributions were few and middling, yet he helped spread the main cultural beliefs of the Enlightenment, not only in his own country but throughout Europe. 7 In his History of Astronomy, Smith wrote that “Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis …His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system.

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—David Hume, 1742 Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii Part I: Evolution, Culture, and Economic History Chapter 1: Culture and Economics 3 Chapter 2: Nature and Technology 16 Chapter 3: Cultural Evolution and Economics 22 Chapter 4: Choice-based Cultural Evolution 34 Chapter 5: Biases in Cultural Evolution 43 Part II: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Economic Change, 1500–1700 Chapter 6: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Choice-based Cultural Evolution 59 Chapter 7: Francis Bacon, Cultural Entrepreneur 70 Chapter 8: Isaac Newton, Cultural Entrepreneur 99 Part III: Innovation, Competition, and Pluralism in Europe, 1500–1700 Chapter 9: Cultural Choice in Action: Human Capital and Religion 119 Chapter 10: Cultural Change and the Growth of Useful Knowledge, 1500–1700 142 Chapter 11: Fragmentation, Competition, and Cultural Change 165 Chapter 12: Competition and the Republic of Letters 179 Part IV: Prelude to the Enlightenment Chapter 13: Puritanism and British Exceptionalism 227 Chapter 14: A Culture of Progress 247 Chapter 15: The Enlightenment and Economic Change 267 Part V: Cultural Change in the East and West Chapter 16: China and Europe 287 Chapter 17: China and the Enlightenment 321 Epilogue: Useful Knowledge and Economic Growth 339 References 343 Index 381 Acknowledgments This book had its origins in the Joseph Schumpeter lectures I delivered in Graz in November 2010 and I am deeply grateful to my hosts at the Schumpeter Society for their hospitality and penetrating comments at an early stage.

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The deep significance of the institutions that governed the market for ideas resides here. In chapters 7 and 8, I will take a closer look at two of the cultural entrepreneurs whose influence I consider as supremely important for the rise of the Industrial Enlightenment and eventually the emergence of useful knowledge as the main engine of modern economic growth—Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. It should be made clear, however, that between 1500 and 1700, the European intellectual scene included other remarkable individuals, who dramatically changed the cultural menu of European society. Besides the obvious religious entrepreneurs such as Luther and Calvin, I could have easily picked Descartes or Spinoza as intellectuals whose work left an indelible print on the evolution of culture in Europe both on their contemporaries and future intellectuals.

Fermat’s Last Theorem
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 1997

T. 47 Mozans, H.J. 119 musical harmony, principles of 14–17 My Philosophical Development (Russell) 154 natural numbers 91 negative numbers 90–94 network formula 85–8 New York, subway graffiti 257 New York Times 254, 272–3, 282 Newton, Isaac 18, 47, 80, 81 Nixon, Richard Milhous 46–7 Noether, Emmy 110–11 nothingness, concept of 59 number line 92, 94–5, 185–6 numbers definition of 150, 152 relationships between 11 numerals, Indo-Arab 59–60 Oberwolfach symposium (1984) 215–19, 221 Olbers, Heinrich 115 order and chaos 17 overestimated prime conjecture 179 Paganini, Nicolò 63 parallelism, philosophy of 254, 257 parasites, life-cycles 106–7 particle physics 22–3 Pascal, Blaise 40, 43–4, 45–6 Penrose, Roger 198 Penrose tilings 198–9 People 274, 290–91 perfect numbers 11–13 philosopher, word coined by Pythagoras 10 pi (π) 17–18, 50–53, 166 Picturegoers, The (Lodge) 177–8 Pillow Problems (Dodgson) 138 Pinch, Richard 285 Plato 109 Poges, Arthur 37, 74 Poincaré, Jules Henri 199 points (dice game) 43 polynomials 237 Portraits from Memory (Russell) 160 prime numbers 70–71 almost primes 308 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 99–100 Germain primes 116 infinity of 100–101, 102–3 irregular primes 126–7, 177 practical applications 103–7 333,333,331 not prime 178 twin primes 308 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead) 156–7 probability 43–7 counter-intuitive 44–5 Problèmes plaisants et delectables (Bachet) 61 puzzles, compendiums of 138 Pythagoras abhors irrational numbers 50, 54–5 at Croton 9–10, 27–8 death 28 and mathematical proof 26 and musical harmony 14–17 and perfect numbers 12–13 and study of numbers 7 travels 7–8 Pythagoras’ equation 28 ‘cubed’ version 30–32 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 32, 65–6 whole number solutions 28–30 Pythagoras’ theorem 6–7, 19–20, 26, 333–4 Pythagorean Brotherhood 9–11, 13, 27–8, 49, 50, 108 Pythagorean triples 28–30, 65, 338 quadratic equations 236–7 quantum physics 162 quartic equations 237 quintic equations 237–8, 239–40, 245, 248–9 Ramanujan, Srinivasa 3 Raspail, François 242–3 rational numbers 11 rearrangement of equations 216 recipes, mathematical 8, 237 reductio ad absurdum 49–50, 53–4 reflectional symmetry 196 Reidemeister, Kurt 142 religion, and probability 46 Reynolds 323 Ribenboim, Paulo 144 Ribet, Ken 220, 229, 267, 270–71, 272, 276, 288–9, 304 Fermat Information Service 282 and significance of Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 221–3 Riemann hypothesis 73 river ratio 17–18 Rivest, Ronald 104 Rosetta stone 212 Rossi, Hugo 46–7 rotational symmetry 195–6 Rubin, Professor Karl 268–9, 300 Russell, Bertrand, 22, 44, 147, 153, 160 Russell’s paradox 152, 154–7 St Augustine (of Hippo) 12 Sam Loyd and his Puzzles: An Autobiographical Review 138 Samos, Greece 8–9 Sarnak, Peter 285–6, 291 Schlichting, Dr F. 144–6 scientific proof 21–2 scientific theories 22–3 scrambling and unscrambling messages 103–5, 168, 170–75 Segre 314 Selmer groups 287 Shamir, Adi 104 Shimura, Goro 193, 191–5, 202, 203, 206 relationship with Taniyama 205, 207, 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 209–10, 272, 274 Shimura-Taniyama conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Silverman, Bob 284 Sir Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge 4–5, 266 Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of Ladies (Algarotti) 112 6, perfection of 11–12 Skewes, S. 179–80 Skewes’s number 180 sociable numbers 63–4 Socrates 109 Somerville, Mary 113 square, symmetries of 195–6 square-cube sandwiches 64, 184 square root of one 93 square root of two 53–4, 91–2, 312–4 strings and particles 23 vibrating 15–17, 16 Suzuki, Misako 207, 208 symmetry 195–202 Taniyama, Yutaka 190, 191–5, 202, 203 death 205, 207–8 influence of 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 202, 204–5 Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 205, 209–15 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 216–19, 221–3 Wiles and 215, 223, 225–31, 232, 258–61, 263–5, 274, 304 Taniyama-Weil conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Tartaglia, Niccolò 40–41 Taylor, Richard 285, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299–300 Thales 26 Theano 9–10, 107–8 theorems 21, 71–2 Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, The (von Neumann) 167 13 Lectures on Fermat’s Last Theorem (Ribenboim) 144 Thomson, J.

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Various libraries and archives have gone out of their way to help me, and in particular I would like to thank Susan Oakes of the London Mathematical Society, Sandra Cumming of the Royal Society and Ian Stewart of Warwick University. I am also grateful to Jacquelyn Savani of Princeton University, Duncan McAngus, Jeremy Gray, Paul Balister and the Isaac Newton Institute for their help in finding research material. Thanks also go to Patrick Walsh, Christopher Potter, Bernadette Alves, Sanjida O’Connell and my parents for their comments and support throughout the last year. Finally, many of the interviews quoted in this book were obtained while I was working on a television documentary on the subject of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

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The price he had to pay for his secrecy was that he had not previously discussed or tested any of his ideas with the mathematics community and therefore there was a significant chance that he had made some fundamental error. Ideally Wiles had wanted to spend more time going over his work to allow him to check fully his final manuscript. Then the unique opportunity arose to announce his discovery at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge and he abandoned caution. The sole aim of the institute’s existence is to bring together the world’s greatest intellects for a few weeks in order to hold seminars on a cutting-edge research topic of their choice. Situated on the outskirts of the university, away from students and other distractions, the building is especially designed to encourage the academics to concentrate on collaboration and brainstorming.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

Humankind was awakening from a dream of immobility to find itself in a waking fall, its planet plummeting through boundless space. The weight of authority that brought Galileo to his knees succeeded only in halting the growth of science in the Mediterranean. Thereafter, the great advances came in the north countries. The physics of the Copernican universe was to be elucidated by Isaac Newton, born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642, the year of Galileo’s death. * Ruled not by a feudal aristocracy but by a thriving merchant class, Venice was relatively liberal, innovative, and inquisitive, an excellent place for a freethinker like Galileo. The difference was evident in the way the anatomy classes were conducted: The proscription against dissection, generally obeyed in Pisa, was circumvented at Padua by means of a laboratory table that could be lowered to an underground river, where corpses brought to the university by boat in the dark of night were raised into the hall for dissection in the advanced anatomy class.

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The thoroughness and assurance with which he accomplished this task were such that his theory came to be regarded, for more than two centuries thereafter, as something close to the received word of God. Even today, when Newtonian dynamics is viewed as but a part of the broader canvas painted by Einstein’s relativity, most of us continue to think in Newtonian terms, and Newton’s laws still work well enough to guide spacecraft to the moon and planets. (“I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now,” said astronaut Bill Anders, when asked by his son who was “driving” the Apollo 8 spacecraft carrying him to the moon.) Yet the man whose explication of the cosmos lives on in a billion minds was himself one of the strangest and most remotely inaccessible individuals who ever lived.

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This he did, and three months later, in November, he sent Halley a paper that successfully derived all three of Kepler’s laws from the precept of universal gravitation obeying an inverse-square law. Halley, immediately recognizing the tremendous importance of Newton’s accomplishment, hastened to Cambridge and urged him to write a book on gravitation and the dynamics of the solar system. Thus was born Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World—the Principia. Work on the book took over Newton’s life. “Now I am upon this subject,” he wrote the astronomer John Flamsteed, in a letter soliciting data on the orbits of Saturn’s satellites, “I would gladly know the bottom of it before I publish my papers.”16 The effort only intensified his air of preoccupation.

Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
Published 9 Sep 2004

He checked it again two months later. Nothing. At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin. This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments. Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony OCTOBER 12, 1713 Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate —MILTON, Paradise Lost LIKE A GOOD CARTESIAN who measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings.

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To us both, opaque. What’s constituted so, only a pen Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go. BOOK ONE Quicksilver Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations . . . may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713 Boston Common OCTOBER 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M. ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUST as the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place.

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As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships. As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell.

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton
Published 7 Dec 2015

. ———. ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake’. Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32–65. Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Ed. HW Turnbull. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. ———. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents. Ed. IB Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. ———. ‘A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors: Sent by the Author to the Publisher From Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; in Order to be Communicated to the R.

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.: Harvard University Press, 1953: 227–45. Snobelen, Stephen D. ‘ “God of Gods, and Lord of Lords”: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia’. Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208. ———. ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’. British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419. ———. ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’. In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. CL Firestone and N Jacobs. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012: 49–184. ———. ‘William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the Crisis of Publicity’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (2004): 573–603.

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All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance.’41 10 Hypotheses/Theories . . . an accompt of a Philosophicall discovery . . . being in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detectioni which hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature. – Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, 18 January 1672 § 1 ‘In the beginning of the Year 1666’ Isaac Newton had just turned twenty-three (his birthday was Christmas Day). The year before, he had obtained his BA degree; a year or so later he began to develop his theory of gravity; less than four years later, in October 1669, he became Lucasian professor of mathematics (at the time the only chair in mathematics at Cambridge), and exactly four years later, in the beginning of 1670, he gave his first university lectures, on the subject of optics.

The Eureka Factor
by John Kounios
Published 14 Apr 2015

Maddening Creativity 1 Historical information relevant to the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple can be found in Steve Connor, “The Core of Truth Behind Sir Isaac Newton’s Apple,” The Independent, January 18, 2010. The quote from Humphrey Newton, Isaac Newton’s secretary and copyist, can be found on page 406 of S. Westphall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The quote from James Gleick came from an episode of the BBC Television series Horizon entitled “Isaac Newton: The Last Magician.” The quote by Milo Keynes about Sir Isaac Newton’s personality is from M. Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 49 (1995): 1–56.

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It’s the sudden experience of comprehending something that you didn’t understand before, thinking about a familiar thing in a novel way, or combining familiar things to form something new. Insights are quantum leaps of thought, creative breakthroughs that power our lives and our history. Insight conveyed a theory of gravity to Sir Isaac Newton, the melody of a Beatles ballad to Sir Paul McCartney, and an understanding of the cause of human suffering to the Buddha. Nearly everyone has had aha moments of sudden clarity. They can and do change our lives. Much has been written purporting to explain how insight works and how you can make it work better.

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But there is another source of evidence for the idea that insightfulness is a relatively stable characteristic. It seems that insightfulness is a blood relative of madness, and madness is firmly rooted in one’s biology. MADDENING CREATIVITY * * * It would be difficult to find an informed person who would disagree with the notion that Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was one of the greatest geniuses ever to walk among mere mortals. His contributions to physics (optics and classical mechanics) and mathematics (calculus) are monumental and seminal, securing him a permanent place in the pantheon of great achievements. Sir Isaac also had the distinction of experiencing the second most celebrated aha moment in scientific history (after Archimedes, a genius of comparable stature).

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
by Steven Weinberg
Published 17 Feb 2015

Whiteside, ed., General Introduction to Volume 20, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968), pp. xi–xii. 2. Ibid., Volume 2, footnote, pp. 206–7; and Volume 3, pp. 6–7. 3. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest—A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 14. 4. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1987). 5. Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 143. 6. Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 6, p. 485. 7. Quoted in James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Pantheon, New York, 2003), p. 120. 8.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956). Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. W. Hazlitt (H. G. Bohn, London, 1857). Moses ben Maimon, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919). Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. D. Thomas Whiteside (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968). , Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Florian Cajori, rev. trans. Andrew Motte (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962). , Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730). , The Principia—Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans.

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Today we understand that the precession of the equinoxes is caused by a wobble of the Earth’s axis (like the wobble of the axis of a spinning top) around a direction perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, with the angle between this direction and the Earth’s axis remaining nearly fixed at 23.5°. The equinoxes are the dates when the line separating the Earth and the Sun is perpendicular to the Earth’s axis, so a wobble of the Earth’s axis causes the equinoxes to precess. We will see in Chapter 14 that this wobble was first explained by Isaac Newton, as an effect of the gravitational attraction of the Sun and Moon for the equatorial bulge of the Earth. It actually takes 25,727 years for the Earth’s axis to wobble by a full 360°. It is remarkable how accurately the work of Hipparchus predicted this great span of time. (By the way, it is the precession of the equinoxes that explains why ancient navigators had to judge the direction of north from the position in the sky of constellations near the north celestial pole, rather from the position of the North Star, Polaris.

Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio
Published 6 Jan 2009

Mathematics under the Microscope. http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/%7Eavb/micromathematics/downloads. Brewster, D. 1831. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street). Bukowski, J. 2008. The College Mathematics Journal, 39(1), 2. Burger, E. B., and Starbird, M. 2005. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton). Burkert, W. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Cajori, F. 1926. The American Mathematical Monthly, 33(8), 397. ———. 1928. In The History of Science Society. Sir Isaac Newton 1727–1927: A Bicentenary Evaluation of His Work (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company).

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This unsurpassed genius had more opportunities to experience the “pleasure of discovery” than probably any other individual in the history of the human race. Figure 26 And There Was Light The great eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was thirty-nine years old when Isaac Newton (1642–1727) died (figure 27 shows Newton’s tomb inside Westminster Abbey). In a well-known couplet, Pope attempted to encapsulate Newton’s achievements: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. Almost a hundred years after Newton’s death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) added in his epic poem Don Juan the lines: And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

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How was that masterpiece—Principia—born? I Began to Think of Gravity Extending to the Orb of the Moon William Stukeley (1687–1765), an antiquary and physician who was Newton’s friend (in spite of the more than four decades in age separating them), eventually became the great scientist’s first biographer. In his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life we find an account of one of the most celebrated legends in the history of science: On 15 April 1726 I paid a visit to Sir Isaac at his lodgings in Orbels buildings in Kensington, dined with him and spent the whole day with him, alone…After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

Jobs had no idea that those engineers held the key to rescuing him from the Moses Trap. And it would have nothing to do with their machine. ISAAC NEWTON VS. STEVE JOBS: A BRIEF INTERLUDE Stories of great breakthroughs tend to coalesce around one person, one genius, and often one moment. Those stories are fun to tell and easy to digest. Occasionally they are true. More often, they contain a kernel of truth, but omit a much richer and more interesting picture. Isaac Newton, for example, is often celebrated for discovering universal gravity, explaining the motion of the planets, and inventing calculus. But well before Newton’s Principia, it was Johannes Kepler who first suggested the idea of a force from the sun driving the motion of the planets, Robert Hooke who first suggested a principle of universal gravity, Christiaan Huygens who showed that circular motion generates a centrifugal force, many who used Huygens’s law to derive the now-familiar form of gravity, Giovanni Borelli who explained the elliptical motion of Jupiter’s moons using gravitational forces, John Wallis and others who created the differential mathematics Newton used, and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus in the form we use today.

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Smith analyzes competing theories of planetary motion and ends with a deep bow to Newton, whose theory of gravity he describes as “the greatest discovery that ever was made by man.” (Newton worship was all the rage at the time. For a taste, see the wonderfully titled Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies.) The complete works of Isaac Newton (abridged), 1739 The idea of an underlying force that can explain complex behaviors, as gravity explained the motion of planets and tides, fascinated Smith. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) proposes an underlying force that explains how humans behave.

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And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water. Which will give all of us the tools to become the initiators, not the victims, of innovative surprise. Along the way, you will learn how chickens saved millions of lives, what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, and where Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs got their ideas. I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott
Published 14 May 2018

This system, called the “Trial of the Pyx,” was designed to prevent fraud at the Royal Mint, where English money was manufactured. It is fascinating precisely because it failed: it missed anomalies left and right, for centuries on end, playing an important yet underappreciated role in an economic crisis that caused widespread suffering and anger. And in 1696, the person at the center of it all was Isaac Newton. Yes, that Isaac Newton—inventor of calculus, explainer of gravity, and the man immortalized in Alexander Pope’s famous couplet: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.” In 1696, Newton was a 54-year-old scientific rock star, with a professorship at Cambridge guaranteed for life.

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No doubt her great-grandfather the admiral would have been proud. Through her efforts to bring people and machines a bit closer together through language, Grace Hopper played an enormous role in inventing the modern world. 5 THE GENIUS AT THE ROYAL MINT Real-time monitoring, from sports to policing to financial fraud: what Isaac Newton’s worst mathematical mistake can teach you about the search for anomalies in massive data sets. IF YOU’RE AN NFL fan, and you live outside a narrow strip of land from mid-Connecticut to Maine, then you probably view the New England Patriots—the most successful football team of the last 15 years—with a mix of peevishness and suspicion.

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A late-seventeenth-century crisis in the English economy, in which the Mint played a subtle but fundamental role. 2. The Great Recoinage of 1696, a drastic step in English monetary policy designed to stanch the crisis, and which Newton had to rescue from disaster. 3. The importance of statistical variability in detecting anomalies—the subject of the worst mathematical mistake that Newton ever made. Isaac Newton’s Second Career Newton arrived at the Royal Mint in 1696 in the middle of a full-fledged currency crisis, one that threatened to bring England’s economy grinding to a halt. To appreciate Newton’s experience at the Mint, you have to understand the roots of that crisis. The problem was this: by 1696, English money had been disappearing from circulation for at least three decades.

Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability With Solutions
by Frederick Mosteller
Published 15 May 1965

Isaac Newlon Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least I six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled What is the answer? Solution for Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Yes, Samuel Pepys wrote Isaac Newton a long, complicated letter about a wager he planned to make. To decide which option was the favorable one, Pepys needed the answer to the above question. You may wish to read the correspondence in American Statistician, Vol. 14, No.4, Oct., 1960, 33 pp. 27-30, "Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, and Probability," discussion by Emil D. ScheIl in "Questions and Answers," edited by Ernest Rubin; and further comment in the issue of Feb., 1961, Vol. 15, No.

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Craps An experiment in personal taste for money Silent cooperation Quo vadis? . The prisoner's dilemma 14. Collecting coupons, including Euler's approximation for harmonic sums 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Twin knights . An even split at coin tossing, including Stirling's approximation Isaac Newton helps Samuel Pepys The three-cornered duel Should you sample with or without replacement? . The ballot box Ties in matching pennies The unfair subway Lengths of random chords The hurried duelers. Catching the cautious counterfeiter Catching the greedy counterfeiter, including the Poisson distribution.

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(b) Replace 8 by 2B in the above problem. Now what is the chance that they meet? 18. An Even Split at Coin Tossing When 100 coins are tossed, what is the probability that exactly 50 are heads? -According to Arthurian legend, they were so evenly matched that on another occasion they slew each other. 5 19. Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least 1 six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled. What is the answer? 20. The Three-Cornered Duel A, B, and C are to fight a three-cornered pistol duel.

Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics
by David Berlinski
Published 2 Jan 2005

For a very long time, the Elements was known to every educated man and woman, so much so that when, seven centuries after Euclid’s death, a philosopher addressing a gathering of Roman intellectuals asked slyly “how to construct an equilateral triangle given a straight line,” the company at once caught the reference to the very first proposition of the Elements, and with the satisfaction of men congratulating one another for being well read, broke into Greek in order to comment on the masterpiece that had formed their character. Warm throaty chuckles all around. When, in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton completed his majestic Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and so created the first and the greatest of physical theories, he chose to express his thoughts in the language of Euclidean geometry, covering up as many traces of his own mathematical inventions as he could, so great was Euclid’s authority still.

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If this is so, the universe must be filled either with material objects or with structures capable of placing material objects in contact with one another. Such are the Cartesian vortices. In Descartes’ view, it is the various vortices, whose effects resemble on a grand scale the spiral sweep of bathwater swirling an errant bar of soap drainward, that brings about the required contact. Isaac Newton demolished Cartesian physics with all the immense power of his genius. He did nothing to assuage the Cartesian scruple about action at a distance, and having with a snort of derision dismissed the Cartesian vortices, he replaced them with the force of universal gravitation, which acts at a distance and throughout the whole of space.

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Many mathematicians had a hand in the development of the calculus—Gilles Personne de Roberval, Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Barrow, Bonaventura Cavalieri, John Wallis—and every one has acquired a contemporary scholar willing to insist that his boy had seen it all along; but it is Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton who are the most closely associated with the pause between heartbeats when everything changed. It is the second half of the seventeenth century. Shall we say roughly 1680 or so? Time has long since promoted both Newton and Leibniz into the pantheon of the great explorers. Like two immense polar bears, they remain forever frozen on the tundra of time.

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
by John Gribbin
Published 1 Mar 2012

Chapter Two Physics before Schrödinger The physics that Schrödinger learned as an undergraduate rested, like a tripod, on three legs: the understanding of mechanics developed by Isaac Newton; the understanding of electromagnetism developed by James Clerk Maxwell; and the understanding of thermodynamics to which Ludwig Boltzmann was a major contributor. He was taught nothing about the new ideas of Albert Einstein, whose special theory of relativity was only published in 1905, and very little about Max Planck’s investigation of electromagnetic radiation, published in 1900, which came to be seen as the birth of quantum theory. For our purposes, physics before Schrödinger means physics before 1900. And it begins with Isaac Newton. Newton and the world of particles Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely regarded as the founder of modern science.

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(trans.), Collected Papers on Wave Mechanics (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1928) van der Waerden, B. L. (ed.), Sources of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1968) Weber, Robert, Pioneers of Science, 2nd edn (Bristol: Adam Hilger/Institute of Physics, 1988) Westfall, Richard, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); a shorter version of this book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993 under the title The Life of Isaac Newton Wheeler, John, and Wojciech Zurek (eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Woolf, Harry (ed.), Some Strangeness in the Proportion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1980) Zeilinger, Anton, Dance of the Photons (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010) Index action at a distance Aharonov, Yakir Aigentler, Henriette von Alpbach American Philosophical Society Anderson, Carl Annalen der Physik Annales de physique anti-particles Arosa Arzberger, Hans Arzberger, Rhoda (née Bauer, aunt) Aspect, Alain atoms: Bohr model; Boltzmann’s work; concept; Copenhagen Interpretation; decoherence; Einstein’s work; entanglement experiments; “green pamphlet”; Mach’s view; Maxwell’s work; nuclear model; Planck’s work; Poincaré’s work; quantum chemistry; quantum computing; quantum physics; quantum spin of electron; quantum teleportation experiments; Rutherford’s work; Schrödinger’s work; structure Austria: Anschluss (1938); army; First World War and aftermath; International Atomic Energy Agency representation; Nazism; religion; Schrödinger’s flight from; Schrödinger’s return to; Second World War aftermath Austria-Hungary Austrian Empire Austrian Physical Society Baird, John Logie Ballot, Christoph Buys Bamberger, Emily (Minnie, née Bauer, aunt) Bamberger, Helga (cousin) Bamberger, Max Bär, Richard Bauer, Alexander (grandfather) Bauer, Alexander (great-grandfather) Bauer, Emily (Minnie, aunt), see Bamberger Bauer, Emily (Minnie, née Russell, grandmother) Bauer, Friedrich (Fritz) Bauer, Georgie, see Schrödinger Bauer, Johanna (Hansi), see Bohm Bauer, Josepha (née Wittmann-Denglass, great-grandmother) Bauer, Rhoda (aunt), see Arzberger BBC Becquerel, Henri Bell, John Bell’s inequality Bennett, Charles Berlin: Academy of Sciences; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry; Schrödinger’s departure; Schrödinger’s professorship; Schrödinger’s work; University of Bernstein, Jeremy Bertel, Annemarie (Anny), see Schrödinger Besso, Michele birds, vision Bitbol, Michel Blackett, Patrick Blair, Linda Bloch, Felix Bohm, David Bohm, Franz Bohm, Johanna (Hansi, née Bauer): escape from Austria to London; escape from Germany to London; marriage; memories of Schrödinger; pregnancy; relationship with Schrödinger; in Vienna Bohr, Niels: on collapse of wave function; on complementarity; Copenhagen Institute; Copenhagen Interpretation; Einstein’s views of his work; Festival; honours; influence; “Light and Life” lecture; model of the atom; Nobel Prize; quantization rules; relationship with Schrödinger; Schrödinger’s views of his work; work with Heisenberg Boltzmann, Ludwig: background; career; depression; education; on entropy; influence on Schrödinger; on international nature of physics; marriage; relationship with Mach; research; statistical approach; Stefan–Boltzmann Law of black body radiation; suicide; work on atoms; work on thermodynamics Born, Max: background and education; in Cambridge; career; on chance and probability; on Copenhagen school; on Dirac’s work; Edinburgh professorship; in Göttingen; Heisenberg’s studies; in Italy; matrix mechanics; Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance; Nobel controversy; Nobel Prize; on quantum mechanics; quantum revolution; relationship with Schrödinger; retirement; sacked under Nazis; Schrödinger’s response to his work; statistics; on von Neumann’s work; work on wave function Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose–Einstein statistics bosons Bragg, Lawrence Bragg, William Braunizer, Andreas (grandson) Braunizer, Arnulf Braunizer, Ruth (née March, daughter): in Belgium; birth; birth of son; care of Arthur; in Dublin; in Graz; half-sisters; in Innsbruck; marriage; in Oxford; pregnancy; relationship with Anny; relationship with father; relationship with mother Brecht, Bertolt Breslau Bristol University Brown, Robert Browne, Monsignor Paddy Brownian motion Bunsen, Robert Cahill & Company California: Institute of Technology; University of Cambridge: Born in; Cavendish Laboratory; Heisenberg’s lectures; Maxwell at; Newton at; Philosophical Society; Schrödinger’s visits; Tarner Lectures Cambridge University Press (CUP) “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”

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Our special thanks go to the following people who and places that helped us, over the years, in our search for Schrödinger: Michel Bitbol; Dominic Byrne; John Cramer; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Einstein Archive, Princeton; Johns Hopkins University Archive; Sir William McCrea; Oxford University Archive; Rudolf Peierls; Terry Rudolph; Schrödinger Archive, Alpbach; Schrödinger Archive, Vienna; Christine Sutton; University of Berlin Archive; University of Wisconsin Archive; Vienna University Archive. Introduction It’s Not Rocket Science Rocket science is the purest expression of the laws of physics spelled out by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, often referred to as “classical” science. Newton explained that any object stays still or moves in a straight line at constant speed unless it is affected by an outside force, such as gravity. He taught us that if you push something it pushes back—action and reaction are equal and opposite, as when a rifle kicks back against your shoulder while the bullet flies off in the opposite direction.

Longitude
by Dava Sobel
Published 1 Jan 1995

Seafaring men such as Captain William Bligh of the Bounty and the great circumnavigator Captain James Cook, who made three long voyages of exploration and experimentation before his violent death in Hawaii, took the more promising methods to sea to test their accuracy and practicability. Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christiaan Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help. Palatial observatories were founded at Paris, London, and Berlin for the express purpose of determining longitude by the heavens. Meanwhile, lesser minds devised schemes that depended on the yelps of wounded dogs, or the cannon blasts of signal ships strategically anchored—somehow—on the open ocean.

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Flamsteed took up residence the following May (in a building still called Flamsteed House today) and collected enough instruments to get to work in earnest by October. He toiled at his task for more than four decades. The excellent star catalog he compiled was published posthumously in 1725. By then, Sir Isaac Newton had begun to subdue the confusion over the moon’s motion with his theory of gravitation. This progress bolstered the dream that the heavens would one day reveal longitude. Meanwhile, far from the hilltop haunts of astronomers, craftsmen and clockmakers pursued an alternate path to a longitude solution.

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Admiral Shovell’s disastrous multishipwreck on the Scilly Isles after the turn of the eighteenth century intensified the pressure to solve the longitude problem. Two infamous entrants into the fray in the aftermath of this accident were William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton, mathematicians and friends, who often engaged each other in wide-ranging discussions. Whiston had already succeeded his mentor, Isaac Newton, as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge—and then lost the post on account of his unorthodox religious views, such as his natural explanation for Noah’s flood. Ditton served as master of the mathematics school at Christ’s Hospital, London. In a long afternoon of pleasant conversation, this pair hit on a scheme for solving the longitude problem.

A Second Chance
by Jodi Taylor
Published 31 Dec 2012

A Second Chance A novel by Jodi Taylor Warning: This product contains nuts. St Mary’s is back and nothing is going right for Max. Once again, it’s just one damned thing after another. The action jumps from an encounter with a mirror-stealing Isaac Newton to the bloody battlefield at Agincourt. Discover how a simple fact-finding assignment to witness the ancient and murderous cheese- rolling ceremony in Gloucester can result in CBC – concussion by cheese. The long awaited jump to Bronze Age Troy ends in personal catastrophe for Max and just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse – it’s back to the Cretaceous Period again to confront an old enemy who has nothing to lose.

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And what does he have to do with us?’ ‘Oh, you’ll love him, Max. He’s a really decent old buffer. He did a lot of the background science stuff when the Boss was setting up St Mary’s and now, finally, he’s retiring, and the Boss is giving him this jump as a going-away present. Apparently, his big ambition has always been to meet Isaac Newton – a big hero of his – and the Boss said yes. So, tomorrow, a quick dash to seventeenth-century Cambridge and a glimpse of the great man. Nothing to it.’ ‘Aha!’ I said, indulging in Olympic standard straw-clutching, ‘I’ve already done that period. In 1666 I was in Mauritius chasing dodos, so I can’t go.

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God bless my soul,’ over and over again, while his senses got to grips with the sights, sounds, and, especially, the smells of 17th-century Cambridge. He pulled himself together eventually. ‘Sorry, Max. That was unprofessional of me.’ ‘Not at all, Eddie. On my first jump I was turning cartwheels.’ We set off for Trinity College, where a young Fellow named Isaac Newton was, with luck, about to make an appearance. Cambridge was every bit as wet and dreary as I thought it would be. I shivered inside my cloak as we picked our way carefully along Trinity Street, easing our way through the crowds. The place was packed as students, townspeople, tradesmen, and livestock noisily shoved their way along the uneven cobbles.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

For all his extraordinary range of achievements (not only was he Christopher Wren’s surveyor and colleague during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, an early advocate of evolutionary theory, the first to see that organic matter was made up of the building blocks that he named “cells,” and probably England’s most gifted mathematician,16 able to turn his hand to everything from describing the catenary curve of the ideal arch to the best way to trim sails), he is frequently remembered today, as he was known during his lifetime, as the world’s best second fiddle. The shadow cast by Wren, by Boyle, and even by Isaac Newton, with whom Hooke engaged in a long-running and ultimately futile dispute over the authorship of the law of gravitational attraction, is unaccountable without considering the class difference between them. James Aubrey, the seventeenth-century memoirist, paid Hooke something of a backhanded compliment when he called him “the best Mechanick this day in the world.”17 When the informal assembly at Oxford whose meetings were generally led by the clergyman John Wilkins was chartered, two years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, each Fellow was explicitly to be a “Gentleman, free, and unconfin’d.”18 Hooke’s need to make a living disqualified him from fellowship, though his talent made him indispensable.

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The two evidently hit it off, and Papin joined Boyle as his secretary, though a better term would have been “experimental assistant.” While Papin was no Hooke (this is scarcely an insult: by 1675, Hooke had explained the twinkling of stars, described the earth’s elliptical orbit, rebuilt the fire-destroyed Royal College of Physicians, disputed with Sir Isaac Newton over the discovery of the diffraction of light, and invented the anemometer, and he still had twenty productive years in front of him), he did excel at both experimental design and mechanical gadgetry. Most famously, in 1681 he invented a steam digester, or “machine for softening bones” as he described it, which was essentially a pressure cooker designed to clean bones rapidly for medical study.

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Bad luck for the universities, good luck for the nation. Only decades after a tidal wave of scientific knowledge started washing over Britain—the first English translation of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences was published in the 1660s, nearly seventy years before an English edition of the Principia of Isaac Newton (Latin edition, 1687)—some of the nation’s most ambitious and practical young were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.

The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Published 15 Jan 2008

Entretiens sur la Nature, les Sciences, les Métamorhphoses de la Terre et du Ciel, l’Humanité, l’Ame, et la Vie eternelle. That certainly covered it. ♣ What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this-that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind…that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton…Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if indeed it be made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense-the image of the Creator-there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system’ (23 March 1801, Letters, Vol. 2, p.709).

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This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it. The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely close-cropped hair, that still dominates the stone-flagged entrance hall to the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. As Wordsworth originally put it, he could see, a few yards from his bedroom window, over the brick wall of St John’s College, The Antechapel, where the Statue stood Of Newton, with his Prism and silent Face.

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This was a tantalising prospect for both of them. Davy had one further scientific seduction to offer. He confided to Jane that the Prince Regent was about to confer a knighthood upon him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage to Jane Apreece was at last accepted. He reacted with genuine rapture. T have passed a night sleepless from excess of happiness. It seems to me as if I began to live only a few hours ago…The great future object of my life will be your happiness…My happiness will be entirely in your will.’20 Congratulations were now in order, and Sir Joseph Banks was pleased and rather amused that one of his young scientific protégés had made such a fine-and wealthy-match: ‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves…It will give to Science a new kind of eclat; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’21 Banks evidently teased the bridegroom in a worldly way.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

It seemed finished—in every edition. It has no equivalent in any other language. Even so, the experts responsible for the third edition (“in Eighteen Volumes, Greatly Improved”), a full century after Isaac Newton’s Principia, could not bring themselves to endorse his, or any, theory of gravity, or gravitation. “There have been great disputes,” the Britannica stated. Many eminent philosophers, and among the rest Sir Isaac Newton himself, have considered it as the first of all second causes; an incorporeal or spiritual substance, which never can be perceived any other way than by its effects; an universal property of matter, &c.

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Yaunde language YouTube ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. His previous books include Chaos and Genius, both Pulitzer Prize finalists and National Book Award nominees. His last book, Isaac Newton, was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. They have been translated into more than twenty languages. His Web site is at www.around.com. ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 4.1 Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 6.1 The New York Times Archive/Redux 7.1 Copyright Robert Lord 7.2 Reprinted with permission from Journal Franklin Institute, vol. 262, E.

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A few engineers, especially in the telephone labs, began speaking of information. They used the word in a way suggesting something technical: quantity of information, or measure of information. Shannon adopted this usage. For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science
by James Poskett
Published 22 Mar 2022

For the first time, scientific thinkers in sixteenth-century Europe started to challenge ancient wisdom. Copernicus was followed by other pioneers of what is often called the ‘scientific revolution’ – the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed the moons of Jupiter in 1609, and the English mathematician Isaac Newton, who set out the laws of motion in 1687. Most historians would then tell you that this pattern continued for the next 400 years. The history of modern science, as traditionally told, is a story focused almost exclusively on men like Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century British naturalist who advanced the theory of evolution by natural selection, and Albert Einstein, the twentieth-century German physicist who proposed the theory of special relativity.

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In Italy, Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter, whilst in England, Robert Boyle first described the behaviour of gases. In France, René Descartes developed a new way of doing geometry, whilst in Holland, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed bacteria under a microscope. Typically, this story culminates with the work of Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician who set out the laws of motion in 1687.7 Historians have long argued over the nature and causes of the scientific revolution. Some see this as a period of intellectual advance, one in which a few lone geniuses made new observations and challenged medieval superstition.

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Over the next 200 years, European empires began to expand more and more aggressively, particularly in Asia and Africa. This, coupled with the gradual weakening of the Ottomans, the Songhay, the Ming, and the Mughals, brought about the next great transformation in the history of science. The Silk Road couldn’t go on forever. Part Two Empire and Enlightenment, c. 1650–1800 3.Newton’s Slaves Isaac Newton invested in the slave trade. In the early eighteenth century, Newton – the famous English mathematician – purchased over £20,000 of shares in the South Sea Company. This was an incredible sum of money, equivalent to well over £2 million today. The South Sea Company had been established in 1711 to help raise funds to pay off the British national debt, which was soaring following years of expensive wars with France and Spain.

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time
by Joseph Mazur
Published 20 Apr 2020

Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 87. 9. John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 108, 104. 10. Stephen D. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 381–419. 11. Isaac Newton to Robert Bentley, December 10, 1692, 189.R.4.47, ff. 4A–5, Trinity College Library, Cambridge. 12. Sir Isaac Newton, Newton’s System of the World, translated by Andrew Motte and edited by N. W. Chittenden (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1850), 486. 13. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 329. 14.

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The earth might seem different now in looks, vegetation, animal population, coastlines, and terrain, but, ignoring those slow changes in appearance, it has always worked in the same way that it works now. Many cultures claimed starting times for time. For the Mayans, it was August 13, 3114 BC, as translated in Gregorian calendar dating. In the seventeenth century, the impression was that the universe is infinite in size and therefore time must also be infinite. Isaac Newton certainly believed that the universe is infinite. Lacking any historical records dating back further than the Trojan War or the great pyramids, many intelligent thinkers of Newton’s generation believed that—if not the universe—then at least the earth must have been formed recently. It’s difficult to know Newton’s religious belief; some biographers say that he was a heretic and that he surely did not believe that God recently created the planet we live on.10 To him, the earth was formed by an accident of gravity and it just happened to fall into a particular spin and orbit giving us, roughly, a 365-day year.

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An asteroid could hit it at any time. With the world being so much older, we can feel that it has survived for such an extraordinarily long time without too many overwhelming consequences that the chances of surviving further are quite certain, if we treat it wisely, and don’t blow it up ourselves. Isaac Newton felt that true mathematical time was the mover of everything from stars to humans. To him it was some continuously flowing, enigmatic, forward-direction driver, an invisible river that propels everything to happen in lockstep with the myriad actions and events of the universe. He believed that, somehow, we can measure that mathematical time through observations of motion, as if the mysterious driver could never be known but its consequences could be measured.

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Mar 2024

If we can get over our frustration that these traditional knowledge workers enjoyed privileges that we don’t have access to, we might find in their experience the foundations for a conception of productivity that makes our harder jobs more manageable. Once you start looking for these McPhee-style slower professional habits among traditional knowledge workers, it’s easy to find a variety of examples. Consider Isaac Newton working through the details of calculus in the countryside north of Cambridge University, or a sculptor named Anna Rubincam, who documented in a beautifully edited video posted online how she plies her craft in a utilitarian studio in South London, the doors thrown open to a quiet tree-lined patio beyond.

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Before diving into these specifics, however, I want to reassure you that slow productivity doesn’t ask that you extinguish ambition. Humans derive great satisfaction from being good at what they do and producing useful things. This philosophy can be understood as providing a more sustainable path toward these achievements. Few people know, for example, how long it actually took Isaac Newton to develop all the ideas contained in his masterwork, the Principia (over twenty years). They just know that his book, once published, changed science forever. The value of his ideas lives on, while the lazy pace at which they were produced was soon forgotten. Slow productivity supports legacy-building accomplishments but allows them to unfold at a more human speed.

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He then landed a position as a visiting research professor at Oxford, which simplified his efforts to focus. (These appointments, by design, have few obligations beyond thinking deeply on hard problems.) Finally, in 1993, eight years after he began his quest, Wiles presented his completed proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture in a series of lectures at the Isaac Newton Institute at Cambridge. For his final lecture, members of the media, tipped off by conference attendees about what was coming, filled the back of the room. When he got to the end of his proof, Wiles quipped, “I think I’ll stop here.” Then the camera flashes began. * * * — Assuming you’re not a tenured mathematics professor, the specific actions Andrew Wiles took to simplify his workload are likely not that relevant.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
by David Bodanis
Published 25 May 2009

The fluently written article “Newton and the Eötvös Experiment” by Curtis Wilson, in his collected works Astronomy from Kepler to Newton: Historical Studies, (London: Variorum Reprints, 1989), is especially good on the subtleties Newton still had to work through. Chapter five of Westfall’s Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) further examines Newton’s actual accomplishments during the plague years in Lincolnshire; see also The “Annus Mirabilis” of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666-1966, ed. Robert Palter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). 86 They would learn what was on offer . . . : What I like about Veblen is that he concentrates on a particular so- notes ciointellectual cusp—the intersection of religion with science—which is liable to be especially laden with meaning.

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There are accounts of Knut Haukelid and a team of fellow young Norwegians, forced to attack their own countrymen to avert a greater Nazi evil; Cecilia Payne, an Englishwoman who finds her career destroyed after daring to glimpse the sun’s fate in the year A.D. 6 billion; and a nineteen-year-old Brahmin, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovers something even more fearful, out in the beating heat of the Arabian Sea in midsummer. Through all their stories—as well as highlights from those of Isaac Newton, Werner Heisenberg, and other researchers—the meaning of each part of the equation becomes clear. P A R T Birth 1 Bern Patent Office, 1905 1 E=mc From THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME I: 13 April 1901 Professor Wilhelm Ostwald University of Leipzig Leipzig, Germany Esteemed Herr Professor!

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m Is for mass 4 E=mc For a long time the concept of “mass” had been like the concept of energy before Faraday and the other nineteenth-century scientists did their work. There were a lot of different material substances around—ice and rock and rusted metal—but it was not clear how they related to each other, if they did at all. What helped researchers believe that there had to be some grand links was that in the 1600s, Isaac Newton had shown that all the planets and moons and comets we see could be described as being cranked along inside an immense, God-created machine. The only problem was that this majestic vision seemed far away from the nittygritty of dusty, solid substances down here on earth. To find out if Newton’s vision really did apply on Earth—to find out, that is, if the separate types of substance around us really were interconnected in detail—it would take a person with a great sense of finicky precision; someone willing to spend time measuring even tiny shifts in weight or size.

Science...For Her!
by Megan Amram
Published 4 Nov 2014

As a self-professed strong, successful, educated, bloated (ugh!) woman, I am the perfect person to attack an institution of gender inequality in the sciences. And everyone loves when a woman gets on a soapbox! You can see up her skirt! Thank you very much for getting through my introduction. In the immortal words of Isaac Newton: “Please enjoy the rest of Megan Amram’s book. I’m Isaac Newton.” Now set your biological clocks to study time, because here we go! MEGAN AMRAM Writer / Alleged “Astronaut Killer” Letters to the Editor * * * Biology Introduction Reproduction How to Build a Biological Clock out of a Potato How Long Should You Wait?

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FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian. He is best remembered for the Galileo, a sex move where the man enters the woman as both are falling at an equal gravitational rate from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (This chapter’s bonus sex move!) * * * ISAAC NEWTON (classical mechanics/gravitation) Sir Isaac Newton, an all-around science genius, was alive from 1643 to 1726, which means that his lifetime spanned the year 1690, the ultimate 69. By all accounts, he spent the year 1690 giving oral pleasure to several British babes at once. He is famous for the three laws of sex, including: a penis in motion tends to stay in motion.

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Make sure that your wrong shade of foundation doesn’t turn into the right shade of blackface! Laws of Physics . . . Jude Laws of Physics! I’m Talkin’ Hotties of Physics! ;) * * * There are laws for physics, just like there are laws for how many carbs you’re supposed to eat. First law of both physics and carbs is “EAT NO CARBS.” FIG. 3.4 Sir Isaac Newton (9 body, 4 face) invented Three Laws of Physics. But, hey, laws, shmaws. Physics should be done by following the heart. Here are some of the most eligible bachelors of physicsdom! (Dead people count as bachelors.) FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian.

Wonders of the Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen
Published 12 Jul 2011

The studies of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, and some of the later true greats of physics – Huygens, Hooke and Newton – were all fuelled by the desire to build better lenses for microscopes and telescopes to enable them to explore the Universe on every scale, and to make great scientific discoveries and advances in the basic science itself. YOUNG’S DOUBLE-SLIT EXPERIMENT By the end of the seventeenth century, two competing theories for light had emerged – both of which are correct. On one side was Sir Isaac Newton, who believed that light was composed of particles – or ‘corpuscles’, as he called them in his Hypothesis of Light, published in 1675. On the other were Newton’s great scientific adversary, Robert Hooke, and the Dutch physicist and astronomer, Christiaan Huygens. The particle/wave debate rumbled on until the turn of the nineteenth century, with most physicists siding with Newton.

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Our old friend Ibn al-Haytham was one of the first to attempt to explain the physical basis of a rainbow in the tenth century. He described them as being produced by the ‘light from the Sun as it is reflected by a cloud before reaching the eye’. This isn’t too far from the truth. The basis of our modern understanding was delivered by Isaac Newton, who observed that white light is split into its component colours when passed through a glass prism. He correctly surmised that white light is made up of light of all colours, mixed together. The physics behind the production of a rainbow is essentially the same as that of the prism. Light from the Sun is a mixture of all colours, and water droplets in the sky act like tiny prisms, splitting up the sunlight again.

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We can measure the precise constituents of any and every visible star in the sky, because encoded in the light that rains down on Earth is the key to understanding what they are made of. It is all made possible by a particularly beautiful property of the elements. The tale of how we learnt to read the history of the stars in their light began with the work of Isaac Newton in 1670. In his ‘Theory of Colour’, Newton demonstrated that light is made up of a spectrum of colours, and that with nothing more complicated than a glass prism you can split the white light of the Sun into its colourful components. Almost 150 years later, the German scientist Joseph von Fraunhofer made a startling discovery about the solar spectrum whilst calibrating some of his state-of-the-art telescopic lenses and prisms.

Time Travel: A History
by James Gleick
Published 26 Sep 2016

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Copyright © 2016 by James Gleick All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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It was true then and it’s true now. Also no one knows what time is. Augustine stated this pseudoparadox in the fourth century and people have been quoting him, wittingly and unwittingly, ever since: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.*2 Isaac Newton said at the outset of the Principia that everyone knew what time was, but he proceeded to alter what everyone knew. Sean Carroll, a modern physicist, says (tongue in cheek), “Everybody knows what time is. It’s what you find out by looking at a clock.” He also says, “Time is the label we stick on different moments in the life of the world.”

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Dark Satanic Mills, but either way, before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress. Technological change had not always seemed like a one-way street. Now it did. The children of the Industrial Revolution witnessed vast transformations within their lifetimes. To the past there was no return. Surrounded by advancing machinery, Blake blamed, more than anyone else, Isaac Newton—the blinkered rationalist imposing his new order*5—but Newton himself had not believed in progress. He studied a great deal of history, mostly biblical, and if anything he supposed that his own era represented a fall from grace, a tattered remnant of past glories. When he invented vast swaths of new mathematics, he thought he was rediscovering secrets known to the ancients and later forgotten.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

Devil take the hindmost: A history of financial speculation. New York, NY: Plume. 5 See Thompson, E. (2007). The tulipmania: Fact or artifact? Public Choice, 130(1–2), 99–114. 6 Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html 7 Cutts, R. L. (1990). Power from the ground up: Japan's land bubble. The Harvard Business Review [online]. Available at https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land-bubble 8 Johnston, E. (2009). Lessons from when the bubble burst.

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Gorden (Ed.), The American business cycle: Continuity and change (pp. 39–122). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. The end of the Bretton Woods System. IMF [online]. Available at https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html Fama, E. F. (1970). Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417. Fama, E. F., and French, K. (1998). Value versus growth: The international evidence. Journal of Finance, 53(6), 1975–1999.

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Many high-profile celebrities and politicians became investors in the railway stocks. The Brontë sisters were among them, as were several leading thinkers and politicians such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Disraeli.14 They were in good company: King George I was an investor in the South Sea bubble (see Chancellor 2000, p. 73), as was Sir Isaac Newton, who reportedly lost £20,000, equivalent to about £3m in today's terms, when the market collapsed.15 This breadth of interest had led more people to believe in the ‘sure bet’ of the investment. In 1845 an author known as ‘successful operator’ wrote, ‘A short and sure guide to railroad speculation – a few plain rules how to speculate with safety and profit in railway shares’.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

And today those explorers, human and robot, employ as unerring guides on their voyages through the vastness of space the three laws of planetary motion that Kepler uncovered during a lifetime of personal travail and ecstatic discovery. The lifelong quest of Johannes Kepler, to understand the motions of the planets, to seek a harmony in the heavens, culminated thirty-six years after his death, in the work of Isaac Newton. Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. Even as a young man, Newton was impatient with insubstantial questions, such as whether light was “a substance or an accident,” or how gravitation could act over an intervening vacuum.

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v3.1 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: American Folklore Society: Excerpt from “Chukchee Tales” by Waldemar Borgoras from Journal of American Folklore, volume 41 (1928). Reprinted by permission of the American Folklore Society. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.: Quote by Isaac Newton (Optics), quote by Joseph Fourier (Analytic Theory of Heat), and A Question Put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.). Reprinted with permission from Great Books of the Western World. Copyright 1952 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Harvard University Press: Quote by Democritus of Abdera taken from Loeb Classical Library.

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Even this may be an accurate prophecy: If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us. *In 1938, a radio version, produced by Orson Welles, transposed the Martian invasion from England to the eastern United States, and frightened millions in war-jittery America into believing that the Martians were in fact attacking. †Isaac Newton had written “If the Theory of making Telescopes could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in perpetual tremor.… The only remedy is the most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser Clouds.”

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America
by Shawn Lawrence Otto
Published 10 Oct 2011

Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 20. White, M. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. 21. Anonymous. The World Will End in 2060, According to Newton. London Evening Standard, June 19, 2007. www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23401099-the-world-will-end-in-2060-according-to-newton.do. 22. White. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. 23. Ibid. 24. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 25.

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Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory. Gallup. com, November 19, 2004. www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Newton, I. Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts. Ed. H. McLachlan. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1950. Nicolay, J. G., & Hay, J. Abraham Lincoln: A History. Volume 2. New York: Cosimo Classics, 1917. Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

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After the civil wars ended and the Church of England was restored, many Puritans broke away. At first these “nonconformists” were again persecuted, but by the 1660s, they were tolerated. Because of their emphasis on individual liberty, their adherents included some of the greatest minds of the age, including Isaac Newton. Newton provides an example of how the idea of “science” had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word “scientist” was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called “natural philosophers”16 in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature.

How to Read a Book
by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren
Published 14 Jun 1972

Departments of the history of science have become respectable, and excellent scientists study and write about the history of their subject. An example is what has been called the “Newton industry.” At the present time, intensive and extensive research is being undertaken in many countries on the work and strange personality of Sir Isaac Newton. Half a dozen books have been recently published or announced. The reason is that scientists are more concerned than ever before about the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. Thus we have no hesitation in recommending that you try to read at least some of the great scientific classics of our tradition.

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Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) * Ethics 63. John Locke (1632-1704) * Letter Concerning Toleration * “Of Civil Government” (second treatise in Two Treatises on Government) * Essay Concerning Human Understanding Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699) Tragedies (esp. Andromache, Phaedra) 65. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) * Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy * Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) Discourse on Metaphysics New Essays Concerning Human Understanding Monadology 67. * *Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe 68. * *Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) A Tale of a Tub Journal to Stella * Gulliver’s Travels A Modest Proposal 69.

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However, it can perhaps go a certain way toward suggesting what such exercises would be, and how to get the most out of them. The Appendix contains brief exercises and test questions at each of the four levels of reading: At the First Level of Reading—Elementary Reading—the texts used are biographical notes about two of the authors included in Great Books of the Western World, John Stuart Mill and Sir Isaac Newton. At the Second Level of Reading—Inspectional Reading—the texts used are the tables of contents of two works included in Great Books of the Western World, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Darwin’s The Origin of Species. At the Third Level of Reading—Analytical Reading—the text used is How to Read a Book itself.

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

With Galileo, the scientific revolution, with experimental observations at its core, was definitively launched. The most important person in the history of dynamics was Isaac Newton. Newton, who was born the year after Galileo died, can be said to have invented, on his own, the science of dynamics. Along the way he also had to invent calculus, the branch of mathematics that describes motion and change. Galileo, 1564–1642 (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, E. Scott Barr Collection) Isaac Newton, 1643–1727 (Original engraving by unknown artist, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives) Physicists call the general study of motion mechanics.

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This is work that largely remains to be done, perhaps by those shocked and frustrated students as they take over from the older generation of scientists. I don’t think the students should have been shocked and frustrated. Any perusal of the history of science will show that the lack of a universally accepted definition of a central term is more common than not. Isaac Newton did not have a good definition of force, and in fact, was not happy about the concept since it seemed to require a kind of magical “action at a distance,” which was not allowed in mechanistic explanations of nature. While genetics is one of the largest and fastest growing fields of biology, geneticists still do not agree on precisely what the term gene refers to at the molecular level.

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Sadi Carnot was a physicist of the early nineteenth century who originated some of the key concepts of thermodynamics. Similarly, we are waiting for the right concepts and mathematics to be formulated to describe the many forms of complexity we see in nature. Accomplishing all of this will require something more like a modern Isaac Newton than a modern Carnot. Before the invention of calculus, Newton faced a conceptual problem similar to what we face today. In his biography of Newton, the science writer James Gleick describes it thus: “He was hampered by the chaos of language—words still vaguely defined and words not quite existing….

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 1 Jan 2000

It would still be resonating in 1821, when Britain officially established the gold standard; it was at the root of William Jennings Bryan's famous cry of defiance about crucifying labor on a cross of gold; it would come back to haunt Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s; and it would continue to stir controversy over expansionary versus contractionary economic policies throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Nor can we expect these kinds of disputes to vanish in the twenty-first century. At this point, an unexpected character appears on center stage: the most distinguished scientist of his age, and surely among the most influential scientists who ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton. In March 1696, just a few months into the turbulence of the Great Recoinage, Newton took on the post of Warden of the Mint at the invitation of his good friend Charles Montagu, Chancellor of the Exchequer. What could possibly have been the Chancellor's motivation in choosing Newton for such a task?

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Renewed fighting with France cut off the imports of gold for a while and made any further changes in the coinage unnecessary until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. At that point, the flood of gold imports gathered renewed strength. Over £4 million came in over the next three years. When the East India Company exported three million ounces of silver in 1717, the authorities once again turned hopefully to the wisdoms of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's "Representation to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Revenue" has become a famous document in the history of money. The reading of it is a tedious business, and the essence of the content is no more than simple arithmetic reciting the values of various weights of gold and silver in different countries.

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From the moment when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558 to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, a period of 136 years, the Mint had issued no more than £15 million in gold coinage, of which half was in guineas that appeared after 1663. During the 45 years from 1695 to 1740, the Mint produced £17 million gold coins. The story on silver is precisely the opposite: L20 million in the earlier period versus rl million in the latter.52 Isaac Newton is the anti-hero of this chapter of our story. Quite aside from his scientific achievements, he deserves heroic status as the first civil servant in history bold enough to employ the laws of supply and demand to make an economic forecast that would determine public policy. He is the anti-hero, nevertheless, because he inaugurated a tradition that will haunt future chapters of this history: economic forecasts by policymakers that turn out to be wrong!

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

. *** Simple arithmetic and patterns for looms are one thing, but if mathematicians wanted to do anything more, they did it by hand. The Holy Grail for scientists at the time was to solve differential equations. Astronomers who studied the skies needed differential equations to predict orbits. The invention of the steam engine would have gone a lot faster if James Watt had been able to solve differentials in Isaac Newton’s law of cooling. Newton stated that if an object, hot or cold, is in an area of constant temperature, then its rate of temperature change is proportional to the difference between the object’s temperature and the ambient temperature. Newton figured this out empirically with a thermometer. Watt ran experiments to figure out how fast steam would cool.

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All bubbles end, and usually for no good reason except an economically unsustainable business is, well, unsustainable. As soon as 70 HOW WE GOT HERE the stock starts dropping, if only because it has exhausted its buyers, the whole thing unwinds. People who had borrowed money sold the stock to pay off the loans, which sent the stock price lower, the upside in exact reverse. Gravity works. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton himself dropped 20,000 pounds faster than an apple falls from a tree. The South Sea bubble is a great story, especially in relation to the Internet Bubble of 1999-2000, when shares of Priceline.com, which sold discount tickets on airlines such as Delta Airlines, were worth more than the airline companies themselves.

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More gold meant the money supply could increase as more of this fiduciary money was created. It wasn’t a bad system, money supply had to come from somewhere. Using gold as a store of wealth was already a sleight of hand, money only fractionally backed by gold was a sleight of a sleight. So what. But then someone messed it all up. *** Sir Isaac Newton had leveraged his planetary dreaming into a real job, as Master of the Mint. In 1717, the Newt decided that the Guinea would represent 129.4 grains of gold. Put another way, an ounce of gold was worth 4 pounds, 4 shillings and 11½ pence. You can tell Sir Isaac was a scientist, if he was an engineer he would have rounded it down to 4 pounds per ounce and called it a day.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything
by Michio Kaku
Published 5 Apr 2021

But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo’s and Kepler’s unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens. Newton’s Theory of Forces Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, “It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.” In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything—that is, the theory that described all motion.

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A blazing comet sailed over London. Everyone, from kings and queens to beggars, was buzzing with the news. Where did it come from? Where was it going? What did it portend? One man who took an interest in this comet was astronomer Edmond Halley. He took a trip to Cambridge to meet the famous Isaac Newton, already well-known for his theory of light. (By shining sunlight through a glass prism, Newton showed that white light separated into all the colors of the rainbow, thereby demonstrating that white light is actually a composite color. He also invented a new type of telescope that used reflecting mirrors rather than lenses.)

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It makes no mention of the Standard Model, because it lacks matter fields. Also, it is not clear if the scattering of multiloops in this formalism is truly finite. There is speculation that the collision between two loops yields divergent results. Chapter 1: Unification—The Ancient Dream “It is with Isaac Newton”: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 11. So the equations of Newton: Because Newton’s Principia was written in a purely geometric fashion, it is clear that Newton was aware of the power of symmetry. It is also clear that he exploited the power of symmetry intuitively to calculate the motion of the planets.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

Very quickly it became so valuable that it was preserved in the face of even the blatant contraventions alleged by Hooke (who denounced Oldenburg as a spy, selling English secrets to the philosopher of Louis XIV, Christiaan Huygens). And the resolutions, too, of some of the most important of those disputes hung on the management of the archives that had been created by the Society’s reading practices. The greatest exponent of such management was to be Isaac Newton. isaac newton and the rejection of perusal Newton was, of course, the dominant figure to emerge in English natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His emergence took shape through repeated episodes of engagement with the perusalregistrationcirculation sequence. The first of these spanned the period from his initial introduction to the Royal Society in early 1672 to his declaration six years later that he was withdrawing and ceasing all philosophical correspondence.

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It was a university enterprise, devoted to explaining routine natural processes by means of an Aristotelian causal analysis. It was qualitative (the mathematical sciences occupied a lower disciplinary level), discursive, and disputational. Between the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, every aspect of this enterprise came under challenge, and most were overthrown. The claims of astronomers, mathematical practitioners, physicians, and natural magicians cast doubt not only on existing knowledge but also on the processes, personnel, and institutions that should be granted intellectual authority.

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That word, nowhere used in the original law of 1710, was copyright. Piracy flourished so scandalously in a city that saw the origins not only of capitalism, but also of the modern natural sciences and mechanical arts. The London of Atkyns and Henry Hills was also the London of Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton. The question of how this could possibly be – of how experimental science could be created in the same place, and sometimes in the same bookshops and printing houses, that saw piracy boom – is the subject of the next chapter. For now, however, it is important to insist that the origin of the concept in struggles of the book trade was never forgotten.

Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson
Published 28 Mar 2012

He became a mathematician by way of reputation, yet remained a courtier by way of life. “Leibniz’s tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” concluded E. T. Bell.4 Nonetheless, Leibniz made fundamental contributions to mathematics on several fronts. The development of a calculus of continuous functions he shared, controversially, with Isaac Newton, while in combinatorial analysis—the study of relations among discrete sets—Leibniz had the field to himself. Leibniz continued reasoning about reasoning where Hobbes left off. He attempted to formalize a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to definite rules.

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A fascination with formal systems and an insight into mechanical computation were combined in the person of Leibniz from the start. Encouraged by his initial steps toward symbolic logic—and by a working model of a calculating machine—Leibniz declared in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and Leibniz’s go-between with Isaac Newton, that “the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.”5 Leibniz thus helped set in motion the two great movements that led to the age of digital computers in which we live.

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The three-ton device “flawlessly performed its first major calculation,” and “affirmed that Babbage’s failures were ones of practical accomplishment, not of design.”22 Babbage associated with the famous and powerful of his day (“I . . . regularly attended his famous evening parties,” recalled Charles Darwin)23 and held Isaac Newton’s Lucasian chair at Cambridge University from 1828 to 1839. His most celebrated collaboration was with the mathematically gifted Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and protégée not only of Babbage but, to a lesser extent, of logician Augustus de Morgan, who was at the same time encouraging work on the Laws of Thought by George Boole.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 27 Feb 2012

Two thousand years ago, long before we understood how and why the planets moved the way they do in the night sky, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy could not restrain his reverence as he contemplated them. In the Almagest he writes: “When I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.” People no longer wax poetic about the orbital paths of planets. Isaac Newton solved that mystery in the seventeenth century with his universal law of gravitation. That Newton’s law is now taught in high school physics classes stands as a simple reminder that on the ever-advancing frontier of discovery, on Earth and in the heavens, the wonders of nature and of human creativity know no bounds, forcing us periodically to reassess what to call the most wondrous

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Whether you’re playing baseball, cricket, football, golf, jai alai, soccer, tennis, or water polo, a ball gets thrown, smacked, or kicked and then briefly becomes airborne before returning to Earth. Air resistance affects the trajectories of all these balls, but regardless of what set them in motion or where they might land, their basic path is described by a simple equation found in Isaac Newton’s Principia, his seminal 1687 book on motion and gravity. Some years later, Newton interpreted his discoveries for the Latin-literate lay reader in The System of the World, which includes a description of what would happen if you hurled stones horizontally at higher and higher speeds. Newton first notes the obvious: the stones would hit the ground farther and farther away from the release point, eventually landing beyond the horizon.

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They successfully installed two new instruments, repaired two others, replaced gyroscopes and batteries, added new thermal insulation to protect the most celebrated telescope since the era of Galileo. It was the crowning achievement of what can happen when the manned space program is in synchrony with the robotic program. Space Tweet #21 Space Shuttle Atlantis – final trip before retirement today. On board, a chunk from Isaac Newton’s apple tree. Cool May 14, 2010 2:22 AM By the way, Hubble is beloved not only because it has taken such great pictures, but because it’s been around a long time. No other space telescopes were designed to be serviced. You put them up; the coolant runs out after three years; the gyros go out after five; they drop in the Pacific after six.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

Conselice, Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End (New York: Springer, 2014), 30–32. 41. William Herschel, The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel, vol. 1 (London: Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, 1912), xxix–xxx. 42. Ethan Siegel, “When Did Isaac Newton Finally Fail?,” Forbes, May 20, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/#8c0137648e7e; Michael W. Begun, “Einstein’s Masterpiece,” New Atlantis, fall 2015, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/einsteins-masterpiece. 43. Ethan Siegel, “Happy Birthday to Urbain Le Verrier, Who Discovered Neptune with Math Alone,” Forbes, March 11, 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/11/happy-birthday-to-urbain-le-verrier-who-discovered-neptune-with-math-alone/#6674bcd7586d. 44.

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On average, it takes roughly twelve minutes for a signal from Mars to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light.7 If something is wrong, and a scientist on Earth spots and responds to the problem in a split second, another twelve minutes will pass for that command to reach Mars. That’s twenty-four minutes round trip, but it takes about six minutes for a spacecraft to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface. All we can do is load up the spacecraft with instructions ahead of time and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat. That’s where the peanuts come in. In the early 1960s, JPL was in charge of the unmanned Ranger missions, which were designed to study the Moon to pave the way for the Apollo astronauts. The Ranger spacecraft would be launched toward the Moon, take close-up photos of the lunar surface, and beam those images back to Earth before plummeting into the Moon.8 The first six missions ended in failure, leading critics to accuse JPL officials of adopting a cavalier “shoot-and-hope” approach.9 But a later mission succeeded when a JPL engineer happened to bring peanuts to the mission control room.

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But it was another composition—of a nonmusical kind—that would overshadow Herschel’s music career. Herschel was fascinated with math. Lacking a university education, he turned to books for answers. He devoured volumes on trigonometry, optics, mechanics—and my favorite, James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics. This was the eighteenth-century version of Astronomy for Dummies. He read books on how to construct telescopes and asked a local mirror-builder to teach him how to build one. Herschel began making telescopes, grinding mirrors for sixteen hours a day and making molds out of manure and straw.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Dec 2015

Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, vol. 1 (1802; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 7. Quoted in V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Morrow, 1998), 227. 8. Isaac Newton, Principia, General Scholium (1713). 9. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; repr., Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 479–80. 10. Ibid., 488; Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1693, in Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–3. 11. For more detailed analysis, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, chap. 3. 12.

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All are instances of the “political guardianship” that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a libertarian tradition that has deep roots—and, like Marx’s old mole, is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to peek through, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, seeking to bring about what seems to me at least to be a reasonable approximation to the common good. 4 | THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN? THE TITLE FOR this chapter is drawn from Hume’s observations about the man he called “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species,” Isaac Newton. In Hume’s judgment, Newton’s greatest achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.”

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And in a later discussion, “In my opinion there is just the same reason to conclude that the brain thinks, as that it is white, and soft.”51 Priestley criticizes Locke for being hesitant in putting forth his speculation about thinking matter, since the conclusion follows so directly from “the universally accepted rules of philosophizing such as are laid down by Sir Isaac Newton.” He urges that we abandon the methodological dualism that deters us from applying to thought and sensation the rules that we follow “in our inquiries into the causes of particular appearances in nature” and expresses his hope “that when this is plainly pointed out the inconsistency of our conduct cannot fail to strike us and be the means of inducing” philosophers to apply the same maxim to investigation of mental aspects of the world that they do in other domains—a hope that has yet to be realized, I think.52 Priestley clearly “wished the disappearance of solid matter to signal an end to matter-spirit dualism,” Thackray writes.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe
by Marcus Chown
Published 22 Apr 2019

Only in 1940 did the American geophysicist Chaim Leib Pekeris realize it was a consequence of the fact that the moon creates tides not only in the earth’s oceans but in its rocks as well (to be precise, the tides are caused by both the moon and the sun, with those of the moon being twice as big as those of the sun). As Isaac Newton first understood, tides are a distortion in the shape of the earth caused by the pull of the moon being stronger on parts of the earth closer to it. Imagine the ocean immediately beneath the moon. The pull on water at the surface is greater than the pull on water at the seabed. The difference causes the sea to bulge upwards towards the moon.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FALLING Though it does not look like it, the moon is perpetually plummeting towards the earth “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” —DOUGLAS ADAMS1 WHY DON’T SATELLITES FALL down? More than once I have been asked this question by schoolchildren. The answer, surprisingly, is that they are falling down—but they never reach the ground! The first person to realize this far-from-obvious fact was Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. He was of course not thinking about artificial satellites but rather the earth’s natural satellite: the moon. Newton wondered why the moon orbits the earth, and he came up with the following explanation. Imagine a cannon that fires a cannonball horizontally across the ground.

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A WONDERFUL THING IS A PIECE OF STRING The universe may have at least ten dimensions “Technically, you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn’t like them too much, but they’ve got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.” —EDWARD WITTEN ISAAC NEWTON WAS FIRST to realize that, at a fundamental level, all there is to the universe is particles of matter and the forces that bind them together. We now know of four fundamental forces, of which gravity and the electromagnetic force that glues together the atoms in your body and powers our electrical world are the most familiar.

Letters From an Astrophysicist
by Neil Degrasse Tyson
Published 7 Oct 2019

Since any two people in the world have a common ancestor—depending on how far back you look, the line we draw to establish family lineage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of as a human being, I don’t look to “relatives,” I look to all human beings. That is the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Joan of Arc and Gandhi, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. I don’t care if I am a descendent of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the brave or cowardly.

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I ranked the Bible No. 1, but my comment irked many a believer. A few years later, catching up with the comments in the thread, I posted a response. The list . . . 1.The Bible “ . . . to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself” 2.The System of the World by Isaac Newton “ . . . to learn that the universe is a knowable place.” 3.On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin “ . . . to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.” 4.Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift “ . . . to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.” 5.The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine “ . . . to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.” 6.The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith “ . . . to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.” 7.The Art of War by Sun Tzu “ . . . to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.” 8.The Prince by Machiavelli “ . . . to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”

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Six moons, including our Moon, are bigger than Pluto. Not only that, several objects in the outer solar system are almost the same size of Pluto (within a factor of two). So what matters more than “how many?” is “what are their various properties?” and “what features do they have in common?” And how about the question of when Isaac Newton was born? This too, does not have an unambiguous answer. According to his mother and all local records, he was born on December 25, 1642. But at the time, England (where Newton was born) used the Julian calendar. Today we use the Gregorian calendar (introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582), which is shifted by ten days from the Julian calendar, and not yet adopted in Protestant England in Newton’s time.

The confusion
by Neal Stephenson
Published 13 Apr 2004

Our President is the Marquis of Ravenscar, a very powerful Whig, and he has been assiduous in finding ways to harness the ingenuity of the Fellows of the Royal Society for practical ends. Some of these, I gad, have to do with money, revenue, banks, stocks, and other subjects that fascinate you. But I must confess I have fallen quite out of touch with such matters. Isaac Newton was elected to Parliament a year ago, in the wake of our Revolution. He had made a name for himself in Cambridge opposing the former King’s efforts to salt the University with Jesuits. He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica.

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He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica. He and your friend Fatio have become the closest of companions, and share lodgings here. POST-SCRIPT—FEB. 1690 After I wrote the above, but before I could post this, King William and Queen Mary prorogued and dissolved Parliament. There have been new elections and the Tories have won. Isaac Newton is no longer M.P. He divides his time between Cambridge, where he toils on Alchemy, and London, where he and Fatio are reading Treatise on Light by our friend and erstwhile dinner-companion Huygens. All of which is to say that I am now even more useless to you than I was a month ago; for I am in a failing Society linked to a Party that has lost power and that has no money, there being none in the kingdom to be had.

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And I will thank you to keep Daniel out of it as well.” Fatio had turned red. “The only thing I wish to snare is a clearer understanding of what has passed between you and Isaac.” “You want to know if you have a rival.” Fatio said nothing. “The answer is: you do not.” “That is well.” “You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.” Ireland 1690–1691 THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history.

The First Tycoon
by T.J. Stiles
Published 14 Aug 2009

Though WmC's report was made three years earlier, its truth regarding the events of 1845 and 1846 were clearly born out. For contemporary evidence of Drew's partnership with Newton in Hudson River steamboats, see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York and Erie Rail Road Company, September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, and Caleb F. Lindsley and George E. Cock v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, March 20, 1848, file 1848-#951A, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC (the latter referring to an incident in 1846); also entries for August 1846, pages 336–6, in vol. 2 of the William D. Murphy Account Books, NYHS. 19 Curtis Peck v.

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Daniel Drew, January 7, 1850, file PL-1850-P 3, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, January 31, 1848, file PL-1848-P 256, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC. 20 Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, June 27, 1848, file PL-1848-R, and Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, November 2, 1848, file PL-1848-R 2, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Medbery 312; Edmund Clarence Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange (New York: Stock Exchange Hstorical Company, 1905), 104. Interestingly, the court filings cited here make clear that manipulation of the road's traffic and its stock price were part of the initial investment plan. 21 Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1845.

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On the loss of the Independence, see AltaC, April 1, 1853, and a report from the San Francisco Whig, reprinted in the LT, May 13, 1853. 48 NYT, October 12, 1853; EP, quoted in the HC, October 17, 1853; RGD, NYC, 341:184. Drew was not new to transactions with the Erie Railroad. As early as February 10, 1842, he and Isaac Newton supplied a steamboat connection to the Erie's terminus at Piermont; see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York & Erie Rail Road Co., September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, NYCC. 49 LW Dictation. 50 CV v. ATC, January 12, 1854, file PL 1854-V9, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; NYH, December 2, 7, 8, 1853; NYTr, December 9, 1853. 51 NYH, January 6, 7, 1854. 52 NYT, January 17, 23, 1854; NYH, November 11, 18, 1853.

The Fabric of the Cosmos
by Brian Greene
Published 1 Jan 2003

Thus, while it is technically an overstatement, I will assume throughout that the error made in asserting that the laws treat past and future on equal footing is minimal—at least as far as explaining the puzzle of time’s arrow is concerned. 6. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Anchor, 1989). Chapter 2 1. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), vol. 1, p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 12. 5. Albert Einstein, in Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The Histories of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: Dover, 1993). 6. A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton, Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 27. 7. Ibid. 8.

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And since the angle associated with causally related events is always greater than 45 degrees, the time slices of an observer, who necessarily travels at less than light speed, cannot first encounter the effect and then later encounter the cause. To all observers, cause will precede effect. 12. The notion that causes precede their effects (see the preceding note) would, among other things, be challenged if influences could travel faster than the speed of light. 13. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), vol. 1, p. 634. 14. Because the gravitational pull of the earth differs from one location to another, a spatially extended, freely falling observer can still detect a residual gravitational influence.

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New York: Viking, 1997. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Gott, J. Richard. Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe. Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1997. Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage, 2000. Gribbin, John. Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Halliwell, J. J., J. Pérez-Mercader, and W. H. Zurek. Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 13–17, 20; Michael J. Sheehan, The International Politics of Space—Space Power and Politics series (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 2. 110.Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, 4th ed. (London, 1730), bk. 1, pt. 1, prop. viii, prob. 2; see p. 110 of the Project Gutenberg ebook at sirisaacnewton.info/writings/opticks-by-sir-isaac-newton (accessed Jan. 13, 2018). 111.Robert W. Duffner, The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), ix. 112.For more detail, see, e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Star Magic,” Natural History 104:9 (Sept. 1995), 18–20, digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6501 (accessed Jan. 14, 2018).

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And I told you, that the Theory, which I propounded, was evinced to me, not by inferring ’tis thus because not otherwise, that is, not by deducing it only from a confutation of contrary suppositions, but by deriving it from Experiments concluding positively and directly. The way therefore to examin it is, by considering, whether the Experiments which I propound do prove those parts of the Theory, to which they are applyed; or by prosecuting other Experiments which the Theory may suggest for its examination.” Isaac Newton, “A Serie’s of Quere’s propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be determin’d by Experiments, positively and directly concluding his new Theory of Light and Colours; and here recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they were generously imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the said Mr. Newtons of July 8. 1672,” Philosophical Transac.

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Although none of the seventeenth-century telescopes measured up to those of later centuries, and not everyone could master the knack of seeing through them, the telescope and its cousin the binocular nonetheless brimmed with potential, both astronomical and military. But the breadth of astronomical possibilities surfaced only gradually and incidentally. Passable wide-field astronomical telescopes barely existed until the second half of the century, by which time Isaac Newton’s nemesis, the talented British scientist Robert Hooke, would have good cause to speculate that “there may be yet invented several other helps for the eye, as much exceeding those already found, as those do the bare eye, such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets [italics in original].”

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

Ultimately, neglect of science and technology caused the Chinese to lose their edge. By the late fourteenth century, Europe had caught up. For warfare, Europeans developed and perfected the smooth-bore cannon. Rockets were relegated to firework displays.6 Wan Hu’s dreams of traveling to the stars were forgotten. They were given a firm theoretical basis in the work of Isaac Newton, the author of a theory of gravity and laws of motion that would be the basis for space travel centuries later. Newton’s 1687 masterwork, Principia, unified the terrestrial and celestial realms. Drop an apple and it falls in one second 3,600 times farther than the Moon curves in its orbit, both caused by the action of the Earth’s gravity.

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With no friction or air resistance, the only force operating is gravity.7 Fired at modest speed, the cannonball will land at the base of the mountain. As the initial speed is increased, the ball travels farther and farther before landing. Newton calculated the speed where the ball falls toward the Earth’s surface at the same rate as the Earth’s surface is “falling away” from it (Figure 5). Figure 5. In the thought experiment of Isaac Newton, a cannonball is launched horizontally from a mountain tall enough to be above the Earth’s atmosphere. As the velocity increases, the surface curves at the same rate the cannonball falls, creating a circular orbit. This is the concept of an orbit. Any projectile shot from Newton’s hypothetical cannon at 7.9 kilometers per second or 17,650 mph would remain a captive of the Earth’s gravity but would never hit the ground.

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Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”17 Forty-nine years after ripping Goddard, and a day after the launch of Apollo 11, the paper issued a brief correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”18 The apology was too late for Goddard, who died of throat cancer in 1945. Wernher von Braun Warfare and space exploration merged again in the 1940s.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

“Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature”: Nathanael Fairfax, “Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature, Both in Men and Brutes; Communicated by the Same,” Philosophical Transactions 1666–67, 2 (1666): 549–51. back in Woolsthorpe: Newton also spent some time at Cambridge during these plague years, where he did work as well. Information on Newton’s life and work can be found in these sources: George Smith, “Isaac Newton,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/newton/; V. Frederick Rickey, “Isaac Newton: Man, Myth, and Mathematics,” The College Mathematics Journal 18, no. 5 (1987): 362–89. “great tragedy of Science”: Tania Lombrozo, “Must Science Murder Its Darlings?” NPR 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/01/26/266784786/must-science-murder-its-darlings.

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According to the scholar Daniel Boorstin, “Before he was twenty-six, Leibniz had devised a program of legal reform for the Holy Roman Empire, had designed a calculating machine, and had developed a plan to divert Louis XIV from his attacks on the Rhineland by inducing him to build a Suez Canal.” In the words of Frederick the Great, Leibniz was “a whole academy in himself.” Similarly, Isaac Newton stitched together a whole host of phenomena—from how objects fall to the orbit of Mars—through his theory of gravitation. Around the same time, Gresham College, one of the oldest colleges in England, and devoted to providing public lectures on various topics, had a small faculty in areas such as astronomy, geometry, and music.

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He did not speculate about why thunder might have this effect on a woman, noting only, “And thus it hath been with this Gentlewoman from a Girl.” One gets the sense that while Fairfax wanted to eventually learn something from these observations and facts he recorded, the act of making the observations was itself enough, at least as a first step toward understanding. Around this same time, a young physicist named Isaac Newton was thinking about how objects move and how light works. While Newton was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, a plague began to sweep through the country. As a precaution, the university closed. So Newton spent the next couple of years primarily at home, back in Woolsthorpe in the countryside.

Day We Found the Universe
by Marcia Bartusiak
Published 6 Apr 2009

As both an amateur astronomer and a geodeist, a profession that took him to towering mountain sites, he had long been convinced that astronomy would best be served by taking its instruments to the highest elevations possible, where a telescope's resolution would improve immensely in the clear, more rarefied atmosphere. Isaac Newton first pointed this out in the eighteenth century. “For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual Tremor,” he wrote in his Opticks. “… The only remedy is a most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds.”

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Barnard in a notice to the Royal Astronomical Society. “… [Keeler] has a real artistic ability such as very few observers possess.” Keeler's real forte, however, was in using a spectroscope, which was a relatively recent addition to astronomy's instrumental arsenal. The scientific basis for it was established in the seventeenth century. A young Isaac Newton, sitting in a darkened room in 1666, let a small stream of sunlight enter through a hole in his window shutter. He then passed it through a triangular prism of glass. Beholding a rainbow of colors on the wall behind him, an enchanting phenomenon observed with pieces of glass since antiquity, Newton clearly demonstrated that white light was a mixture of many hues: On one end was a band of red, followed by orange, yellow, green, and blue, until it reached a deep violet on the other end.

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Over that time scholars only occasionally reflected on the possibility of a universe significantly bigger. In the sixteenth century, for example, Thomas Digges in England imagined the stars scattered throughout a boundless space, while in Italy Giordano Bruno presciently declared that “the center of the universe is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.” Even Isaac Newton had a good scientific reason to prefer a cosmos without end. If the universe had a border, gravity would gradually draw all its matter inward, and ultimately the universe would collapse. To keep the cosmos stable—immutable and immovable—required that the stars be spread infinitely outward in all directions.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology
by Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili
Published 14 Oct 2014

Two hydrogen nuclei have to be able to get very close in order to fuse; but the closer they get, the stronger the repulsive force between them becomes, as each carries a positive electric charge and “like” charges repel. In fact, for them to get close enough to fuse, the particles have to be able to get through the subatomic equivalent of a brick wall: an apparently impenetrable energy barrier. Classical physics*1—built upon Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, mechanics and gravity, which describe very well the everyday world of balls, springs, steam engines (and even planets)—would predict that this shouldn’t happen; particles should not be able to pass through walls and therefore the sun shouldn’t shine. But particles that obey the rules of quantum mechanics, such as atomic nuclei, have a neat trick up their sleeve: they can easily pass through such barriers via a process called “quantum tunneling.”

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One could argue over who was responsible for this extraordinarily productive shift in human thought; medieval Arab and Persian scholars, such as Alhazen and Avicenna, certainly played a role, and the trend was then taken up in the emerging scholarly institutions of Europe such as the universities of Paris and Oxford. But this way of describing the world probably bore its first great fruit in the University of Padua in Italy, where Galileo enshrined simple laws of motion in mathematical formulae. In the year he died, 1642, Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England, and went on to provide an extraordinarily successful mathematical description of how the motion of inanimate objects could be changed by forces, a system which is to this day referred to as Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s forces were initially rather mysterious notions, but over the following centuries they became increasingly identified with the concept of energy.

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Descartes exempted the human mind from his mechanistic view, leaving it with an immortal soul; but his philosophy did at least attempt to provide a scientific framework that accounted for life in terms of the physical laws that were being discovered to govern inanimate objects. The mechanistic biological approach was continued by a near-contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton’s: the physician William Harvey, who discovered that the heart was nothing more than a mechanical pump. A century later, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated that a respiring guinea pig consumes oxygen and generates carbon dioxide, just like the fire that provided the motive force of the new technology of steam engines.

The World According to Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 10 Mar 2020

But this should be far from obvious. To explore this further, I will introduce three concepts that are not always taught to students of physics, but which most certainly should be: universality, symmetry, and reductionism. UNIVERSALITY The first ‘universal’6 law of physics was discovered by Isaac Newton.7 Whether or not he saw an apple fall from a tree on his mother’s farm, triggering him to develop his law of gravitation, or what the mathematical formula articulating this law looks like, are not of importance here. The crucial point is that Newton realised that the force that pulls an apple to the ground has the same origin as the force that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth—that a simple mathematical relation can describe both processes equally well.

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And what if we now get rid of the physical walls of both boxes, and everything else in this imaginary universe, so that all that is left is nothingness? Is that nothingness still something? Does this empty space exist ready to be filled with matter, or to be contained within the confines of a box? Maybe I am just asking the same question in different ways, but only because it is by no means a trivial one. Isaac Newton believed that space has to exist in order for matter and energy to be contained within it and for events to take place within it. But space exists, he argued, only as an empty nothingness, independently of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of matter and energy within it. For Newton, space is the canvas on which reality is painted.

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These two statements sound contradictory … until you learn about Einsteinian relativity. Einstein proved that absolute space and absolute time do not exist as separate entities. But to appreciate why this notion is necessary, I need to introduce you to the first of his two theories of relativity. EINSTEIN’S SPECIAL THEORY Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion, debates about the nature of time were considered to be the domain of philosophy and metaphysics rather than proper science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all motion or change requires time to make any sense, time had to be included as a fundamental part of his mathematical description of the world.

The Scientist as Rebel
by Freeman Dyson
Published 1 Jan 2006

In the West, theory was unconstrained by new observations, and in the East, observations were unguided by theory. Then came the great awakening in the West, when Bacon and Descartes together led the way to the flowering of modern science. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the heyday of the scientific amateurs. During those two centuries, professional scientists like Isaac Newton were the exception and gentleman amateurs like his rival Gottfried Leibniz were the rule. Amateurs had the freedom to jump from one area of science to another and start new enterprises without waiting for official approval. But in the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of amateur leadership, science became increasingly professional.

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Random House, 2002. 3. The theme of amateur biology is explored further in my forthcoming book, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (University of Virginia Press, 2006). 17 A NEW NEWTON IT WAS A strange juxtaposition. A big metal box filled with the manuscripts of Isaac Newton, hidden by Newton during his lifetime and unread for two hundred years afterward, and a fat young man with red hair and khaki shorts, strutting on the stage at meetings of the British Union of Fascists. The big metal box was packed up by Newton in 1696, when he left Cambridge and moved to London.

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He quotes with approval Westfall’s judgment that The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a book written by Newton in his old age and published after his death, is “a work of colossal tedium.” Anyone who would like a more sympathetic and more detailed account of Newton’s religious studies, based on the Yahuda papers in Jerusalem, should read the book The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel.4 Manuel’s book is, so far as I know, the only important work about Newton that does not appear in Gleick’s bibliography. For several years after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Newton was deeply involved in national politics. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was a turning point in English constitutional history, as important for England as the revolution of 1776 was for America.

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe
by Paul Sen
Published 16 Mar 2021

But on the other hand, some sections of the public also grew wary of science because many of its practitioners, such as Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, publicly supported the radical politics of the French Revolution. He paid dearly for his views. In 1791, an angry mob burned down his house and laboratory. Moreover, England’s two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, offered no courses in subjects that resemble modern-day physics and engineering. Cambridge, being Isaac Newton’s alma mater, did rigorously train students in the mathematical principles that great scientist had discovered. But basking in Newton’s legacy, professors there saw no need to extend his work and were suspicious of novel mathematical techniques being developed abroad. In 1806, when one progressive scholar, Robert Woodhouse, urged the adoption of a European style of mathematics, he was condemned as unpatriotic in the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review.

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Intrigued, Bernoulli turned to mathematics for an explanation. Specifically, Bernoulli looked first at the one aspect of the physical world the mathematics of the day could describe, namely the way solid objects such as cannonballs and billiard balls move—the so-called principles of mechanics. These had been established by Isaac Newton in the 1680s and had become a sophisticated tool by the time Bernoulli was writing in the 1730s. Bernoulli applied these principles to fluids such as blood and water and showed that they predicted what he’d observed. Now known as Bernoulli’s principle, the idea can be extended beyond liquids to gases.

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Hilbert then allowed Noether to lecture in his name, thus frustrating the Göttingen Senate’s desire to prevent her from teaching. Noether worked in this way for four years without pay—her family covered her living expenses. The year Noether arrived in Göttingen, 1915, was the same year Einstein published his general theory of relativity, overturning Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Hilbert found the mathematical implications of Einstein’s work fascinating. In fact, one reason he had invited Noether to Göttingen was because she was an expert in the theory of invariants, a key technique Einstein had used in his work. Hilbert, in essence, asked Noether to assess the validity of Einstein’s mathematics.

A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking
Published 16 Aug 2011

Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, even more than his support for Copernicus, that was to be the genesis of modern physics. ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man. His relations with other academics were notorious, with most of his later life spent embroiled in heated disputes. Following publication of Principia Mathematica—surely the most influential book ever written in physics—Newton had risen rapidly into public prominence.

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v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright FOREWORD Chapter One Our Picture of the Universe Chapter Two Space and Time Chapter Three The Expanding Universe Chapter Four The Uncertainty Principle Chapter Five Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature Chapter Six Black Holes Chapter Seven Black Holes Ain’t So Black Chapter Eight The Origin and Fate of the Universe Chapter Nine The Arrow of Time Chapter Ten Wormholes and Time Travel Chapter Eleven The Unification of Physics Chapter Twelve Conclusion ALBERT EINSTEIN GALILEO GALILEI ISAAC NEWTON GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author FOREWORD I didn’t write a foreword to the original edition of A Brief History of Time. That was done by Carl Sagan. Instead, I wrote a short piece titled “Acknowledgments” in which I was advised to thank everyone. Some of the foundations that had given me support weren’t too pleased to have been mentioned, however, because it led to a great increase in applications.

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As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
by Steven Johnson
Published 26 Dec 2008

The History began with a stirring argument for why electricity was so interesting in the first place: Hitherto philosophy has been chiefly conversant about the more sensible properties of bodies; electricity, together with chemistry, and the doctrine of light and colours, seems to be giving us an inlet into their internal structure, on which all their sensible properties depend. By pursuing this new light, therefore, the bounds of natural science may possibly be extended, beyond what we can now form an idea of. New worlds may open to our view, and the glory of the great Sir Isaac Newton himself, and all his contemporaries, be eclipsed, by a new set of philosophers, in quite a new field of speculation. Could that great man revisit the earth, and view the experiments of the present race of electricians, he would be no less amazed than Roger Bacon, or Sir Francis, would have been at his.

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Priestley aimed to popularize not simply by helping ordinary readers understand the new science of electricity, but also by encouraging them to become scientists themselves. While he wanted to celebrate the electricians’ discoveries, he deliberately avoided establishing an aura of otherworldly genius around them: Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. . . . [T]he interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered; and . . . an opinion of the greater equality of mankind in point of genius would be of real service in the present age.

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Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on. . . . [S]o capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers. . . . The classic image of Franklin with his electrified kite, ingrained in the minds of countless American schoolchildren over the past two centuries, dates back to this paragraph from Priestley’s History. Franklin himself had only published a brief third-person account of his experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette, without specifying that he himself had performed it.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution
by Henry Schlesinger
Published 16 Mar 2010

Building his conclusions through experiment after experiment, he amassed a huge body of data in order to reach those proofs. In the words of the historian of science Park Benjamin, “…he, first of all men, systematically replaced the great doctrine of words by the great doctrine of works.” De Magnete marked the beginning of modern science, opening the door for Galileo and Isaac Newton. In particular, Newton took to experimentation with sometimes frightening gusto—at one point staring at the sun with one eye to study the afterimages, nearly blinding himself in the process. In another series of experiments, he inserted various instruments around his eye, including a bodkin (an ivory toothpick) as well as his finger to change the shape of his eyeball.

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Landed gentry, noblemen, and successful tradesmen with social ambitions who possessed the time and resources enthusiastically took to science, reading the details of the latest discoveries, supporting research, attending lectures, and even setting up small laboratories of their own to conduct experiments. Not surprisingly, with the popularity of science on the rise among the aristocracy, interest grew among the less fortunate classes. Ben Jonson—a friend of Bacon’s—wrote a popular comic play called The Magnetick Lady or Humours Reconcil’d, featuring Lady Lodestone as the lead character. Sir Isaac Newton, an intensely private and often paranoid man, paradoxically became something of a pop culture icon of the day with his likeness adorning an endless stream of portraits and commemorative medals. A kind of cottage industry began to flourish with itinerant men of science offering demonstrations for small towns and villages.

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Charlatans and natural philosophers of dubious merit soon took to presenting demonstrations in parlors and lecture halls, many of them making up theories as they went along. To feed the curiosity of a public eager for the latest news of scientific discovery, publications also multiplied, ranging from the serious science of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions to popular titles such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explained for the Ladies. In the mid-1600s, a London physician named Thomas Brown published Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. Like Gilbert, he intended to discredit unproven and untested beliefs. Although an instant bestseller, quickly selling out multiple printings, the book is generally seen as a mishmash of solid experimentation and confusing explanations, though he did manage to coin several new words.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
by Jim Bell
Published 24 Feb 2015

Through my youthful eyes, the biggest appeal of Voyager was indeed this idea of exploring the truly unknown—throwing a bottle, of sorts, into the cosmic ocean and seeing where the eddies and currents of nature would take it. In my telescope, on a clear cold night, I could make out the reddish-brown belts and bands of Jupiter, as well as its famous Great Red Spot. It was a good-sized instrument for a young amateur astronomer, a so-called Newtonian telescope (designed by Isaac Newton, and using mirrors instead of lenses) made by a company called Meade Instruments, with a main mirror about eight inches in diameter and a tube about four feet long. With that tube held by a metal mounting post and three wide metal legs, it was a heavy, bulky, cumbersome thing to schlep outside and in from the garage and to set up every time I wanted to use it (especially in the snow), but it was so worth the effort.

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But no one recognized it as a planetes asteres, a wandering star. At least, not until March of 1781. That’s when the German-born English musician and astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) single-handedly doubled the size of the solar system. Herschel is one of those almost mythic characters from the early history of Western astronomy. Like Isaac Newton in the century before him, Herschel was a prominent polymath—a person with many different kinds of technical and academic skills. He focused much of his energy on, and made his living by, composing and performing music (twenty-four symphonies, fourteen concertos, and many other pieces) and also dabbled in astronomy, optics, and other areas of science.

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Notable examples from the history of Western astronomy include pioneers like the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus; Danish observer Tycho Brahe and German astronomer Johannes Kepler working together in the late sixteenth century; the late-seventeenth-century English physicist Isaac Newton; and of course the first loner at the telescope, Galileo Galilei, in the early 1600s. But the history of individual, or “small,” science pushed forward mostly by key individuals goes much farther back in time and crosses many cultures, including notable Greek, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Indian, and other thinkers.

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 22 Oct 2012

So Zeno’s argument that a finite duration of time is just made up of a sequence of such consecutive instants is wrong. It would take advances in mathematics as well as physics for this paradox to be finally laid to rest. More specifically, it was an understanding of calculus, the field of mathematics developed by Isaac Newton and others in the seventeenth century, which describes how to add up tiny quantities in order to describe the notion of change correctly, that would lay Zeno’s naïve ideas to rest. Well, almost. In 1977, two physicists at the University of Texas published a surprising research paper that suggested Zeno’s Arrow Paradox might have been laid to rest too prematurely.

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OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE In 1915 Einstein published his greatest work. It wasn’t his famous equation, E = mc2; nor was it his work on light, which won him the Nobel Prize. It is called his General Theory of Relativity, and in it he describes how the force of gravity affects space and time. We learn at school a description of gravity that Isaac Newton gave us: that it is an invisible force acting to pull all objects together. Of course, this is quite right, and we live our lives under the influence of our planet’s gravity holding us to its surface. Newton’s law of gravity also explains how the Moon orbits the Earth and how its gravitational pull affects the ocean tides; and it explains how the Earth orbits the Sun, thus confirming Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system.

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But even our most powerful scientific theories often fall short when we try to push them too far in trying to answer such deep metaphysical questions as: “Does time really flow, or is that just an illusion?” and: “Is there an absolute rate to the flow of time, or even an unambiguous direction to this flow?” Clearly, statements such as “time points from the past to the future” or “time goes by at a rate of one second every second” are somewhat unhelpful. Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion more than three centuries ago in his Principia mathematica, time was considered to be the domain of philosophy rather than science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all movement and change require the notion of time to make sense, time had to be included as an integral part of his mathematical description of nature.

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering
by Ann K. Finkbeiner
Published 16 Aug 2010

Chapter 11: Everything’s Different The American Museum of Natural History’s website on the Sloan is at http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/astro/f/sdss.20051208/. The information about the large surveys PanSTARRS and LSST came from their excellent websites: PanSTARRS, http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/, and LSST, http://www.lsst.org/lsst. Chapter 12: Jim Again The quote from Isaac Newton came from “Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Richard Bentley Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity” (between 1692 and 1756); quoted in Joseph Silk, “How Big Is the Universe,” Historical Development in Modern Cosmology. Vicent J. Martínez, Virginia Trimble, and María Jesús, ed., ASP Conference Series 252 (2001): 117.

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And for every dollar that Princeton puts in, Chicago matches it. And then for every dollar the universities put in, NSF matches it. And for every dollar NSF puts in, Sloan matches it. OK? The multiplicative factors add up. —Jerry Ostriker, Princeton University God, they’ve been doing this since Isaac Newton, can’t they get it right? —Hirsh Cohen, Sloan Foundation ABOUT THE TIME the University of Chicago was founded, Princeton University turned 150 years old. Nassau Hall, its main building, had been the venue for the Continental Congress in 1783, just after the university amended its charter so that its trustees no longer needed to swear allegiance to the king of England.

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Chapter 12 Jim Again But if the matter were evenly disposed throughout an infinite space, it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered throughout all that infinite space. —Isaac Newton It’s easier if you’re smart, but I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. I think dedication really matters more. —Jim Gunn, Princeton University START NOW NOT with scale, small to large, but with time, at the beginning—though not at the very beginning, which is the province not of cosmology but of theoretical physics, some of it highly theoretical.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

The average world market price of gold in 2009 was about £20,500 per kilogram. Who invented the catflap? It wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton. It’s an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. Sadly, the evidence doesn’t stack up. To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes in the door of his lodgings – a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens.

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The trick was to remove small amounts of metal from legal coinage, melt down the scraps and recast new coins. There were three ways of doing this: ‘clipping’ (filing tiny fragments from the coin’s edges); ‘drilling’ (taking the coin and punching small holes in it, which were then hammered shut); and ‘sweating’ (shaking a bag of coins for long enough to create a dust of gold and copper). Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) became obsessed with the underworld of counterfeiting gangs after he was made Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696. His secret career as an alchemist had made him something on an expert at assessing the purity of metals. By his reckoning, one in five coins in circulation in England were false.

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Whatever afflicted him, it didn’t prevent Newton from producing Principia Mathematica (1687), the most influential scientific book of all time, or from building a successful second career as a civil servant and administrator. He lived until he was eighty-four and died a very wealthy man, leaving assets worth £31,821 (equivalent to £49 million in today’s money). STEPHEN There are people in history who were said to be agelastic, including Isaac Newton, who was supposed to have laughed only once in his life. CLIVE ANDERSON When an apple fell on his head. STEPHEN No, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid, and he burst out laughing. JIMMY CARR Yeah, that is a good one, though. What did Molotov invent? Molotov didn’t invent his ‘cocktails’.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

In fact, atoms stayed out of fashion right up until 1800, when the English chemist John Dalton proved that they were real (he didn’t know, and couldn’t know, that atoms do indeed exist, but are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are in turn made of quarks, and none of it can be called solid). * * * The no-atom business made it difficult for Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to talk about what he understood as small, solid masses moving about in a void. But really, Democritus and Newton were positing the same kind of system – there is a void, or empty space, and there are solid, indestructible bits of matter moving about in the void. Newton’s great idea was to add the force of gravity to explain movement. * * * In the 17th century, Isaac Newton built his mighty model of how the world works on the notion of empty space that was exactly that – a void – with solid matter moving about inside the empty space, worked upon by gravity.

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His idea, like so many innovations of the Industrial Revolution, was to mechanise repetitive work. The word ‘computer’ at this time was used for human operators doing the tedious arithmetical tabling that Babbage imagined (correctly) could be done by his Difference Engine. Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post held by both Isaac Newton before him and Stephen Hawking after him (and still never held by a woman, btw). Babbage had a fascination for mechanical automata, as well as numbers. Building a cogs-and-wheels calculating machine was perfect for him. And for Ada, as it turned out. To be invited to a Babbage party you had to be beautiful, clever or aristocratic.

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Ross Ashby, 1956 Buddhism for Beginners, Thubten Chodron, 2001 A Simple Path: Basic Buddhist Teachings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 2000 The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra, 1975 The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, 2014 Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm, 1980 Reality Is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli, 2014 A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945 The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch, 1970 A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton, 2011 The Symposium, Plato On the Soul and Poetics, Aristotle Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, Edith Hall, 2018 Shakespeare’s sonnets Opticks, Isaac Newton, 1704 The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind, Michio Kaku, 2014 (I am just about to read Kaku’s The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, 2021. I recommend all his books.) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, 1999 Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, James Lovelock, 2019 (and everything he has written) Coal-Fired Vampire Epic of Gilgamesh (world’s earliest surviving text) Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice, 1976 The Twilight saga, Stephenie Meyer 2005–20 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890 Faust, Goethe, 1808 The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1472 ‘Piers Plowman’ (poem), William Langland, 1370–90 ‘The Vampyre’ (short story), John William Polidori, 1819 How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Ray Kurzweil, 2012 ‘Transhumanism’ (article), Julian Huxley, 1968 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom, 2014 To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, Mark O’Connell, 2017 Selected poems of Andrew Marvell, 1995 (I should have included ‘To His Coy Mistress’ in the essay.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

In 1965, observing the accelerating rate at which individuals were entering the sciences, the junior minister of science and education of Great Britain concluded, "For more than 200 years scientists everywhere were a significant minority of the population. In Britain today they outnumber the clergy and the officers of the armed forces. If the rate of progress which has been maintained ever since the time of Sir Isaac Newton were to continue for another 200 years, every man, woman and child on Earth would be a scientist, and so would every horse, cow, dog, and mule" (in Hardison 1988, p. 14). Transportation speed has also shown geometric progression, with most of the change being made in the last 1 percent of human history.

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"No, I do believe in ghosts." "What?" "The laws of physics and logic, the number system, the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravity existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity." "Of course." "So, before the beginning of the Earth, before people, etc., the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy, and not existing in anyone's mind." "Right."

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It has just passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have, or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. I predict that if you think about it long enough, you will go round and round until you realize that the law of gravity did not exist before Isaac Newton. So the law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads. It is a ghost!" This is what I call Pirsig's Paradox. One of the knottier problems for historians and philosophers of science over the past three decades has been resolving the tension between the view of science as a progressive, culturally independent, objective quest for Truth and the view of science as a nonprogressive, socially constructed, subjective creation of knowledge.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

European kings started: Hutchison, “Copernican Revolution”; Eran Shalev, “A Republic amidst the Stars: Political Astronomy and the Intellectual Origins of the Stars and Stripes,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (2011): 39–73. “system of the world”: Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157–67. “language of mathematics”: Galilei Galileo, Opere 6:232; Douglas Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes and the Book of Nature,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 191–211. “solitary, poor, nasty”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), 97. See also Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes.” Newton replaced this aimless cosmos: Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol. 2 (London, 1729), 388; available at http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00056.

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The minor variations in the Sun’s speed through the sky (which create a discrepancy of up to sixteen minutes between “Sun time” and “clock time”) hadn’t been large enough to matter. But now clocks were more accurate than the Sun. The devices initially built to imitate the cosmos had transcended it, with profound consequences for human thought. Poised to take advantage of this development was the physicist Isaac Newton, working on his theory of gravity. His pioneering work Principia, published in 1687, revolutionized the scientific view of the cosmos, and remains one of the most important scientific publications ever. In it, Newton set out three basic laws of motion and explained how these, combined with his law of gravitational attraction,* could account for all of the movements of the solar system from wandering planets and distant moons to once-in-a-lifetime comets and even the ocean tides.

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Kirchhoff, though just as brilliant in his own field, was in many ways the opposite of Bunsen. Thirteen years younger than the exuberant chemist, Kirchhoff was described by his colleagues as modest and shy. He was interested in how electricity behaves in different circuits and materials, and like Isaac Newton he had a talent for making meticulous observations of complex phenomena, then deriving elegant mathematical laws to describe them. Kirchhoff suggested that instead of comparing different colored flames by eye, Bunsen should pass their light through a glass prism, just as Newton had done in 1666.

New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 4 Dec 2003

Chomsky has cut the Gordian knot by emphasizing a more fundamental difficulty: the mind–body problem cannot even be formulated. This is not, as generally supposed, because we have too limited an understanding of the mind, but because we don’t have criteria for what constitutes a body. In a typically radical attempt at clarification he points out that, as Isaac Newton’s insights led to the demise of contact mechanics, the Cartesian notion of body was refuted and nothing since has replaced it. In the absence of a coherent notion of “body”, the traditional mind–body problem has no conceptual status, so no special problems of causality arise. More generally, there is no special metaphysical problem associated with attempts to deal naturalistically with “mental” phenomena (such as knowledge of language), any more than there are metaphysical problems for chemists in defining the “chemical”.

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The enterprise of epistemic naturalism is uncontentious, apart from the term, which is misleading in a peculiarly modern way. The epistemic naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was science, an attempt to construct an empirical theory of mind; Hume, for one, compared his enterprise with Isaac Newton’s. Epistemic naturalism, in Naturalism and dualism 81 contrast, is presented as a “philosophical position,” something apparently different. We plainly cannot read back into earlier periods a distinction between science and philosophy that developed later. We would not use the term “visual naturalism” to refer to the empirical study of the growth and functioning of the visual system (also a topic of earlier rational psychology), implying that there was some coherent alternative for the same realm of problems.

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To account for them, he postulated a new principle; in his framework, a second substance, whose essence is thought. The “unification problem” arose as a question about the interaction of body and mind. This metaphysical dualism was naturalistic in essence, using empirical evidence for factual theses about the world – wrong ones, but then, that is the rule. The Cartesian theory collapsed soon after, when Isaac Newton showed that terrestrial and planetary motion lie beyond the bounds of the mechanical philosophy – beyond what was understood to be body, or matter. What remained was a picture of the world that was “antimaterialist,” and that “relied heavily on spiritual forces,” as Margaret Jacob puts it (M. Jacob 1988: 97).

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden
Published 27 Sep 2021

v All from the island of Sulawesi (Alfred Russel Wallace’s Celebes) or its surrounding waters. 18 Opening Up the Razor The maxim which inspires all scientific philosophising… [is] ‘Occam’s razor’: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Bertrand Russell, 19141 In April 1761, thirty-four years after the death of Isaac Newton and 118 years before the birth of Albert Einstein, Richard Price (1723–91), the non-conformist Protestant minister, moral philosopher and mathematician, examined the unpublished papers of his recently deceased friend and mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702–61). Bayes had been a modestly successful scientist. Thirty years earlier, he had rushed to the defence of Isaac Newton’s mathematical method known as calculus, which had been attacked in an article addressed to ‘an infidel mathematician’ by the Irish philosopher and Roman Catholic bishop George Berkeley who feared that Newton’s mechanistic science would undermine religious faith.

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Franklin had shown that lightning, for millennia thought to be a missile of the gods, was just another form of electricity. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Franklin ‘the new Prometheus’, and the English chemist Joseph Priestley described the kite experiment as ‘the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton’, insisting that Franklin was ‘the father of modern electricity’.12 Is life electric? A few years earlier, in 1746, Robert Turner, an English naturalist steeped in the vitalist tradition, had published Electricology: Or a Discourse upon Electricity. Being an Enquiry into the Nature, Causes, Properties and Effects thereof, upon the Principles of the Aether.

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His pamphlet Diatribe du Docteur Akakia is a vicious lampoon of the life and work of another Frenchman, Berlin resident and the president of the Berlin Academy, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759). Maupertuis was born in 1698, four years before Thomas Bayes, in Saint-Malo, a port on the Brittany coast of France. He studied mathematics in Paris and in 1723 was admitted to the Académie des Sciences where he became a champion of the mechanistic laws that Isaac Newton had discovered across the Channel. In the 1730s Maupertuis engaged in a debate over whether the earth was flattened at either equator (prolate) or the poles (oblate). He used Newtonian mechanics to predict that the earth was oblate, in opposition to the opinion of the eminent French astronomer Jacques Cassini (1677–1756).

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator
by Keith Houston
Published 22 Aug 2023

There was one more innovation to come, after which the form of the slide rule was essentially fixed. The so-called cursor, a sliding vertical bar that made it easier to read slide rules with multiple scales, was independently invented at least four times before it finally stuck. First to come up with the idea was Isaac Newton, shortly after logarithmic scales became fashionable, but it was a young French artillery officer named Amédée Mannheim whose 1850 design, bearing a metal cursor and four scales labeled A to D, became the prototype for all that followed.73 The end result of all this tinkering and tweaking—this elaborate ruler, this clever stick—was a portable mathematics powerhouse.

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‡ Coincidentally, Johannes Gutenberg’s father held a similar position in Mainz a century and a half earlier. It is interesting to compare what the two men did with their knowledge of metalworking: Gutenberg perfected movable type; Napier applied it to the practice of alchemy. § In 1687, seventy years after John Napier’s death, Isaac Newton would put an end to more than a millennium of such outlandish theories with the observation that all physical bodies exhibit an attraction to one another in proportion to their mass. For all intents and purposes, the publication of Principia Mathematica was the alchemical act that transmuted astrology into astronomy

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It was the brainchild of a mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a man so argumentative that only his secretary attended his funeral, and whose philosophical assertion that we must necessarily live in “the best of all possible worlds” was mercilessly satirized by, among others, the celebrated French writer Voltaire.8 For all his faults, Leibniz was an indefatigable scholar, vaulting between disciplines as he pleased. He created binary arithmetic, inspired by an ancient Chinese book called the Yì jīng (often spelled “I Ching”).9 And he would later be given dual credit, with Isaac Newton, for having invented “calculus,” the mathematics of gradients, change, integration, and differentiation, whose name descends from the Roman counting tokens called calculi.10 An 1862 drawing of the internals of Charles Xavier Thomas’s arithmometer. Fig. 2 shows a section through one of the device’s counters.

Beyond Weird
by Philip Ball
Published 22 Mar 2018

So it was that quantum mechanics seemed at the outset to be about this notion of ‘quantized energy’: how it increases in steps, not smoothly, for atoms and molecules and light radiation. This, we’re told, was the fundamental physical content of the early theory; the rest was added as a theoretical apparatus for handling it. That, however, is a little like saying that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation was a theory of how comets move through the solar system. It was indeed the appearance of a comet in 1680 that prompted Newton to think about the shape of their paths and to formulate a law of gravity that explained them. But his gravitational theory is not about comets.

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Wavefunctions Ψ and the corresponding ‘rungs’ on the energy ladder for the first three quantum states of a particle in a box. The amplitudes of all the wavefunctions are zero at the walls themselves. Here, then, is the quantum alternative to the mechanics of classical physics, as embodied in the equations of motion deduced by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. And how abstract and hard to visualize this description has become! Instead of particles and trajectories, we have wavefunctions. Instead of definite predictions, we have probabilities. Instead of stories, we have maths. It doesn’t seem enough. What is the real nature of the electron that underlies these probabilities, this smooth, spread-out wavefunction?

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In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason. They just happen. That sounds like a terribly unscientific thing to say, and seems to go against the grain of everything that scientists and natural philosophers have striven to achieve since well before the time of Isaac Newton: to explain the world. Quantum events don’t appear to have an explanation as such – one in which definable causes lead to specific effects – but only a probability of occurrence. This is what Einstein found unreasonable. Who can pretend that it isn’t? He suspected that this apparent randomness is just like the randomness of a toppling pin: it really does have a specific, deterministic cause (this leads to that), but we can’t see what that is.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 28 Sep 2010

6 That Jābir is regarded in the West as having been ‘just an alchemist’ probably has more to do with the prejudices of the early European translators of his work than with his own scientific leanings. Some of his most influential books were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, at a time when alchemy was still considered a respectable pursuit in Europe (it would continue to be so, well into the Renaissance). Even Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist later in life and is sometimes referred to as the last of the magicians rather than the first scientist of the age of reason – and he lived nine hundred years after Jābir. One distinction that was made between the two disciplines is that while chemistry was regarded as the science of matter, alchemy involved the philosophy of matter.

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In any case, I do not see that such a stance is necessary in order to legitimize the achievements of Jābir in chemistry. After all, was Aristotle a fool for believing in the four elements theory of matter? Was Plato any less of a genius for his adherence to the intromission theory of vision (that claimed we see objects by emitting light from our eyes)? Indeed, was Isaac Newton less worthy of the mantle of the greatest scientist who ever lived for his own obsession with alchemy? Hindsight is wonderful, but we should not project back our modern scientific ideas and values onto a very different time. Referring to Jābir ibn Hayyān as an alchemist rather than a chemist (according to our modern definitions of the two words) is rather like referring to the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy as an astrologer.

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It was during the second half of the tenth century that we see the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam arriving on the scene. The first of these was a man after my own heart: a physicist; in fact, the greatest physicist since Archimedes and the like of whom would not be seen until Isaac Newton seven hundred years later. And acknowledging someone as being the greatest physicist in a span of nearly two thousand years is not done lightly.1 The Arab polymath Abū Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham was born in Basra in southern Iraq in c. 965. He is often said to be Egyptian, because he spent his later, most productive years there.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

New York: Springer Science, p. 24. 23. Soros, G. (2009) ‘Soros: a general theory of reflexivity’, Financial Times, 26 October 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab49a.html#axzz3dtwpK5o2 24. Holodny, E. (2016) ‘Isaac Newton was a genius but even he lost millions in the stock market’, 20 January 2016, Businessinsider.com, available at http://uk.businessinsider.com/isaac-newton-lost-a-fortune-on-englands-hottest-stock-2016-1?r=US&IR=T 25. Keen, S. Rethinking Economics Kingston 2014, 19 November 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR_75cdCujI 26. Brown, G. (1999), Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 27 September 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/458871.stm 27.

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In the sixth century BCE, the oldest known map of the world, the Imago Mundi, was etched into clay with a sharpened stick in Persia, showing Earth as a flat disc and with Babylon firmly at its centre. The Ancient Greek father of geometry, Euclid, mastered the analysis of circles, triangles, curves and rectangles in two-dimensional space, creating a diagrammatic convention that Isaac Newton later used to lay out his groundbreaking laws of motion, and that is still used in maths classes worldwide today. Few people have heard of the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio but Leonardo da Vinci’s visual depiction of his theory of proportion is instantly recognised the world over in the image of Vitruvian Man, standing – naked and open armed – in a circle and square simultaneously.

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Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth – in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today. The idea of economics, and even chrematistics, as an art may have suited Xenophon, Aristotle and their time, but two thousand years later, when Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion, the allure of scientific status became far greater. Perhaps this is why, in 1767 – just forty years after Newton’s death – when the Scottish lawyer James Steuart first proposed the concept of ‘political economy’, he defined it no longer as an art but as ‘the science of domestic policy in free nations’.

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
by Stephen Greenblatt
Published 31 Aug 2011

Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing24 really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God25 as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.”

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Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 139. 18 On the contrary, with a backward glance at John Evelyn, Hutchinson observed that a “masculine wit,” presenting to the public only a single book of the difficult poem, “thought it worth printing his head in a laurel crown.” 19 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation, pp. 24–25. 20 Ibid., p. 23. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 24. 24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, II.ii. 25 The most powerful philosophical expression of this view is in the works of the French priest, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). 26 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 32 (London, 1718), cited in Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, pp. 141–42. 27 To William Short, October 31, 1819: “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

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“Darwin Still Rules, But Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift,” The New York Times, June 26, 2007, p. D2. Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———, and David Money. “Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin Poetry,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), pp. 549–71. Fenves, Peter. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments
by Michael Batnick
Published 21 May 2018

He got an expensive lesson in just how far intelligence goes when attempting to turn money into even more money. When asked about the direction of the markets, Newton replied, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Isaac Newton actually was one of the smartest people to ever walk the earth, and not even he was able to resist the sight of other people getting rich without him. One of the problems many investors face is that we all feel we have a little Isaac Newton in us. We all feel we're above average. In a classic 1977 study, “Not Can, But Will College Teaching Be Improved,” 94% of professors rated themselves above their peer group average.1 If traders and investors were asked the same question, I would guess that the results would be very similar.

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Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 6. 11. Krass, Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, 197. 12. Ibid., 201. 13. Quoted in Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 67–70. CHAPTER 4 John Meriwether Genius's Limits Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined. —William Bernstein Isaac Newton advanced science and thinking like few others ever have. With an IQ of 190, and the ability to calculate to the 55th decimal by hand, his intellect towered above Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. But powerful as his brain was, it was unable to save him from falling prey to our most basic human instincts, namely, greed and envy.

The Fractalist
by Benoit Mandelbrot
Published 30 Oct 2012

In the 1930s, the Yale mathematics department had been driven by a bitter split between two leading figures: a Norwegian and a Swede, brothers-in-law who became bitter enemies and pushed everyone to choose a side. That dark era was and remains a spur to a strong collegiality. Isaac Newton Institute The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, bears some similarities to the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden, but it is larger and of a broader scope. In 1999, from January to April, it held a program on fractals. The University of Cambridge kindly offered me a visiting Rothschild Professorship, but had to withdraw the offer after finding that I exceeded its retirement age by ten years.

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After the carnage of World War I, Hadamard and Paul Montel recognized that fresh blood was desperately needed, and were delighted to find themselves a successor who closely shared their interests. Therefore, Szolem encountered open arms rather than competition or discrimination. Later, many foreigners flocked to Paris. Competition revived and discrimination returned. Like Poincaré and Hadamard, and Isaac Newton long before them, Szolem viewed mathematics as almost real, but with a crucial difference. They were fascinated by profound issues of physics and the actual world, but Szolem was not. He befriended a brilliant and driven younger man, André Weil (1906–98), soon to become the founder and forceful leader of a new generation of French mathematicians who emerged just after World War I.

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Matching the sterling quality of their accomplishments was far beyond my ambitions, and I couldn’t think of less exalted advisers. Norbert Wiener of MIT The towering Keplerian achievements of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) were his mathematical theory of Brownian motion and cybernetics—the word and the book. Isaac Newton knew around 1700 that prisms decompose light into components of different colors. But the mathematical theory was given much later, by Wiener. A related achievement, his theory of Brownian motion, strongly affected me later in my life—as a miserable model of the variation of competitive prices, and as a wiggle with an interesting boundary that forms fractal islands.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Because Google, alone among the five, is the protagonist of a new and apparently successful “system of the world.” Represented in all the most prestigious U.S. universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading through the world’s intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. That phrase, “system of the world,” which I borrow from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, denotes a set of ideas that pervade a society’s technology and institutions and inform its civilization.1 In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable.

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Money is a central metric to both, exchange rates mediating cross-border transactions, and interest rates guiding movement through time. When the signs and signals of time and space are muddled by government interventions or by arbitrary “caps” or controls, trade can founder, and the horizons of investment shrink in both dimensions. In scrutinizing this problem, Kendall first became fascinated with Isaac Newton’s system of the world—his perdurable gold standard as the exemplary money—and then became intrigued by Satoshi’s bitcoin as an imitation of gold. To understand the prospects for bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies and tokens, it is necessary to grasp the centrality of gold. Gold resolved both the horizontal and vertical enigmas of money.

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“The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market.” Chapter 2: Google’s System of the World 1. Stephenson borrowed the title from Newton himself, who titled the third volume of his Principia, “De mundi systemate.” 2. D. T. Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xxix. 3. Franz Lieber, “Appointment in Tomorrow,” Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951. 4. For my explorations of this theory see Knowledge and Power (2013), expanded in The Scandal of Money (2016). 5. Nathan K. Lewis, “The World’s Experience with Gold Standard Systems,” Chapter 5 in Gold: The Monetary Polaris (New Berlin, N.Y.: Canyon Maple Publishing, 2013). 6. 

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 23 Aug 1996

With the Restoration in full sway, the English were finally rid of the intellectual repression that the Puritans had imposed on the nation. The death of absolutism and Republicanism led to a new sense of freedom and progress throughout the country. Great wealth was beginning to arrive from the colonies across the Atlantic and from Africa and Asia as well. Isaac Newton, now 28 years old, was leading people to think in new ways about the planet on which they lived. Charles II himself was a free soul, a Merry Monarch who offered no apologies for enjoying the good things of life. It was time to stand up and look around. John Graunt did, and began counting. Although Graunt's book offers interesting bits for students of sociology, medicine, political science, and history, its greatest novelty is in its use of sampling.

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Naumann sent the results of his study to Leibniz, who in turn sent them on to the Royal Society in London. 16 Naumann's data soon attracted the attention of Halley. Halley was then only 35 years old but already one of England's most distinguished astronomers. Indeed, he was responsible for persuading Isaac Newton in 1684 to publish his Principia, the work in which Newton first set forth the laws of gravity. Halley paid all the costs of publication out of his own modest resources, corrected the page proofs, and put his own work aside until the job was done. The historian James Newman conjectures that the Principia might never have appeared without Halley's efforts.

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In his introduction he confesses to the long delay and to frequent prodding by the publishers, but he offers as an excuse of "my absence on travels" and the fact that "I was too young and inexperienced to know how to complete it."' Perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt: he spent those eight years seeking out the opinions of the leading mathematicians of his time, including Isaac Newton. In addition to conducting an active correspondence for the exchange of ideas, he traveled to London and Paris to consult with outstanding scholars in person. And he made a number of contributions to mathematics on his own, including an analysis of the use of conjecture and probability theory in applications of the law.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

(If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative. It was the sacrifice of absolute time that was most stunning. Isaac Newton believed that time was objective, universal, and transcendent of all natural phenomena; “the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change,” he declared at the beginning of his Principia. Einstein, however, realized that our idea of time is something we abstract from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the ticking of clocks.

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“To those of us who believe in physics,” he wrote to the widow of a friend who had recently died, “this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one.” When his own turn came, a couple of weeks later, he said, “It is time to go.” 2 Time—the Grand Illusion? Isaac Newton had a peculiar notion of time. He saw it as a sort of cosmic grandfather clock, one that hovered over the rest of nature in blithe autonomy. And he believed that time advanced at a smooth and constant rate from past to future. “Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” Newton declared at the beginning of his Principia.

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It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a historian at the University of Chicago, “should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science—at a level with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and with Isaac Newton’s of the separation of light.” By 1889, when he published his most influential book, Natural Inheritance, his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. (Regression to the mean even held between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall.)

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
by Charles Seife
Published 31 Aug 2000

—FRIEDRICH ENGELS, ANTI-DUHRING Zero and infinity had destroyed the Arisotelian philosophy; the void and the infinite cosmos had eliminated the nutshell universe and the idea of nature’s abhorrence of the vacuum. The ancient wisdom was discarded, and scientists began to divine the laws that governed the workings of nature. However, there was a problem with the scientific revolution: zero. Deep within the scientific world’s powerful new tool—calculus—was a paradox. The inventors of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, created the most powerful mathematical method ever by dividing by zero and adding an infinite number of zeros together. Both acts were as illogical as adding 1 + 1 to get 3. Calculus, at its core, defied the logic of mathematics. Accepting it was a leap of faith.

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Calculus, on the other hand, gave scientists a way to express the laws that govern the motion of the celestial bodies—and laws that would eventually tell scientists how those moons and stars had formed. Calculus was the very language of nature, yet its very fabric was infused with zeros and infinities that threatened to destroy the new tool. The first discoverer of calculus nearly died before he ever took a breath. Born prematurely on Christmas Day in 1642, Isaac Newton squirmed into the world, so small that he was able to fit into a quart pot. His father, a farmer, had died two months earlier. Despite a traumatic childhood* and a mother who wanted him to become a farmer, Newton enrolled in Cambridge in the 1660s—and flourished. Within a few years he developed a systematic method of solving the tangent problem; he could figure out the tangent to any smooth curve at any point.

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As you raise the temperature of a gas, the average molecule moves faster and smashes harder into the walls of its container. The gas pushes harder on the walls: the pressure goes up. Statistical mechanics—the theory of wiggles—explained some of the basic properties of matter, and it even seemed to explain the nature of light itself. The nature of light was a problem that had consumed scientists for centuries. Isaac Newton believed that light was composed of little particles that flowed from every bright object. Over time, though, scientists came to believe that light was not in fact a particle, but a wave. In 1801 a British scientist discovered that light interferes with itself, apparently putting the matter to rest once and for all.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
Published 27 Nov 2001

Several were now bishops; one, John Tillotson, was even Archbishop of Canterbury. Tillotson and the other “Latitude men” were also closely wired into the new scientific ideas sweeping across seventeenth-century Europe. They were keen admirers of England’s two most famous scientists, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician Isaac Newton, and saw no conflict between religious belief and rational scientific inquiry into the nature of man and the world. To a Scottish Presbyterian of the old school, Latitudinarianism was little different from atheism. And in Aikenhead’s jocose remarks, Lord Advocate Stewart sensed more than a whiff of both.

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But he was also troubled by the radical direction Simson’s teachings sometimes seemed to take. Simson proposed that belief in Jesus as Savior was not necessary for salvation, and that even moral and upright pagans might be saved. He cast doubt on the Trinity and on Jesus Christ as the Son of God—Christian tenets that advanced English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton had also abandoned. At one point in a lecture, Simson was even supposed to have told his students that when they read the passage from the Bible proclaiming Jesus “the highest God,” they should read it “with a grain of salt.” No wonder Simson ran into such trouble with the Kirk authorities, who branded his teachings blasphemy.

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Hutcheson believed there had to be a middle way between these two extremes, one that preserved the notion of an unquestionable moral law governing men’s actions, but without the austere tyranny of a jealous God. He found some of what he was looking for in the classes of another professor, Gershom Carmichael. If Hutcheson is the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment, then Carmichael can claim to be its grandfather. He was one of the first teachers in Scotland to discuss Isaac Newton in his lectures. As Professor of Moral Philosophy, Carmichael intoduced his students to the great natural-law thinkers of the previous century, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius and the German Samuel Pufendorf. Hutcheson came to listen as Carmichael lectured—or, more precisely, read aloud his written notes in Latin, the common form of university teaching in those days.

Alex's Adventures in Numberland
by Alex Bellos
Published 3 Apr 2011

Yet here was one of the most elegant and uncomplicated equations in maths. Pi, the poster boy of disorder, it turned out, had some kind of order in his DNA. Leibniz had devised the formula using ‘the calculus’, a powerful type of mathematics he had discovered, in which a new understanding of infinitesimal amounts was used to calculate areas, curves and gradients. Isaac Newton had also come up with calculus, independently, and the men spent a good deal of time bickering about who had got there first. (For years, Newton was considered to have won the argument, based on the dates of his unpublished manuscripts, but it now appears that a version of calculus was actually first invented in the fourteenth century by the Indian mathematician Madhava.)

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Having become a keen amateur geometer in later life, Hobbes published his solution when he was 67. Even though circle-squaring was still an open question at the time, his proof was received with bemusement by the scientific community. John Wallis, professor at Oxford and the finest British mathematician before Isaac Newton, exposed Hobbes’s errors in a pamphlet, thus setting in motion one of the most entertaining – and pointless – feuds in the history of British intellectual life. Hobbes replied to Wallis’s comments with an addendum to his book entitled Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics. Wallis countered with Due Correction for Mr Hobbes in School Discipline for not saying his Lessons right.

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We have also seen that there are many infinite series that converge on pi. On the other hand, the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +… is divergent, heading off towards infinity. The Greeks may have been wary of infinity, but by the seventeenth century mathematicians were happy to take it on. An understanding of infinite series was required for Isaac Newton to invent calculus, which was one of the most significant developments in mathematics. When I studied maths one of my favourite exercises was being presented with an infinite series and being asked to work out whether it converged or diverged. I always found it incredible that the difference between convergence and divergence was so brutal – the difference between a finite number and infinity is infinity – and yet the elements that decided which path the series took often seemed so insignificant.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig
Published 1 Jan 1974

”Oh, the laws of physics and of logic-the number system-the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. ”They seem real to me,” John says. ”I don’t get it,” says Chris. So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.” ”Of course.” ”So when did this law start? Has it always existed?” John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at. ”What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.” ”Sure.” ”Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere this law of gravity still existed?”

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John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.” ”Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense. ”And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.” ”Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”

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He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.” I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentiethcentury lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself. ”But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

FIGURE 3.2: Parallels in the marked uptake of the printing press and smartphones, with very different x-axis time intervals. Fostering Autonomy When we’re sharing ideas via print or electrons, there’s a lot more chance you can do things yourself. Take Isaac Newton, one of if not the most influential scientists of all time. Amazingly enough he was self-taught in mathematics via books that he either bought or borrowed. Newton himself was responsible for, as Bernard Cohen wrote in The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, “the transformation of a youth who knew no more mathematics than simple arithmetic and who could not read a treatise on astrology for want of trigonometry into the profound creator of higher mathematics.”31 As Eisenstein affirmed, the impact of books to alter the master-apprentice traditional relationship was quite clear, as people could “instruct themselves primarily from books with a minimum of outside help” and “cut the bonds of subordination which kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master.”32 The do-it-yourself (DIY) capabilities took varied forms, from learning to be musicians, self-help in medicine, to autodidact printers like Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin.

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The communal gathering places consisted of reading rooms, coffeehouses, and bookshops.20 The coffeehouses weren’t just for drinking coffee, but were used to discuss the latest books, pamphlets, and new-sheets. By the seventeenth century, many of the coffeehouses were specialized for particular topics such as science, literature, or politics. A coffeehouse argument accounted for Isaac Newton’s canonical book Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, which laid the foundation for classical mechanics, the laws of motion and gravity, and much more.21 We’ll come back to Newton shortly. Later in the 1700s, the preeminent economist Adam Smith actually wrote The Wealth of Nations in a coffeehouse, after having repeatedly circulated drafts for input among the regulars there.

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Hall, The Scientific Renaissance 1450–1630 (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 130. 29. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 268. 30. N. Schmidle, “A Very Rare Book,” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_schmidle. 31. I. Cohen, “Review of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton,” Scientific American 1 (1968): 139–144. 32. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 245. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 74. 35. Ericsson, “On The Pulse of the Networked Society,” Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2014, http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2014/ericsson-mobility-report-june-2014.pdf. 36.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

This in turn was a relic of a mighty tree that had been blown down in a great historic storm that had devastated a country estate a little farther north, that of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. And Woolsthorpe Manor was the home of Sir Isaac Newton. It was to Lincolnshire that Newton had fled from Cambridge in 1666—and it was here, during the summer of that annus mirabilis, that he famously observed the apple falling from the tree. It was here, and from wondering of the force that might have impelled the apple’s fall, that he came up with the notion of gravity, as a force that affected both this humble fruit and by logical extension affected the constant motion and altitude of the moon in orbit around the planet Earth. So, Isaac Newton’s apple tree—or more properly a child descendant of it—now flowers and fruits in a Beijing garden, beside where the Ming emperors once buried their dead, where one can see the Great Wall running along the mountain ridges, and where China’s latest generation of scientists are confirming their intellectual ambitions by working out, with the greatest accuracy, the effect that gravity has upon the steady beat of time.

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He was about to abandon the quest when, suddenly, one day that October, he had his brain wave: why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear? An idea that would change the world in unimaginable ways had come to Frank Whittle when he was just twenty-two years old. His recent school days, and his later mathematical skills, reminded him that a propelling jet of the kind he was proposing would offer a working demonstration of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, propounded back in 1686. Newton (a Cambridge man, as it happens) had written that “for every force acting on a body, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Under this law, a powerful jet being thrust from the rear of an aircraft engine would drive that aircraft forward with equal power and, in theory, at almost any imaginable speed.

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Since this nine-odd-degree arc was located around the middle of the meridian—Dunkirk is at 51 degrees North and Barcelona 41 degrees North, with the midpoint of 45 degrees North being the village of Saint-Médard-de-Guizières in the Gironde—it was thought likely the oblate nature of the Earth’s shape, the bulge that afflicts its sphericity and makes it resemble more of an orange than a football, would be most evident and so easier to counter with calculation. (To further confirm the Earth’s shape the French Academy of Sciences sent out two more expeditions, one to Peru and the other to Lapland, to see how long a degree of high latitude was: all confirmed the orange shape that Isaac Newton had predicted centuries before.) The story of the triangulation of the meridian in France and Spain, and which was carried out by Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre over six tumultuous years during the worst of the postrevolutionary terror, is the stuff of heroic adventure. On numerous occasions the pair escaped great violence (but not jail time) only by the skin of their teeth.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

But any resulting benefit was probably a mutual one, since Adam Smith was to amass a formidable reputation later in life for absent-mindedness. As Rae drily remarked, ‘He would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy.’ Moments during which the son escaped his mother’s watchful eye were rare. The link between them was exceptionally strong, and lasted over six decades. Adam Smith was born on or before 5 June 1723—like Isaac Newton, a posthumous child. His father, also Adam Smith, had died five months earlier at the age of only forty-three, having worked his way up via public service and the law to be Comptroller of Customs in Kirkcaldy. Information is scarce, but this branch of the Smith family seems to have hailed from Seaton, near Aberdeen, from which Adam senior went to Edinburgh to study law.

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Like his fellow students, Smith studied these subjects as well as the ancient languages and authors, and of course divinity. But his greatest early interest lay in natural philosophy—we should say the sciences today—and specifically in physics and mathematics. These subjects had been revolutionized after 1687 by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which had set out from first principles a new and extraordinarily powerful theory of the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies, and of gravity. The Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow, Robert Simson, nephew of the banned theologian John, was a follower of Newton and an expert on the ancient Greek geometer Euclid, whose Elements was still seen as the gold standard for demonstrative reasoning in the exact sciences.

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But in the seventeenth century it had come under severe criticism from those in and around the new Royal Society, who followed Francis Bacon in seeking to purge science of the false and ‘idolatrous’ influences of human subjectivity, culture and religion, even of language itself. The brilliant mathematician Colin Maclaurin, a student of Isaac Newton and vigorous defender of Newtonianism against religious attack, kept the flame of scientific expression alive in Scotland—as it was remarked, his ‘pure, correct and simple style inducing a taste for chasteness of expression [and]… a disrelish of affected ornaments’. But, if rhetoric was an intellectually contested topic, it was also one of considerable practical importance in lowland Scotland after the disaster of the ’45, and especially so in Edinburgh, whose professional young men needed to be able to communicate well—both in speech and on paper—if they were to make their way in the courts, in politics, in the Church or as soldiers.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
by David Christian
Published 21 May 2018

Similar, but subtly different, is the idea that, yes, there was a moment of creation when great forces or beings roamed the universe making things, but since then, nothing much has changed. The elders of Lake Mungo might have seen the universe like this, describing a world brought to life more or less in its current form by their ancestors. Isaac Newton saw God as the “first cause” of everything and argued that He was present in all of space. That is why Newton thought that the universe as a whole did not change much. The universe, he once wrote, was “the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living, and intelligent.”1 Early in the twentieth century, Einstein was so sure the universe was unchanging (at large scales) that he added a special constant to his theory of relativity to make it predict a stable universe.

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Many collected or read about experimental instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, and air pumps; they thought of Newton as the greatest of scientists; they knew Earth orbited the sun; they did not take magic, the histories recounted in ancient legends, the stories of unicorns, or (most) stories of miracles seriously; they believed in the advancement of knowledge and something like progress. New information provided the intellectual bricks and mortar for new types of knowledge. As Isaac Newton developed his laws of gravity, he had access to an unprecedented range of information. He could, for example, compare how pendulums swung in Paris with how they swung in the Americas and Africa. No previous generation of scientists could have tested their ideas so thoroughly or within such wide and varied networks of information.

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Newton’s achievement can be tied to the vast increase in general knowledge that overseas trade and exploration had brought to Europeans. The courage to generalize, to arrive at universals about the natural world, owes much to the immense quantity of information—and self-confidence—that European mastery of the great seas gave land-bound thinkers like Isaac Newton.11 Dazzling new flows of wealth and information had one more powerful effect: they stimulated the commercial forms of mobilization often described as capitalism that were driven by gradients of both wealth and information. For the most part, traditional rulers had mobilized wealth with the threat of coercion, the promise of protection, and appeals to religious and legal authorities.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

But Satoshi was the one who actually coded his idea and put it into practice. Back, Finney, Dai and Szabo were all Cypherpunks. Bitcoin has implemented all of their ideas, and the ideas of many more besides.34 Without these developments, Bitcoin almost certainly could not have happened. It was ‘standing on the shoulders of Cypherpunks’, to misquote Isaac Newton – who, incidentally, also laid down a new system of money: the gold standard on which Britain would thrive in the 18th and 19th centuries. Bitcoin’s first year It was two days before anyone even acknowledged Satoshi’s creation. ‘Announcing the first release of Bitcoin’, he said. ‘A new electronic cash system.’35 Nobody seemed to care.

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From mathematics to computer programming to economics and monetary history to politics to PR and psychology to cryptography to business acumen and vision to plain old written English – in all of these fields he excelled. To cap it all, he’s probably good-looking too. It’s too early in history to be drawing this sort of comparison, I know, but there are many parallels between Satoshi and Isaac Newton. Newton was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, of course. But he was also Master of the Royal Mint. He redesigned England’s monetary system, putting us onto the gold standard on which Britain’s colossal progress during the next 200 years was built. As I continued my hunt for Satoshi, I started asking myself questions not just about who he could be…but also about why he did what he did?

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There are many who will disagree with this interpretation. And, with investment, it is dangerous to have rigid opinions – I reserve the right to change my mind as events unfold. You could still make a mint There seems to be a 100-year cycle in money. 1716 saw the first Great Recoinage, in the years after Isaac Newton had taken over at the Bank of England. A hundred years later, after excess spending on the Napoleonic Wars, there was another Great Recoinage in 1816. 1913-4 saw another fundamental change to the monetary system with the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US and in Europe the move away from the gold standard.

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton
by Colin Read
Published 16 Jul 2012

However, once word arrived in London that one of the South Seas Trading Company’s initiative in the New World, the Mississippi Scheme, had failed to materialize, rampant profit taking induced a mass sell-off that burst the speculative bubble and caused millions of pounds of losses for all but the earliest purchasers of the stock. After making a handsome profit from early The Times 99 purchases of the stock and rolling the profit over into later purchases and losing everything, Sir Isaac Newton was quoted as having quipped that he could not calculate the madness of people: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”3 The bursting of the South Sea Trading Company bubble and the loss of huge potential profits by legislators as their warrants became worthless induced those legislators bribed with these warrants to put in place waves of regulation that restricted options trading.

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With the faint praise of his highly placed supervisor, Bachelier did not earn the highest thesis grade of très honorable and thus did not carry the weight he might have wished for as he tried to find an academic appointment. The reason for Poincaré’s faint support may have been the subject matter. Bachelier chose to devote his mathematical physics skills to an understanding of the stock market and the options prices listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. Ever since Isaac Newton’s damning of financial markets, serious scientists and mathematicians viewed the stock market as folly at best and gambling at worst. Nonetheless, Bachelier’s life experiences endowed him with a fascination for the financial market and he would not be persuaded to study elsewhere over mere issues of academic snobbery.

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He was the former President of the American Sociological Association and, in 1994, was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, the first sociologist to be granted this award. He also coined such terms as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model” and “focus groups,” which are still used today. And in his epic but undertitled essay, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” he quoted Isaac Newton as having said “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He may have anticipated the work of his son and of a finance discipline grappling with uncertainty through the last book of his life, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Robert King Merton, the first-generation son of Jewish immigrants, married Suzanne Carhart in 1934.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses
by Tom Standage
Published 1 Jan 2005

Halley later recalled that Wren offered to "give Mr Hook or me 2 months time to bring him a convincing demonstration thereof, and besides the honour, he of us that did it, should have from him a present of a book of 40 shillings." Neither Halley nor Hooke took up Wren's challenge, however, and this prize went unclaimed. A few months later Halley went to Cambridge, where he visited another scientific colleague, Isaac Newton. Recalling his heated coffeehouse discussion with Wren and Hooke, Halley asked Newton the same question: Would an inverse-square law of gravity give rise to elliptical orbits? Like Hooke, Newton claimed to have proved this already, though he could not find the proof when Halley asked to see it.

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During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thought in France had flowered under thinkers, such as the philosopher and satirist Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, who extended the new scientific rationalism into the social and political spheres. After offending a nobleman with a witticism in 1726, Voltaire had been imprisoned in the Bastille prison in Paris and was only released on condition that he went to England. While there he immersed himself in the scientific rationalism of Isaac Newton and the empiricism espoused by the philosopher John Locke. Just as Newton had rebuilt physics from first principles, Locke set out to do the same for political philosophy. Men were born equal, he believed, were intrinsically good and were entitled to the pursuit of happiness. No man should interfere with another's life, health, liberty, or possessions.

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London: Chatto 8c Windus, 1973. Froissart, Sir John de. Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries. Translated by Thomas Johnes. New York: Colonial Press, 1901. Gaiter, Mary K., and W. A. Speck. Colonial America. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2002. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Gribbin, John. Science: A History, 1543-2001. London: Allen Lane, 2001. Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Press, 2002. Hartman, Louis E, and A. L. Oppenheim. "On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia."

Stephen Hawking
by Leonard Mlodinow
Published 8 Sep 2020

Made of brick, metal, and stone, they had large windows and a futuristic, Japanese temple look. I liked the windows, and there were a lot of them. The complex had won some design awards, but the design element I’d have liked most would have been arrows on signs saying “This way to Stephen Hawking.” Stephen’s pavilion was adjacent to an older building called the Isaac Newton Institute. Newton’s name came up a lot when you knew Stephen. People even compared him to Newton, which is ironic because Stephen didn’t like Newton. Newton engaged in many petty squabbles, and was conniving and vindictive when in a position of power. He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others.

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He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others. He was also humorless. A relative who’d been his assistant for five years said he’d only seen Newton laugh once, when someone asked him why anyone would want to study Euclid. I’d read several biographies of the man, and though they had various titles, any one of them could have been called Isaac Newton: What an Ass. Perhaps more important than Stephen’s estimation of Newton’s disposition is that, in high school, Stephen had been bored by the Newtonian physics he was taught. What excites a scientist is discovery—the revelation of a type of behavior that no one has ever seen, or the achievement of an understanding no one has ever had.

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question, for two millennia everyone had assumed that the universe had either always been in existence and was unchanging, or else that it was created at some moment—for example, as described in the Bible—and had been relatively unchanging since then.*1 Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, as well as scientists, including even Isaac Newton, believed this. Newton should have known better. How could a collection of galaxies and stars maintain a stationary configuration when each, through the force of gravity, pulls all the others toward it? Shouldn’t the objects coalesce over time? And, since forever is a long time, shouldn’t all matter, by now, be clumped together in a big dense ball?

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions
by Lee Freeman-Shor
Published 8 Sep 2015

I will demonstrate how legendary investors have been easily led astray by temptations such as a new idea, love or fear – and how the successful ones were able to escape and recover. Anyone who reads this book will be able to use the exact same methods themselves. Lee Freeman-Shor London, 2015 “If I have seen so far it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton * * * 1 Being Right or Making Money, by Ned Davis (2000). 2 As quoted in Ibid. Part I : I’m Losing – What Should I Do? In this part of the book we meet some of the world’s greatest investors in losing situations. These are situations we can all relate to – the investors have lost a lot of money and there is massive uncertainty and negativity surrounding their investments.

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However, if someone yells fire in a theatre with very few people, the people can get up, look for signs of fire, and walk out in an orderly manner. This is another reason that the Connoisseurs’ approach of taking some profit over the years is a good idea. It’s like inching towards the fire exit. Sir Isaac Newton famously lost everything with his investment in the South Sea stock in the 1700s. The amazing thing, however, was that he was early into the trade and sold out completely having made a nice profit. Then the stock kept going up, and Newton saw his friends who had remained invested become very rich.

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World
by Rufus Pollock
Published 29 May 2018

All painters learn from other painters – whether imitating or reacting against them. Learning how to do something means learning to adapt existing ideas in new ways. Practically everything we use in everyday life has been designed and made by someone else, and they too were collaborating. Entirely original and independent creations are astonishingly rare. As Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Technology is the same, but with the dependency even more apparent. Smartphones, for instance, combine thousands, even hundreds of thousands of ideas and innovations, big, small and microscopic, accumulated over decades and even centuries.

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Although it has recently suffered some corruption (notably from proprietary publishers and a creeping pressure to commercialise), publicly funded science remains dedicated to the open creation and sharing of information. The very essence of science is “publication”: the sharing of the results of research with other scientists and the community at large. Openness is central to the cumulative and collaborative nature of science. As Isaac Newton knew, each scientist stands on the shoulders of those who went before. The Secret of Life On 28 February 1953 Francis Crick stood up in the Eagle pub on Benet Street in Cambridge and shouted “we’ve found the secret of life”. Whether any of his fellow drinkers that lunchtime knew what he meant, history does not relate.

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies
by Nik Bhatia
Published 18 Jan 2021

The Gold Standard Pound sterling has been the currency denomination of England since 1158 when King Henry introduced a silver coin of 92.5% purity.9 The currency represented a weight in silver until England started minting a gold coin in 1663 called guinea, which was named after the part of West Africa from which the gold was mined. The guinea subjected the pound to the plaguing complications of bimetallism when both the guinea and the English silver coin called shilling carried official values in pounds. But shortly after the creation of the Bank of England, English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint permanently altered the course of bimetallism around the world by setting a new exchange rate between gold guineas and silver shillings in 1717. Newton studied the flow of gold and silver throughout Europe and the exchange rates set forth in other countries’ bimetallic standards, specifically France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

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A Monetary Mix Sixteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the second Congress of the United States of America finally passed the Coinage Act in 1792 to establish the United States dollar as the country’s official unit of account, defining one dollar as both 1.6 grams of gold and 24 grams of silver. For the next 108 years, the United States experimented with a few different monetary regimes. An early adjustment to the exchange rate between gold and silver had the opposite effect of Isaac Newton’s adjustment as Master of the Mint and drove gold out of usage for several decades. Two separate central banks were created in 1791 and 1812, but each ended after its twenty-year charter. Many early Americans didn’t trust central banks to administer their currency. The banks existed in antithesis to limited government ideals and led to a great deal of political vitriol, which prevented the institutions from charter renewal.

Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins
Published 7 Aug 2011

He also, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), anticipated a time when 'The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed'. His collaborator Coleridge said elsewhere that 'the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton'. This can be interpreted as the naked hostility of a leading Romantic against science in general, but the case of Coleridge is more complicated. He read a great deal of science and fancied himself as a scientific thinker, not least on the subject of light and colour, where he claimed to have anticipated Goethe.

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Sir Arthur Eddington, whose own scientific writings were noted for poetic flair, used the solar eclipse of 1919 to test General Relativity and returned from Principe Island to announce, in Banesh Hoffmann's phrase, that Germany was host to the greatest scientist of the age. I read those words with a catch in the throat, but Einstein himself took the triumph in his stride. Any other result and he would have been 'sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.' Isaac Newton made a private rainbow in a dark room. A small hole in a shutter admitted a sunbeam. In its path he placed his famous prism, which refracted (bent) the sunbeam through an angle, once as it penetrated the glass, then again as it passed through the farther facet into the air again. When the light fell on the far wall of Newton's room, the colours of the spectrum were clearly displayed.

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'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1820) Keats and Lamb should have raised their glass to poetry, and to mathematics, and to the poetry of mathematics. Wordsworth would have needed no encouragement. He (and Coleridge) had been inspired by the Scottish poet James Thomson, and might have recalled Thomson's 'To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton' (1727): ... Even Light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And, from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every ray into his kind, To the charmed eye educed the gorgeous train Of parent colours.

Big Bang
by Simon Singh
Published 1 Jan 2004

Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Fourth Estate, 2000) An account of the life of Galileo, which includes letters sent to him by his daughter, who lived in a convent from the age of thirteen. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Abacus, 1995) The book based on the famous television series, which must have been the inspiration for numerous careers in astronomy. Chapter 2 James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Fourth Estate, 2003) An accessible and concise account of the life of Isaac Newton. Hans Reichenbach, From Copernicus to Einstein (Dover, 1980) A short history of the ideas that contributed to relativity theory. David Bodanis, E = mc2 (Walker, 2001) The biography of an equation, inspired by Cameron Diaz, who once asked if somebody could explain the meaning of Einstein’s famous formula.

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Day and night I rack my brain in an effort to penetrate more deeply into the things that I gradually discovered in the past two years and that represent an unprecedented advance in the fundamental problems of physics.’ In speaking of ‘truly great things’ and ‘fundamental problems’, Einstein was referring to the fact that the general theory of relativity seemed to be leading him towards an entirely new theory of gravity. If Einstein was right, then physicists would be forced to question the work of Isaac Newton, one of the icons of physics. Newton was born in tragic circumstances on Christmas Day 1642, his father having died just three months earlier. While Isaac was still an infant, his mother married a sixty-three-year-old rector, Barnabas Smith, who refused to accept Isaac into his home. It fell to Isaac’s grandparents to bring him up, and as each year passed he developed a growing hatred towards the mother and stepfather who had abandoned him.

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As discussed in Chapter 1, the scientific establishment at the start of the twentieth century was confident that the universe was static and eternal, not contracting and temporary. Not surprisingly, Einstein disliked the notion of a collapsing universe: ‘To admit such a possibility seems senseless.’ Although Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was different, it also gave rise to a collapsing universe, and Newton had also been troubled by this implication of his theory. One of his solutions was to envisage an infinite, symmetric universe, in which every object would therefore be pulled equally in all directions, and there would be no overall movement and no collapse.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter
Published 16 Oct 2013

This would be the ultimate proof by synthesis. 8 Synthesis of the M. mycoides Genome If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. —Richard Feynman, 19881 Many believe that the most important innovations of human creativity are the result of some kind of visionary gift, a gift associated with such extraordinary and singular geniuses as Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. I don’t doubt the incredible impact of individuals who can make great intellectual leaps, who can see further than anyone before them, and who discern patterns where others see only noise. However, there is also a less dramatic kind of creativity that drives science, a humble variety that is no less important: problem-solving.2 Vaulting a single hurdle to achieve one very particular goal can sometimes result in a technology that can prove to have an extraordinary range of other uses.

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We are moving toward a borderless world in which electrons and electromagnetic waves will carry digitized information here, there, and everywhere. Borne upon those waves of information, life will move at the speed of light. 12 Life at the Speed of Light The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations. —Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (1718)1 When life is finally able to travel at the speed of light, the universe will shrink, and our own powers will expand. Simple calculations indicate that we could send electromagnetic sequence information to a digital-biological converter on Mars in as little as 4.3 minutes, at the closest approach of the Red Planet, to provide a settlement of colonists with vaccines, antibiotics, or personalized drugs.

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“A controlled clinical trial of a therapeutic bacteriophage preparation in chronic otitis due to antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa: A preliminary report of efficacy.” Clinical Otolaryngology 34, no. 4 (August 2009): pp. 349–57. 35. L. J. Marinelli, et al. “Propionibacterium acnes bacteriophages display limited genetic diversity and broad killing activity against bacterial skin isolates.” mBio 3, no. 5 (2012): e00279-12. Chapter 12 1. Isaac Newton. Opticks, 2nd edition (1718). Book 3, Query 30, 349. 2. Brett J. Gladman, Joseph A. Burns, Martin Duncan, Pascal Lee, and Harold F. Levison. “The exchange of impact ejecta between terrestrial planets.” Science 271, no. 5254 (March 8, 1996): p. 1387(6). 3. David S. McKay, et al. “Search for past life on Mars: Possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001.”

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

Rails translated what Twitter’s programmers wanted to tell all those computer transistors to do—with relatively little effort. And that allowed them to build a company fast. In the world of high tech—like in racing—a tiny time advantage can mean the difference between winning and getting passed. ISAAC NEWTON ATTRIBUTED HIS success as a scientist to “standing on the shoulders of giants”—building off of the work of great thinkers before him. Platforms are tools and environments that let us do just that. It’s clear how using platforms applies in computer programming, but what if we wanted to apply platform thinking to something outside of tech startups?

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I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings.

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If you’re really hungry, the books in this list will keep you going for a while: “A Reading List for the Self-Taught Computer Scientist,” Reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/ch0wt/a_reading_list_for_the_selftaught_computer/ (accessed February 16, 2014). 85 He called it Ruby on Rails: For more information on Ruby on Rails, see http://rubyonrails.org/. 85 a couple of guys at a podcasting startup: For a thorough and dramatic history of Twitter, see Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (Portfolio, 2013). 86 “standing on the shoulders of giants”: The common contemporary quotation comes from a line in one of Sir Isaac Newton’s letters to Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants,” Newton, letter to Hooke, February 5, 1676, http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/essays/Giants. The phrase appears to have originated with Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century: Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (Free Press, 1965). 86 managed to be the best with less effort: Robert Compton directed Dr.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

One simple example of eurekometrics—and one that I was involved in—is examining how discoveries become more difficult over time. . . . IF you look back in history you can get the impression that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes; Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge (and perhaps a lack of squeamishness or regard for one’s own well-being) to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be very simple. Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a ten-thousand-member team that runs a multibillion-dollar atom smasher.

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And now think about your math classes from high school and college. What Tai “discovered,” even being so bold as to term it Tai’s Model, is integral calculus. Tai was not the first person to discover calculus, no doubt to her great disappointment. Rather, it was first developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, more than three hundred years before Tai’s diabetes-related calculations. Specifically, Tai rediscovered something known as the trapezoidal rule for calculating the area below a curve, which seems to have been known to Newton. And yet Tai’s article passed through the editors and has received well over one hundred citations in the scientific literature.

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Luckily, the Times was willing to print a correction. The only hitch: They printed it the day after Apollo 11’s launch in 1969. Three days before humans first walked on the moon, they recanted their editorial with this bit of understatement: Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. Why do we believe in wrong, outdated facts? There are lots of reasons. Kathryn Schulz, in her book Being Wrong, explores reason after reason why we make errors.

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One
by Meghnad Desai
Published 15 Feb 2015

“The man of system,” he wrote, seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand that arranges the different pieces on a chess-board; he does not consider that the different pieces upon a chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own. Altogether different from that which the legislator might choose to impress upon it.2 The “Principle of Motion” Adam Smith and his Scottish contemporaries were part of the Scottish Enlightenment. They founded what we now consider to be the social sciences. They were deeply impressed by Isaac Newton’s achievement in astronomy, delineating the principles upon which the planets moved in a systematic way unaided by any explicit agency. It was said that Newton had discovered God’s system of how the heavens worked. Smith and his fellow Scotsmen wanted to discover the principles of social astronomy, as it were: what made societies function and evolve, grow or decay.

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The invisible hand was a similar idea of a sort of secular rather than divine mechanism to coordinate the myriad activities of separate individuals, buying and selling, working and saving, investing and exporting. But no one is actually in charge; we all are on our separate ways. The idea of society as a self-organizing entity that Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment gifted to posterity comes from such notions about how the world works. Isaac Newton’s theory about the movements of planets also fitted in with this idea. The universe was obeying the laws of motion (implicitly set by God long ago and discovered by Newton) and no one was driving the planets on a daily basis. Once it was understood that the economy was a complex web of mutually interdependent relations, with each person pursuing their own interest and yet arriving at a good outcome, it was easy to see the international system as just an extension of this idea.

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Champions of the French Revolution identified with Godwin, though he admired Edmund Burke, a virulent enemy of the Revolution. But there was economic turbulence as well. Inflation, the old specter of a century ago, had raised its head again. To combat inflation in the earlier century, the pound sterling had been based on its value in terms of gold, £3 17s 10½d per ounce, a price fixed by Sir Isaac Newton when he was Master of the Mint. (This price held until 1933.) Citizens could take gold to be coined at the Mint and offer their coins to get gold if they wanted. The pound was convertible into gold. Banknotes issued by the Bank of England were also convertible into gold – the £20 note still bears the legend “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds.”

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time
by Emma Chapman
Published 23 Feb 2021

The small part of the spectrum that we refer to as ‘light’ in everyday life is just the visible part that our eyes have adapted to, and we use the word colour to talk about the specific wavelengths in that small section. The first person to understand that light was composed of different colours was English physicist Isaac Newton. In 1666, he aligned a glass prism with a beam of sunlight and observed a rainbow emanating from the other side of the prism.15 I’m running low on diagram space so just look up Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover. It had been noted before how a broken piece of glass, or a prism, resulted in different colours when held up to sunlight.

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Had we just looked at Centaurus A in visible wavelengths, the black hole would not have been so obvious, whereas in radio it might as well have an arrow-shaped sign saying ‘Black Hole Here’. Taking the temperature of the stars Let’s go back and colour in our drawing of the Sun. We often depict the Sun as yellow but, as we know from Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Pink Floyd, sunlight comprises a whole range of different wavelengths. The range of wavelengths of light a star emits makes up a barcode unique to that star, a stellar spectrum, with similar types of star having similar spectra. The solar spectrum demonstrates that the Sun radiates across a range of wavelengths, with only 40 per cent being visible to the human eye.

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Chatto & Windus. 13 Klimchuk, J. A. 2006. On Solving the Coronal Heating Problem. Solar Physics, 234 (1): 41–77. 14 G Caspi, A. et al. 2020. A New Facility for Airborne Solar Astronomy: NASA’s WB-57 at the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. The Astrophysical Journal, 895 (2): id.131. 15 Gleick, J. 2004. Isaac Newton. Harper Perennial. 16 Private communication with Royal Society Librarian Keith Moore. 17 Herschel, W. 1800. Experiments on the refrangibility of the invisible rays of the Sun. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 90: 284–292. 18 Einstein, A. 1905. On a heuristic point of view about the creation and conversion of light.

Ye Olde Britain: Best Historical Experiences
by Lonely Planet Publications
Published 3 Mar 2012

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poets’ Corner, where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Austen, Brontë etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. Verger-led tours are held several times a day (except Sundays) and are limited to 25 people per tour; call ahead to secure your place. Of course, admission to the Abbey is free if you wish to attend a service. On weekdays, Matins is at 7.30am, Holy Communion at 8am and 12.30pm, and Choral Evensong at 5pm.

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It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 32 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

As long as Newton’s long shadow casts itself over economic theory, it is unlikely that economics, as a discipline, will be able to accommodate the growing schisms that threaten all of its most basic assumptions. Economic historian E. Ray Canterbery notes that taking on the likes of Adam Smith becomes increasingly daunting because he rides on the coattails of the great Sir Isaac Newton. He writes, “From time to time, a cluster of economists consider conventional economics ripe for revolution, but any economic revolutionaries will have to go to the barricades against the genius of Isaac Newton as well as against Adam Smith and his long line of followers.”6 Now however, for the first time, the many cracks in the theoretical foundations of the discipline are threatening to tumble the edifice of classical economic theory.

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In their attempts to understand the new forces let loose by coal-powered steam technology and factory production, the founding fathers of the new discipline—Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the like—looked to the new field of physics for a set of guiding principles and metaphors to fashion their own theories of the workings of the marketplace. NEWTON’S LAWS AND SELF-REGULATING MARKETS Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical method for discussing mechanical motion was all the rage at the time. It was being purloined by virtually every serious thinker to explain away the meaning of existence and the ways of the world. Newton declared that “all the phenomena of nature may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other.”

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N. (1952). Science and the Modern World. New York: New American Library, p. 50. 4.Miller, G. T. (1971). Energetics, Kinetics, and Life: An Ecological Approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, p. 46. 5.Soddy, F. (1911). Matter and Energy New York: H. Holt and Co., pp. 10–11. 6.Canterbery, E. R. (2003). Isaac Newton and the Economics Paradigm: Newton, Natural Law and Adam Smith. In The Making of Economics. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Pub, p. 75. 7.Laslett, P. (1967). Second Treatise. In John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 312. 8.Schrödinger, E. (1947).

The Case Against Sugar
by Gary Taubes
Published 27 Dec 2016

If this were a criminal investigation, the detectives assigned to the case would start from the assumption that there was one prime suspect, one likely perpetrator, because the crimes (all the aforementioned diseases) are so closely related. They would only embrace the possibility that there were multiple perpetrators when the single-suspect hypothesis was proved insufficient to explain all the evidence. Scientists know this essential concept as Occam’s Razor. When Isaac Newton said, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” he was saying the same thing that Albert Einstein, three centuries later, said (or was paraphrased as saying): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

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Burkitt and Trowell went along with their peers and adopted a less parsimonious way of viewing the emergence of these Western diseases. But is this perspective justified? Can a host of chronic diseases that cluster together both in individuals and in populations and associate closely with Western diets and lifestyles best be explained by the presence of a single dietary trigger—i.e., sugar—or by multiple triggers? When Isaac Newton paraphrased the concept of Occam’s Razor, he did so by saying, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” This was rule number one of Newton’s “rules of reasoning in natural philosophy” in his Principia. So is it necessary to posit multiple aspects of diet and lifestyle—multiple causes—to explain the presence of these chronic diseases that associate with Western and urban lives, or will one suffice?

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A conservative estimate: The CDC estimates the direct and indirect costs for heart disease and stroke at $315 billion each year, cancer at $157 billion, diabetes at $245 billion, and obesity (in 2008) at $147 billion (CDC 2016a). The Rand Corporation has estimated the total monetary cost of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, at between $157 and $215 billion (Hurd et al. 2013). Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes: See, for instance, Guthrie 2007. “We are to admit”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Isaac_Newton. “Everything should be”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Albert_​Einstein. “multifactorial, complex disorders” or “multidimensional diseases”: See, for instance, NIDDK 2011: 117–38. At least a tenth of all cases of lung cancer: ALA 2014: 5. “all wars combined”: West 1978: ix. Heavy smokers had twenty to thirty times: See, for instance, Doll and Hill 1964.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

Indeed, the historian of science Catherine Wilson has argued that the whole of seventeenth-century empiricism, started by Pierre Gassendi in opposition to Descartes, and taken up by the most influential thinkers of the age, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Bishop Berkeley, was fuelled to a remarkable extent by the sudden popularity of Lucretius. As Lucretian ideas percolated, the physicists were the first to see where they led. Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Later he acquired a Latin edition of De Rerum Natura itself, which survives from his library and shows signs of heavy use. He echoed Lucretian ideas about voids between atoms throughout his books, especially the Opticks.

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It could come, dangerously, from small, portable books – and even from ideas you came to yourself.’ Gradually, by reading Lucretius and by experiment and thought, the Enlightenment embraced the idea that you could explain astronomy, biology and society without recourse to intelligent design. Nikolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Baruch Spinoza and Isaac Newton made their tentative steps away from top–down thinking and into the bottom–up world. Then, with gathering excitement, Locke and Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, Hume and Smith, Franklin and Jefferson, Darwin and Wallace, would commit similar heresies against design. Natural explanations displaced supernatural ones.

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It was inevitable that these things would be invented or discovered just about when they were. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is ‘one endless chain of parallel instances’. It’s just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s Law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Wallace having precisely the same idea, after reading precisely the same book (Malthus’s Essay on Population).

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History
by Stephen Hawking
Published 28 Mar 2007

But we know that a is one of the roots of this equation, and therefore NR, the shorter length, must be a, and CG must be y. Then x = y − a = CG − NR, the first of the required mean proportionals. 233. That is, makes so small an angle with it. 234. This is especially noticeable when there are six real positive roots. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) HIS LIFE AND WORK Galileo died on January 8, 1642, exactly three hundred years before the day I was born. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day of that year in the English industrial town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He would later become Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair I now hold. Newton’s mother did not expect him to live long, as he was born very prematurely; he would later describe himself as having been so small at birth he could fit into a quart pot.

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Heath, courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Diophantus of Alexandria, A Study in the History of Greek Algebra, by Thomas L. Heath, reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. The Geometry of Rene Descartes, trans. David E. Smith and Marcia L. Latham courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Isaac Newton’s Principia, notes by David Eugene Smith, courtesy of New York: Daniel Adee, © 1848. English translation of Leonhard Euler’s On the sums of series of reciprocals (De summis serierum reciprocarum) courtesy of Jordan Bell. Leonhard Euler’s The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and Proof that Every Integer is A Sum of Four Squares courtesy of Dover Publications.

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Alan Turing’s On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society courtesy of the London Mathematical Society. Picture Credits: Euclid: Getty Images. Archimedes: Getty Images. Diophantus: Title page of Diophanti Alexandrini Arthimeticorum libri sex. . . ., 1621: Library of Congress, call number QA31.D5, Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room, (Jefferson LJ239). Rene Descartes: Getty Images. Isaac Newton: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Leonhard Euler: Getty Images. Pierre Simon de Laplace: Getty Images. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Science and Society Picture Library, London. Carl Friedrich Gauss: Getty Images. Augustin-Louis Cauchy: © Bettmann/CORBIS. Évariste Galois: © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the government gave up passing pointless laws about money (such as the 1660 act forbidding the export of bullion) and instead of asking investment bankers or celebrities for advice in the modern fashion, they decided to ask someone clever instead. And so it was that the smartest man that ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton, then the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was appointed the Master of the Mint. Newton quickly figured out what was wrong and changed money in such a way as to set England on a path of economic growth (Levinson 2009). Newton looked to harness more technological innovation to transform money.

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Money of the past Money of the future Physical money Money that exists, at least in part, in a physical means of exchange Electronic money Money that has no physical medium of exchange Cash Money that can be passed from person to person Electronic cash Electronic money that can be passed from person to person Mundane currency Physical money that is a unit of account Virtual currency Electronic money that is a unit of account but only in a virtual world Analogue currency Physical money that is a unit of account Digital currency Electronic money that is a unit of account in mundane and virtual transactions Fiat currency Analogue currency whose value is maintained by the reputation of the issuer Crypto currency Money without an issuer: a currency whose value is maintained by cryptography We are at a similar point now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money in the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place. Just as that machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so we can expect some form of digital money to better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). Mentally, we’re still in the present. But can we look around in the present to find the distributed building blocks of the future?

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We are at a similar cusp now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money from the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place and completely new institutions will manage them. Just as the machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so I have long maintained that we should expect some form of digital money that will better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). But what will it look like? Are we looking at a world of multiple, overlapping communities with a similar variety of values-based currencies?

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless
by John D. Barrow
Published 1 Aug 2005

In fact, there are further options. It is possible for the matter to be infinite in extent, but only finite in total mass if matter thins out gradually, leaving space empty beyond a particular distance from the centre (see Figure 7.8). Fig 7.8 The Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean models of the universe. Fig 7.9 Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century picture of the universe.17 Indeed, at the beginning of his work on gravity in the seventeenth century, Newton viewed the Universe as a finite system of stars and planets surrounded by an infinite empty space (Figure 7.9). Others, like Descartes, had argued that where there was no matter there could be no space, but Newton believed that the Divine spirit supported the existence of space in places where there was no matter.

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chapter nine Worlds Without End ‘And since space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions of Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe.’ Isaac Newton 1 OTHER WORLDS IN HISTORY ‘“But do you really mean, sir”, said Peter, “that there could be other worlds – all over the place, just around the corner – like that?” “Nothing is more probable”, said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.” ’ C.S.

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Einstein taught us that there is a fundamental limit to the speed at which information can be transferred in Nature. There is a cosmic speed limit: the speed at which light moves in a perfect vacuum. This simple idea has many unexpected consequences and it underpins all that we know about the physical world. In the world according to Isaac Newton, we can observe light to travel at many different speeds, just like anything else. Stand by the road side and shine a torch down the street. The light will move at a particular speed relative to you on the street. But what happens if a car drives past with its headlights on (see Figure 10.5)? If you were Newton, you would think that relative to you the light from the car would move at the speed at which it radiates from the light bulb (the same as the speed with which it shines from the torch) plus the speed at which the car is moving.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow
Published 12 May 2008

CHAPTER 2 The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths LOOKING TO THE SKY on a clear, moonless night, the human eye can detect thousands of twinkling sources of light. Nestled among those haphazardly scattered stars are patterns. A lion here, a dipper there. The ability to detect patterns can be both a strength and a weakness. Isaac Newton pondered the patterns of falling objects and created a law of universal gravitation. Others have noted a spike in their athletic performance when they are wearing dirty socks and thenceforth have refused to wear clean ones. Among all the patterns of nature, how do we distinguish the meaningful ones?

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IN 1680 a great comet sailed through our neighborhood of the solar system, close enough that the tiny fraction of sunlight it reflected was sufficient to make it prominent in the night sky of our own planet. It was in that part of earth’s orbit called November that the comet was first spotted, and for months afterward it remained an object of intense scrutiny, its path recorded in great detail. In 1687, Isaac Newton would use these data as an example of his inverse square law of gravity at work. And on one clear night in that parcel of land called Basel, Switzerland, another man destined for greatness was also paying attention. He was a young theologian who, gazing at the bright, hazy light of the comet, realized that it was mathematics, not the church, with which he wanted to occupy his life.8 With that realization sprouted not just Jakob Bernoulli’s own career change but also what would become the greatest family tree in the history of mathematics: in the century and a half between Jakob’s birth and 1800 the Bernoulli family produced a great many offspring, about half of whom were gifted, including eight noted mathematicians, and three (Jakob, his younger brother Johann, and Johann’s son Daniel) who are today counted as among the greatest mathematicians of all times.

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The imprecision of measurement became a major issue in the mid-eighteenth century, when one of the primary occupations of those working in celestial physics and mathematics was the problem of reconciling Newton’s laws with the observed motions of the moon and planets. One way to produce a single number from a set of discordant measurements is to take the average, or mean. It seems to have been young Isaac Newton who, in his optical investigations, first employed it for that purpose.2 But as in many things, Newton was an anomaly. Most scientists in Newton’s day, and in the following century, didn’t take the mean. Instead, they chose the single “golden number” from among their measurements—the number they deemed mainly by hunch to be the most reliable result they had.

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

Scientific breakthroughs usually rest on a multitude of advances made by researchers building on earlier findings, learning from each other’s mistakes, testing rival theories, adding their own piece to the puzzle. The aim of Philosophical Transactions was to spread scientific knowledge so that hunches, theories and flashes of inspiration could cross-pollinate. One early contributor to the journal, Sir Isaac Newton, summed up the importance of leaning on peers and predecessors in a letter to a rival in 1676. “If I have seen farther,” he wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That remains true today. Study after study suggests that scientists solve problems better when they work together. Nobel laureates collaborate more than less garlanded colleagues.

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Sometimes you just want to find a diamond in the rough, that one person in the crowd armed with a killer app. In the early 18th century Britain’s Royal Navy lost many ships at sea because crews had no way to measure longitude while sailing. Some of the finest scientific minds of the day, including Sir Isaac Newton, had tried in vain to solve this problem. Desperate for a solution, Britain set aside its cosy assumptions about social class and turned to the crowd. In 1714 an Act of Parliament offered £20,000, a vast sum at the time, to anyone who invented a “Practicable and Useful” way of calculating longitude at sea.

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Picasso talked of remaining child-like in order to paint. Henri Matisse noted that “a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play” is the hallmark of creative heavyweights. In science, too, a playful testing of the boundaries is often the first step towards the lightning bolts of genius that win Nobel prizes. Sir Isaac Newton once wrote that “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Albert Einstein put it more pithily: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the child-like inclination for play.”

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
by Rachel Hewitt
Published 6 Jul 2011

The Dundases had played central roles in the Union and they considered themselves to be standard-bearers of the Scottish Enlightenment. His intimacy with this influential family would open up an array of opportunities to the young David Watson. THE ONSET OF an Age of Enlightenment in Britain was enormously helped by two events that had occurred in 1687 and 1688. The publication of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), and the ‘abdication’ of King James II of England, followed by the arrival of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William as joint monarchs, were events that were both widely considered to demonstrate the potential of human powers of reason.

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The Dundases’ enthusiasm for geography was such that they even attended the prestigious lectures on surveying that were delivered by the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin. A child prodigy who was elected Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen University at the age of nineteen, Maclaurin had so impressed Isaac Newton with his work that Newton had even offered to pay his salary. At Edinburgh, Maclaurin devised a rigorous course of mathematical education that emphasised the discipline’s practical applications, especially to map-making. The Scots Magazine described how, in his lectures, Maclaurin ‘begins with demonstrating the grounds of vulgar and decimal arithmetic; then proceeds to Euclid; and after … insists on surveying, fortification and other practical parts’.

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Lind’s ‘spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom’ was praised by his adoring surrogate son, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who, it was rumoured, was saved from the asylum by the physician’s intervention), and Lind gladly agreed to Roy’s request. In 1774 Roy had a friendship with a fellow member of the Royal Society whose ambitious project gave the map-maker an opportunity to take his barometer to Scotland in person. The laws of motion that Isaac Newton had laid out in his Principia Mathematica had sparked a widespread interest in geodesy. Without proof or evidence, Newton had assumed that the earth had originally been a homogeneous fluid mass and he claimed that one of the effects of the law of universal gravitation was that the centrifugal force to which the earth was subject meant that it was not a perfect sphere.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

This feedback phenomenon, which has been better understood by novelists and poets than many Chicago economists, was also at work in the South Sea Bubble, as we saw in my initial quotation from Alexander Pope. Pope, incidentally, was himself one of those irresistibly charmed by the South Sea Bubble. So, too, was the greatest genius of the day, Isaac Newton. As Master of the Royal Mint and the man who put England onto the gold standard when he was not busy discovering the physical laws of the universe, he was hardly a novice in finance. Having made an initial 100 per cent profit of £7,000 on his shares in the South Sea Company, he was unlucky enough to go back into the market close to the top and lost £20,000, equivalent to £2.5 million in today’s money.

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The dottiness of their enterprise consisted, to my mind, not only in the physical challenge but the nonsensical economics. Since a successful alchemist would have been no more able to keep his formula secret than the first claimant in a gold rush, the prospect of infinite supply would have turned gold into a commodity about as valuable as sand. Yet even Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern physical science, devoted much of his career to alchemical research. Few were more immoderate in their blindness than sixteenth-century European adventurers, whom John Maynard Keynes regarded as the originators of capitalism. We owe the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas to gold, for gold was the probable motive that drove Christopher Columbus westward: his diary of a voyage that lasted less than a hundred days mentions gold sixty-five times.

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These great Scottish intellectuals argued that the source of a nation’s wealth was not the amount of gold that its citizens hoarded, but the production of goods and services. Note, though, that for nearly two centuries from 1717, gold provided stable monetary underpinning for the economy after the introduction of the gold standard. This was at the suggestion of Sir Isaac Newton, who persuaded the parliament to fix the price of gold at £3.17s. 10½p an ounce. John Maynard Keynes argued that the success of the gold standard in the nineteenth century was accidental. The supply of gold did not increase in line with economic growth, which was a potential curb on the money supply and thus on economic activity.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

In our perception, each of those registers ascribes certain magical powers to symbols and meaning; each of them generates cultural power based on the inherent tension between reality and representation. The link between spoken language and abstract symbolic systems, particularly mathematics, has created new avenues for mystical connections between numbers, universal truths, and the fundamental structure of reality. Jewish kabbalah, Isaac Newton’s fascination with alchemy, and biological examples of mathematical figures like the Golden Ratio all reinforce a particular metaphysical notion that some logical order, some grammar and symbolic vocabulary, underlies the universe. In debating these questions, philosophers and mathematicians developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of symbolic languages, laying the groundwork for the contemporary era of computation.

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Historian Nathan Ensmenger recounts how the academic discipline of computer science coalesced only after its advocates embraced the concept of the algorithm, with one of the field’s founders, Donald Knuth, tracing the field’s origins to al-Khwarizmi in his seminal textbook The Art of Computer Programming.6 The algorithm was an ideal object of study, both easily grasped and endlessly puzzling: By suggesting that the algorithm was as fundamental to the technical activity of computing as Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were to physics, Knuth and his fellow computer scientists could claim full fellowship with the larger community of scientists.7 And yet, as mathematician Yiannis Moschovakis points out, Knuth’s argument about what algorithms actually are is an extremely rare instance where the question is foregrounded.8 For computer scientists the term remains more of an intuitive, unexamined notion than a delineated logical concept grounded in a mathematical theory of computation.

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State currencies and central banks added a second layer of trust and directed management to the equation, backing the value of a coin or note with the authority of the state, what in the United States is sometimes called the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.29 Currencies could be supported intrinsically, like Isaac Newton weighing and tracking the precious metals in each British coin, or extrinsically, like a government maintaining a reserve of gold bullion to anchor the value of its paper currency. A state and its central bank might control the introduction of new specie into circulation, manipulate exchange rates, mandate fixed prices for commodities, or simply change its value by fiat (as North Korea did in 2009 by introducing a new currency overnight).

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
by Sabine Hossenfelder
Published 11 Jun 2018

After evidence forced him to give up the beautiful polyhedra, Kepler, in later life, became convinced that the planets play music along their paths. In his 1619 book Harmony of the World he derived the planet’s tunes and concluded that “the Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” It wasn’t his best work. But Kepler’s analysis of the planetary orbits laid a basis for the later studies of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), the first scientist to rigorously use mathematics. Newton believed in the existence of a god whose influence he saw in the rules that nature obeyed: “This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being,” he wrote in 1726, “Every newly found truth, every experiment or theorem, is a new mirror of the beauty of God.”4 Since their inception, Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation have been radically overhauled, but they remain valid today as approximations.

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Can’t be so hard, I tell myself; he probably has a speech lined up anyway. Vaguely I ask, “What is the relevance of beauty in theoretical physics?” And off he goes. “When we come to unfamiliar realms of reality—the subatomic, quantum realms—everyday intuition is unreliable,” Frank begins. “And the idea of just gathering a lot of data, like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton recommended, that’s just not practical because experiments are so hard now. The way forward that has worked very well in the biggest part of the twentieth century was hoping that the equations would be very beautiful, that they would be symmetric and economical, and deriving consequences and then checking them.

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Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3. Quoted in McAllister JW. 1996. Beauty and revolution in science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 178. 4. Newton I. 1729. The general scholium. Motte A, trans. https://isaac-newton.org/general-scholium. 5. Leibniz G. 1686. Discourse on metaphysics. Montgomery GR, trans. In: Leibniz (1902). La Salle, IL: Open Court. 6. Called “the principle of least action.” 7. Quoted by Freeman Dyson in Weyl’s obituary, Nature, March 10, 1956. 8. Rebsdorf S, Kragh H. 2002. “Edward Arthur Milne—the relations of mathematics to science.”

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll
Published 15 Jan 2010

Then, wherever we went in spacetime, there would be a clock sitting at each point telling us what time it was, once and for all. The real world, as we will see, doesn’t let us construct an absolute universal time coordinate. For a long time people thought it did, under no less an authority than that of Sir Isaac Newton. In Newton’s view of the universe, there was one particular right way to slice up the universe into slices of “space at a particular moment of time.” And we could indeed, at least in a thought-experiment kind of way, send clocks all throughout the universe to set up a time coordinate that would uniquely specify when a certain event was taking place.

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The lesson is that clocks are kind of like odometers, keeping track of some measure of distance traveled (through time or through space) along a particular path. If clocks are kind of like odometers, then time is kind of like space. Remember that even before special relativity, if we believed in absolute space and time à la Isaac Newton, there was nothing stopping us from combining them into one entity called “spacetime.” It was still necessary to give four numbers (three to locate a position in space, and one time) to specify an event in the universe. But in a Newtonian world, space and time had completely separate identities.

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The right-hand side characterizes all the various forms of stuff that make spacetime curve—energy, momentum, pressure, and so on. In one fell swoop, Einstein’s equation reveals how any particular collection of particles and fields in the universe creates a certain kind of curvature in spacetime. According to Isaac Newton, the source of gravity was mass; heavier objects gave rise to stronger gravitational fields. In Einstein’s universe, things are more complicated. Mass gets replaced by energy, but there are also other properties that go into curving spacetime. Vacuum energy, for example, has not only energy, but also tension—a kind of negative pressure.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016

Long Comment Regarding a Proposed Exemption under 17 U.S.C. 1201 (Proposed Class # 21) at 6, Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works: Second Round of Comments, http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2021/John_Deere_Class21_1201_2014.pdf, accessed September 7, 2015. 23. Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961). 24. Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 15, 1675, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Vol. 1 (1661–1675), ed. H. W. Turnbull (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 416. 25. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 26. See Ethan Zuckerman, “Eric von Hippel and 2.9 Million British Innovators,” ... My Heart’s in Accra (blog), September 14, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/09/14/eric-von-hippel-and-2-9-million-british-innovators/, accessed September 7, 2015. 27.

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Most obviously, by denying farmers the right to repair—a right entrenched enough that even patent protection can’t disturb it23—John Deere has effectively raised the price of its products for farmers. It has also done serious harm to the market for repair services, which are less competitive since farmers have no real choice of mechanics. Less obvious is the harm locking down tractors can have on innovation. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”24 Of course, Newton borrowed the phrase from Bernard of Chartres, but that only underscores the point. Innovation is, in nearly every instance, an incremental affair. Small contributions add up, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson
Published 6 Jul 2020

He went so far as to speculate about extraplanetary mathematics, envisioning tables of sines and logarithms, since “there’s no reason but the old one, of our being better than all the World, to hinder them from being as happy in their Discoveries, and as ingenious in their Inventions as we ourselves are.” * * * — MEANWHILE, AT CAMBRIDGE University, Isaac Newton was developing the basic optics of a new telescope: the reflector. Lenses at the time could not bring red and blue light to the same focus, resulting in a haze of color surrounding bright objects. So instead of a lens, he designed a prototype that collected light by way of a curved metal mirror: six parts copper, two parts tin.

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A famous eighteenth-century mineralogist remarked that “in our time it would be unpardonable to consider such fairy tales even probable.” Some believed the bizarre objects were volcanic rocks, lofted like small bombs during an eruption, or rocks that had condensed in hail-filled clouds, or rocks that had been hit by lightning, giving rise to the name “thunderstones.” Isaac Newton’s work, which suggested that no small objects would exist in interplanetary space, wasn’t questioned until the turn of the nineteenth century, when a German physicist first suggested, to great mockery, that meteorites from space caused fireballs and might themselves be “world fragments.” McKay wondered if the rock might in fact be a kind of meteorite called SNC, or “snick”—the shergottite, nakhlites, and chassignites—named for three witnessed falls near the villages of Shergotty in India in 1865, El-Nakhla in Egypt in 1911, and Chassigny in France in 1815.

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“THERE’S NO REASON” Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets (London: Timothy Childe, 1698; Digitized by Utrecht University). A HAZE OF COLOR This is known as chromatic aberration. THIRTY-FIVE TIMES Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (London: William and John Innys at the West End of St. Paul’s, 1721), p. 91. WITHIN A CENTURY In the meantime, with some desperation, astronomers were trying to mitigate the problem of chromatic aberration with increasingly long refracting telescopes.

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood
by Dhun Sethna
Published 6 Jun 2022

He did use the word circulatio but understood that to mean a to-and-fro movement, as in the rising and falling of fluid: evaporation followed by condensation. PHYSIOLOGY OF CIRCLES The motion of the blood may be called circular in the way that Aristotle says air and rain follow the circular motion of the stars. —William Harvey twenty Prelude to Glory No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess. —Isaac Newton William Harvey was born in a fortunate land at a fortunate time. One may ask whether he was a singular phenomenon, an inexplicable figure of genius that appears only once every few centuries, or whether his arrival was in some sense more explicable. The answer, of course, is both. Harvey was undoubtedly brilliant, but his achievement would have been virtually unthinkable without the Elizabethan culture that surrounded him.

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Working alongside chemists at Oxford, he highlighted a possible particulate (corpuscular) component of air as an explanation for the process of combustion and respiration, setting into motion the quest for such a component that combined with blood to generate life. Boyle, the Anglo-Irish “Skeptical Chymist,” as he was called, was a younger contemporary of Isaac Newton and “the chief wonder of the English scientific world” after Newton. The fourteenth child of the second Earl of Cork, a political nouveau riche of the early Stuart period, he was born at Waterford, Ireland, a year before Harvey published De motu cordis. Educated at Eton and then in France, Switzerland, and Italy, he became familiar with the work of the recently deceased Galileo.1 Tall, pale, and emaciated, he showed poor health, weak sight, and a bad memory.

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Vain and jealous, he was despised by many contemporaries. But behind those unfriendly sunken eyes and disheveled locks burned the fire of genius. The very fact that he served, in turn, as assistant to “that prodigious young scholar” Christopher Wren (to borrow John Evelyn’s phrase), Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton established his greatness as well as his shortcomings. Hooke was not content to make only half the discoveries of his age; being more sensitive than most of his colleagues regarding the increasing importance of priority in scientific discoveries, he also claimed the other half! When Newton’s Principia was in publication, Hooke was so insistent that part of the work had been stolen from him that Newton, furious at the charge of plagiarism, virtually suppressed a third of the volume.

The Planets
by Dava Sobel
Published 1 Jan 2005

Over the next several decades, precise measuring devices mounted on improved telescopes helped astronomers pare Mercury close to its acknowledged current size of three thousand fifty miles across, or less than one three-hundredth the actual diameter of the Sun. By the end of the seventeenth century, mystic and magnetic attractions among the Sun and planets had been replaced with the force of gravity, introduced by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 in his book Principia Mathematica. Newton’s calculus and the universal law of gravitation seemed to give astronomers control over the very heavens. The position of any celestial body could now be computed correctly for any hour of any day, and if observed motions differed from predicted motions, then the heavens might be coerced to yield up a new planet to account for the discrepancy.

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Together, Jupiter and Saturn implied that Galileo would face ideological crises (such as his later clash with the Inquisition, perhaps) and live in seclusion and solitude (as he did under house arrest his last eight years). The ebullient increase and fertility of Jupiter is tempered, in Galileo’s nativity, by the sobering nearness of Saturn. Jupiter assumed its astrological mantle of benevolence and largesse in Babylonian times, around 1000 B.C.—long before Sir Isaac Newton (a Capricorn) grasped the planet’s true physical enormousness by watching it pull on Galileo’s moons. The ancients had no way to assess the sizes of the planets or the distances between them, so their association of Jupiter with grandeur poses a mystery for astronomy and astrology to share. As befits the planet of expansion, Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined.

Pocket London Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Royal Wedding On 29 April 2011, Prince William married Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The couple had chosen the Abbey for the relatively intimate setting of the Sanctuary – because of the Quire, three-quarters of the 1900 or so guests couldn’t see a thing! Sir Isaac Newton’s Tomb On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner, where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle, where Baroque composers Henry Purcell and John Blow are buried. Top Tips › Crowds are almost as solid as the Abbey’s unshakeable stonework, so get to the front of the queue first thing in the morning. › Hop on one of the 90-minute tours ( 7654 4834; £3) led by vergers and departing from the north door. › Grab an audio-guide, free with your individual entry tickets at the north door.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth
Published 14 Jan 2020

Error correction is the basis of all intelligence. As Karl Popper (1902–1994), one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, said, “All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”43 Some of the biggest revolutions in science actually come from small refinements of existing theories. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”44 The biggest “giant” for Newton was Galileo: Newton’s work that resulted in the three laws of motion was influenced by Galileo’s work on forces. The printing press recorded and stored information and, with it, delivered the ability to correct errors to a much wider audience.

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Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Philipp Gunz, “The Evolution of Modern Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances, January 24, 2018. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao5961. 42. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (Verso, 1976). 43. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Penn, Buckinghamshire, 1965). 44. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675. Available at digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/9792. 45. Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752). 46. Karl Popper, as quoted by Mark Damazer, “In Our Time’s Greatest Philosopher Vote,” In Our Time (BBC 4). 47. “The Babbage Engine,” Computer History Museum. computer history.org/babbage. 48.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

Predictions will always be flawed, but one way to make them as authoritative as possible is to grasp the four fundamental forces in nature that drive the entire universe. Each time one of them was understood and described, it changed human history. The first force to be explained was the force of gravity. Isaac Newton gave us a mechanics that could explain that objects moved via forces, rather than mystical spirits and metaphysics. This helped to pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam power, especially the locomotive. The second force to be understood was the electromagnetic force, which lights up our cities and powers our appliances.

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Lanza believes that as long as an intact cell can be extracted from a long-dead person, it will be possible to bring this person back to life. In Westminster Abbey, we have the carefully preserved bodies of long-dead kings and queens, as well as poets, religious figures, politicians, and even scientists like Isaac Newton. One day, Lanza confided to me, it may be possible to find intact DNA within their bodies and bring them back to life. In the movie The Boys from Brazil, the plot revolves around bringing back Hitler. One should not believe, however, that one will be able to bring back the genius or notoriety of any of these historic figures.

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All this, however, was covered up by the excitement and drama of competing with the Russians. Spectacular space stunts by brave astronauts hid the true cost of space travel from view, since nations were willing to pay dearly if their national honor was at stake. But even superpowers cannot sustain such costs over many decades. Sadly, it has been over 300 years since Sir Isaac Newton first wrote down the laws of motion, and we are still dogged by a simple calculation. To hurl an object into near-earth orbit, you have to send it 18,000 miles per hour. And to send it into deep space, beyond the gravity field of the earth, you have to propel it 25,000 miles per hour. (And to reach this magic number of 25,000 miles per hour, we have to use Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

But the timing of the siege was significant. For the late seventeenth century was a time of accelerating change in Europe in two crucial fields: natural philosophy (as science was then known) and political theory. The years after 1683 saw profound changes in the way the Western mind conceived of both nature and government. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia. Three years later, his friend John Locke published his Second Treatise of Government. If one thing came to differentiate the West from the East it was the widely differing degrees to which such new and profound knowledge was systematically pursued and applied. The long Ottoman retreat after 1683 was not economically determined.

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Micrographia was a manifesto for the new empiricism, a world away from Faustus’ sorcery. However, the new science was about more than just accurate observation. Beginning with Galileo, it was about systematic experimentation and the identification of mathematical relationships. The possibilities of mathematics were in turn expanded when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz introduced, respectively, infinitesimal and differential calculus. Finally, the Scientific Revolution was also a revolution in philosophy as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza overthrew traditional theories about both perception and reason. Without exaggeration, this cascade of intellectual innovation may be said to have given birth to modern anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, mechanics and physics.

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.* 1530 Paracelsus pioneers the application of chemistry to physiology and pathology 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium states the heliocentric theory of the solar system Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica supplants Galen’s anatomical textbook 1546 Agricola’s De natura fossilium classifies minerals and introduces the term ‘fossil’ 1572 Tycho Brahe records the first European observation of a supernova 1589 Galileo’s tests of falling bodies (published in De motu) revolutionize the experimental method 1600 William Gilbert’s De magnete, magnetisque corporibus describes the magnetic properties of the earth and electricity 1604 Galileo discovers that a free-falling body increases its distance as the square of the time 1608 Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Jansen independently invent the telescope 1609 1609 Galileo conducts the first telescopic observations of the night sky 1610 Galileo discovers four of Jupiter’s moons and infers that the earth is not at the centre of the universe 1614 John Napier’s Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio introduces logarithms 1628 William Harvey writes Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, accurately describing the circulation of blood 1637 René Descartes’ ‘La Géométrie’, an appendix to his Discours de la méthode, founds analytic geometry 1638 Galileo’s Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche founds modern mechanics 1640 Pierre de Fermat founds number theory 1654 Fermat and Blaise Pascal found probability theory 1661 Robert Boyle’s Skeptical Chymist defines elements and chemical analysis 1662 Boyle states Boyle’s Law that the volume occupied by a fixed mass of gas in a container is inversely proportional to the pressure it exerts 1669 Isaac Newton’s De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas presents the first systematic account of the calculus, independently developed by Gottfried Leibniz 1676 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers micro-organisms 1687 Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica states the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion 1735 Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema naturae introduces systematic classification of genera and species of organisms 1738 Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica states Bernoulli’s Principle and founds the mathematical study of fluid flow and the kinetic theory of gases 1746 Jean-Etienne Guettard prepares the first true geological maps 1755 Joseph Black identifies carbon dioxide 1775 Antoine Lavoisier accurately describes combustion 1785 James Hutton’s ‘Concerning the System of the Earth’ states the uniformitarian view of the earth’s development 1789 Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie states the law of conservation of matter By the mid-1600s this kind of scientific knowledge was spreading as rapidly as had the doctrine of the Protestant Reformers a century before.

8 Day Trips From London
by Dee Maldon
Published 16 Mar 2010

The first college was Peterhouse, founded in 1284, with the most recent college, Robinson, created in the 1970s. In the Middle Ages, students were expected to pray for their college’s founder. As a result, most of the early colleges have chapels. The university has been home to many academics through the years including Erasmus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and today’s well-known scientist Stephen Hawking. Cambridge University colleges provide the historical backbone of the city, and there have been ‘town and gown’ struggles in the city’s past as townspeople objected to university privileges. Many of the university colleges are clustered along the River Cam, therefore a river punt, or flat-bottomed boat, offers a relaxing and informative journey.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

He would instead “conceal it for some time, that others might know how to value it.” If he thought any more on the matter, he left no evidence of it. Halley, however, became consumed with finding the answer, to the point that the following year he traveled to Cambridge and boldly called upon the university's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton, in the hope that he could help. Newton was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness.

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Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665.

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The world was about to get its first real master race, Homo sapiens. Things would never be the same again. 30 GOOD-BYE IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia, Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London
by Richard Jones
Published 2 Jan 1998

There was a short-lived renaissance in 1851, when geographer James Wyld erected a model of the Earth in a dome-shaped building that filled the entire square. In 1874, a Member of Parliament, Albert Grant, purchased this land and commissioned James Knowles to design a public garden surrounding a memorial to Shakespeare and the busts of four famous residents: physicist Sir Isaac Newton, artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and surgeon John Hunter. The London plane trees that now tower over the square were planted at this time. In 1975, Leicester Square was permanently closed to traffic, and in 1990, the Westminster County Council had the square renovated. At the center of Leicester Square is: 2.

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Reynolds lived and painted at 47 Leicester Fields. Walk counterclockwise around the square. Be sure to look down at the handprints of various film stars embedded in the pavement. Among the imprints are those of Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellen, Sylvester Stallone, and Billy Crystal. The next gate is Newton Gate, commemorating Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who propounded the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Continue counterclockwise past the Half-Price Ticket Booth, where you can buy discounted same-day theater tickets. The booth is open at noon for tickets to matinees, and from 2:30 to 6:30pm for tickets to evening performances.

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love
by Dava Sobel
Published 25 May 2009

Bubonic plague strikes Florence. 1631 Michelangelo Galilei (brother) dies of plague in Germany. 1632 Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican. 1633 Galileo stands trial for heresy by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; Dialogue is prohibited. 1634 Suor Maria Celeste Galilei dies in Arcetri on April 2. 1636 Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina is published in Holland, in Latin and Italian. 1637 Galileo discovers lunar libration, loses his eyesight. 1638 Louis Elzevir publishes Galileo’s Two New Sciences in Leiden, Holland. 1641 Vincenzio Galilei draws his father’s design for a pendulum clock. 1642 Galileo dies in Arcetri, January 8. Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.

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What Galileo saw in 1604 would today be termed a “supernova”—the fireball explosion of a dying star. * Given the longevity of the council, its membership naturally changed considerably over the years, while ultimate approval of its decisions passed from Paul III to Julius III to Pius IV. * His successor, Sir Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo died (1642), dignified the idea of action at a distance in 1687 when he published his law of universal gravitation. In fact, the Moon’s gravity would create tides in the Earth’s oceans even if the Earth itself did not rotate or revolve. * No clear, close-up view of any comet could be obtained until 1986, when several spacecraft observed Halley’s comet during its recent return.

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Visitors to the Impruneta church, which was rebuilt following bomb hits during World War II, must content themselves with simply being near the icon, as it reposes inside a marble shrine, behind a blue gilt-embroidered curtain. * Galileo’s last book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences indeed ignited later physicists: Sir Isaac Newton transformed Galileo’s ideas into laws of motion and universal gravitation. * The English translations of these Latin phrases, respectively, are “from the book of the living” and “No one is accepted [as] prophet in his own country.” * Later, Galileo thanked him by dedicating Two New Sciences “To the very illustrious nobleman, my Lord the Count de Noailles, Councilor to his Most Christian Majesty; Knight of the Holy Ghost; Field Marshal of the Armies,” et cetera, et cetera

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time. Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010 (2012) This philosophy is a gift of God to this old world, to serve as the only plank, as it were, which pious and prudent people may use to escape the shipwreck of atheism which now threatens us. —LEIBNIZ, IN A 1669 LETTER TO THOMASIUS Isaac Newton was slow to join to the Royal Society—in the Charter Book that lives in the Society’s vault, his signature does not appear until the ninth page—but by the second decade of the Eighteenth Century he had become its President. His unquestioned status as the greatest mind of his generation, combined with his political connections as Master of the Mint and his ruthlessness toward those he perceived as rivals, had given him an unusual degree of power.

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The 69-year-old Leibniz, who had become unfashionable and, because of the dispute over the calculus, something of a political problem, had been left behind in Germany. He wrote a short letter to Caroline, warning her that religion was declining in England; that John Locke did not believe in the immortality of the soul; and that Sir Isaac Newton held to some strange views about the relationship between God and the physical universe. Anyone who has blithely forwarded a private email to a corporate mailing list, with incalculable consequences, will recognize what happened next: Caroline made Leibniz’s letter known, and one Samuel Clarke stepped forward to rebut Leibniz’s charges.

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“Quicksilver,” written by hand with a fountain pen in an alcove lined with a huge map of early 18th-century London, immersed the author and his legions of devoted readers in one of the most intellectually exciting and politically momentous periods of history. It was the age of such scientific geniuses as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and the undersung polymath Robert Hooke, and also the time when our modern economic systems began to take form. Unusual subjects for fiction, perhaps, but Stephenson makes the “Baroque Cycle” a weirdly effective mix of high-octane tutorial and ripping yarn. To balance such cerebral characters as Newton and Daniel Waterhouse (Puritan ancestor of the Waterhouses, crack mathematicians and programmers, in “Cryptonomicon”), he introduces Jack Shaftoe, aka the King of the Vagabonds and his sometime-paramour turned countess and financial whiz, Eliza.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by David Epstein
Published 1 Mar 2019

For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.” * * * • • • Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework. Unlike Galileo and Isaac Newton, he documented his confusion. “What matters to me,” Kepler wrote, “is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.” Kepler was a young man when he showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory—so cutting edge at the time that it cost 1 percent of the national budget of Denmark.

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To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. * * * • • • Casadevall leads by example. A single conversation with him is liable to include Anna Karenina, the Federalist Papers, the fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were philosophers as well as scientists, why the Roman Empire wasn’t more innovative, and a point about mentoring in the form of a description of the character Mentor from Homer’s Odyssey. “I work at it,” he said, smirking. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something.

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Markman, “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 45–56. Also, Kepler read a new publication on magnetism: A. Caswell, “Lectures on Astronomy,” Smithsonian Lectures on Astronomy, 1858 (British Museum collection). “the moon’s dominion over the waters”: J. Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage, 2007). no concept of gravity as a force; “Ye physicists”: A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2017). “I especially love analogies”: B. Vickers, “Analogy Versus Identity,” in: Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll
Published 28 Apr 2014

It helps explain why, with all its possibilities, genius, and might, France stalled and began to crumble. By Louis XIV’s death in 1715, France was bankrupt, with no effective accounting system. Seventy-five years of financial crisis and a great reckoning awaited the French. CHAPTER 7 THE FIRST BAILOUT I can calculate the orbit of heavenly bodies, not the madness of people. —SIR ISAAC NEWTON, 1721 Like the French, the English in the seventeenth century struggled with government accounting reform. Even in the country of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary oversight, financial accountability came slowly, met fierce resistance, and remained a fragile political tradition. The whole idea of a constitutional monarchy was accountability to Parliament, yet it would take the English more than 150 years to establish oversight of royal finance.1 As early as 1644, following public calls for inquiry into the management of state revenue, Parliament established a Commission of Accounts.

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For this reason, Walpole, a Whig, had initially been a foe of the company. In spite of interparty debate over the debt scheme and an admission that he had, at first, found the South Sea scheme “a chimera,” Walpole eventually embraced it. If it seems surprising that Walpole would have gotten entangled in the South Sea bubble, it should be remembered that even Isaac Newton, the great astronomer, lost the immense sum of £20,000 speculating at the height of the scheme. Walpole believed in the scheme in spite of public financial data that put it into question. He was no less shrewd than Newton, but he very well could have been blinded by greed. In 1720, at the very moment Walpole was both supporting and investing in the South Sea scheme, the lawyer and MP Archibald Hutcheson made a fairly accurate calculation of South Sea stock value.

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They were imbued with ideals of happiness, self-discipline, scientific progress, and salvation—the heady and unique mix of British Enlightenment Protestantism that Max Weber would idealize as the Protestant work ethic. Their belief in accounting was inspired by religious fervor. Dissenters followed the old English tradition of attempting to marry scientific rationalism and the natural sciences with Christianity. Their beliefs rested on Isaac Newton’s ideals of order, harmony, and progress as revealed by mathematics. For these divinely inspired people of discipline and profit, accounting was a tool of personal industriousness, as well as for realizing political freedom and faithfully watching over the God-given gift of prosperity.5 Private academies not only afforded Dissenters income but also were a place where they could apply their unique brand of scientific, mercantile learning.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

The use of experiments does not explain why chemistry flourished and alchemy died. Perhaps, then, it was down to the characters involved? Perhaps the great early scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton were sharper, wiser, more creative men than the alchemists they replaced? This is a spectacularly unpersuasive explanation. Two of the leading alchemists of the 1600s were Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. They were energetic, even fervent, practitioners of alchemy, which thankfully did not prevent their enormous contributions to modern science.25 No, the alchemists were often the very same people using the same experimental methods to try to understand the world around them.

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Sabine Hossenfelder, “Blaise Pascal, Florin Périer, and the Puy de Dôme Experiment,” BackRe(Action) (blog), November 21, 2007, http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/blaise-pascal-florin-p-and-puy-de-d.html; and David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2015), chap. 8. 25. See, for example, Louis Trenchard More, “Boyle as Alchemist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 1 (January 1941), 61–76; and Adam Mann, “The Strange, Secret History of Isaac Newton’s Papers,” Q&A with Sarah Dry, Wired, May 14, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/05/newton-papers-q-and-a/. 26. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 340. 27. James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978; repr. 1995), 74. 28. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 357. 29. Jeff Larson et al., “How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm. 30.

CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans
by Henry T. Greely
Published 22 Jan 2021

Ann Ran, David Cox, et al., “Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems,” Science 339, no. 6121 (2013): 819–824. 27. Prashant Mali, Luhan Yang, Kevin M. Esvelt, et al., “RNA-Guided Human Genome Engineering via Cas9,” Science 339, no. 6121 (2013): 823–826, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1232033. 28. Most commonly attributed to Isaac Newton. See Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke (1675), in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: 1661–1675, Volume 1, ed. H. W. Turnbull (London: The Royal Society at the University Press, 1959), 416. See also Maria Popova, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Story behind Newton’s Famous Metaphor of How Knowledge Progresses,” Brain Pickings, February 16, 2016, https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants. 29.

Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
by Rebecca Boyle
Published 16 Jan 2024

The comet was visible for as many as eighty days, according to reconstructions of the event using modern astronomy software. Its tail was gigantic, spanning almost the entire sky. We know of one other comet that has done this, and done so repeatedly, every seventy-six years. The comet*32 could have been Halley’s, named for a pal of Isaac Newton who predicted it would reappear, and became famous when it did, long after his own death. Anaxagoras may have been the first to record it, and to glean some new insight from it. Maybe we should call it Anaxagoras’s Comet. ALL OF ANAXAGORAS’S unorthodox ideas refuted earlier theories. There were no giant cosmic bowls up above, there were no flat leaves—there were rocks, and the Moon was one of them.

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Exploration and expansion are in our nature, as they have been since the Moon calendar makers of Warren Field planned their salmon haul, since Abraham bade farewell to Moon City Ur and set out for the Promised Land, since my great-grandparents boarded ships and left Ireland in search of a new and better life. The Moon seemed reachable. We had the technology. It was time to try. * * * *50 This is not an evil demon in the way modern Western people think of them, but more like a spirit guide. *51 Sir Isaac Newton finally figured out the full tidal mechanism eighty years later. In the Principia, he correctly showed that the tides depend on both the gravitational attraction of the Moon, like Kepler said, and centrifugal forces caused by the Moon-Earth orbit. *52 In a nod to Aristotle, Plutarch, and Saint Augustine

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Angular momentum is a quantity that describes the movement and mass of a rotating object or a system of rotating objects: the spinning Earth, the spinning Moon revolving around the spinning Earth, and so forth. The rotation of an object remains constant unless it is acted upon by an external force. Plato talks about this paradoxical pairing of rest and motion in his Republic. Sir Isaac Newton was the first Western thinker to lay out the mathematics behind angular momentum, in his Principia. The proof for conservation of angular momentum is attributed to both Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler, who described it in 1746. 3. Darwin, Tides and Kindred Phenomena, 282. 4. Daly, “Origin of the Moon,” 104–19. 5.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are?
by Chris Rojek
Published 15 Feb 2008

Top Ten Great Britons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Winston Churchill – 456,498 votes (28.1 per cent) Isambard Kingdom Brunel – 398,526 votes (24.6 per cent) Diana, Princess of Wales – 225,584 votes (13.9 per cent) Charles Darwin – 112,496 votes (6.9 per cent) William Shakespeare – 109,919 votes (6.8 per cent) Isaac Newton – 84,628 votes (5.2 per cent) Queen Elizabeth 1 – 71,928 votes (4.4 per cent) John Lennon – 68,445 votes (4.2 per cent) Horatio Nelson – 49,171 votes (3 per cent) Oliver Cromwell – 45,083 votes (2.8 per cent) The nation’s ‘greatest Briton’, attracting over 28 per cent of the votes cast, was Winston Churchill.

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Contrary to the tabloid, middle-brow view that there is a creeping tendency for British culture to be overwhelmed by film stars, sporting 97 BRITONS TODAY legends and pop idols, only 22 of the top 100 are living; and of those only twelve are from the fields of pop music, film and sport. For every Boy George, David Beckham, Bono or Cliff Richard, there is a Stephen Hawking, Tony Benn or J. K. Rowling. Three out of the top ten are engineers and natural scientists (Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton). Indeed, the poll suggests that the British value their scientists above their artists. The British are frequently dismissed as a philistine people, narrowly inured to respect practical knowledge, pragmatism and money-making activities, rather than abstract theory, philosophy and pure research.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

After eight weeks of almost solitary confinement, he was able to get the project done. To me, it is a little sad that this executive was driven to such measures. Yet while his methods may have been extreme, I can’t argue with his intention. He knew that making his highest point of contribution on a task required that he create the space for unencumbered thought. Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary confinement proved critical in what became a true breakthrough that shaped scientific thinking for the next three hundred years.

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David Sedaris, “Laugh, Kookaburra,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris. 5. ESCAPE 1. Frank O’Brien, “Do-Not-Call Mondays.” 2. Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012), 132. 3. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 105. 4. Jeff Weiner, “The Importance of Scheduling Nothing,” LinkedIn, April 3, 2013, https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130403215758-22330283-the-importance-of-scheduling-nothing. 5. I am indebted here to an excellent first-person account of Bill Gates’s Think Week by Robert A.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Soon those watching the novel phenomenon of economic development put into circulation descriptions of how people behaved in their market transactions. They started to depict men and women as having an inherent disposition toward the producing, selling, and buying that drove the market’s expansion. These observations, scattered in pamphlets, how-to books, broadsides, and learned tomes, many of them written by such luminaries as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Daniel Defoe, converged on the universal appeal of making money. The initiatives of ordinary people, such as floating a meadow to gain a head start on spring planting or carrying locally made cheese to a distant market, mattered most. This no longer appeared as peculiar conduct; being responsive in their commercial dealings was treated as a newly discovered human capacity.

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In creating government, people had acted to protect their life, liberty, and property, and they chose government as a convenient means to do that. Locke gave the English a naturalistic theory of political obligations wrapped around an inaccurate description of the money mechanism. More than three hundred pamphleteers, including Isaac Newton and Daniel Defoe, entered the ensuing debate over the proposed recoinage. The issue was whether or not the clipped coins should be reminted with the official silver content or lowered to match the devaluation by chisel. Sharply divided, the antagonists carried the conceptualization of money to a new level of sophistication.

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There was never any thought of importing slaves into Great Britain, but the high cost of workers’ wages proved to be a powerful incentive to find alternative sources of energy. This gave a push to inventors who began a technological saga that has only accelerated with time. Drawing on seventeenth-century scientific experiments in hydraulics and hydrostatics, these pioneer engineers designed mechanical slaves, machines that could harness energy. Isaac Newton’s brilliant calculations of how gravity kept the planets in place prompted a new respect for human reason. As Alexander Pope wrote: Nature and nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; GOD said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Thomas Newcomen, Richard Arkwright, and James Watt demonstrated that lesser mortals could take the Promethean fire from Newton and build engines that could work a lot harder than human beings and their animals.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

—Phil Fisher Failure to ignore and avoid the temptation that comes from watching other people get rich thanks to a sharp rise in the prices of their stock holdings may lead to the destruction of your wealth, if you fall prey to the fear of missing out. Even the legendary Isaac Newton succumbed to this bias during the South Sea Bubble of 1720 (figure 31.1). He had invested in South Sea stock before its euphoric rise and had exited with a handsome profit of more than 100 percent in a few months. Lured by social proof—his friends continued to make even bigger returns on the stock after his exit—he caved and bought the stock again near its peak. I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. FIGURE 31.1 South Sea Stock, December 1718–December 1721. Source: “Isaac Newton’s Nightmare During the South Sea Stock Bubble (Dec 1718 – Dec 1721),” Bamboo Innovator (blog), https://bambooinnovator.com/2013/04/04/isaac-newtons-nightmare-during-the-south-sea-stock-bubble-dec-1718-dec-1721/.

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Source: “Isaac Newton’s Nightmare During the South Sea Stock Bubble (Dec 1718 – Dec 1721),” Bamboo Innovator (blog), https://bambooinnovator.com/2013/04/04/isaac-newtons-nightmare-during-the-south-sea-stock-bubble-dec-1718-dec-1721/. I wish I had known this story earlier. In late 2015, I bought shares of Capital Trust only because a close friend recently had made more than 150 percent on it in less than a year. As Charles Kindleberger says, “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.”4 I did not want to get left behind in this competitive race with my close friend, so I bought the stock of Capital Trust even though I did not properly understand its underlying business.

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Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ryan Holiday enlightened me on the virtues of stoicism and of being in control of our personal reaction to any event in our lives. Will Durant, Ariel Durant, and Yuval Noah Harari educated me on the history of human civilization. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling instilled great optimism in me about the constant, ongoing improvements in our world on a daily basis. My life truly epitomizes Isaac Newton’s saying: “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The Joys of Compounding is my heartfelt tribute to all of my teachers who helped me achieve financial independence, become a better and wiser person, and embark on the path to a fulfilling and meaningful life. Over the years, I have learned vicariously through the writings and speeches of others.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
Published 17 Jul 2017

What is it about an apple in a physicist’s vacuum that needs only pencil and paper, while an apple falling through the air of the real world demands solution by gadget? Both falls, as Bush noted, can be captured in differential equations—the equations at the heart of calculus that represent continuous change. So first imagine the apple falling on the head of, say, Isaac Newton (and it’s no coincidence that the man who formulated the laws of gravitation also co-invented calculus—without equations that capture change over time, there’s no making sense of gravity). In a vacuum, the apple falls 9.8 meters per second faster, each second, until it concusses Newton. But now drop the apple on Newton in the open air.

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He wasn’t a big influence on my ideas there, though I once took a course from him.” Given Shannon’s habitual lack of interest in these sorts of confrontations, statements like those are telling. But for the most part, he left the struggle for credit to others. By the standards of the great mathematical feuds—Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton battling over custody of calculus, or Henri Poincaré and Bertrand Russell debating the nature of mathematical reasoning—the rivalry between Shannon and Wiener is, sadly, less spectacular than biographers might prefer. But it still stands as an important moment in Shannon’s story. Shannon gave the impression of the carefree scholar—someone secure enough in his own intellect and reputation to brush aside the opinion of others.

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He had a flair for the dramatic and the artistic; we see it in the flaming trumpet, Theseus the mouse, a flagpole he hand-carved out of an oversize tree on his property, the juggling clowns he built to exacting specifications. Shannon’s admirers are just as quick to compare him to M. C. Escher or Lewis Carroll as they are to put him in the company of Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton. He turned arid and technical sciences into vast and captivating puzzles, the solving of which was play of the adult kind. It says something about Claude Shannon and his instinct for play that his work found its way into both the pages of journals and the halls of museums. In one sense, it may be impossible to draw anything from this.

Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control
by Kenneth L. Grant
Published 1 Sep 2004

Freud would endorse this approach, and it might even pay us over the long run. But now, having put off the matter longer than I had intended, I find I must revert to the numeric. Statistics I have promised, and statistics I will deliver. A Tribute to Sir Isaac Newton To fortify us in this exceedingly daunting enterprise, I will call on the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton. It seems to me that Newton would have made a great trader; history tells us he had all of the tools. He spent his early days observing certain patterns of motion in the universe, generalized them into a theory that is certainly the basis for all modern physics, and invented the 54 TRADING RISK mathematical science of calculus as a means of explaining his theories.1 As the world eventually found out, this latter discovery was not only perfectly applicable to the description of the physical universe, but also proved itself to be enormously handy in modeling the social sciences, most notably (at least for our purposes) economics.

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ISBN 0-471-65091-9 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents PREFACE ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHAPTER 1 The Risk Management Investment CHAPTER 2 Setting Performance Objectives Optimal Target Return Nominal Target Return Stop-Out Level The Beach CHAPTER 3 Understanding the Profit/Loss Patterns over Time And Now to Statistics, but First a Word (or More) about Time Series Construction Time Units Time Spans Graphical Representation of Daily P/L Histogram of P/L Observations Statistics A Tribute to Sir Isaac Newton Average P/L Standard Deviation Sharpe Ratio Median P/L Percentage of Winning Days Performance Ratio, Average P/L, Winning Days versus Losing Days xiv 1 19 21 24 26 32 37 39 40 43 48 51 53 53 56 57 65 68 68 69 v vi CONTENTS Drawdown Correlations 70 73 Putting It All Together CHAPTER 4 The Risk Components of an Individual Portfolio Historical Volatility Options Implied Volatility Correlation Value at Risk (VaR) Justification for VaR Calculations Types of VaR Calculations Testing VaR Accuracy Setting VaR Parameters Use of VaR Calculation in Portfolio Management Scenario Analysis Technical Analysis CHAPTER 5 Setting Appropriate Exposure Levels (Rule 1) Determining the Appropriate Ranges of Exposure Method 1: Inverted Sharpe Ratio Method 2: Managing Volatility as a Percentage of Trading Capital Drawdowns and Netting Risk Asymmetric Payoff Function CHAPTER 6 Adjusting Portfolio Exposure (Rule 2) Size of Individual Positions Directional Bias Position Level Volatility Time Horizon Diversification Leverage Optionality Nonlinear Pricing Dynamics Relationship between Strike Price and Underlying Price (Moneyness) 79 81 84 86 90 91 92 94 98 99 102 104 106 109 110 111 114 129 130 133 134 135 141 142 144 146 148 149 149 vii Contents Implied Volatility Asymmetric Payoff Functions Leverage Characteristics Summary CHAPTER 7 150 150 151 154 The Risk Components of an Individual Trade Your Transaction Performance Key Components of a Transactions-Level Database Defining a Transaction Position Snapshot Statistics Core Transactions-Level Statistics Trade Level P/L Holding Period Average P/L P/L per Dollar Invested (Weighted Average P/L) Average Holding Period P/L by Security (P/L Attribution) Long Side P/L versus Short Side P/L Correlation Analysis Number of Daily Transactions Capital Invested Net Market Value (Raw) Net Market Value (Absolute Value) Number of Positions Holding Periods Volatility/VaR Other Correlations Final Word on Correlation Performance Success Metrics Methods for Improving Performance Ratios Performance Ratio Components Maximizing Your P/L Profitability Concentration (90/10) Ratio 155 156 157 158 160 161 162 162 163 164 164 165 166 168 170 171 172 173 174 175 177 179 179 184 189 190 192 200 Putting It All Together 208 CHAPTER 8 213 Bringin’ It on Home Make a Plan and Stick to It If the Plan’s Not Working, Change the Plan Seek to Trade with an “Edge” 214 218 219 viii CONTENTS Structural Inefficiencies Methodological Inefficiencies 220 223 Play Your P/L Avoid Surprises—Especially to Yourself Seek to Maximize Your Performance at the Margin Seek Nonmonetary Benefits Apply Liberal Doses of Humility and Humor Be Healthy/Cultivate Other Interests 236 237 242 244 APPENDIX 245 Optimal f and Risk of Ruin 226 234 Optimal f Risk of Ruin 246 250 INDEX 253 Contents Preface Make voyages.

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go
by Emily Cockayne
Published 15 Aug 2020

In September 1891 the Irish-born bishop of Edinburgh, John Dowden, picked at a copy of the 1637 prayer book, rummaging through the leather binding and pulling out older versions of the text. He encouraged others to do likewise, ‘to sacrifice [the covers], though it be with a pang, to the advancement of liturgical inquiry’.4 In the turbulent years spanning the 1630s through to the 1720s, roughly the lifespan of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whom we encounter soon, many later recycling and reuse practices were developed. Materials were stretched in the British civil wars, also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–51), during which Charles I was executed in 1649. The English Civil War saw the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell (the ‘Roundheads’) pitted against the Royalists (the ‘Cavaliers’), who were loyal to the monarchy.

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These suggestions appear particularly altruistic when Bush’s employment, as a draper, is factored in: his own business would be undercut by a reduction in cloth sales.24 Bush died by the end of the year, and the bells survived mostly intact. A portion of the plate held by families and institutions survived the civil wars unscathed only to be liquidated during the Great Recoinage of 1696, at a time when Isaac Newton was warden of the mint. Recoinage was complete by the time Newton became the master of the mint at the end of 1699. Citizens were induced to sell their plate and bullion to the state. Recoinage was needed because people had lost faith in their coins, which were often clipped or damaged. The bad coins drove the good ones from circulation and into hoards.

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Have you ever started a new notebook, with pages put speculatively aside, often alphabetically, for future jottings? I have. Finding that I had left scant space for one category, and too much for others (nothing at the end, under X, Y and Z), I was afflicted with pangs of guilt for my wastefulness. Paper was sufficiently affordable in 1612 for Isaac Newton’s stepfather, Revd Barnabas Smith, to have done just this, to keep track of his theological musings. Many of the hundreds of pages were left blank, and Smith did not find much to say about ‘Frugalitas’, beyond one line from Proverbs 6: 6. Momentarily abandoning alphabetic order, Smith skipped to ‘Prodigalitus’ for his next category, which remains blank – one leaf of wasted paper.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
by Richard Dawkins
Published 3 Oct 2011

We can’t get very far with that explanation until we have looked at what makes heavenly bodies orbit other heavenly bodies in the first place. So that’s what we’ll do next. Into orbit Why do the planets stay in orbit around the sun? Why does anything stay in orbit around anything else? This was first understood in the seventeenth century by Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Newton showed that all orbits were controlled by gravity – the same force of gravity that pulls falling apples towards the ground, but on a larger scale. (Alas, the story that Newton got the idea when an apple bounced off his head is probably not really true.)

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It’s an illusion – but a fascinating illusion, and understanding it leads on to all sorts of interesting things, some of which we’ll come to in the next chapter. What light is made of First, we need to understand about something called the spectrum. It was discovered in the time of King Charles II – that’s about 350 years ago – by Isaac Newton, who may well have been the greatest scientist ever (he discovered lots of other things besides the spectrum, as we saw in the chapter on night and day). Newton discovered that white light is really a mixture of all the different colours. To a scientist, that’s what white means. How did Newton find this out?

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome)
by Gavin Francis
Published 28 Apr 2015

Astronomers, whose very business was the elucidation and understanding of light, were peering into the eye in order to better comprehend the stars. The astronomer-mystic Johannes Kepler was the first to write about how an image of the world was projected upside down and back to front onto the retina. When Isaac Newton was working out the motion of the planets around the sun he embarked on dramatic experiments to test the reliability of his own vision. Inserting a long blunt needle (a ‘bodkin’) into his own eye socket between the bone and the eyeball, he described how wiggling it around distorted his vision.

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He still thought that kidneys filter blood in some way; he just admitted he didn’t know how they did it. No one would come closer to the true mechanism until microscopes became commonplace a hundred and fifty years later, following advances in lens and prism technology. In the 1660s, lenses were achieving transformations in the understanding of both inner and outer space: near Cambridge, Isaac Newton, in quarantine from the plague, used his time to demonstrate how sunlight can be broken into colours by a prism, and formulated his laws of gravity. In London, Robert Hooke published his Micrographia, which showed the astonishing intricacy of tiny, everyday structures, such as body lice, pieces of cork, and flies’ eyes (he coined the word ‘cell’ as the basic unit of life, because under the microscope they resembled a series of monks’ cells).

Thinking in Numbers
by Daniel Tammet
Published 15 Aug 2012

Always resistant to the thinking of his day, he denounced historians as hero worshippers. In War and Peace, over one thousand pages long, he launched his most sustained attack. His primary weapon was drawn from mathematics. Calculus was by no means a novel idea in Tolstoy’s time. Its ‘inventors’, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, in the late-seventeenth century, were refining theories that had been in development since the time of the ancient Greeks. As geometers study shape, the student of calculus examines change: the mathematics of how an object transforms from one state into another, as when describing the motion of a ball or bullet through space, is rendered pictorial in its graphs’ curves.

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The mathematician takes ideas that are valid in one area and ‘transplants’ them into another hoping that they will take, and not be rejected by the recipient domain. The creator of ‘noncommutative geometry’, Connes himself has applied geometrical ideas to quantum mechanics. Metaphors, he argued, are the essence of mathematical thought. Sir Michael Atiyah, a former director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, used his four minutes to speak about mathematical ideas ‘like visions, pictures before the eyes.’ As if painting a picture or dreaming up a scene in a novel, the mathematician creates and explores these visions using intuition and imagination. Atiyah’s voice, soft and earnest, made attentive listeners of everyone in the room.

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age
by Paul J. Nahin
Published 27 Oct 2012

Enough, in fact, that he was asked to give an address (on February 5, 1835, only a few months past his nineteenth birthday) on Newton during the presentation ceremony of a bust of Newton to the Institute, and that address was soon after published as a pamphlet, On the Genius and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, now quite rare. 3. An amazing example of what Gregory’s Journal would publish that almost certainly would not have been accepted in a more established publication was the first paper ever written by William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. In 1837 the Anglican cleric and mathematician Philip Kelland (1808–1879) published the book Theory of Heat, in which he took sharp exception to central results in Fourier’s 1822 theory of the possibility of expanding periodic functions in terms of sinusoids (a routine mathematical tool today: see my Dr.

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When used this way, the XOR is often called a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, and we’ll see it and a more sophisticated version (a controlled-controlled-NOT) in Chapter 10. 8 Sequential-State Digital Circuits Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. —From Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), showing that the idea of a physical system changing state long predates the invention of digital circuitry 8.1 TWO SEQUENTIAL-STATE PROBLEMS What is a sequential-state problem? This is a question that is most directly answered by giving some specific examples. One can, I should admit, formulate a theoretical, mathematical definition, but examples are both more illuminating and, even more importantly, I think, more fun.

Think Like a Freak
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 11 May 2014

Sure, there are some truly brilliant people out there and they probably should think big. For the rest of us, thinking big means you’ll spend a lot of time tilting at windmills. While thinking small won’t win you many points with the typical big thinker, there are at least a few noteworthy advocates of our approach. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance. “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age,” he wrote. “Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.” Maybe the two of us are biased.

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Warren, Sharyn Leis, Rosa Surace, and Ori Ashman, “Treatment of Ulcerative Colitis Using Fecal Bacteriotherapy,” Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 37, no. 1 (July 2003). CHAPTER 5: THINK LIKE A CHILD 88 “SOPHISTICATION” AND THE SOPHISTS (FOOTNOTE): Drawn from the “Sophisticated” entry on worldwidewords.org, by the excellent British etymologist Michael Quinion. 89 “TO EXPLAIN ALL NATURE IS TOO DIFFICULT A TASK . . .”: See Isaac Newton and J. E. McGuire, “Newton’s ‘Principles of Philosophy’: An Intended Preface for the 1704 ‘Opticks’ and a Related Draft Fragment,” The British Journal for the History of Science 5, no. 2 (December 1970); hat tip to Freakonomics Radio producer Katherine Wells, who scripted this for Stephen J. Dubner, “The Truth Is Out There . . .

The Right Side of History
by Ben Shapiro
Published 11 Feb 2019

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, explained: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”5 Kepler routinely described his own physics as part and parcel of Aristotelian metaphysics, and explained that the laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”6 Kepler’s philosophy was also that of Isaac Newton (1642–1726): “Opposite to [God] is Atheism in profession & Idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”7 SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, CONTINUED The progress of science was motivated by a determination to know God’s universe, but it became increasingly clear that one significant by-product of that quest for knowledge was the betterment of man’s material status.

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CHAPTER 5: ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATORS 1.Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014), 175–77. 2.Steph Solis, “Copernicus and the Church: What the History Books Don’t Say,” CSMonitor.com, February 19, 2013, https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say. 3.Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, “Vatican Admits Galileo Was Right,” NewScientist.com, November 7, 1992, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460.600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right-/. 4.Del Ratzsch, “The Religious Roots of Science,” in Melville Y. Stewart, Science and Religion in Dialogue, vol. 1 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 59. 5.Stark, How the West Won, 317. 6.Ratzsch, “The Religious Roots of Science,” 59. 7.Isaac Newton, Keynes Ms. 7, King’s College, Cambridge UK, http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00007. 8.Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Pocket Books, 1926), 129. 9.B. H. G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics & Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 262. 10.

Prime Obsession:: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics
by John Derbyshire
Published 14 Apr 2003

Since the integral of 1 ⁄ x is log x, I hope it won’t be too much of a stretch to believe—I shall not pause to prove it—that the integral of 1 ⁄ (1 – x) is −log(1 − x). The right-hand side is even easier. I can just integrate term by term, using the rules for integrating powers that I gave in Table 7-2. Here is the result (which was first obtained by Sir Isaac Newton). x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 + + + + + +L 2 3 4 5 6 7 It will be a little handier, as you can see in Expression 9-3, if I multiply both sides by −1. − log(1 − x ) = x + x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 − − − − − −L 2 3 4 5 6 7 Expression 9-3 log(1 − x ) = − x − Oddly, though it makes little difference to the way I shall apply it, Expression 9-3 is true when x = −1, even though the expression I started with, Expression 9-2, isn’t.

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Only seven British mathematicians showed up at the Paris Congress, ranking Britain below France (90), Germany (25), the U.S.A. (17), Italy (15), Belgium (13), Russia (9), Austria, and Switzerland (8 each). Mathematically, Britain in 1900 was a backwater. Even a backwater, of course, has some pockets of vitality. Trinity College, Cambridge, where Littlewood was in residence, maintained a strong mathematical tradition. It had been Sir Isaac Newton’s college, 1661−1693, and counted several geniuses of mathematics and physics among its nineteenth-century alumni: Charles Babbage, generally credited with inventing the computer; the astronomer George Airy, after whom a family of mathematical functions is named; 226 PRIME OBSESSION Augustus de Morgan, the logician; Arthur Cayley, the algebraist; James Clerk Maxwell, and some lesser lights.

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From Power Rule 9, which says that log (a × b) = log a + log b, ζ (s ) = 1 PRIME OBSESSION 304   1 log ζ (s ) = log  1 1− s  2    1   + log  1 1− s   3    1 + log  1 1− s  11 Since log    1   + log  1 1− s   5     1   + log  1 1− s   7         K +   1 = − log a by Power Rule 10, this is a 1 1 1 1     − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s   2   3   5   7  1   − log 1 − s  − K  11  Now recall Sir Isaac Newton’s infinite series for log (1 − x) in Chapter 9.vii. It applied to x between −1 and +1, which is certainly the case here, so long as s is positive. So I can expand each log as an infinite series as shown in Expression 19-3. 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 2s  2 22s   3 23s   4 24s   5 25s   6 26s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 3s  2 32s   3 33s   4 34s   5 35s   6 36s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 5s  2 52s   3 53s   4 54s   5 55s   6 56s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 7s  2 72s   3 73s   4 74s   5 75s   6 76s  TURNING + THE GOLDEN KEY 305 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  × 2s  +  × 3s  +  × 4s  +  × 5s  s 11  2 11   3 11   4 11   5 11  1  1 +  × 6s  + L  6 11  +L Expression 19-3 This is an infinite sum of infinite sums—a bit startling at first sight, I suppose, but not actually an unusual situation in math.

Collider
by Paul Halpern
Published 3 Aug 2009

Like a well-designed electronic dog collar it allows some wandering away from the house but discourages fleeing the whole property. While scientists like Boyle, Dalton, and Mendeleyev focused on discovering the ingredients that make up our world, others tried to map out and understand the invisible forces that govern how things interact and transform. Born on Christmas Day in 1642, Sir Isaac Newton possessed an extraordinary gift for finding patterns in nature and discerning the basic rules underlying its dynamics. Newton’s laws of mechanics transformed physical science from a cluttered notebook of sundry observations to a methodical masterwork of unprecedented predictive power. They describe how forces—pushes and pulls—affect the journeys through space of all things in creation.

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Clinton, Letter to the House Committee on Appropriations, June 16, 1993. 4 Lyn Evans, “First Beam in the LHC—Accelerating Science,” CERN press release, September 10, 2008, press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR08.08E.html (accessed March 2, 2009). 5 Peter Higgs, in “In Search of the God Particle,” Independent, April 8, 2008, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/in-search-of-the-god-particle-805757.html (accessed April 18, 2008). 6 Lyn Evans in “Meet Evans the Atom, Who Will End the World on Wednesday,” Daily Mail, September 7, 2008, www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1053091/Meet-Evans-Atom-end-world-Wednesday.html (accessed March 4, 2009). 7 J. P. Blaizot et al., “Study of Potentially Dangerous Events during Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC: Report of the LHC Safety Study Group,” CERN Report 2003-001, February 28, 2003, p. 10. 1. The Secrets of Creation 1 Isaac Newton, Opticks, 4th ed. (London: William Innys, 1730), p. 400. 2. The Quest for a Theory of Everything 1 L. M. Brown et al., “Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry,” in Lillian Hoddeson et al., eds., The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 508. 3.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2009

CASTLES IN THE AIR 23 3. HOW TO BUILD FINANCIAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION 45 4. HURRICANE SEASON 69 5. MADLY IN ALL DIRECTIONS 99 6. TOMORROW CAPITALISM? 129 MY DEBTS 157 NOTES 159 REFERENCES 167 INDEX 179 Preface I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. -Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in the South Sea Bubble in 1720 In the fall of 1991, a high-pressure system from northern Canada collided with a powerful low-pressure system over the coast of New England. The large temperature contrast in such a small area gave rise to a cyclone. The cyclone, in turn, absorbed a nearby dying hurricane, which created an enormously powerful storm.

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The best outcome to be hoped for is that they will prevent market players from making exactly the same mistake they made last time-that is, the mistake everybody is focusing on avoiding anyway. And on top of that, you also get a whole new battery of regulations that may well make the next crisis considerably worse. We do not know where the next crisis will come from. From history we learn that we do not learn from history. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest geniuses of all time, lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble. Not even those whose job it is to make forecasts know what will happen next. One of those who did that best, Economic Cycle Research Institute founder Geoffrey Moore, told his students that someone who can predict a recession at the exact time when it starts is a very successful forecaster.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

Based on Vieweg’s now-public sales records, Hermann and Dorothea went on to be a best seller, earning tens of thousands of talers for Vieweg and nary a penny more for poor Goethe. You can have the best-designed mechanism, but it doesn’t do you the least bit of good if the process is corrupted. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Vickrey’s innovations based on their conspicuous absence from today’s auction markets. It’s like saying that Isaac Newton’s contributions to physics were pointless because he never anticipated the theory of relativity. First, just as Newton’s physics prove to be good enough for a range of circumstances, there are enormously important markets where variants on Vickrey’s original design exist today. Most notable among these is Google’s system for selling off search ads, AdWords, which instructs prospective advertisers to bid “the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad (though the final amount you’re charged per click—your actual CPC—could end up being less).”

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A bridge that stands in theory may, in practice, sink into the riverbed or ripple with wave-like undulations when the wind blows just so. (If you want to see a dramatic example, go to YouTube and watch the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.) Every bridge presents its own unique design challenges—the soil, the way the river flows, the weather, the wear and tear of cars and trucks speeding to and fro. You start with Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler, but had better take into account the complexities of each situation even if it doesn’t allow you to derive a simple “final answer.” That makes bridge engineering a messier process, involving extended computer simulations, site visits to scope out the river-bank, analysis of soil samples, and stress testing scale models in a wind tunnel.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy
by William Poundstone
Published 4 Jan 2012

Candidates are judged on how valiantly they struggle with the bar raiser’s near-impossible questions. That’s becoming a common strategy in these desperate times for job seekers. Another notable example of the impossible question genre asks ? Can you swim faster through water or syrup? It turns out that Sir Isaac Newton pondered this question more than three hundred years ago. Newton’s answer was wrong. Fortunately, he never tried to get a job in Silicon Valley. Salvaging a Doomed Interview I have given many examples of how to answer tough questions in this book. Sooner or later, you’ll meet up with a question you can’t answer.

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They actually touch and overlap in the sky. That’s as close as a pair of stars can get. How do you find the closest pair? The astronomer’s answer is that eclipsing binaries are identified by their regularly varying brightness and spectroscopic signatures. Chapter Ten ? Can you swim faster through water or syrup? Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens debated this question in the 1600s, without resolving it. Three centuries later, two University of Minnesota chemists, Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler, did a syrup-versus-water experiment. Maybe it’s not so surprising that it took so long. Cussler said he had to obtain twenty-two approvals, including permission to pour massive quantities of syrup down a drain.

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

It turns out she has developed a system for remembering people by their clothes and that she applied her system very conscientiously and consistently; without the system she would be lost. People such as myself, who have normal face-recognition abilities, usually have no such system. The result was that this woman—some might call her “handicapped”—had a much better sense of the crowd than I did. Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Swift, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Glenn Gould, Steven Spielberg, and Bill Gates, among many others, are all on the rather lengthy list of famous figures who have been identified as possibly autistic or Asperger’s. I do not think we can “diagnose” individuals from such a distance, so we should be cautious in making any very particular claims.

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If you’re wondering, a typical list of historical figures claimed to be on the autism spectrum includes Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Bela Bartók, Bob Dylan, Glenn Gould, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Mozart, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Henry Cavendish, Samuel Johnson, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Emily Dickinson, Michelangelo, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, and Willard Van Orman Quine, among others. When it comes to any individual life, I have my worries about making any firm judgments. First, for some of these lives I know a bit about, such as Mozart’s, I just don’t see the evidence for autism. Mozart for instance may well have been neurodiverse in the broad sense of the word (arguably an ordinary mind could not have composed his extraordinary music) but that’s not the same as placing him on the autism spectrum.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

Adam Smith Faces a Major Obstacle After taking twelve long years to write his big book, Smith was convinced he had discovered the right kind of economics to create "universal opulence." He called his model the "system of natural liberty." Today economists call it the "classical model." Smith's model was inspired by Sir Isaac Newton, whose model of natural science Smith greatly admired as universal and harmonious. Smith's biggest hurdle would be convincing others to accept his system, especially legislators. His purpose in writing The Wealth of Nations was not simply to educate, but to persuade. Very little progress had been achieved over the centuries in England and Europe because of the entrenched system known as mercantilism.

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Some Keynesians, such as Charles Hession and John Kenneth Galbraith, emphatically insist that the correct title is The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, without the comma. True, no commas were used on the cover of the original, but in the preface, Keynes added a comma after "employment." Keynes identified with the great scientists of the past. Adam Smith and Roger Babson compared their analytical systems to those of Sir Isaac Newton, and Keynes emulated Albert Einstein. Keynes's book title refers to Einstein's general theory of relativity. His book, he said, created a "general" theory of economic behavior while he relegated the classical model to a "special" case and treated classical economists as "Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world" (Skidelsky 1992, 487).

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past
by Chuck Klosterman
Published 6 Jun 2016

In fact, that’s the one arena where I would think that most of our contemporary evidence is circumstantial, and that the way we think about gravity will be very different.” These are the words of Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University who writes books with titles like Icarus at the Edge of Time. He’s the kind of physicist famous enough to guest star on a CBS sitcom, assuming that sitcom is The Big Bang Theory. “For two hundred years, Isaac Newton had gravity down. There was almost no change in our thinking until 1907. And then from 1907 to 1915, Einstein radically changes our understanding of gravity: No longer is gravity just a force, but a warping of space and time. And now we realize quantum mechanics must have an impact on how we describe gravity within very short distances.

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Jimi Hendrix imagined such a scenario, but only because he was an electric philosopher (as opposed to a pocket calculator). “In physics, when we say we know something, it’s very simple,” Tyson reiterates. “Can we predict the outcome? If we can predict the outcome, we’re good to go, and we’re on to the next problem. There are philosophers who care about the understanding of why that was the outcome. Isaac Newton [essentially] said, ‘I have an equation that says why the moon is in orbit. I have no fucking idea how the Earth talks to the moon. It’s empty space—there’s no hand reaching out.’ He was uncomfortable about this idea of action at a distance. And he was criticized for having such ideas, because it was preposterous that one physical object could talk to another physical object.

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 9 Mar 2009

Grit clearly involves motivation and perseverance in the pursuit of a goal despite setbacks, but its less obvious component is closely bound up with attention: maintaining consistent interest in a project or idea over time. Given a hard problem to figure out—the nature of gravity, perhaps—most people might think about it for a while, then get tired and forget about it. A genius such as Isaac Newton, however, has enough “mental energy” to pay rapt attention to the same thing for a long time without wavering: “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open little by little before me into the full light.” His modern successor, Richard Feynman, had a similarly protean absorption in his subject.

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Motivation and Emotion, October 2003; Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, “The Initiation and Regulation of Intrinsically Motivated Learning and Achievement,” in Ann Boggiano and Thane Pittman (eds.), Achievement and Motivation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. p.178. Why some very focused individuals have lots of the stick-to-itiveness: A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, 2007. p.179. A genius such as Isaac Newton, however, has enough “mental energy”: David Lykken, “Mental Energy.” Intelligence 33, 2005. p.182. In a less dramatic illustration of a hidden motivation’s power: Gráinne M. Fitzsimons and John A. Bargh, “Thinking of You: Nonconscious Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals Associated with Relationship Partners.”

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment
by Guy Spier
Published 8 Sep 2014

He spoke with tender admiration about her kindness, recalling how she had taken terminally ill AIDS patients into her home and given them her own bedroom, seeking to ease their pain in their final days. He told Mohnish’s children that choosing the right person to marry would be the most important decision of their lives. For three hours, we relished the most wonderfully wide-ranging conversation. For example, Harina and Mohnish asked Warren about Sir Isaac Newton, since he had once remarked that Newton was the historical figure with whom he’d most like to have lunch. He explained to us that Newton was “probably the smartest human in history” but joked that he’d thought this through some more and would actually prefer to have lunch with Sophia Loren. He said Charlie Munger would most like to share a meal with Ben Franklin, since “Newton was smarter, but Franklin was wiser.”

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Today there are substantial parts of our mental apparatus that evolved to help us survive in the wilderness that was home to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These primitive survival routines embedded in our brains are easily capable of bypassing the neocortex. We might like to perceive ourselves as potential Isaac Newtons, but it’s perilous to forget that we also have this other aspect of our nature. Indeed, Newton himself would have been better off if he’d recognized this, given that he was an infamously dumb investor who lost his life savings in the South Sea Bubble. As Newton wryly observed: “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”

Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life
by Donald Goldsmith
Published 9 Sep 2018

Measuring the Motions of Stars with Precision Understanding astronomers’ approaches to finding exoplanets begins by contrasting two related approaches: astrometry, which has so far produced few positive results, and the radial-velocity method, which has opened the gates of exoplanetary research.2 Both of these techniques rely on the fact, first demonstrated by Isaac Newton, that whenever a less massive object orbits a more massive one, both objects actually move in orbit around their common center of mass.3 This center of mass lies along the imaginary line that connects the objects’ centers, and the ratio of the objects’ distances from the center of mass equals the inverse ratio of the objects’ masses.

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(Courtesy of Debra Fischer) In addition to furnishing us with the planet’s orbital period and eccentricity, radial-velocity observations provide a third key property of the planet’s orbit: its mass. As Johannes Kepler realized four centuries ago from his studies of the planets in the solar system, and as Isaac Newton showed how to generalize to other objects in orbit, the length of time required for a less massive object to complete an orbit around a more massive one depends on the average distance between the two objects. More distant objects, which feel less gravitational force, move more slowly in orbit and must travel farther to complete an orbit.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Published 14 Aug 2020

Of course, some people go to the show just to enjoy the beauty of garden design, but many go to understand the plants, using if-and-then logic to learn when and where they can be planted, and with what effect. We can systemize anything, from the menstrual cycle and its link to fertility, to predicting when volcanos will erupt, to classifying rocks by how they were formed.38 Consider how Sir Isaac Newton inferred gravity as a cause from seeing an apple fall from a tree (in my college, Trinity, in Cambridge): if an apple is unsupported, and there is a gravitational force, then it will fall toward the Earth.39 The ocean’s tides are another aspect of nature we systemize via observation. The discovery that tidal patterns are caused by the moon, for example, was documented at least 3,000 years ago.40 The tide information available at the seaside is usually in the form of a table or spreadsheet, reflecting the systematic organization of the information in the mind of a strong systemizer.

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Dunnington, “The menstrual cycle and sleep,” SleepHub, August 17, 2015, sleephub.com.au/menstrual-cycle-and-sleep/. Here’s the algorithm for systemizing rocks: if it’s an old rock, and it has been squeezed but not melted, then it’s metamorphic. See “Identifying rocks,” Science 6 at FMS, June 7, 2012, fitz6.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/identifying-rocks/. 39. Some biographical research suggests that Isaac Newton and other outstanding physicists and scientists may have been autistic—long before the diagnosis was available. Retrospective diagnosis when the person is no longer alive is replete with difficulties, as the evidence may be fragmentary and the person or their family cannot give complete accounts.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
by Ryan North
Published 17 Sep 2018

These were thermo-scopes (a way to see temperature), rather than thermo-meters (a way to measure it). Knowing humanity’s track record as you now do, you will not be surprised that it took more than a hundred years after thermoscopes were invented for anyone to think of applying a fixed scale to them. Two men (Isaac Newton and Ole Rømer) finally came up with this idea independently in 1701 CE, but Rømer’s scale was better: Newton used a lot of subjective temperature references (“the heat at midday about the month of July”: what the heck, Newton?) while Rømer at least used constants like the freezing and boiling points of water as the basis for his temperature scale.* There’s another problem: since the water in a thermoscope is open to the air, it’s also susceptible to changes in pressure, which actually makes this invention a combination thermoscope and barometer, or “thermobaroscope.”

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* That comes from classical mechanics, a field of study that you’re about to invent right here in this very footnote! Classical mechanics is concerned with describing how objects respond to forces that act upon them, and the three laws we’re about to describe are its foundation. Before they were formalized in 1686 CE by Isaac Newton, people had a less-perfect understanding of why and how things moved, and had to make do with worse theories like “Rocks love the ground and smoke loves the sky, so that’s how come smoke rises and rocks don’t” (Aristotle, 300 BCE). The three laws of motion are: (1) Objects at rest remain at rest, and objects in motion remain in motion, unless acted on by a force. (2) The rate of change of an object’s momentum is directly proportional to the force applied, and is in the direction of the applied force. (3) For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction: as you push a box forward, the box also pushes you back.

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“Dark-brown heat” was good for glazing pastries, slightly cooler “light-brown heat” was good for pie crusts, “dark-yellow heat” was best for larger pastries, and the coolest “light-yellow heat” for meringues. * You can build a temperature scale around anything (as some of Newton’s whimsically useless temperature references illustrate), but physical constants are better. They’ll make your measurements consistent and reproducible, even if for some reason you don’t have access to Isaac Newton’s backyard, in summer, on an Earth whose climate approximates what it was like in England in 1701 CE. See Section 4 to reproduce the centigrade scale of measurement used in this book. * It’s also why you can use lakes to cool your buildings, when your civilization gets to that point! When water reaches around 4°C (3.98 degrees, if we’re being exact) it’s at its maximum density.

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials)
by Benjamin Graham and Jason Zweig
Published 1 Jan 1949

For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words “South Sea” in his presence. 4 Sir Isaac Newton was one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, as most of us would define intelligence. But, in Graham’s terms, Newton was far from an intelligent investor. By letting the roar of the crowd override his own judgment, the world’s greatest scientist acted like a fool. In short, if you’ve failed at investing so far, it’s not because you’re stupid. It’s because, like Sir Isaac Newton, you haven’t developed the emotional discipline that successful investing requires. In Chapter 8, Graham describes how to enhance your intelligence by harnessing your emotions and refusing to stoop to the market’s level of irrationality.

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In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management L.P., a hedge fund run by a battalion of mathematicians, computer scientists, and two Nobel Prize–winning economists, lost more than $2 billion in a matter of weeks on a huge bet that the bond market would return to “normal.” But the bond market kept right on becoming more and more abnormal—and LTCM had borrowed so much money that its collapse nearly capsized the global financial system. 3 And back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he “could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000.

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As Graham puts it, “while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.” By letting themselves get carried away—on Internet stocks, on big “growth” stocks, on stocks as a whole—many people made the same stupid mistakes as Sir Isaac Newton. They let other investors’ judgments determine their own. They ignored Graham’s warning that “the really dreadful losses” always occur after “the buyer forgot to ask ‘How much?’” Most painfully of all, by losing their self-control just when they needed it the most, these people proved Graham’s assertion that “the investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.”

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time
by Becky Smethurst
Published 1 Jun 2020

It’s an island of gas, dust, and stars, more than a million trillion kilometers across. At the center of the Milky Way star system there’s a black hole four million times more massive than the Sun. That’s something we call a supermassive black hole, and like the Sun in our solar system, it’s in the gravitational driving seat of our whole galaxy. Isaac Newton discovered the law that governs gravity some centuries ago: two objects will attract each other proportional to how heavy each object is. The lighter object will be affected more by the force between the two objects. The force also depends on how far apart the two objects are: the farther apart they are, the weaker the force between them.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
by Paul A. Offit
Published 1 Jan 2007

If being sick at the right time with the right virus helped—great.” One reporter later wrote, “Jeryl recovered from mumps virus, but mumps virus never recovered from infecting Jeryl.” CHAPTER 3 Eight Doors “If I have seen farther than others, it was because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.” SIR ISAAC NEWTON What possessed Maurice Hilleman to take his daughter’s mumps virus and inject it into hen’s eggs and minced chick embryos? Why did he cut off the chicks’ heads before using them? And most importantly, why in the 1960s did he resort to a process so seemingly crude, arcane, and convoluted? Eight critical experiments performed during the previous century determined Hilleman’s choices.

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Wistar wrote the first textbook on anatomy in the early 1800s and developed a series of anatomical teaching aids that included wax-preserved human limbs and organs. The institute’s museum of anatomy contained a cyclops; Siamese twins; two Indian mummies; seven wax-injected human hearts; the death masks of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and Voltaire; and the largest number of human and animal skeletons in the world. A massive whale skeleton hung from the ceiling. Although the Wistar Institute had been founded to advance studies of anatomy, by the early 1960s Hilary Koprowski had made it one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of cancer and viruses.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

Google is the successful embodiment, through technology, of the earlier dream of the memory palace. For many centuries the idea of an algorithmic path toward greater knowledge was an obsession in Western thought and religion; it infused the Kabbalah, many of the medieval scholastics, and scientists such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. It fell out of favor as it was increasingly regarded as ridiculous, but guess what? These visions made perfect sense but just didn’t yet have the right technologies to make them work. For a long time the memory tradition in Western thought appeared to be a dead end and indeed few people today use memory theatres or other memory tricks; the technology never seemed practical for most of us.

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The overall picture is a daunting one for the ability of the individual human mind to comprehend the science of how our world works. Specialization As science progresses, each new marginal discovery is more the result of specialization and less the result of general breakthroughs, compared to earlier times. There probably won’t be another Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, or Euclid, because the most fundamental contributions in those fields have already been made. New fundamental contributions are hardly over, but they will come in dribs and drabs and they are more likely to come from research teams than from lone geniuses in major, unexpected bursts.

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World
by Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
Published 20 Apr 2015

As if spurring on three scientific revolutions were not enough, Weaver also pioneered the study of complexity. In his 1948 article, Weaver described science as progressing through successive eras, defined by the three types of problems—simple, uncertain, and complex—that they solved. Simple problems address a few variables that can be reduced to a deterministic formula. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion (force = mass x acceleration, for example) were powerful tools to solve simple problems, such as how a satellite orbits the Earth or what happens when two billiard balls collide. Simple problems occupied scientists for most of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and their solutions yielded life-changing inventions ranging from the telephone to the diesel engine.

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Under pressure from merchants who refused to accept debased currency, some princes transferred their right of coinage to autonomous city councils, a forerunner of the modern central bank, some of which relied on simple rules to regulate currency. The rules used to manage monetary policy grew more sophisticated over time. As England’s master of the mint in 1717, Sir Isaac Newton decreed the “golden rule” that paper currency must be convertible to an equivalent amount of gold. Eight decades later, England abandoned Newton’s golden rule and proceeded to print pounds to fund the Napoleonic wars. The financial chaos that followed inspired English bankers to develop new rules to stabilize England’s economy: (1) limit the amount of paper money, (2) never reduce circulating cash but “vibrate within limits,” (3) expand cash as trade expands, and (4) allow temporary increases in emergencies.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

—Samuel Butler, nineteenth-century English poet and author More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. —Woody Allen I. J. Good didn’t invent the intelligence explosion any more than Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity. All he did was observe that an event he considered both inevitable and a net positive for mankind was certain to yield the kind of “ultraintelligence” we humans need to solve problems that are too difficult for us. Then, after he’d lived three more decades, Good changed his mind.

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It’s just too hard.” Goertzel, for example, responded to this by looking at me as if I’d started preaching intelligent design. A sometime mathematics professor, like Vinge, Goertzel draws lessons for AI’s future from the history of calculus. “If you look at how mathematicians did calculus before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz, they would take a hundred pages to calculate the derivative of a cubic polynomial. They did it with triangles, similar triangles and weird diagrams and so on. It was oppressive. But now that we have a more refined theory of calculus any idiot in high school can take the derivative of a cubic polynomial.

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

Indeed, as the curtain came down at the end of the production, it would be hard to imagine Gates getting a curtain call or receiving the lion’s share of the applause, let alone walking away with the entire box office take. • • • Among other things, the story of the personal computer suggests that inventions and innovations are the result of an evolutionary process involving many players, rather than being the product of one brilliant individual. As Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to scientific rival Robert Hooke: ‘What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways…If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Indeed, an invention typically occurs when the scientific body of evidence has accumulated to the point that the breakthrough is almost apparent – at least to the scientists closely engaged in the field.

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In the overall picture, one person’s contribution would still inevitably be infinitesimally small. If this seems to underestimate the importance of individual greatness, consider some of the most outstanding minds in history and try to imagine how far they would have got without the benefit of society and all the knowledge accumulated before them. Alperovitz and Daly put it well: ‘If [Isaac] Newton, in his lifetime, had to learn everything humanity had learned from the time of the caveman to the late seventeenth century – if he had no knowledge inheritance whatsoever to work with – he could not have contributed much more than an insightful ‌caveman could in his lifetime.’19 And Bill Gates, stranded on a deserted island, would have his work cut out just figuring how to keep himself warm. ‌6 ‌Why Other Billionaires Are Even Less Deserving It was late in 2006 when an ageing, little-known economic consultant named Gary Shilling arrived at a well-appointed office in New York’s Upper East Side for a meeting with hedge fund manager John Paulson and his team of high-powered analysts.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981. American artist Mark Tansey incorporated Diana in his 1986 painting Achilles and the Tortoise. She is shown planting a hemlock, a sapling version of the mature tree behind her. Diana was often photographed planting trees, among them an apple tree she planted in honor of Isaac Newton. In 1993 Diana came to the attention of American astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III. Gott had devised a mathematical formula for predicting the future. He wanted to test it on a celebrity marriage, and he chose Charles and Diana’s because a magazine reported they were the most famous couple of the time.

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(I don’t bother to mention the year-based median prediction of 200,000 years. Nobody would care.) I have noticed that hardly anyone contests the 760 years figure as tinfoil-hat crazy. The chart below suggests why. It summarizes some popular and expert estimates of the date of human extinction. There is a lot of overlap. In a 1704 letter, Isaac Newton used the book of Daniel to predict that the end of the world would come in AD 2060. That was then 356 years in the future. Newton offered his forecast in the hope that it would “put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the end of time.” Fat chance of that.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Published 27 Aug 2018

He then had to travel another few hundred miles to Wolfenbüttel, the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Anton Ulrich was a major patron of the European Enlightenment. His librarian was Gottfried Leibniz, one of the leading philosophers, mathematicians, and inventors of his era, and cocreator, with Isaac Newton, of calculus; and the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel housed one of the most magnificent book collections in the world. The child had apparently been offered as a “gift” to the duke, who, in turn, handed the boy on to his son, August Wilhelm; and we first hear of him as a member of August Wilhelm’s household.

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(Or, conversely, if Amo had been sent, like his brother, to work as a slave in the sugarcane fields of Suriname?) It is, perhaps, worth noting that the discovery that not a single Negro was good at philosophy wouldn’t have justified black slavery. As Thomas Jefferson admitted, in responding to the Abbé Grégoire, “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”15 The slanders against the Negro race may have salved some Christian consciences, but they could never have justified what had been done in enslaving millions of black people. Still, ideology—enlisted by forms of domination from slavery to colonization—does help explain why, at a time when scientists were discarding notions like phlogiston, supposedly the substance of fire, they made extraordinary efforts to assert the reality of race.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

“On Jan. 13, 1920,” the paper explained, it published an article that “dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum.” The original article teased the scientist who “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” Now the paper teased itself. “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” Using frames to see what’s not there (yet) is common in the sciences. In 1846 scholars predicted the existence of an eighth planet, Neptune, based on their model of planetary motion and data gathered from observing Uranus, its planetary neighbor.

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Bush and Congress explaining why it was vital to bail out AIG—not to rescue the company but to save the economy. As he looked out the window, he took a contemplative moment to rethink his decision to bring the machinery of the Fed directly into the markets. People have long understood the economy in terms of causality. But the frames they used were at times ill-fitting. In the late 1600s Isaac Newton’s principles of inertia and gravity were adapted to explain market competition. In the mid-1700s in France a clique of economists who had initially studied to be physicians called themselves physiocrats. They saw the flow of money through the economy like blood in the body’s circulation system.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

By Rowbotham’s time, schools had long been teaching a fairly modern model of the solar system. Rowbotham claimed he never took to his school’s teachings, and that he tried sneaking out of a school astronomy lesson, which he believed was bogus. Those doubts compounded when he searched the Bible for confirmation of his beliefs. He concluded that if Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the solar system—round planets orbiting a round sun—was true, then God was dead. “Again and again, the feeling came over me that as the Newtonian system appeared so plausible and so grand in its extent and comprehensiveness, it might after all be correct,” Rowbotham later wrote of his path to Flat Earth, “and, if so, there could be no heaven for man’s future enjoyment; no higher existence than on this earth; no spiritual and immortal creatures, and therefore no God or Creator.”

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“Time was, they said the Earth was flat; but now they say it’s round!” begins an introductory poem. “But strange enough, though true, it is, no PROOF has yet been found.” Carpenter took up Rowbotham’s biblical arguments and found new places to poke at established science. Legendary astronomers Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton had all estimated different distances between Earth and sun. Carpenter claimed the discrepancy should call the entire field of modern astronomy into question. (Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton never had the chance to compare notes because none of them lived at the same time, and all were using inexact estimation methods.)

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
by Keith Houston
Published 23 Sep 2013

The Roman term for a pound in weight was libra pondo, where libra means “scales” or “balances” (from which the constellation takes its name) and where pondo comes from the verb pendere, “to weigh.”3 The tautological flavor of this pairing is borne out by the fact that both libra and pondo were also used singly to mean the same thing—one pound in weight—and it is from these twin roots that the # gets both its form and its oldest name.4 Sometime in the late fourteenth century the abbreviation “lb” for libra entered English,* and according to common scribal practice it was accessorized with a line—known as a “tittle,” or “tilde,” and for which the modern “∼” is named—drawn just above the letters’ x-height to denote the use of a contraction.6 The barred form of “lb” was originally so common that some early printers cut the paired letters onto a single, combined punch, but it has since been overtaken by both its predecessor and its descendant: jotted down in haste (as seen in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl in image 3.1), was transformed into # by the carelessly rushing pens of successive scribes, while the naked “lb” soldiers on to this day.7 The has become a missing link, a vital evolutionary step buried out of sight in the paleographic fossil record.† In tandem with the development of the # symbol, libra’s estranged partner pondo was also changing.

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Whereas libra had become “lb” and then # through the urgency of the scribe’s pen, pondo was instead subjected to the vagaries of spoken language. The Latin pondo became first the Old English pund (sharing a common root with the German Pfund) and later the modern word “pound.”9 Libra and pondo were reunited: #, the “pound sign,” was born. Figure 3.1 as an abbreviation for libra, or “pound in weight,” from the pen of Isaac Newton. Courtesy of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, CHF. Figure 3.2 A detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s Pyrosophia (1698) showing printed symbols crossed by a tittle to show that they are abbreviations. Courtesy of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, CHF. * * * The # is but one of the relics of the phrase libra pondo, which spawned a dynasty of intertwined signs, words, and concepts that are still evident today.

The Infinity Puzzle
by Frank Close
Published 29 Nov 2011

Whereas the force of gravity controls the motion of the latter, it is the electrical attraction of opposite charges— positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons—that holds atoms together. Analogies can be dangerous if stretched too far, and the case of the planetary electrons is a cautionary example: Atoms built like that could not survive for a moment if they obeyed Isaac Newton’s laws of mechanics. The same force of gravity that governs the motion of the planets is degrading their orbits over the eons. The solar system is vast and gravity relatively feeble; as a result, the erosion of the orbits is so gradual even the most sensitive measurements cannot detect it.10 Atoms, by contrast, are very tiny, and the electrical forces are much more powerful than gravity.

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He was, in effect, redesigning quantum mechanics from the bottom up, led by intuition as much as by formal mathematics. feynman’s action The challenge of classical mechanics, such as determining the motion of planets, is that if you know where some objects are now, where will they be at some future moment? In the seventeen century Isaac Newton stated 38 the infinity puzzle the laws of motion: If no forces act, bodies move at a constant velocity, whereas a force gives them acceleration. This inspired the concept of energy, such as the energy associated with motion—“kinetic energy”—and latent or “potential” energy, where the situation of a body gives it the potential to gain kinetic energy, the sum of the potential and kinetic energies being constant.

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In 1940 he entered Hanley High School and the present of a chemistry set two years later sparked his interest in science, or at least in verifying whether the information about explosives, in the school textbooks, was correct. A physics teacher, who had noticed his remarkable natural talent, enrolled him for the entrance scholarship exam at Trinity College, Cambridge. The choice of Trinity appears to have been entirely because the teacher admired Isaac Newton, the college’s most distinguished alumnus. Shaw arrived there in 1949 and moved into room K9, overlooking Jesus Lane. There is nothing particularly special about this room other than the coincidence that its previous occupant was Freeman Dyson. Trinity has always hosted a galaxy of stars, and that year was no exception.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

America is “but in her infancy with regard to manufactures: a few iron works, several glass houses, some tan yards, a considerable number of trifling and imperfect manufactories of kerseymere [a coarse kind of knitting] and, in some places, of cotton . . . point out the feeble efforts that have hitherto been made [to] furnish the country with manufactured articles of daily consumption.”5 America’s financial system was primitive compared with the mother country’s. Britain established its national bank in 1694, when it gave the governor and company of the Bank of England a monopoly of issuing banknotes, and introduced the gold standard in 1717, when the master of the mint, Sir Isaac Newton, defined the pound in terms of gold weight (£4.25 per troy ounce). America didn’t have any banks whatsoever until the 1780s, when Robert Morris chartered the Bank of North America (1781), Alexander Hamilton established the Bank of New York (1784), and John Hancock and Samuel Adams chartered the Massachusetts Bank (1784).

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The gold standard thus became self-vindicating: pleas that the gold standard was harming the economy were treated as proof that it was “working.”9 Critics of the gold standard have likened this worship of the yellow metal to a primitive fetish. But it is much more than this. The exchange value of gold as a percentage of a fixed basket of goods and services had remained stable since Sir Isaac Newton, master of the British mint, in 1717, set the pound sterling at 4.25 per ounce of gold. The price remained at that level until 1931, when Britain abandoned the gold standard. The United States followed in 1933. One of the most remarkable things about the economic expansion of the second half of the nineteenth century was that it took place without the distraction of inflation.

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The real economy suffered because Britain at its old exchange rate was uncompetitive, leading to unnecessary agonies as industry was squeezed, export industries such as coal mining contracted, unemployment soared, and the trade unions organized a general strike. In 1931, with 22 percent of the workforce unemployed, the British government, with its gold reserves rapidly depleting, took sterling off the gold standard for the first time in peacetime since Sir Isaac Newton established the gold parity in 1717. The pound fell by more than a third against the dollar (from $4.86 to $3.25), forcing other countries to follow suit, first the Scandinavian and Baltic states, with their close ties to the British market, then Japan, then much of Latin America. For all Keynes’s adumbrations against the “barbarous relic,” the problem was not the gold standard in the abstract but the decision by almost all the developed world to fix their postwar currencies against the dollar at the prewar noncompetitive exchange rates, despite significant costs of storage and loss of interest.

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World
by John Dickie
Published 3 Aug 2020

Despite the hardship of his early surroundings, he went to Oxford University and embarked on an ecclesiastical career. But religion seems to have been a means to an end for Desaguliers, who became notorious for his tedious sermons. His real interests lay in his flourishing career as a scientist, public lecturer and showman. As a student at Oxford, he had fallen under the spell of Sir Isaac Newton, and he developed a zeal for demonstrating Newton’s theories in striking experiments. In Enlightenment England, especially London, there was an audience prepared to pay well for such entertainment. Thanks to Newton, without disbursing the usual membership fee, Dr Desaguliers was invited to join the Royal Society, where commoners and aristocrats mixed in the shared pursuit of scientific knowledge and the prestige that went with it.

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In 1716 he became chaplain to James Brydges, soon to become 1st Duke of Chandos, a Whig grandee whose patronage would be crucial in his rise. His network of contacts quickly spread deep into the community of scientists and their aristocratic patrons. One indicator is the list of godparents he managed to secure for his children in the 1720s. Apart from Sir Isaac Newton, they included the Marquis of Carnarvon, who was the eldest surviving son of the Duke of Chandos, and the Earl of Macclesfield–a fabulously wealthy Whig courtier and Lord Chancellor who would later be prosecuted for taking enormous bribes. It was mightily impressive for the son of a refugee like Desaguliers to have such traction in high places.

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Nor should it strike us as strange that a man of science like Dr Desaguliers was drawn to a Brotherhood so wedded to pre-scientific beliefs as the Freemasons. Certainly, he performed famous experiments to prove the inanity of myths like the perpetual-motion machine. Yet he lived in an age where the boundaries between science and superstition were still far from clearly demarcated. Sir Isaac Newton himself believed in the alchemical search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life; the great man was no Accepted Mason, but he pored over the design of Solomon’s Temple in the search for ancient truths. For Desaguliers, Freemasonry was all of a piece with his personal ambition, his politics and his intellectual passions.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

For Thomas Willis, the Anglican clergyman and Cambridge professor who coined the term “neurology,” the entire universe was a bodying-forth of a soul, alive and self-actualizing, not designed from without but generated from within by “moving animal spirits.” Willis’s colleague Ralph Cudworth postulated a teleological force, driving toward greater complexity and variety in an organized fashion, operating immanently in natural things and “Magically and Sympathetically” producing the diversity of forms that makes up the natural world. Isaac Newton himself combined precise observation and measurement with the postulation of mysterious invisible forces, notably gravity. Throughout the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers in all areas of inquiry were beset by the growing suspicion that “there must be something more than dead matter,” as the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman have shown—some vivifying principle that pervaded the cosmos, linking humans with other animals and the rest of creation.

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A report, industriously spread, that Spain was willing to concede four ports, on the coasts of Chili [sic] and Peru, for the purposes of traffic, increased the general confidence; and for many years the South Sea Company’s stock was in high favour. When these cheerful prospects all proved illusory, the speculative bubble finally burst in 1720. One of the investors was Isaac Newton, who had stood aghast as the company’s share prices soared. As the mathematician reportedly said, he could “calculate the movement of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Rational calculation could not comprehend the emotions that animated speculative finance. The “Money’d Man” marveled at how completely wealth had become decoupled from familiar markers of worth: How from all Corners of the Nation The Wise, Fools, Cits, and Folk of Fashion Repair promiscuous to the Alley To lose or gain more Money daily: Say how, and by what means, a Lord, On sudden, turns out not worth a T__d; While, from a Dunghill to a Coach, A Rascal rises in a Touch.

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THE MADNESS AND MILDNESS OF MONEY “one very often trades”: Commercial writer, cited in James Buchan, John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century (2018), 58. “a Money’d Man”: A Familiar Epistle to Mr. Mitchell Containing a Seasonable SATIRE, Written in the Style of Modern Poetic Beggars (1720), 8. “visionary ideas”: Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), 46–47. “calculate the movement”: Isaac Newton, cited in Andrew Odlyzko, “Newton’s Financial Misadventures in the South Sea Bubble,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (2018), doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0018. “How from all Corners”: A Familiar Epistle, 4–5. “invincible patience”: Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989), 11.

A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
Published 11 Jun 1998

Von Neumann’s 1928 article on parlor games was the first successful attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries.15 Just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, great scientists have often looked for clues to vast and complex problems in the small, familiar phenomena of daily life. Isaac Newton reached insights about the heavens by juggling wooden balls. Einstein contemplated a boat paddling upriver. Von Neumann pondered the game of poker. A seemingly trivial and playful pursuit like poker, von Neumann argued, might hold the key to more serious human affairs for two reasons. Both poker and economic competition require a certain type of reasoning, namely the rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage based on some internally consistent system of values (“more is better than less”).

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His genius also won him love. He had married a beautiful young physics student who adored him, and fathered a child. It was a brilliant strategy, this genius, this life. A seemingly perfect adaptation. Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.20 An emotionally detached, inward-looking temperament can be especially conducive to scientific creativity, psychiatrists and biographers have long observed, just as fiery fluctuations in mood may sometimes be linked to artistic expression.

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The symptoms can be “slightly, moderately, severely, or absolutely disabling,” according to Irving Gottesman, a leading contemporary researcher.38 Though Nash succumbed at age thirty, the illness can appear at any time from adolescence to advanced middle age.39 The first episode can last a few weeks or months or several years.40 The life history of someone with the disease can include only one or two episodes.41 Isaac Newton, always an eccentric and solitary soul, apparently suffered a psychotic breakdown with paranoid delusions at age fifty-one.42 The episode, which may have been precipitated by an unhappy attachment to a younger man and the failure of his alchemy experiments, marked the end of Newton’s academic career.

The Knowledge Illusion
by Steven Sloman
Published 10 Feb 2017

Most people think it’s going to take a curved path (the right side of the figure). In fact, Newton’s laws dictate that it will fly off in a straight path (toward your brother if you’re lucky). We don’t always expect objects to behave according to Newton’s laws because everyday observations often don’t appear to follow them. (This is one reason it took such insight for Isaac Newton to discover them in the first place.) For example, Newton’s first law states that a body in motion tends to remain in motion at the same speed and in the same direction. But usually we don’t observe this. If you push a brick across the floor it will stop pretty quickly. Physicists correctly attribute this phenomenon to friction.

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The World Is Your Computer As we’ve already focused on baseball in this chapter, let’s stick with the theme to further illustrate the point that we are not engaged in intensive computation inside our heads. Imagine a fly ball has been hit straight toward you. How do you go about deciding where you should be to catch it? The traditional cognitive science answer is that the little Isaac Newton inside you takes over. You start calculating trajectories and predicting where the ball is going to fall using everything you know about physics. You may have forgotten much of the calculus that you learned in high school, but it’s possible that your motor system knows what it needs to: that, when hit, the path a ball takes has the shape of a parabola (neglecting wind and friction).

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far
by Lawrence M. Krauss
Published 21 Mar 2017

Once serious minds began to investigate in detail the hidden nature of the universe, it took over four centuries for them to fully resolve the question What is light? Perhaps the most serious modern mind, although certainly not the first, to ask this question was also one of the most famous—and oddest—scientists in history: Isaac Newton. It is not inappropriate to classify Newton as a modern mind—after all, his seventeenth-century Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy uncovered the classical laws of motion and laid the basis for his theory of gravity, both of which form the foundation of much of modern physics.

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That alone would have made him memorable, but in his spare time he also was one of the first to help decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone. He developed the physics of elastic materials, associated with what is now called Young’s modulus, and helped first elucidate the physiology of color vision. And his brave demonstration of the wave nature of light (which argued against Isaac Newton’s powerful claim that light was made of particles) was so compelling that it helped lay the basis of Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetic waves. Young’s experiment is simple. Let’s return to Plato’s cave and consider a screen placed in front of the back wall of the cave. Place two slits in the screen as shown below (as seen from above): If the light is made of particles, then those light rays that pierce the slits would form two bright lines on the wall behind these two slits: However, it was well known that waves, unlike particles, diffract around barriers and narrow slits and would produce a very different pattern on the wall.

I Never Knew That About London
by Christopher Winn
Published 3 Oct 2007

Bonnie Prince Charlie paid a secret visit to St Mary’s in 1750, converting to the Anglican faith in an attempt to boost his claim to the English throne. This upset the Pope, who withdrew his support for the Prince’s campaign. Charles Dickens’s parents were married here in 1809. Beside the church was LONDON’S FIRST HACKNEY CARRIAGE RANK, established in 1634, while on the green in front of the church was a tall maypole. Sir Isaac Newton purchased this in 1718 and had it erected it in Wanstead Park as a stand for Europe’s highest telescope. St Mary-le-Strand Somerset House Riverside Palace THE ORIGINAL SOMERSET House was THE FIRST RENAISSANCE PALACE IN ENGLAND, and was built on land belonging to the Bishops of Worcester and Chester which was given to the Lord Protector Somerset by Henry VIII at the Dissolution.

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When both front legs are shown raised, it means that the rider died in battle, and if all four legs are on the ground, then the rider died of old age. Well, I never knew this ABOUT ST JAMES’S JERMYN STREET is named after Henry Jermyn, the 1st Earl of St Albans, who laid out St James’s Square in the 17th century. Sir Isaac Newton lived at No. 86 from 1696 until 1710, and the poet Thomas Gray, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Nelson all had lodgings in the street. At No. 93 Jermyn Street is PAXTON AND WHITFIELD, BRITAIN’S OLDEST CHEESE SHOP, founded in 1742. Stilton cheese was first sold in London here, and Paxton & Whitfield is where the Queen gets her cheeses from.

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science
by Ian Sample
Published 1 Jan 2010

In the early fourteenth century, the Parisian philosopher Jean Buridan drew on the concept of mass when he described how throwing an object gave it an impetus that depended on how much matter it contained and the speed at which it was lobbed.3 The sixteenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler took things further, arguing that planets stayed true to their orbits and didn’t hurtle around space like scattered snooker balls thanks to the inertia arising from their enormous masses. Despite the valuable work of early philosophers and astronomers, the term “mass” was not used systematically until 1687, when Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical mechanics in a great but wholly impenetrable work, the Principia.4 Newton said mass was a quantity of matter that arose from an object’s volume and density. An object’s mass governed its inertia, or how much it resisted being pushed around, and also how strongly it felt the force of gravity.

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The Allied and Axis powers both knew that with the right expertise it was possible to create a chain reaction and release an enormous amount of energy from countless atoms in one devastating blast. Paul Dirac spent the war years at Cambridge as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the job that Isaac Newton had held more than 250 years earlier and that Stephen Hawking would assume 40 years later. Dirac worked briefly on confidential techniques to make weapons-grade uranium, which fed into the Manhattan Project, the U.S. atomic bomb effort led by Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

He just jumped out of the wave, dropped to the bottom, and rode off. Nothing to it.” Of course, there was something to it and it was the exact same kind of something that saved Hamilton’s ass on the Millennium Wave—a moment of sudden, creative insight. Often these moments are important enough to make history. Isaac Newton sees an apple fall and BAMMO: the theory of gravity arrives fully formed in his brain; Archimedes climbs into the bathtub and SHAZAM: the solution to the mathematical puzzle of volume pops into his head. But, seriously, Newton was lazing around an orchard and Archimedes was having a hot soak. Hamilton, meanwhile, had his creative insight while riding down the gullet of Godzilla.

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The general reaction is “Sure, that’s amazing, but just imagine what Schaar’s going to be able to do when he’s twenty.” Alex Honnold is the answer to that question. He’s climbing’s version of Tom Schaar, only all grown up. He was born into a world where both his baseline for reality and his spectrum for possibility were a quantum leap forward from the previous generation and he took full advantage. Isaac Newton wasn’t wrong. We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants. In other words, asking what the future would hold if flow became central to culture is another way of asking how good the view is from Honnold’s shoulders. Again, it’s hard to say for certain, but it’s worth pointing out that in 2012 Honnold repeated his Half Dome solo.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

Silver suggested some possible uses: maybe a sticky spray, or an adhesive bulletin board where notices could be easily posted and removed. Fry was fascinated, but he didn’t think those applications made sense, and at that moment he couldn’t come up with any others.8 We like eureka stories. Popular lore is filled with this kind of thing. One warm evening, Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree in his garden when an apple falls and bonks him on the head; he instantly discovers gravity.9 Thomas Edison is staying up all night at Menlo Park, frantically experimenting, when suddenly he creates a new lightbulb that glows continuously for thirteen-and-a-half hours.10 Tim Berners-Lee is helping some scientists share data when out of the blue an idea hits him and he invents the World Wide Web.11 But these stories are rarely accurate.

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Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 38. 6. “Podcast: Art Fry’s Invention Has a Way of Sticking Around,” Smithsonian Lemelson Center, May 20, 2008, http://invention.smithsonian.org/video/vid-popup.aspx?clip=1&id=518. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. The story originates from a passage in a biography of Newton, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written by one of his contemporaries, William Stukeley, and published more than two decades after Newton’s death. The relevant passages from the book are available online at The Royal Society, “Newton’s Apple,” http://royalsociety.org/library/moments/newton-apple/. 10. Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Young Edison,” http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park (excerpted from Westfield Architects and Preservation Consultants, Preservation Master Plan, Edison Memorial Tower, Museum, and Site (2007). 11.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
by Thomas S. Kuhn and Ian Hacking
Published 1 Jan 1962

Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London, 1954), p. 16. 2. Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, Wis., 1959), Parts II–III. A. Koyré displays a number of medieval elements in Galileo’s thought in his Etudes Galiléennes (Paris, 1939), particularly Vol. I. 3. For Newton, see T. S. Kuhn, “Newton’s Optical Papers,” in Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters in Natural Philosophy, ed. I. B. Cohen (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 27–45. For the prelude to the wave theory, see E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, I (2d ed.; London, 1951), 94–109; and W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (rev. ed.; London, 1847), II, 396–466. 4.

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The detailed history of the gradual changes in measurements of chemical composition and of atomic weights has yet to be written, but Partington, op. cit., provides many useful leads to it. XI. The Invisibility of Revolutions 1. L. K. Nash, “The Origins of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory,” Isis, XLVII (1956), 101–16. 2. For Newton’s remark, see Florian Cajori (ed.), Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (Berkeley, Calif., 1946), p. 21. The passage should be compared with Galileo’s own discussion in his Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, trans. H. Crew and A. de Salvio (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 154–76. 3. T. S. Kuhn, “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Isis, XLIII (1952), 26–29. 4.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin
Published 14 Nov 2016

The big breakthrough Paul Romer made when he launched the endogenous growth theory in the 1980s was conceptual and mathematical. The mathematical part is of no interest here and the conceptual part is so simple it is hard to believe no one had thought of it before Romer. In fact, it is related to Isaac Newton’s well-known phrase, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”2 Or in today’s more prosaic phraseology, knowledge creation generates “spillovers” that make future innovation easier. Think of each innovation as creating two types of knowledge. The first bit is quite specific and directly remunerated—call it a “patent.”

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The next step is to get distance into the story line so that we can think about the growth implication of falling trade costs (in the first unbundling) and falling communications cost (in the second unbundling). Romer’s framework had no distance lever for globalization to pull, but more recent work has bolted on a few such levers. Growth in a Global Economy Distance matters for innovation and growth; Isaac Newton’s innovators can’t get up onto the shoulders of giants if the giants are too far away. Putting this sort of consideration into the framework was done when Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman took endogenous growth theory to an international setting in their 1991 book Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy.4 Again, the key insight is simplicity itself.

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves
by Hiawatha Bray
Published 31 Mar 2014

And in 2001, when some scientists from Sonoma State University hung a pendulum very close to latitude 90 degrees south—the South Pole—it made the circuit in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes, only counterclockwise.2 What Foucault’s experiment showed was that the arc of the pendulum did not change its direction at all. Centuries earlier, Sir Isaac Newton had explained why, in his principle of inertia. Once set in motion, the pendulum would keep moving in the same direction, unless some force altered its course. No such force existed for Foucault’s pendulum. As the pendulum swung, the planet itself was shifting beneath it. At the North or South Pole, the shift would synchronize with the earth’s rotation around its axis.

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In reality, it would take considerably longer to solve the gravity problem. Four more Transit satellites went up between June 1960 and November 1961. These were prototypes that were not intended to provide navigational aid to navy ships. Instead, they were mainly used to map the world’s gravitational irregularities. Isaac Newton had long ago surmised that, far from being perfectly spherical, the earth had an oblate shape—flatter at the poles and thicker at the equator than a perfect sphere. Transit observations confirmed and refined Newton’s theory. Researchers who had studied the orbit of an earlier US satellite, Vanguard I, concluded that the earth was actually pear shaped, with the Northern Hemisphere somewhat longer than the Southern.

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
by T. R. Reid
Published 18 Dec 2007

But his father’s death, when J.J. was sixteen, left the Thomsons unable to pay the fees engineers charged for training apprentices. The boy won a scholarship at a local college and quickly came under the spell of mathematics and physics. The timing was perfect—Thomson’s professional career spanned the most fertile era in physics since Isaac Newton’s day—but nobody knew that during his college days. Quite the contrary, in fact: in the 1870s, there was a general sense that the interesting part of physics was over, and all that remained was refining the measurements. After all, everyone knew that all matter was made of indivisible particles called atoms, and that differences among elements were due to differences in their atoms.

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In his memoirs he notes with great pride that twenty-seven of his students (including his son) were elected to the Royal Academy; as an aside, he mentions that seven of them (including his son) also picked up Nobel Prizes. J.J.’s own Nobel Prize, in 1906, seems to have satisfied him less than the knighthood he received two years later. When he died, at eighty-four, in 1940, he was buried in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Isaac Newton. Physicists talk about Thomson’s cathode ray experiment of 1897 the way architects talk about the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The approach was elegant, the conclusion bold and stunning, and the result left an indelible mark on everything that came after. Thomson was determined to find out everything he could about that electric beam shooting through the cathode ray tube.

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single)
by Richard Newton
Published 11 Apr 2015

Creating constantly looks for improvements and ways to generate emotional energy. “With manufacturing, most of the thinking is done prior to the work. With creating, the thinking is done during the work.” Meandering messily towards Aha! The path to a creative breakthrough is messy. It’s tempting to think of the moment that an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head and suppose that as it bounced to the ground he muttered, “well, gee!” and wrote down the theory of gravity. Our love of causal sequences presses us to believe that Newton’s law of gravity truly came like a bolt out of the blue – somehow the causal result of “apple-strikes-head, therefore…” But as with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Edison’s invention of the lightbulb, the epiphanic moment is usually a long time coming.

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever
by Christopher Hitchens
Published 14 Jun 2007

I ’s safe to say that without the devoted skill of Lori Hobkirk as copy editor and project editor and Cliff Corcoran as copyright and permissions editor, the scope and range of the collection would have been considerably less than it is. When accused—probably correctly—of scientific plagiarism, Sir Isaac Newton was careful to say (again plagiarizing from an ancient acknowledgement) that he had “stood on the shoulders of giants.” I am, in this effort as in all my other ones, immensely indebted to a small but growing group of devoted rationalists, who reject the absurd and wicked claims of the religious and who look for answers in the marvels and complexities of science, as well as in the higher and deeper reaches of literature.

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There is also (and here I make a slightly different stress than does Dawkins) no special reason to credit “science” as the father or godfather of reason. As in the case of the doctors mentioned earlier, a commitment to experiment and find evidence is no guarantee of immunity to superstition and worse. Sir Isaac Newton was prey to the most idiotic opinions about alchemy. Joseph Priestley, the courageous Unitarian and skeptic who discovered oxygen, was a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of Darwin’s greatest collaborators and progenitors, was a dedicated attender of spiritualist sessions where “ectoplasm” was produced by frauds to the applause of morons.

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Our wildest wrong is part of His great Right, Our weakness is the shadow of His might, Our sins are His, forgiven long ago, To make His mercy more exceeding bright. When first the stars were made and planets seven, Already was it told of me in Heaven That God had chosen me to sing His Vine, And in my dust had thrown the vinous leaven. Of Religion From Leviathan THOMAS HOBBES Atomist ideas began to revive in the seventeenth century. Sir Isaac Newton included ninety lines of De Rerum Natura in the early drafts of his Principia. Galileo’s 1623 work, Saggiatore, was so infused with the atomic theory that its friends and critics both referred to it as an Epicurean book. However, at no time was it other than extremely dangerous to profess any public doubt about religious orthodoxy.

Extraterrestrial Civilizations
by Isaac Asimov
Published 2 Jan 1979

Starlight is a mixture of light of all wavelengths. The light can be spread out in order of wavelength from the short waves of violet light to the long waves of red light, and the result is a “spectrum.” The instrument by which the spectrum is produced is the “spectroscope.” The spectrum was first demonstrated in the case of sunlight by Isaac Newton in 1665. In 1814, the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) showed that the Solar spectrum was crossed by numerous dark lines, which, it was eventually realized, represented missing wavelengths. They were wavelengths of light that were absorbed by atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere before they could reach the Earth.

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The Moon, after all, is so close to Earth that it takes only 3 days to reach it, as compared with the 7 weeks it took Columbus to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In reaching the Moon, we have made only the most microscopic dent in the true vastness of space. Indeed, we have not really left Earth, since the Moon is as much a slave to Earth’s gravitational influence as an apple on a tree—something Isaac Newton perceived three centuries ago. To be sure, there are small bodies that occasionally come to within a few million kilometers of the Earth, 10 to 50 times the distance of the Moon—an occasional asteroid or comet. The nearest sizable body other than the Moon, however, is the planet Venus. Even when Venus is at its closest to Earth, it is 40 million kilometers (25 million miles) away in a straight line, and is 105 times the distance of the Moon.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

So when English and French ships began to skirmish in the English Channel in 1337, the Ideal Chronicler might have noted that a war of some kind seemed likely, but it could not have recorded the observation “The Hundred Years War began today.” Not only was the extent of the conflict between the two countries unknown at the time, but the term “Hundred Years War” was only invented long after it ended as shorthand to describe what was in actuality a series of intermittent conflicts from 1337 to 1453. Likewise, when Isaac Newton published his masterpiece, Principia, the Ideal Chronicler might have been able to say it was a major contribution to celestial mechanics, and even predicted that it would revolutionize science. But to claim that Newton was laying the foundation for what became modern science, or was playing a key role in the Enlightenment, would be beyond the IC.

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CHAPTER 10 The Proper Study of Mankind Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” When Alexander Pope published his “Essay on Man” in 1732 our understanding of the world was very different from what it is today. Written just decades after Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Principia, had laid out the mathematical principles of planetary motion, Pope’s essay arrived when intellectuals were still wrapping their heads around a concept that must have been staggering at the time—that the laws governing the motion of everyday objects here on Earth were exactly the same laws as those governing the heavenly spheres.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by Carl Sagan
Published 8 Sep 1997

But what if these facts contradict the beliefs of those who hold their religion incapable of making mistakes? The princes of the Church threatened the aged astronomer with torture if he persisted in teaching the abominable doctrine that the Earth moved. He was sentenced to a kind of house arrest for the remainder of his life. A generation or two later, by the time Isaac Newton demonstrated that simple and elegant physics could quantitatively explain—and predict—all the observed lunar and planetary motions (provided you assumed the Sun at the center of the Solar System), the geocentrist conceit eroded further. In 1725, in an attempt to discover stellar parallax, the painstaking English amateur astronomer James Bradley stumbled on the aberration of light.

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Passionate and curious humans wished to understand their actual circumstances, how unique or pedestrian they and their world are, their ultimate origins and destinies, how the Universe works. Surprisingly, some of these debates have yielded the most profound practical benefits. The very method of mathematical reasoning that Isaac Newton 36 introduced to explain the motion of the planets around the Sun has led to most of the technology Of our modern world. The Industrial Revolution, for all its shortcomings, is still the global model of how an agricultural nation can emerge from poverty. These debates have bread-and-butter consequences.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Release from ceaseless labor, provided by science and technology, is for them a means and not an end. The Prophets of Progress: Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte The empiricism of Bacon (that is, his belief in the significance of experience in the acquisition of knowledge)—along with the The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 55 scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton, the rationalism of Rene Descartes, and the circulation of many other intellectual currents— fostered a belief in “natural law,” a confidence in human reason, and a faith in progress. Together these fed into the Enlightenment. Two works by Condorcet, a leading Enlightenment philosopher, broke radically with the notion of utopia as a means of contemplating and worshipping God and with many other characteristics of previous utopias.

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Meanwhile, rivals to the Kindle have inevitably come about, above all the Apple iPad, released in 2010. This tablet computer offers not only books and periodicals but also games, movies, music, and the Internet. Its origins can be traced back to Apple’s first tablet computer, the Newton Message Pad of 1993 (discontinued in 1998), named, of course, after Isaac Newton. Like Apple’s extremely popular iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad uses a multi-touch finger-sensitive touchscreen—a vast improvement over the pressure-triggered stylus used in previous tablet computers. Studies of human interaction with these devices indicate that touchscreens have become integral components of our daily lives much sooner than other “technological behaviors” because they The Resurgence of Utopianism 219 are “so natural, intimate, and intuitive.”

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

As described by the consulting firm McKinsey, “These techniques give computers the ability to draw conclusions from patterns they discern within massive data sets (anything from all legal cases of the past 20 years to data concerning the way in which molecular compounds react with one another).”7 For humans, advancing learning down a narrow path of specialization isn’t usually an exercise in gaining a broad enough perspective thanks to the accumulation of “big data” to spot patterns others have not seen. That much data in a narrow field simply doesn’t exist in most cases. The approach is more akin to Isaac Newton’s method of standing on the shoulders of giants, squinting in one direction, and trying to see just that little bit farther than others. You want to choose an area in which there isn’t a lot of data and in which there won’t be a lot for a while. Stepping narrowly means pushing ever deeper into a subject, with all the force of past achievement helping you, and learning the next thing about it through the kind of focused consideration and experimentation machines can’t manage.

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McKinsey Global Institute, “Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business, and the Global Economy,” May 2013, file:///C:/Users/jkirby/Downloads/MGI_Disruptive_technologies_Full_report_May2013%20(2).pdf. 8. Syd Field, Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay (New York: Delta, 1994). 9. Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012). 10. Greg Farrell and Andrew Martin, “How Goldman Banker Became NFL’s Go-To Stadium-Finance Guy,” BloombergBusiness, January 29, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/how-goldman-banker-became-nfl-s-go-to-stadium-finance-guy.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

When they meet, their styles mix and create a quadratic speedup of creativity. Yin and yang crystallized. The villain they’re fighting is inertia. The status quo. They find scientists to create companies to solve important world problems. But it’s hard. Capitalism fights back. One might say they are up against Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion, which says the bigger the mess, the easier it is to just keep going the same way we’ve always done it. Unexpectedly, over the course of the two years, a classic Hollywood role reversal transforms them both. Arvind learns to think slower to build bigger. Po learns to act faster to see further.

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And while maybe Inertia wouldn’t make the best Bond film after all, it is the villain we fight day after day. The Turow coal mine is just one of many heists that illustrate the role that Inertia plays in our real world. The only explanation for increasing coal production in the year 2019, with the climate crisis in full swing, is Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion. The bigger the mess, the easier it is to just keep going the same way we’ve always done it. And the Turow mine is a big mess. I follow the road several miles around the coal pit to visit the town of Bogatynia, which is nestled right up against the mine’s fifteen-foot concrete wall.

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
by Geoffrey Parker
Published 29 Apr 2013

Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman who heard (and recorded) this exhortation, rejoiced that ‘by God's mercy I practice it already’, and between 1637 and 1654 he filled eight volumes with his nightly ‘introspections’ on the public and private events that, he believed, reflected ‘God's little mercies’ towards him and those who shared his faith. In 1660 Samuel Pepys began his celebrated Diary as a spiritual journal and balance sheet, while at Whitsunday 1662, Isaac Newton (then a 19-year-old student at Cambridge) compiled a list of the 49 sins he could remember committing to that date – most of them involved disrespecting the Sabbath in some way, and beating people. (Interestingly, both Pepys and Newton compiled his record in shorthand, no doubt ‘to conceal thoughts that he wished to set down for his own edification alone’.)22 A generation later, the Reverend Gervase Disney saw no need for concealment, noting in his diary in longhand the ‘mercies’ and misfortunes of each day.

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The last (and most popular) work written by Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, contained a chapter on telepathy, wart-charming and witchcraft; William Harvey carried out ‘experiments’ to see whether or not those who claimed to be witches had supernumerary nipples or ‘familiars’ who performed supernatural tricks; while Robert Boyle sponsored a treatise to prove the existence of witchcraft (like Bacon, the last book he wrote examined the supernatural). Even Isaac Newton, knighted by the queen of England for his services to science, bought many books on magic, conducted alchemical experiments, and calculated from the Book of Daniel that the world ‘will end A.C. [AD] 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.’67 The appearance of two comets in 1664–5 spawned well over 100 publications, most of them filled with dire predictions of war, plague, famine, drought, gales, floods, the death of princes, the downfall of governments, and perhaps the end of the world.

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It was only because ‘we that live in America know but little of the great motions of Europe, much less in Africa and Asia, until a long time afterwards’ that news of yet more catastrophic consequences had not reached Boston.71 Exactly half a century before, Descartes had expressed the hope that someone would publish in a single book all ‘the observations of comets, with a table of the paths of each one’. He predicted that ‘such a work would be of greater public utility than it might seem at first sight’, but (he continued with a sigh) ‘I have no hope that anyone will do it’ because ‘I think it is a skill beyond the reach of the human mind’. Isaac Newton took up this challenge in the 1680s, carefully copying into his notebooks the descriptions of comets that he found in Aristotle, medieval chronicles and more modern accounts, as well as the observations made by his contemporaries – not only Edmond Halley (who travelled to several European observatories to check their records) and John Flamsteed (the astronomer royal) but also the Jesuit Valentin Stansel from Brazil, the Harvard astronomer Thomas Brattle and his former schoolmate Arthur Storer, now a planter slave-owner in Calvert County, Maryland, who transmitted outstanding observations of the 1682 comet.

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction
by Mark Lilla
Published 19 Oct 2015

The reactionary is the last remaining “other” consigned to the margins of respectable intellectual inquiry. We do not know him. The term “reaction” has an interesting history. It first entered the vocabulary of European political thought in the eighteenth century, when it was taken over from the scientific treatises of Isaac Newton. In his highly influential work The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu portrayed political life in dynamic terms as an endless series of actions and reactions. He recognized revolution as one such political act, but considered it rare and unforeseeable. One revolution might transform a monarchy into a democracy, another might turn a democracy into an oligarchy.

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening
by John Elder Robison
Published 6 Apr 2016

Maybe we’ve just got the gift of harnessing it in a particular way. “Do you think my ability to visualize musical waves is like the calendar-calculating ability some other autistic people have?” I asked Alvaro. “I don’t know,” he answered. “We don’t know how that works either, so it’s impossible to tell if they are the same or related.” Consider Isaac Newton, widely acclaimed as the inventor of calculus. Several recent articles suggest that he was autistic, as they point to signs of autism in accounts of his behaviour. We can’t ever know that for sure, but I had a flash of insight into how he perhaps “invented” calculus. Maybe he saw waves in his head, like I do.

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As Howard Gardner first wrote decades ago in Multiple Intelligences, there are a variety of distinct intellectual capacities and orientations that contribute to our understanding of ourselves and our place in society. Sometimes, a touch of disability is what makes us great. Consider a few historical figures who were touched by autism, serious eccentricity, or some other disability in addition to their well-recognized gifts: Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo Ludwig van Beethoven Isaac Newton Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Albert Einstein Today, we might add to the list folks like Bill Gates and Dan Aykroyd.* Where would we be if we’d made those people “normal” in childhood? As Temple Grandin says, “We’d be living in caves and using our social skills to tell each other jokes by firelight.”

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable
by James Owen Weatherall
Published 2 Jan 2013

Even as Goldman’s triage saved the day, however, explanations were difficult to come by. The fund managers went about their business, nervously hoping that the week from hell had been some strange fluke, a squall that had passed. Many recalled a quote from a much earlier physicist. After losing his hat in a market collapse in seventeenth-century England, Isaac Newton despaired: “I can calculate the movements of stars, but not the madness of men.” The quant funds limped their way to the end of the year, hit again in November and December by ghosts of the August disaster. Some, but not all, managed to recover their losses by the end of the year. On average, hedge funds returned about 10% in 2007 — less than many other, apparently less sophisticated investments.

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.”: This history of the 2007 quant crisis, including numbers cited below, comes from Patterson (2010), from news articles from August/September 2007 (Patterson and Raghavan 2007; Lahart 2007; Nocera 2007; Ahrens 2007), as well as from academic work on the topic (Gorton 2010; Khandani and Lo 2011). “Isaac Newton despaired . . .”: While it is known that Newton suffered some losses in the South Seas bubble, this quote is sometimes disputed. The attribution seems to originate with Spence (1820, p. 368). “On average . . .”: These numbers come from Sourd (2008). The Medallion returns are from Willoughby (2008).

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

KISS and Tell We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible. —Claudius Ptolemy It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer. —William of Occam To the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes. —Isaac Newton Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities. —Bertrand Russell What counts as knowledge, and what qualifies as an explanation, are two of the main questions discussed in this book. They are also central concerns for philosophers of science.

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What defense is possible against such nihilism? What can be said to people who assert that “reality” is mere socially constructed fiction? Paradigm Shifts Five years after Lord Kelvin’s pronouncement about the boring future of physics, Einstein published his paper on special relativity. Relativity theory literally replaced Isaac Newton’s mechanics—the laws describing motion and force that had stood unchallenged for two centuries. Einstein’s theory was not a mere new development in physics. It heralded a new physics. Fifty years after Einstein’s paper was published, the philosopher and sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn shook the scientific community by announcing in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science doesn’t always consist of an earnest slog through theory followed by collection of data followed by adjustment of theory.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

The system developed in a higgledy-piggledy fashion with different countries adopting the metal at different times; it was not set up by some eighteenth-century equivalent of the United Nations. Indeed, you could argue that, like the British Empire, the gold standard was a result of a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’. In Britain, the system came about thanks to a decision by Sir Isaac Newton who, as master of the Royal Mint, was in charge of the nation’s currency. Both gold and silver were in circulation at the time and a conversion rate had to be set between the two. In 1717, the great physicist set the conversion rate at a level that seemed to undervalue silver. Gresham’s Law duly kicked in.

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Buyers do not believe prices are justified but think they will find a gullible buyer willing to pay even more. They buy apartments sight unseen and purchase Internet stocks with no dividends or even revenues. Investors who take part in such bubbles will usually feel much more sophisticated than the naïve fools who fall for pyramid schemes, but they are making a similar mistake. Even Isaac Newton lost money in the South Sea bubble of the early eighteenth century, declaring afterwards, ‘I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ In the long run, the value of an asset must be linked to the income that can be generated from it (rent in the case of property, dividends in the case of shares).

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
by George Johnson
Published 26 Aug 2013

I wondered how many of them were going from the stadium with its third-hand smoke to the urologist for a prostate test. I had picked the location because it was near Dana-Farber, where I had an appointment to interview Franziska Michor, who had recently been chosen as one of “the best and brightest” by Esquire magazine. She was described as “the Isaac Newton of biology.” Michor had a PhD from Harvard in evolutionary biology and her thesis was titled “Evolutionary Dynamics of Cancer.” After all the talks about translational science, what I expected to learn about now was the most theoretical of research, vital to understanding the phenomenon of cancer but many stories removed from the clinic.

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Urologists offer free tickets: The examples are from Gary Schwitzer, “Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty,” a presentation on April 23, 2012, Science Writing in the Age of Denial, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. The urinal example was provided to Schwitzer by Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health. 46. one of “the best and brightest”: Tom Junod, “Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology,” Esquire, November 20, 2007. [http://www.esquire.com/features/michor1207] 47. uncovered some of the early clues: See, for example, J. C. Fisher, “Multiple-Mutation Theory of Carcinogenesis,” Nature 181 (March 1, 1958): 651–52 [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v181/n4609/abs/181651b0.html]; P.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody
by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay
Published 14 Jul 2020

But even if the majority view is in most respects correct, and the view being censored mostly wrong, permitting open debate is still crucial for allowing the majority view to be refined and improved. Mill’s second harm is more subtle, but no less important, and to illustrate it he takes an example from a sphere that is ordinarily less contentious than politics or religion: namely, science. Isaac Newton founded modern physics in 1687, writing the equations of what came to be called Newtonian mechanics and which are nowadays taught in every freshman physics course. Over the next century, scientists accumulated overwhelming evidence, from both terrestrial and astronomical observations, that Newtonian physics was correct (even to the point of predicting accurately, in 1846, the existence and precise location of the hitherto-unknown planet Neptune).

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Dowd, The Man Question: Male Subordination and Privilege (New York University Press, 2016). 51.Eric Anderson, Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2012). 52.This idea is often attributed to the feminist and postcolonial scholar Sandra Harding’s book Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). Harding was perhaps most influential for developing the idea of “strong objectivity” in standpoint theory and is perhaps most famous for referring to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, which she later claimed to have regretted writing. Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 53.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin Books, 2019). 54.Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, “Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): eaas9899. 7 Disability and Fat Studies 1.This strange notation is relatively common in disciplines that use postmodern methods and means.

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

As Buffett explained, the US cannot “have a debt crisis of any kind as long as we keep issuing our notes in our own currency.”10 Buffett also understood that the Greek debt crisis happened because “Greece lost the power to print their money. If they could print drachmas, they would have other problems, but they would not have a debt problem.”11 Still, isn’t there some limit? As Isaac Newton taught us, “what goes up must come down.” Surely the debt can’t go on rising forever. If the government never pays it down, then it has to keep finding new buyers for its bonds.12 It seems risky. As Margaret Thatcher famously quipped, the problem is that “eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

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The equation looks like this: Government financial balance + Nongovernment financial balance = Zero Because it’s not a theory, it doesn’t rest on any set of assumptions that might not hold in the real world. It’s an ironclad accounting identity that will always produce an accurate statement of fact. You can think of it as a twist on Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, which states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the Godley model, we can see that for every deficit that exists in one part of the economy, there is an equal and opposite surplus in some other part. There’s just no way around it. If one part of the economy is paying out more dollars than it’s receiving, the other part must be receiving exactly that many dollars.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

Over time, as evidence and arguments accumulate, scientists figure out how to resolve impasses, or at least bypass them for the time being. Before Hutton, arguments about geology had surfaced many interesting notions but made little progress. That was not because thinkers were stupid or dogmatic; it was because they lacked systematic ways to compile and test ideas and then build upon and reconcile those ideas. Isaac Newton was a genius, by any measure. But the world had seen geniuses before. And not all of Newton’s insights were sound; far from being like a modern physicist, he was an alchemist and a mystic. What empowered Newton’s genius? The world of alchemists, as the philosopher of science Noretta Koertge has noted, was “loose knit and closeted.”14 Their findings (such as they were) were held close and shared only with a few adepts, and so could not be falsified or developed.

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But as an example of setting up professional bodies to develop standards and bring order from chaos, it resembled the establishment of the Royal Society, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and countless others. In other words, Facebook was doing what the reality-based community has been doing since Isaac Newton’s day. Another example of institutionalizing truth-friendliness online was less prominent but might turn out to be more important. It had to do with the organizing question of the Constitution of Knowledge: what is a fact, and who decides? When I was trained as a journalist in the 1980s, the standard practice was to seek multiple points of view about every controversy in an effort to cover both sides (or all sides) of the story.

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham
by Joe Carlen
Published 14 Apr 2012

Considering that it wasn't until the early 1940s when such conditions were treated with penicillin, a diagnosis of bacterial meningitis was usually a death sentence for children in the 1920s. (To illustrate, Boston Children's Hospital data from that decade pertaining to two forms of bacterial meningitis reveal that the mortality rate was 98.7 percent for one and 100 percent for the other.30) Tragically, not only did Isaac Newton Graham pass away just days before his ninth birthday, but, as the infection consumed and debilitated him in progressive stages, the last weeks of his life were an unspeakable horror for his parents. As Graham wrote in his memoirs, “Many painful incidents connected with Newton's illness and death are engraved on my memory, but I don't have the courage to recount them—for which the reader may indeed be grateful.”31 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Graham family burial plot north of New York City is the fact that Graham himself is not buried next to his mother, one of his brothers, or his second son, Newton II (who, like the first Newton, passed on long before his father did).

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According to the CFA Institute (the current incarnation of the federation), the award is presented to “those individuals who have made outstanding contributions of such significance as to change the direction of the [financial-analyst] profession and to raise it to higher standards of accomplishment.”42 A QUIET EXIT Almost two years to the day after his acclaimed “Renaissance of Value” address, Graham died peacefully in his sleep on September 21, 1976, at Malou's home in Aix-en-Provence. According to the Hamburgers, a death mask was made of Graham's face (presumably kept by Malou) before he was cremated. Graham's remains were sent back to America, where they were buried beside his “sweetest, bravest, most beloved” Isaac Newton Graham (or Newton I) in a Jewish cemetery north of New York City. (Newton II is interred in the Graham family plot in the same cemetery, as are Graham's brothers, mother, and various other relatives.) On October 10 of that year, Irving Kahn organized a memorial service for Graham at Columbia University, a place of immense significance in Graham's life.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
by Dava Sobel
Published 6 Dec 2016

Miss Farrar dutifully introduced Mrs. Fleming to the plates of stellar spectra, and taught her how to measure the hordes of tiny lines. Mrs. Fleming could have taught Miss Farrar a thing or two about marriage and childbirth, but on the subject of the spectrum she had everything to learn. • • • THE YOUNG ISAAC NEWTON coined the word spectrum in 1666, to describe the rainbow colors that arose like ghostly apparitions when daylight passed through cut glass or crystal. Although his contemporaries thought glass corrupted the purity of light by imparting color to it, Newton held that colors belonged to light itself.

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Those stars heralded the coming of distance markers in the farther reaches of space. As soon as astronomers learned the key to the stellar code—the degree of brightness linked to each period—they could determine the stellar magnitudes by watching a clock, then leap the interstellar distances on the wings of Isaac Newton’s inverse square law: a variable only one-quarter as bright as another of the same period must lie twice as far away. Ejnar Hertzsprung in Denmark seized on Miss Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation. He, too, had been drawing graphs, plotting one stellar characteristic against another to test their interdependence.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2019

Simons bought a book on the subject and took it home for the summer, reading and thinking for hours at a time. Finally, it clicked. Simons aced subsequent algebra classes. Though he received a D in an upper-level calculus course in his sophomore year, the professor allowed him to enroll in the next level’s class, which discussed Stokes’ theorem, a generalization of Isaac Newton’s fundamental theorem of calculus that relates line integrals to surface integrals in three dimensions. The young man was fascinated—a theorem involving calculus, algebra, and geometry seemed to produce simple, unexpected harmony. Simons did so well in the class that students came to him seeking help.

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It didn’t feel like much of a setback, because Simons was finally making progress in his research on minimal varieties, the subfield of differential geometry that had long captivated him. Differential equations—which are used in physics, biology, finance, sociology, and many other fields—describe the derivatives of mathematical quantities, or their relative rates of change. Isaac Newton’s famous physics equation—the net force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration—is a differential equation because acceleration is a second derivative with respect to time. Equations involving derivatives with respect to time and space are examples of partial differential equations and can be used to describe elasticity, heat, and sound, among other things.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

How many more business leaders, politicians and others in positions of power have excuses from economic imperialists being whispered in their ears? 7 Everyone Has a Price In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, an aristocratic Philadelphian, published The Principles of Scientific Management. Later dubbed ‘the Isaac Newton of the science of work’ by 1970s management guru Peter Drucker, Taylor was arguably the world’s first management consultant. His book paved the way for what are now mainstream management techniques to improve worker efficiency. But Taylorism, as it became known, had a shaky start. The Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts was a US Army-run facility used mainly as a factory for manufacturing artillery-gun carriages.

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Similarly, while Apple were lauded and rewarded for introducing a computer mouse to accompany their Mac desktop in 1984, it was Douglas Engelbart and Bill English who, with funding from the US Air Force, had invented the computer mouse back in the early 1960s.fn1 When, in popular mythology, a single individual is strongly associated with a new product, invention or breakthrough, it is exactly that – a myth. Trying to tease out one person’s contributions is a hopeless task. Professions of intellectual modesty tend to be more accurate than hero myths, a point well understood by one genius who changed the world. As Isaac Newton wrote to his rival Robert Hooke: ‘You have added much several ways … If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Moving from the individual perspective to the whole economy, the point stands. Attempts to trace the source of economic growth find that most of it is due neither to increases in labour productivity nor to investment.

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon
by Robert Kurson
Published 2 Apr 2018

Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum. Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting.

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“You can’t beat a deal like that,” Anders replied. “How was Christmas at your house today?” “Early and busy as usual,” Collins said. “I told Michael you guys are up there, and he said, ‘Who’s driving?’ ” Michael was Collins’s five-year-old son. “That’s a good question,” Anders replied. “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.” Collins informed the crew that Borman’s family was at Mission Control. Susan did not want to distract her husband; instead, she and her boys, and Frank’s parents, just beamed their grins to Collins. “You’ve got a whole row of smiling faces in the back room, Frank,” he said.

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
by Robert Kanigel
Published 25 Apr 2016

And yet, somehow, out of such a place, from a poor family, came a mathematician so alive with genius that the English had practically hand-delivered him to Cambridge, there to share his gifts with the scholars of Trinity College and learn whatever they could teach him. Among the colleges of Cambridge University, Trinity was the largest, with the most lustrous heritage, home to kings, poets, geniuses. Isaac Newton himself had studied there; since 1755, his marble likeness, holding the prism he’d used to explore the polychromatic nature of light, stood in its chapel. Lord Byron had gone to Trinity. So had Tennyson, Thackeray, and Fitzgerald. So had the historian Macaulay, and the physicist Rutherford, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

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Jacob Bernoulli was among the first in a line of eminent seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mathematicians derived from a merchant family that had fled anti-Protestant massacres in Antwerp and settled in Switzerland. He helped extend calculus, the powerful set of mathematical tools for dealing with continuously varying quantities, beyond the point that Germany’s Gottfried von Leibniz, along with England’s Sir Isaac Newton, had taken it two decades before. Along the way, he derived the numbers that have since borne his name. Bernoulli numbers are intimately tied to the quantity e which, like π, is a number whose special properties make it ubiquitous in mathematics. It is defined as Now, when a particular algebraic expression involving e is expressed as an infinite series, the coefficients of each term turn out to have special significance.

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“But a great deal that was important was going on outside the garden: it was there that the twentieth-century world was being made”—in mathematics, he might have added, as elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century, Britain had stood, mathematically, with its back toward Europe, scarcely deigning to glance over its shoulder at it. Back then, Isaac Newton and the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had each, more or less independently, discovered calculus. Controversy over who deserved the credit erupted even while both men lived, then mushroomed after their deaths, with mathematicians in England and on the Continent each championing their compatriots.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

They also have the computing power to crunch vast amounts of data in a way that even thirty years ago would have seemed like fantasy. Scientific inquiry is cumulative, with inventors building on each other’s work. Unlike today, knowledge used to diffuse slowly. In the 1600s, scholars such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke shared their scientific discoveries in letters that took weeks or even months to reach their destination. Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric system, which correctly placed Earth in the orbit of the sun, was developed during the first decade of the sixteenth century.

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He was therefore mortified to find that someone else with no scientific education claimed to have invented an equally effective safety lamp at the same time as, or perhaps even before, Davy’s innovation. That other innovator was none other than George Stephenson. Davy, though of humble origin, was very much a product of the Scientific Revolution, standing on the shoulders of Robert Boyle (1627‒1691), Robert Hooke (1635‒1703), and Isaac Newton (1643‒1727), all of whom had been leading lights in the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in November 1660. Davy was a pioneer in the study of the properties of gases, including nitrous oxide. He had also demonstrated how batteries could be used to generate an electric arc, which was a crucial step toward understanding the properties of electricity and artificial lighting.

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It is true that in the late sixteenth century, most of the country shifted from Catholicism to Protestantism. In the early 1600s, Galileo’s astronomical work was hindered by Catholic dogma and by an Italian church hierarchy that was determined to preserve its monopoly on interpreting scripture. Working at the far end of the same century, Isaac Newton and his English contemporaries still had to step carefully when it came to religion, even if they did not face the same personal dangers or blockages imposed by the remnants of medieval theocracies. However, there were plenty of other European countries that turned Protestant without adopting industrial technologies early, including Scandinavia, Germany, and what became the Czech Republic.

Locke: A Very Short Introduction
by John Dunn
Published 31 Jul 2003

But it is clear, too, that it was a deeply personal impact. In the course of his life Locke had many close friends and very many more friends who, if less close, were also men and women of great power or wealth or very high intelligence: political grandees like Pembroke and Somers, scientists like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, theologians like Limborch. However much he liked and respected Locke as a man, Shaftesbury was, of course, very much master as well as friend. But lop-sided though their friendship plainly was, it did not lack emotional energy; and over those 16 years it is clear that his great patron made Locke into a very different man. 3.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent
by Douglas Coupland
Published 29 Sep 2014

< br > Once inside the building proper, I meet Deb McGregor from the press department—a glamorous person from the school of Money-penny whose rock-hard fist it probably was that knocked you out cold in Jakarta. Our schedule is tight. Deb takes me past a set of windows overlooking a courtyard area to the west, where an apple tree is dozing through the winter. She tells me the tree was grown from a cutting taken from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple orchard. Its variety is the Pride of Kent. So this New Jersey tree is a descendant of the apple tree that dropped the apple that Newton saw falling, triggering the thoughts that became his theory of gravity. Newton dealt with planets and solar systems. What would he have made of the past two hundred years?

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
by Shane Parrish
Published 22 Nov 2019

From gravity to celestial motion, Newtonian physics was a wide-ranging map. _ Would you be able to use this map to get to Egypt? Then in 1905 Albert Einstein, with his theory of Special Relativity, changed our understanding of the universe in a huge way. He replaced the understanding handed down by Isaac Newton hundreds of years earlier. He created a new map. Newtonian physics is still a very useful model. One can use it very reliably to predict the movement of objects large and small, with some limitations as pointed out by Einstein. And, on the flip side, Einstein’s physics are still not totally complete: With every year that goes by, physicists become increasingly frustrated with their inability to tie it into small-scale quantum physics.

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel
by Nicholas Ostler
Published 23 Nov 2010

In the High Middle Ages, when even little birds were said to sing “in their own Latin,” Latin was rather the cliché for a universal language, while lingua franca was a striking new turn of phrase. Human life has been moving noticeably faster for some centuries now, opening up possibilities that we know to be unprecedented. We have a sense, absent in the eras of Caesar, Christ, or Isaac Newton, that something really is new under the sun, that inventions are taken up and change ways of life, that innovations accumulate and move life as it is lived all over our planet into quite different pathways. To quote just one example—striking because its elemental significance is already almost forgotten— consider the technology of horsepower.

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His protests were in vain, of course.32 This decline of Latin, like the retreat of Sanskrit before the advance of courtly Persian in India, is a classic example of the loss of a lingua-franca through the diminishing influence of the elite that had spoken it. But in this case the motive was social and intellectual, rather than the long-term effect of an alien invasion. No one ever abolished Latin in early modern Europe; even in 1687 Sir Isaac Newton still thought it advisable to have his Principia published in it. But he was the last major British scientist or philos opher to do so. In a time of great politi cal and intellectual change, Latin had remained firmly associated with tradition and the past. Although its use fell away at different speeds in different places, and in different subjects (German mathematicians such as Gauss, for example, were still using Latin until the mid-nineteenth century), it nowhere survived to develop, or even transmit, the radical new ideas that transformed all the natural and life sciences in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 10 Jan 2011

Government officials tried in vain to restore confidence, and a complete collapse of the public credit was barely averted. Similarly, the price of Mississippi Company shares fell to a pittance as the public realized that an excess of paper currency creates no real wealth, only inflation. Big losers in the South Sea Bubble included Isaac Newton, who exclaimed, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So much for castles in the air. To protect the public from further abuses, Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade the issuing of stock certificates by companies. For more than a century, until the act was repealed in 1825, there were relatively few share certificates in the British market.

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And rental income had been rising far more slowly than land values, indicating a falling rate of return on real estate. Finally, the low interest rates that had been underpinning the market had already begun to rise in 1989. Much to the distress of those speculators who had concluded that the fundamental laws of financial gravity were not applicable to Japan, Isaac Newton arrived there in 1990. Interestingly, it was the government itself that dropped the apple. The Bank of Japan (Japan’s Federal Reserve) saw the ugly specter of a general inflation stirring amid the borrowing frenzy and the liquidity boom underwriting the rise in land and stock prices. And so the central bank restricted credit and engineered a rise in interest rates.

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
by William J. Bernstein
Published 26 Apr 2002

This, then, is the essence of a bubble: a brief period of rising prices and suspended disbelief, which, in turn, supplies large numbers of investors willing to invest in dubious enterprises at absurdly low discount rates and high prices. Bubbles streak across the investment heavens, leaving behind financial destruction and disillusionment, respecting neither intelligence nor social class. Probably the most famous dupe of the South Sea episode was none other than Sir Isaac Newton, who famously remarked, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” The Duke’s Failed Romance The first technological marvel that can be properly said to have transformed modern life was the development of large-scale canal transport. In 1758, the Duke of Bridgewater, heartbroken by an unsuccessful romance, concocted the radical notion of building a canal to bring coal from his mines to a group of textile mills 30 miles away.

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PILLAR THREE The Psychology of Investing The Analyst’s Couch The biggest obstacle to your investment success is staring out at you from your mirror. Human nature overflows with behavioral traits that will rob you faster than an unlucky nighttime turn in Central Park. We discovered in Chapter 5 that raw brainpower alone is not sufficient for investment success, as demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most notable victims of the South Sea Bubble. We have no historical record of William Shakespeare’s investment returns, but I’m willing to bet that, given his keen eye for human foibles, his returns were far better than Sir Isaac’s. In Chapter 7, we identify the biggest culprits. I guarantee you’ll recognize most of these as the face in the looking glass.

The Quants
by Scott Patterson
Published 2 Feb 2010

Nearly $2 million in proceeds would go to support a math program for New York City’s public schools—a fitting beneficiary, as the players were Wall Street’s glorified mathletes. Muller, Asness, Griffin, and Weinstein were all quants. Math was the very air they breathed. Even the custom-made poker chips at the event were stamped with the names of mathematical river gods such as Isaac Newton. The potent combination of their mathematical brilliance, feverishly competitive natures, and out-on-the-edge gambling instincts led to an almost fanatical obsession with poker—the odds, the looping mental games, the bluffing (if I bet this much, he’ll think that I think that he thinks …). Asness didn’t take the game as seriously as Muller, Weinstein, and Chris did.

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Amazingly, not one of the quants, despite their chart-topping IQs, their walls of degrees, their impressive Ph.D.’s, their billions of wealth earned by anticipating every bob and weave the market threw their way, their decades studying every statistical quirk of the market under the sun, saw the train wreck coming. How could they have missed it? What went wrong? A hint to the answer was captured centuries ago by a man whose name emblazoned the poker chips the quants wagered with that night: Isaac Newton. After losing £20,000 on a vast Ponzi scheme known as the South Sea Bubble in 1720, Newton observed: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” Just past 5:00 A.M. on a spring Saturday in 1961, the sun was about to dawn on a small, ratty casino in Reno, Nevada.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

How best to describe a planet’s orbit? As an ellipse, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) discovered. He derived three laws of planetary motion that made new almanacs accurate to within two-tenths of a degree.* And why, if the Earth really were spinning through space, could no one feel it? Inertia, answered Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)—and the answer became the first of his Three Laws of Motion. The impact of Copernicus’s work extended far beyond the time horizon of the Renaissance and far beyond astronomy. He laid a fresh foundation atop which all modern physics was built. When genius became general We label this rare class of achievement “genius,” and during the Renaissance, it became startlingly common.

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But in the subatomic realm of electrons, quarks and gluons, nature isn’t like that at all. An electron doesn’t occupy a single place. Rather, it occupies all possible places simultaneously—until we look at it, at which moment it does settle in a single place. Where we find it in that moment isn’t set by Isaac Newton’s laws of cause and effect, but rather by laws of probability. Most of the time it’s where Newton would expect, but sometimes it’s not. This weird indeterminacy is completely contrary to our experience and intuition. “God does not play dice,” Albert Einstein, a skeptic of quantum mechanics, famously declared (to which Niels Bohr, a believer, replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”).

Discover Great Britain
by Lonely Planet
Published 22 Aug 2012

His left hand holds a golden orb, while his right grips not the original sceptre but a table leg, put there by student pranksters and never replaced. As you enter the Great Court , scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 32 Nobel Prize winners. Corpus Christi College College Offline map Google map (www.corpus.cam.ac.uk; King’s Pde; admission £2) Entry to this illustrious college is via the so-called New Court, which dates back a mere 200 years.

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Its architect was paid a grand total of 15p for his design and, feeling aggrieved at such a measly fee, it’s said he cut a chunk out of one of the balls adorning the balustrade so the bridge would never be complete. Most curious of all is the flimsy-looking wooden construction joining the two halves of Queen’s College known as the Mathematical Bridge , first built in 1749. Despite what unscrupulous guides may tell you, it wasn’t the handiwork of Sir Isaac Newton (he died in 1727), originally built without nails, or taken apart by students who then couldn’t figure how to put it back together. Tours City Sightseeing Bus Tour (www.city-sightseeing.com; adult/child £13/7; every 20min 10am-4.40pm) Hop-on/hop-off bus tours. Riverboat Georgina Boating Offline map Google map ( 01223-307694; www.georgina.co.uk) One-/two-hour cruises (£6/12) with the option of including lunch or a cream tea.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

* Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commit adultery: extroverts; function well without sleep: introverts; learn from our mistakes: introverts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratification: introverts; be a good leader: in some cases introverts, in other cases extroverts, depending on the type of leadership called for; ask “what if”: introverts. * Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J. K. Rowling. * This is an informal quiz, not a scientifically validated personality test. The questions were formulated based on characteristics of introversion often accepted by contemporary researchers.

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Morgan, “Perceptions of Intelligence in Leaderless Groups: The Dynamic Effects of Shyness and Acquaintance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 3 (1997): 581–91. 18. one informal study: Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2008), 3–4. 19. the theory of gravity: Gale E. Christianson, Isaac Newton (Oxford University Press, Lives and Legacies Series, 2005). 20. the theory of relativity: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 4, 12, 18, 2, 31, etc. 21. W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: Michael Fitzgerald, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2005), 69.

The Glorious Heresies
by Lisa McInerney
Published 8 Apr 2015

There’s no force in the universe, said his teacher (Mr O’Reilly, whose designer spectacles were betrayed by a face mired in 1985), which doesn’t have an opposing force to balance it. Action and reaction, push and pull. That’s the Law, now, kids. Sir Isaac Newton came up with that one. That’s knowledge that came before you and so defines your lives without as much as a by-your-leave. Shit happens, then more shit happens. Ah, but shit happens right up to the point where it’s happening in the face of someone who doesn’t want to see it. That was the truth and the truth had fuck all respect for Sir Isaac Newton and his axioms. So here, Ryan realised, was a case of the pig-headedness of people versus the Laws of Physics, and while flesh and bones have to obey the push and pull of the universe the real meat of men, their thoughts and actions and utter arrogance, ignores the processes the universe has run on for aeons.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

There are a host of natural laws that can help you understand the changes unfolding around you as well as how to adapt to them and even shape them. This chapter highlights many of these natural super models that can help you be more adaptive and manage change. DON’T FIGHT NATURE At some point you have likely heard someone paraphrase Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, often referred to as the law of inertia: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” Inertia is a physical object’s resistance to changing its current state of motion.

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The why now model also explains why there are often concurrent academic discoveries across the world and similar startups independently emerging simultaneously. Wikipedia has a huge list of instances like these, and there is a name for the concept: simultaneous invention, or multiple discovery. Modern calculus was independently formulated around the same time in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. And as we mentioned in Chapter 4, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace jointly published the theory of natural selection after independent discovery. The underlying conditions were ripe for these ideas, and often more than one person will act on the same secret once they have determined the time is right to pursue the opportunity.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

I was interested in Einstein long before I had any inkling that he might be on the autism spectrum. Why was I so attracted to him when I was in high school? I could sense he wasn’t like other people, and neither was I. Allowing Genius the Opportunity to Develop We have always been fascinated by pondering the nature of genius. We marvel at Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, and Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. How did these towering achievements come into being? What cultural forces contributed? What individual abilities fuel innovation in arts and science? In my work, I have often observed what I refer to as “Grade A Bookworms.” These are top students who are often lacking in creativity and flexible problem-solving, and sometimes common sense.

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“History of Twins.” Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1875: 155–73. Gardner, H. Creating Minds. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Gigliotti, J. Who Is Stevie Wonder? New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 2016. “The Girl Who Asked Questions.” Economist, February 29, 2020, 72. Gleick, J. Isaac Newton. New York: Vintage, 2004. Goldberg, E. Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Grandin, T. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Expanded edition. New York: Vintage, 2006. Grant, D. A., and E. Berg. “A Behavioral Analysis of Degree of Reinforcement and Ease of Shifting to New Responses in a Weigl-Type Card-Sorting Problem.”

The Grand Design
by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Published 14 Jun 2010

If that were true, one might think that God still had the choice of creating a variety of different worlds, each corresponding to a different set of initial conditions, but Descartes also denied this. No matter what the arrangement of matter at the beginning of the universe, he argued, over time a world identical to ours would evolve. Moreover, Descartes felt, once God set the world going, he left it entirely alone. A similar position (with some exceptions) was adopted by Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Newton was the person who won widespread acceptance of the modern concept of a scientific law with his three laws of motion and his law of gravity, which accounted for the orbits of the earth, moon, and planets, and explained phenomena such as the tides. The handful of equations he created, and the elaborate mathematical framework we have since derived from them, are still taught today, and employed whenever an architect designs a building, an engineer designs a car, or a physicist calculates how to aim a rocket meant to land on Mars.

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations
by Nancy Duarte
Published 15 Nov 2008

ome” akesm “j Vicki ins Watk Using Visual Elements: Background, Color, and Text 127 About the Color Wheel Understanding and using the color wheel helps you choose a harmonious palette. The color wheel helps you visualize the relationships that colors have to one another. Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote applications base their color wheels on the one that Sir Isaac Newton discovered. The wheel uses three primary colors, red, yellow and blue, spaced evenly apart. Blending those colors creates the full color wheel, as shown on the right-hand page. Each pie slice of the wheel has tints and shades of a single hue (true color). The hue on this wheel is four rings out from the center.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen
Published 6 Feb 2024

Like other great men, he was modest about his accomplishments. “I’m not sure why Aristotle or Descartes didn’t consider this amazing thing I did while still a boy,” was a common refrain in his letters. Though, to be fair, he did accomplish impressive feats like developing calculus (contentiously, in competition with Isaac Newton), inventing a novel binary notation (under the spell of Chinese and Egyptian sources), and proposing the blueprints for his own Characteristica universalis. The latter combined Kircher’s Mathematical Organ and Wilkins’s Real Character into a single, unified system. We stand at a crossroads with Leibniz because, from here, the history of artificial reason splits into at least two diverging paths.

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy
by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
Published 16 May 2011

During his 40s, Bayes’ interests in mathematics and theology began to tightly intertwine. An Irish-Anglican bishop—George Berkeley, for whom the University of California’s flagship campus is named—published an inflammatory pamphlet attacking Dissenting mathematicians, calculus, abstract mathematics, the revered Isaac Newton, and all other “free-thinkers” and “infidel mathematicians” who believed that reason could illuminate any subject. Berkeley’s pamphlet was the most spectacular event in British mathematics during the 1700s. Leaping into the pamphlet wars again, Bayes published a piece defending and explaining Newton’s calculus.

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And he compared three hypotheses about the orbits of 100 comets to confirm what he already knew: that the comets most probably originate within the sun’s sphere of influence. After the fall of Napoleon, France’s new king, Louis XVIII, bestowed the hereditary title of marquis on Laplace, the son of a village innkeeper. And on March 5, 1827, at the age of 78, Laplace died, almost exactly 100 years after his idol, Isaac Newton. Eulogies hailed Laplace as the Newton of France. He had brought modern science to students, governments, and the reading public and had developed probability into a formidable method for handling unknown and complex causes of natural phenomena. And in one small, relatively insignificant portion of his lifework he became the first to express and use what is now called Bayes’ rule.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

However, despite the best efforts of the church, such investigations were indeed pursued, and with ever more severe consequences. When Galileo died in 1642, a far more dangerous heretic was born. A man that explained the unexplainable, discovered the unknowable, and motivated a feeding frenzy on the forbidden tree of knowledge that would undermine the very foundations of man’s soul. For in 1687 Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This heretical work solved the ancient mystery of the motion of heavenly bodies. It did not merely describe the motion, it actually explained why heavenly bodies move as they do. Newton did this using the following two very simple formulas:f=ma f = G m1 m2 / d2 The first is the law of inertia, the second is the law of gravity.

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There is certainly no known reason to believe that wet neurons are required to produce intelligent machines. Time and time again, processes that appear to be beyond our understanding have been understood using scientific methods. To the ancients, the movement of the planets could only be explained as “God’s will”, whereas Isaac Newton showed us that their paths and periods just followed a simple law of gravity. More recently, the great mystery of life itself has been solved, not by reference to undetectable aethers or other mystical properties, but in terms of well-defined principles of carbon chemistry undertaken on a huge scale, all orchestrated by DNA.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

I have fond memories of playing with a clever Japanese toy called Denshi Burokku. It consisted of analog electronics embedded in plastic cubes that you could arrange and rearrange to build lie detectors and radios.16 By the seventh grade, I was programming an Apple II personal computer. My bookshelves were filled with biographies of Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers as well as titles such as How Things Work and Tell Me Why. One book that left a deep impression on me described Russian efforts to build a fusion reactor. When I was growing up in the 1970s, a series of energy crises caused long lines at gas stations and an adult obsession with turning off lights.

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Before the Enlightenment, major civilizations came and went on all the continents except Antarctica. None of them, though, built anything like the rich intellectual edifice on which the modern world was constructed.61 History has its twists and turns, but you can draw a straight line from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the contemporary world. Isaac Newton and others paved a highway for science and technology with their explorations into the laws of motion and electromagnetism. Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical cornerstones of modern democracy. John Locke’s arguments for property rights and Adam Smith’s analysis of markets undergird contemporary capitalism.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

If the Greenwich time readings drifted by even very modest amounts, they would add up to disablingly large variations over the weeks or months of a typical sea voyage. Just as challenging, the clock would need to be utterly impervious to the extremities of a sailing-era sea voyage: the sharp temperature changes, the storm batterings, the salt everywhere. In 1721, no less an authority than Isaac Newton declared that it would be all but impossible for a solution to the longitude problem to come from the “Watchmakers.” The “Astronomical” solution, which Newton preferred, was at least as difficult. Sailors long ago learned to fix latitudes because the apparent path of the sun was so readily observed and easily measured.

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Charles Babbage If there were a hall of fame of intelligent people, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) would surely have his own plaque. Born into a well-to-do family, he spent most of his career in academia and for a dozen years held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post graced by luminaries from Isaac Newton through Stephen Hawking.24 In Babbage’s day, all calculation-intensive sciences like astronomy were dependent on thick volumes of standard tables—logarithms, sines, and other functions—each incorporating decades of laborious construction. As a newly minted mathematician, Babbage realized that even the best tables were riddled with errors.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Published 11 May 2020

The idea occurred to me while on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens given by their charismatic director. In his company, clouds of stories emanated from even the most unremarkable shrub. One plant, a large apple tree near the entrance, stood out. It grew, we were told, from a cutting taken from a four-hundred-year-old apple tree in the garden of Isaac Newton’s family home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was the only apple tree that grew there and was old enough to have been around when Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation. If any tree had dropped an apple that inspired Newton, it was this one. Having been grown from a cutting, the tree in front of us was, the director reminded us, a clone of the famous tree.

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New Phytologist 220: 1012–30. Studerus E, Kometer M, Hasler F, Vollenweider FX. 2011. Acute, subacute and long-term subjective effects of psilocybin in healthy humans: a pooled analysis of experimental studies. Journal of Psychopharmacology 25: 1434–452. Stukeley W. 1752. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life. Unpublished, available from website of the Royal Society: ttp.royalsociety.org/​ttp/​ttp.html?id=1807da00-909a-4abf-b9c1-0279a08e4bf2&type=book [accessed October 29, 2019]. Suarato G, Bertorelli R, Athanassiou A. 2018. Borrowing from nature: biopolymers and biocomposites as smart wound care materials.

Paper: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 3 Apr 2016

“We cannot, however, approve of any mode of discovery without writing, and when that comes into more general use, we may have further hopes,” he predicted correctly. A generation later, Robert Boyle, founder of the Royal Society in London, introduced the use of a scientific methodology that would lay the foundation for modern chemistry. And another generation later, Isaac Newton, the first modern theoretical physicist, used mathematical calculation and physical observation to lay the foundation for both physics and calculus. He developed theories on gravity and the laws of motion, and built the first true telescope, from which he could observe his theories at work in space.

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In 1724 he petitioned the New York Assembly for the right to start a paper mill with an exclusive monopoly in New York for fifteen years. This kind of arrangement was how paper mills had been started in England, and some in the assembly favored the idea. But the New York governor, William Burnet, an aristocratic intellectual who was tutored as a child by Isaac Newton, was a staunch believer in the economics of colonialism—that is, he believed colonies were supposed to enrich the merchants of the mother country, as stated in the Navigation Act of 1663. If Americans wanted paper, he believed, they should buy it from British papermakers, not make it themselves.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

Government officials tried in vain to restore confidence, and a complete collapse of the public credit was barely averted. Similarly, the price of Mississippi Company shares fell to a pittance as the public realized that an excess of paper currency creates no real wealth, only inflation. Big losers in the South Sea Bubble included Isaac Newton, who exclaimed, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So much for castles in the air. To protect the public from further abuses, Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade the issuing of stock certificates by companies. For more than a century, until the act was repealed in 1825, there were relatively few share certificates in the British market.

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And rental income had been rising far more slowly than land values, indicating a falling rate of return on real estate. Finally, the low interest rates that had been underpinning the market had already begun to rise in 1989. Much to the distress of those speculators who had concluded that the fundamental laws of financial gravity were not applicable to Japan, Isaac Newton arrived there in 1990. Interestingly, it was the government itself that dropped the apple. The Bank of Japan (Japan’s Federal Reserve) saw the ugly specter of a general inflation stirring amid the borrowing frenzy and the liquidity boom underwriting the rise in land and stock prices. And so the central bank restricted credit and engineered a rise in interest rates.

England
by David Else
Published 14 Oct 2010

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poet’s Corner where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. The octagonal Chapter House (10.30am-4pm) dates from the 1250s and was where the monks would meet for daily prayer before Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries. Used as a treasury and ‘Royal Wardrobe’, the cryptlike Pyx Chamber (10.30am-4pm) dates from about 1070. The neighbouring Abbey Museum (10.30am-4pm) has as its centrepiece death masks of generations of royalty.

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The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. Today the university remains one of the top three for research worldwide, and international academics have polled it as the top university in the world for science.

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It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 31 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H. W. Brands
Published 1 Jan 2000

The plague began during the spring of 1665, creeping out of the slums of the city and spreading silently—except for the wailing of friends and relatives, before they themselves succumbed—across every district and neighborhood. By summer thousands of men, women, and children were dying each week. Those who could fled the city for the countryside in hopes of eluding the invisible destroyer. (Isaac Newton, sitting out the plague in Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall from a tree and extrapolated its trajectory into a theory of universal gravitation.) Persons too poor to leave kept to their houses, fearing contact with carriers of the disease. Taverns, inns, and theaters were closed by decree of the frantic civic authorities; a curfew reinforced the popular desire to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone who might be a carrier.

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Among these was Bernard Mandeville—“a most facetious entertaining companion,” in Franklin’s words—who had written The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. This work outraged moralists and made Mandeville a minor hero among those who liked to tweak conventional conscience; not surprisingly, its author saw in Franklin a kindred spirit who might carry the fight forward. Another member of the circle was Henry Pemberton, a friend of Isaac Newton. Pemberton delighted Franklin by promising to introduce him to the great scientist; he disappointed Franklin by failing to fulfill his promise. Even as he gained a reputation as a philosophical wunderkind, Franklin made friends by his other gifts. One of his printing colleagues at Watts’s was a young man named Wygate, a lover of knowledge after Franklin’s heart and a bit of a linguist as well.

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If you think any thing in my power whereby I can promote so useful an undertaking I will with much pleasure receive your instructions for that end.” This response encouraged Franklin, especially as it came from one as distinguished as Colden. A physician by training, Colden was surveyor general of New York, and a man almost as catholic in his interests as Franklin would become. Colden refused to be intimidated by the awesome reputation of Isaac Newton, convincing himself that Newton had erred on certain important points. He devoted much of his adult life to correcting the mistakes. Yet the effort hardly exhausted him. He found time to write a history of the Indian tribes in and around the colony of New York, a taxonomy of the flora near his Orange County home (which he rendered in Latin and sent to the Swedish patriarch of plant science and Latin nomenclature, Linneaus, who duly published it), assorted treatises on moral philosophy, medical accounts of major diseases and lesser distempers, and a translation of Cicero’s letters.

The London Compendium
by Ed Glinert
Published 30 Jun 2004

The directors of the South Sea Company took on around three-fifths of the national debt – £9 million – resulting in considerable speculation in company stock, with shares rising in value from £100 to £1,000 and speculators trying to win finance for impossible projects. When the bubble burst in September 1720 many investors were ruined. Isaac Newton, the leading English scientist of the era, had sold £7,000-worth of stock the previous April at 100 per cent profit but had then unwisely re-entered the market and lost £20,000, which led him to comment: ‘I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ Some of those found guilty were thrown in the Tower.

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New Connaught Rooms (former Freemasons Tavern), Nos. 61–65, south side Banqueting rooms with a long and varied history, the New Connaught Rooms stand on the site of the seventeenth-century Conway House, the residency of the Lord Chancellor, whose best-known incumbent of the period, Heneage Finch, hid the Great Seal of England under his pillow to prevent its theft. In 1774 Conway House was replaced by the Freemasons Tavern which soon became a popular venue for public meetings. Thomas Taylor, a vehement opponent of Isaac Newton’s scientific theories, gave a lecture here on the subject of perpetual light, using supposedly ‘everlasting’ lamps filled with phosphorus, but succeeding in little more than setting light to the room. On 28 October 1863 the Football Association was founded here by eleven clubs – Barnes, Blackheath, Black-heath Proprietary School, Crystal Palace, Crusaders, Forest (Leytonstone), Kensington School, No Names Kilburn, Perceval House (Blackheath), Surbiton and War Office.

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Named after Henry Jermyn, the seventeenth-century Earl of St Albans – the poet Andrew Marvell claimed he looked like a butcher with ‘drayman’s shoulders’ – who was granted a sixty-year Crown lease on 45 acres of land in St James’s Fields in 1660, the street was laid out in the 1680s, a relief at No. 73 showing Charles II, who was then on the throne, handing the deeds to Jermyn. Past residents of what is now an almost entirely commercial street include the scientist Isaac Newton, who lived at No. 87 from 1696 to 1710, and the poet Thomas Gray. At No.40 is the exclusive nightclub Tramps. The Mall A grand boulevard central to state ceremonies and usually filled with tourists on their way to Buckingham Palace, it was cut through St James’s Park in 1660 by Charles II as a pitch for the game of paille-maille, with two long avenues of trees in the French style.

The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe
Published 30 Aug 2016

By then the Theory of Evolution had won the intellectual status battle, even within the ranks of the Anglican Church’s young clergymen. They were turning from clergy into the clerisy themselves. The reviews approached Darwin as an already Great Man. The Annual Register, a yearly survey of British intellectual life, compared him to Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravity and creator of the fields of physics, mechanics, modern astronomy, and the Rules of Scientific Reasoning in the 1600s. The Register’s anonymous reviewer said everyone knew “how profound was the influence of the Newtonian philosophy over the next two or three generations.”

A Framework for Understanding Poverty
by Ruby K. Payne
Published 4 May 2012

These sources are (i) the recent research in the field of science and (2) the work Stephen Covey has done with personal effectiveness. Margaret Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science (1992), states quite clearly: Scientists in many different disciplines are questioning whether we can adequately explain how the world works by using the machine imagery created in the 17th century, most notably by Sir Isaac Newton. In the machine model, one must understand parts. Things can be taken apart, dissected literally or representationally ... and then put back together without any significant loss ... The Newtonian model of the world is characterized by materialism and reductionism-a focus on things rather than relationships ...

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

—George Soros, October 1987, twenty years before the subprime crisis The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.1 —George Soros, February 1995, twelve years before the subprime crisis SIR ISAAC NEWTON was not just the world’s greatest mathematician and scientist. He was also Master of the Royal Mint in London from 1699 to 1727, a period that took in the South Sea Bubble, perhaps the most notorious of all the booms and busts that have punctuated financial history. With his incomparable intellect and his access to what today might be called insider information, he invested in the South Sea Company and cashed out his shares with a 100 percent profit in April 1720, judging that their price had advanced too far.

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It seems presumptuous to suggest that some of the most successful and thoughtful financiers of their generation may have misunderstood the nature of an extreme financial cycle. But history shows that such things often happen. If this turns out to be true, Soros and El-Erian would be in excellent company, with Isaac Newton no less. Part II began with the investors’ adage that “this time is different” are the four most expensive words in the English language and noted that all financial booms are created by a belief that the world has changed in a way never seen before. This is a good reason to be suspicious of extravagant claims made at times of financial euphoria.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

Starting a Company * * * Figure 58. Apple’s original logo The 1976 logo, designed by Apple cofounder Ron Wayne, features Isaac Newton under an apple tree. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) They founded the company on April Fool’s Day, 1976 (an appropriate date for two pranksters), together with a third partner, Ron Wayne. An Atari field service engineer, Wayne agreed to help found the company for a 10 percent stake. Wayne immediately started work on a company logo, a drawing of Isaac Newton seated under an apple tree. Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak sold his two prized HP calculators to pay for the creation of a printed circuit board.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox
Published 29 May 2009

These events convinced Babson that the information about individual companies he had been trafficking in was less important than “fundamental data” about the economy as a whole. He developed a forecasting tool he called the “Babsonchart,” a one-line composite of economic data through which he drew a smooth trend line.20 He got the idea from one of his MIT professors, who was inspired by Isaac Newton’s law of action and reaction.21 For every period spent above the trend line, the economy—and with it the stock market—would later fall below the trend for a period such that the area below the trend line would equal that above. This happens to be the definition of a trend line, which can only be drawn with certainty after the fact.

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Babson also turned bearish in 1926, announcing that the economy had been growing too fast for too long and that an “equal and opposite reaction” was due, although he allowed that it might take two or three years. For the next three years the market continued to rise, but Babson wouldn’t back down. He became an object of mockery. “We could say that his worship of Isaac Newton was an eccentricity,” recalled John Burr Williams, a young investment banker in Boston at the time, “and nothing was proved by his claim that action and reaction were always equal.”33 In September 1929, Babson issued his most dire warning yet. “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific,” he declared at the annual National Business Conference he hosted.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand , Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 1989

The greatest achievements of science are invisible: they take place in a man’s mind; they occur in the form of a connection integrating a broad range of phenomena. The astronaut of an earlier mission who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.) In this sense, the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning, in regard to the moon, but it was a last step, an end product, in regard to the earth—the end product of a long, intellectual-scientific development.

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
by Ira Rutkow
Published 8 Mar 2022

* * * Cheselden’s career was noteworthy for the range of his clinical accomplishments as well as the diversity of his outside interests. He was an architect, artist, litterateur, photographer, pugilist, raconteur, and all-around bon vivant who mixed freely with the luminaries of eighteenth-century London society. Isaac Newton was a close friend, as were Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Voltaire, the French writer. Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, was Cheselden’s patient. Alexander Pope, the poet, was an active correspondent. According to the bard, Cheselden was the “most deserving man in the whole profession of Chirurgery and has saved the lives of thousands.”14 In 1710, after a seven-year surgical apprenticeship, twenty-two-year-old Cheselden was admitted to the London Company of Barber-Surgeons and began to teach courses in human anatomy at the group’s hall.

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Hunter’s body was autopsied, which confirmed a diseased heart, and then placed in the burial vaults of the church of St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square. Six decades later, as Hunter’s reputation flourished, he received state honors at a second funeral when his remains were reinterred in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey, near those of Ben Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, and, afterwards, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. * * * Stephen Preston left the Boston VA hospital three days following his hernia operation. His recovery was uneventful and he returned to work four weeks later. As for me, I received my evaluation one month after rotating out of the VA.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

Not only did the balls evoke the celestial bodies whose movements were described by Galileo, but every time he rested his billiard cue on his hand, he channelled the elemental principles of geometry as outlined by Euclid, Pythagoras and Archimedes. And every time his cue ball, energised by the movement of his arm, struck other balls, they diligently followed the laws on mass, motion and force identified by Sir Isaac Newton nearly a century earlier. They also raised a whole range of questions about friction, elasticity and the transfer of energy. Unsurprisingly, Coriolis’s most important contributions to science and mathematics focused on the effects of motion on rotating spheres: the kinetic energy an object like a billiard ball possesses due to its motion, and the process by which energy is transferred from an arm and through a cue to send billiard balls scuttling around the table.

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Influenced by the ‘physiocrats’– a French intellectual movement that, among other things, lobbied for idle aristocrats to shoulder a greater proportion of the king’s extravagant tax demands, and who believed that neither governments nor nobles should meddle in the natural order of the markets – Smith was convinced that reason could reveal the fundamental laws of human economic behaviour in the same way that Isaac Newton had used reason to reveal some of the fundamental laws that governed the movement of celestial bodies. The Wealth of Nations has a biblical quality to it, not least because Smith had a particular genius for presenting complex ideas in the form of neat parables similar in structure to those that were issued from church pulpits across the land every Sunday.

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World
by Martyn Rady
Published 24 Aug 2020

It caught Maximilian II’s son, Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), in its snares and may have driven him to the episodes of depression and self-imposed isolation that beset his reign. The content of the occult world, as it was imagined in early modern Europe, is best broached through The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina). Translated from Latin to Czech in Rudolf’s court, it starts as follows in English, in Sir Isaac Newton’s translation: ’Tis true without lying, certain and most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing. And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.

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The success of the ruse owed as much to the person within as to Kempelen’s technical ingenuity.1 Automata had been playthings for several hundred years, but by the middle decades of the eighteenth century they had become more than toys. The machine symbolized humanity’s capture of nature and yet, by the regularity of its movements, its conformity to the laws of a repetitious universe as disclosed by Isaac Newton. The human form might thus be explained in mechanical terms—as, in one contemporary description, ‘a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion.’ One by one, philosophers (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Bentham) succumbed to the illusion that human beings might themselves be organized as if they were clockwork and, moreover, that there was no sphere in which mechanical solutions might not be applied—the drilling of soldiers, the organization of hospitals, prison and workshop management, and so on.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph. Likewise, the important categories are the ones that do not contain everything in the universe. Good hypotheses can only explain some possible outcomes, and not others. It was perfectly all right for Isaac Newton to explain just gravity, just the way things fall down—and how planets orbit the Sun, and how the Moon generates the tides—but not the role of money in human society or how the heart pumps blood. Sneering at narrowness is rather reminiscent of ancient Greeks who thought that going out and actually looking at things was manual labor, and manual labor was for slaves.

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Lyon Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Incomplete Enchanter (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1941). 182 Universal Law Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered that breathing (respiration) and fire (combustion) operated on the same principle. It was one of the most startling unifications in the history of science, for it brought together the mundane realm of matter and the sacred realm of life, which humans had divided into separate magisteria. The first great simplification was that of Isaac Newton, who unified the course of the planets with the trajectory of a falling apple. The shock of this discovery was greater by far than Lavoisier’s. It wasn’t just that Newton had dared to unify the Earthly realm of base matter with the obviously different and sacred celestial realm, once thought to be the abode of the gods.

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So that’s professional training of a kind, and it works after a fashion—but if social convention is the only reason why seven sheep plus eight sheep equals fifteen sheep, then maybe seven apples plus eight apples equals three apples. Who’s to say that the rules shouldn’t be different for apples? But if you know why the rules work, you can see that addition is the same for sheep and for apples. Isaac Newton is justly revered, not for his outdated theory of gravity, but for discovering that—amazingly, surprisingly—the celestial planets, in the glorious heavens, obeyed just the same rules as falling apples. In the macroscopic world—the everyday ancestral environment—different trees bear different fruits, different customs hold for different people at different times.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time
by Richard P. Feynman , Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands
Published 22 Mar 2011

It was, indeed, Albert Einstein who, in 1905, first clearly enunciated the profound principles which underlie this new realm of physical endeavor. But there were others before him, most notably Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, who had already appreciated most of the basics of the (then) new physics. Moreover, the great scientists Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, centuries before Einstein, had already pointed out that in the dynamical theories that they themselves were developing, the physics as perceived by an observer in uniform motion would be identical with that perceived by an observer at rest. The key problem with this had arisen only later, with James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery, as published in 1865, of the equations that govern the electric and magnetic fields, and which also control the propagation of light.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David
Published 1 Apr 2013

Cycler trajectories are routes used over and over again on paths around the sun. These trajectories are identified by using the laws of celestial mechanics—essentially Newton’s laws. Interestingly, to create 21st-century sustainable space transportation architecture I’m counting on laws of motion compiled by Sir Isaac Newton in his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687. Newton’s laws of motion have led to a trio of physical laws that form the basis for celestial mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces. My cycler design depends on these principles.

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible
by Lance Fortnow
Published 30 Mar 2013

And as I observed that in the words “I think, therefore I am”, there is nothing at all which gives me assurance of their truth beyond this, that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist, I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true, only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive. Descartes, Discourse, Part IV A contemporary of Descartes, Johannes Kepler, examined planetary motion and derived a set of rules that described the path and speed of planets in their orbits. Kepler had no simple description of why planets followed these rules. Isaac Newton applied the principle of Occam’s razor to the physical world. Newton’s famous laws of motion gave very simple rules on how objects react. 1. If no force is applied to an object, an object at rest remains at rest and one in motion remains at a constant velocity. 2. A force applied to an object creates a fixed acceleration in proportion to the size of the force. 3.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin
Published 15 Feb 2009

But that understanding is unequally distributed. Some people remain stuck in the world of mystery, while others master its heuristics. The beauty of heuristics is that they guide us toward a solution by way of organized exploration of the possibilities. With a heuristic to guide his further thought and consideration, the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton derived precise rules for determining how fast an object will fall under any circumstance. Newton’s rule—that an object dropped from any height will accelerate at a constant rate of 32 feet per second squared—advanced the understanding of gravity to the third stage, the algorithm. An algorithm is an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem.

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything
by Peter Morville
Published 14 May 2014

Embodiment is heady stuff, so let’s explore a basic example. How about the colors of a rainbow? In school we learn the spectral colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are produced by the light of a single wavelength, and all are visible to the human eye, except for indigo, which Isaac Newton added so the number of colors would match the number of planets, notes in a major scale, and days in a week. This all makes sense, sort of, until you learn that in Japan, people say traffic lights are red, yellow, and blue, even though ‘Go’ is green.xxvii The distinction gets lost in translation since until the twentieth century, Japanese had only one word, ao, for both blue and green.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
by John C. Bogle
Published 1 Jan 2007

They followed the old uncle’s wise advice, returning to their original passive but productive strategy, holding all the stocks of corporate America, and standing pat. That is exactly what an index fund does. . . . and the Gotrocks Family Lived Happily Ever After Adding a fourth law to Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, the inimitable Warren Buffett puts the moral of his story this way: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases. Accurate as that cryptic statement is, I would add that the parable reflects the profound conflict of interest between those who work in the investment business and those who invest in stocks and bonds.

Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain Everything
by Tim James
Published 26 Mar 2019

The Greek scientist Thales (the one who fell down the pit) had already made the discovery that rubbing pieces of amber with wool caused them to gain a crackly property, which sparked under the right circumstances, but the discovery of what we think of as electric current goes to an English experimenter named Stephen Gray. One of the reasons why Gray’s work was overlooked is that he made the mistake of asking another scientist to help him develop it. That scientist was John Flamsteed, who happened to be a mortal enemy of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a socially cruel, even malicious character who used his position as head of the Royal Society to discredit and bury the work of people he disliked, including Flamsteed.6 Consequently, much of Flamsteed and Gray’s achievements were ignored. It has to be said that while Newton was one of the greatest minds in history, he was also a jackass sometimes.

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 26 Apr 2021

Frederick Lindemann—later known as Lord Cherwell—was born in Germany in 1886. His father was a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress. Lindemann was a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin just before the First World War—at a time when Germany was the center of the world in physics. Colleagues compared his mind to Isaac Newton’s. He had an extraordinary memory for numbers: as a child, Frederick would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of statistics from memory. He could demolish anyone in an argument. He also spent a considerable amount of time with Albert Einstein. Once, at dinner, Einstein mentioned some mathematical proposition for which he’d never been able to come up with a proof.

How to Be Human: An Autistic Man's Guide to Life
by Jory Fleming
Published 19 Apr 2021

I’ve seen very little public consideration for a logical empathy, which is more nuanced, where it’s possible to be good at one part of it and bad at another part of it. LW: There are a lot of lists speculating on different historical and more contemporary figures who may have been autistic. The names include Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Michelangelo, Mozart, Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla. What are your thoughts when you see lists like that and people making the case that these individuals also may have been on the autism spectrum? JORY: I don’t particularly know why anybody would be overly concerned about that. To me, Tesla’s scientific accomplishments are interesting, but I wouldn’t be interested in whether he did or didn’t have autism.

The Art of Profitability
by Adrian Slywotzky
Published 31 Aug 2002

“It was discovered in the 1960s and fully formulated in the early ‘70s. It reached its zenith in practice in the early 1980s with Jack Welch, who 134 THE ART OF PROFITABILITY was its most aggressive, most persistent, most unsparing, and most thoughtful practitioner. “Bruce Henderson is the under-recognized innovator in the discipline—the Isaac Newton of strategy. But he wandered off into biology and Darwinism instead of completing what he started. That’s why he was eclipsed by Michael Porter. Porter filled in the rest of the picture and gave managers methods they could use. “But the whole intellectual underpinning of the thought system was Relative Market Share.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink
Published 1 Jan 2008

And just as Newton's principles can help us explain our physical environment or chart the path of a thrown ball, Motivation 2.0's principles can help us comprehend our social surroundings and predict the trajectory of human behavior. But Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schršdinger's cat things get freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. Motivation 2.0 is similar in this regard, too. When rewards and punishments encounter our third drive, something akin to behavioral quantum mechanics seems to take over and strange things begin to happen. Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

Sound money is the equivalent of scientific integrity: the system must not permit the manipulation of data after the experiment has taken place. Gold achieves irreversibility through its refractory chemistry and the time-based entropy of extraction. As master of the mint in eighteenth-century England, Isaac Newton spent much of his time proving that gold could not be hacked, counterfeited, or reverse-engineered from other elements.2 As Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine has observed, Newton was not an alchemist so much as an “anti-alchemist.”3 Bitcoin and other digital currencies offer similar irreversibility through complex mathematics and software using a time-stamped public “blockchain” of transactions.

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything
by John Gribbin
Published 29 Nov 2009

Many physicists now believe that they are on the verge of explaining the way all the particles and forces of nature work within one set of equations—a ‘theory of everything’ involving a phenomenon known as supersymmetry, or SUSY. The story of the search for SUSY begins with the realization, early in the twentieth century, that subatomic particles such as electrons do not obey the laws of physics which apply, as Isaac Newton discovered three centuries ago, to the world of objects such as billiard balls, apples, and the Moon. Instead, they obey the laws of the world of quantum physics, where particles blur into waves, nothing is certain, and probability rules. Chapter One Quantum Physics for Beginners Before 1900, physicists thought of the material world as being composed of little, hard objects—atoms and molecules which interacted with one another to produce the variety of materials, living and non-living, that we see around us.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Apr 2009

Somewhere inside this white-coated man, there must have remained vestigial urges to dominate, shout, master, blow up and attack, but how carefully such instincts had been contained, by what cautious laboratory rules his urges had been governed, how quiet modern omnipotence could be. 7. The satellite and its launch vehicle were practical achievements no doubt, but they were also, and perhaps primarily, the products of revolutionary changes in belief systems. Isaac Newton (whose namesake street was home to Kourou’s only travel agency) was the first to postulate the theories on which the launch itself would be based, when he speculated that if a cannonball could be fired at a tremendous speed from a great height, the top of an implausibly tall mountain, for instance, it would orbit right around the earth, for gravity would pull it downwards at the same rate at which the planet spun away from it.

The Naked Eye: How the Revolution of Laser Surgery Has Unshackled the Human Eye
by Gerard Sutton and Michael Lawless
Published 15 Nov 2013

Dr Tsutomu Sato carried out the first form of vision correction surgery in the 1930s. It was then a radical experimental procedure, which it remained for many decades, as visionaries like Ridley, Fyodorov and Barraquer worked tirelessly to unlock the secrets to successfully improving the vision of their patients through surgical intervention. Isaac Newton, the English physicist, mathematician and astronomer famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And so it is with us. In our own humble way we have followed in the footsteps of our ‘giants’, Sato, Ridley, Fyodorov and Barraquer. If they were alive today we believe they would be delighted to see the amazing developments brought about by the surgery they pioneered and would be very proud of the results we are able to achieve for our patients.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel
Published 7 Sep 2020

Take the billion-year history of ice ages, and what they teach us about growing your money. Our scientific knowledge of Earth is younger than you might think. Understanding how the world works often involves drilling deep below its surface, something we haven’t been able to do until fairly recently. Isaac Newton calculated the movement of the stars hundreds of years before we understood some of the basics of our planet. It was not until the 19th century that scientists agreed that Earth had, on multiple occasions, been covered in ice.¹⁵ There was too much evidence to argue otherwise. All over the world sat fingerprints of a previously frozen world: huge boulders strewn in random locations; rock beds scraped down to thin layers.

Pocket Rough Guide Barcelona (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Mar 2019

If you’re up at the park, it’s worth having a quick look inside the country house just below the Collserola information centre. Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902), the Catalan Renaissance poet, lived here briefly before his death, andthe house has been preserved as an example of well-to-do nineteenth-century Catalan life. CosmoCaixa Chris Christoforou CosmoCaixa MAP C/Isaac Newton 26 932 126 050, cosmocaixa.com. Tue–Sun 10am–8pm. €4, under-16s free. A dramatic refurbishment in 2005 turned the city’s science museum into a must-see attraction, certainly if you’ve got children in tow – it’s an easy place to spend a couple of hours and can break the journey on your way to or from Tibidabo.

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
by Henry Petroski
Published 2 Jan 1990

Yet in spite of the material’s near-extinction, a large lump of unprocessed Cumberland graphite was on display in the Crystal Palace, and Hunt’s Hand-Book did not hesitate to make a natural philosophical connection between the dark plumbago and the sparkling object in a neighboring display: The diamond, as Sir Isaac Newton conjectured from its high refracting power, is a combustible body. The researches of Lavoisier, and others, have shown that this gem is nothing more than pure carbon, and under the influence of the voltaic battery diamonds have recently been converted into coke. The plumbago, which is in the adjoining bay, and the coke but a short distance from it, differ only in physical condition; in chemical constitution they are similar to the diamond.

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Todhunter, I., and K. Pearson. A History of the Theory of Elasticity and of the Strength of Materials from Galilei to Lord Kelvin. 1886 edition. New York, 1960. Townes, Jane. “Please, Some Respect for the Pencil,” Specialty Advertising Business, March 1983: 61–63. Turnbull, H. W., editor. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1: 1661–1675. Cambridge, 1959. Turner, Gerard L’E. “Scientific Toys,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 20 (1987): 377–98. Turner, Roland, and Steven L. Goulden, editors. Great Engineers and Pioneers in Technology. Vol 1: From Antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. New York, 1981.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

—Winston Churchill We’ll come back to the knee of the curve, but let’s delve further into the exponential nature of time. In the nineteenth century, a set of unifying principles called the laws of thermodynamics6 was postulated. As the name implies, they deal with the dynamic nature of heat and were the first major refinement of the laws of classical mechanics perfected by Isaac Newton a century earlier. Whereas Newton had described a world of clockwork perfection in which particles and objects of all sizes followed highly disciplined, predictable patterns, the laws of thermodynamics describe a world of chaos. Indeed, that is what heat is. Heat is the chaotic—unpredictable—movement of the particles that make up the world.

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A Practical Guide to Designing Expert Systems. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984. Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W H. Freeman, 1976. Werner, Gerhard. “Cognition as Self-Organizing Process.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10,2:183. Westfall, Richard. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. White, K. D. Greek and Roman Technology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Whitehead, Alfred N. and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. 3 vols. Second ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925-1927. Wick, David. The Infamous Boundary: Seven Decades of Heresy in Quantum Physics.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
by Donovan Hohn
Published 1 Jan 2010

Aristotle did indeed flee to Chalcis, but the actual cause of his death was an undiagnosed gastrointestinal ailment, brought on, probably, by a funky oyster. In Aristotle’s suicidal confusion, it seems, Bolland and his seventeenth-century oceanographic colleagues saw their own. Just twelve years after Bolland repeated the apocryphal story of Aristotle’s suicide, Isaac Newton finally determined the lunar and solar “Cause of Tydes.” The currents, however, would prove to be an even more maddeningly intractable riddle. “The secrets of the currents in the seas,” Melville observes in Moby-Dick, which unlike most novels includes citations to actual scientific papers, “have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research.”

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In 1960, aboard a one-hundred-foot ketch called the Aries, a British oceanographer named John Swallow sailed northeast out of Bermuda into the Sargasso Sea in search of a vast, deep, and altogether hypothetical northerly current that he was confident he would find. He was confident because a scientist at Woods Hole, Henry Stommel, the Isaac Newton of physical oceanographers, had deduced its existence. Most oceanographers sailed out, collected data, and then interpreted it. Stommel made his most important discoveries on land, with pencil and paper. In 1947, scribbling on a place mat at a roadside diner, he’d mathematically explained the physics of the Gulf Stream.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 12 May 2014

The already phenomenally rich Duke of Marlborough, the greatest general of the age, had, on the urging of his canny wife Sarah, sold his £27,000 holding for £100,000.33 The Duchess of Portland shrewdly instructed her broker to buy as much as he could with the money she gave him and to ‘sell it out again next week’.34 Many were ruined, however. The Duke of Chandos lost a paper fortune of £700,000, while, more grievously still, Sir Justus Beck, a director of the Bank of England, went bankrupt owing £347,000; Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist, lost £20,000 by selling too early and then buying back into the shares at their peak.35 There were political casualties, as many of the leading political figures such as Aislabie, the Chancellor, and Craggs, the Secretary of State, had been suspected of taking shares in the company and then using their parliamentary position to talk up the share price.

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Yet of course the resumption would mean that, in future, interest payments could be convertible to gold. The committee recommended a resumption on the basis of the ‘ancient and permanent standard of value’. This would later be known as the ‘gold standard’. That an ounce of gold was worth £3 17s 10½d became another totem of British high finance.2 This in fact had been the value which Sir Isaac Newton, the great physicist, had established more than a century before in 1717, when he was Master of the Mint. Peel’s diligence as Chairman of the committee would shame many modern parliamentarians. The committee began taking evidence on 11 February 1819 and continued until 1 May. After sifting through all the matter with ‘the same attention, as he said, that he would give to the proof of a proposition in mathematics’, Peel, writing to an old Oxford tutor, was convinced that the ‘system of paper money had resulted in a depreciation of the currency, an increase in the price of bullion, and an unfavourable rate of exchange in the foreign markets’.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

It’s suggestive of so much: the Garden of Eden, and the humanity—both good and bad—resulting from Eve’s bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Johnny Appleseed, the great sower of plentitude from American myth; the Beatles and their own record label, a connection that would lead to litigation years later; Isaac Newton, the plummeting apple, and the spark of an idea; American as apple pie; the legend of William Tell, who saved his own life and that of his son by using his crossbow to pierce an apple perched on the son’s head; wholesomeness, fecundity, and, of course, the natural world. Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies.

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Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before. Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree. It was the kind of overworked, precious image that a young calligraphy student might find enchanting, but far too esoteric for a company with big mainstream ambitions. This graphic rendition was drawn by Ronald Wayne, a former Atari engineer whom Steve had recruited to join the team.

They Gave Me a Seafire
by Commander R 'Mike' Crosley Dsc Rn
Published 5 Aug 2014

We could then stay in the air for about three and a half hours and, except for bombs or rockets, take part in all the strikes and all operations on a par with the Corsairs and Hellcats in the other carriers. Chapter 22 The Final Onslaught During the next few days at Manus we collected eight new pilots. Only two of these new pilots could be trained up and made use of in time for the forthcoming operations. They were S/Lts Jimmy Sheeran and ‘Isaac’ Newton. They had already been acclimatised at Puttalam in Ceylon. On 25 June we steamed out of Manus yet again and, taking on a few replacement Seafires and Fireflies from Ponam, we set course for the south. We were making our second rendezvous with Admiral Vian who was coming up from Sydney in Formidable.

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As this was only enough for seven minutes aviation, I asked the Yanks for a quick pancake. They replied: “Limey chickens, join Eagle 1 (Essex) traffic now. You will be number one to land. Over.” “Eagle 1, Limey Seafire Leader. We have only two. Over.” “Limey chicken leader, we’ll take any number you have in mind. Come straight in. Out.” So Mike (‘Iron Swede’) Banyard and ‘Isaac’ Newton landed aboard Essex. (His story of life aboard an American carrier is at Appendix 12.) I turned out early next morning 11 August and consulted the oracle in the Ops room. Two hours later at 0530, it became clear that we should have to supply two Seafires all day as ‘strapped-in’ deck standby.

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her
by Rowland White and Richard Truly
Published 18 Apr 2016

There were good reasons for this, the physics of which had been understood for hundreds of years. In July 1687, sixty copies of a freshly printed new book were dispatched from London to Cambridge by horse and cart. The volume’s title was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and its author, Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. A fellow of Trinity College, Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and Principia was his masterpiece, establishing laws of motion and gravity that have both underpinned classical physics and provided the foundation for all rocketry and spaceflight ever since.

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Ellis, Warren, and Colleen Doran, with Dave Stewart. Orbiter. DC Comics, 2003. Evans, Ben. Space Shuttle Columbia. Springer-Praxis, 2005. Gainor, Chris. Arrows to the Moon. Apogee Books, 2001. Gatland, Kenneth. The Illustrated Book of Space Technology. Salamander, 1981. Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory. Penguin Books, 2012. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Fourth Estate, 2003. Godwin, Robert, ed. Space Shuttle STS Flights 1–5: The NASA Mission Reports. Apogee Books, 2001. Gordon, Yefim, and Bill Gunston. Soviet X-Planes. Midland, 2000. Graham, Richard H. SR-71 Revealed. MBI, 1996. Gray, Mike. Angle of Attack. Norton, 1992. Grey, Jerry. Enterprise.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

In 1900 global life expectancy was no higher than forty because many people died young from malnutrition, infectious diseases and violence. Yet those who escaped famine, plague and war could live well into their seventies and eighties, which is the natural life span of Homo sapiens. Contrary to common notions, seventy-year-olds weren’t considered rare freaks of nature in previous centuries. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight, without any help from antibiotics, vaccinations or organ transplants. Indeed, even chimpanzees in the jungle sometimes live into their sixties.29 In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year.

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But just as the hunters and farmers had their myths, so do the people in the R&D department. Their most famous myth shamelessly plagiarises the legend of the Tree of Knowledge and the Garden of Eden, but transports the action to the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. According to this myth, Isaac Newton was sitting there under an apple tree when a ripe apple dropped on his head. Newton began wondering why the apple fell straight downwards, rather than sideways or upwards. His enquiry led him to discover gravity and the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s story turns the Tree of Knowledge myth on its head.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

As David Wootton, a scientific historian, noted: “It is this assumption that there are new discoveries to be made which has transformed the world for it has made modern science and technology possible.”20 In the 17th century, philosophers like Francis Bacon introduced a systematic way to think about scientific research, while Isaac Newton changed the way people thought about the universe. In the 18th century, the ideas of the Enlightenment favoured liberty, tolerance and reason over faith and appeals to authority. What did all this have to do with steam engines or textile production? There are only a few direct links between scientific advances and the technological changes of the 18th century.

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A rival bank, the South Sea Company, agreed to buy government debt in exchange for its shares. The company did have one profitable asset – the right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But the share price of the South Sea Company followed a similar trajectory to that of its French counterpart: up like a rocket, down like a stick. Even Sir Isaac Newton was caught up in the mania, leading to one of his most famous quotes: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” The demise of the South Sea Bubble left the Bank of England unchallenged as Britain’s premier financial institution. And the bank played an important role in the rise of Britain as a global power in the 18th century.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

More simply known as the Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific organization was established in 1660 to promote and disseminate “new science” by big thinkers of the day such as Sir Francis Bacon, the Enlightenment’s promulgator of “the prolongation of life.”1 Befitting its rich scientific history, the society has held annual scientific events ever since. Highlights have included lectures by Sir Isaac Newton on gravity, Charles Babbage on his mechanical computer, and Sir Joseph Banks, who had just arrived back from Australia with a bounty of more than a thousand preserved plants that were all new to science. Even today, in a post-Enlightenment world, most of the events at the society are fascinating if not world changing.

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It is home to dozens of institutions of higher education and hundreds of thousands of university students. And it is home to what is arguably the most prestigious national scientific association in the world, the Royal Society. Founded in the 1600s during the Age of Enlightenment and formerly headed by Australia’s catalyst, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, as well as such legendary minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Henry Huxley, the society’s cheeky motto is a pretty good one to live by: “Nullius in Verba,” it says underneath the society’s coat of arms. That’s Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it.” So far in this chapter I have presented a case—one agreed upon by many great scientists—that even at current and very conservative population growth projections, based on lives that are extended only slightly in the coming decades, our planet is already past its carrying capacity and we, as a species, are only exacerbating that problem with the ways in which we are increasingly choosing to live.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest
by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster
Published 16 Aug 2021

.… Owning index funds, with their cost-efficiency, their tax-efficiency, and their assurance that you will earn your fair share of the markets’ returns, is, by definition, a winning strategy.… Stay the course!”120 6 Myron Scholes and the Black-Scholes / Merton Option Pricing Model FAMOUS MATHEMATICIANS and physicists often have arcane formulas permanently associated with their names as their legacy. Pythagoras has a2 + b2 = c2, Isaac Newton has F = ma, and Albert Einstein has E = mc2. However, it’s an exceptionally rare honor for economists, who are known more for being dismal than for their mathematical precision. Myron Scholes is that rare exception. Myron Scholes is the co-originator of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula, a mathematical expression that produces the price of complex securities such as stock options, warrants, and other so-called derivative securities (securities whose payoffs depend on or derive from those of other securities).

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One of the authors (Lo) has argued that a body of knowledge becomes a science only when a corresponding field of engineering emerges from it.53 As such, financial science had its beginnings with Harry Markowitz in 1952 but didn’t become a real science until Barr Rosenberg took Markowitz’s theoretical ideas and showed how to construct real live portfolios through them, when he introduced the BARRA model of risk factors to the investment industry in the 1970s. Merton was acknowledged as a scientist by his PhD dissertation supervisor and collaborator, Paul Samuelson, who called Merton “the Isaac Newton of finance.” Like his Nobel corecipient, Scholes, Merton has had one foot in the academic world and the other in the investment world, and each world has benefited. He once relayed a story about a trade in Hong Kong with Scholes. They were trading an option with a stock price that had fallen below a certain level, at which point the option was cancelled—a so-called down-and-out option.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 18 May 2016

The one thing any course on probability drums into you is that it doesn’t matter how many times in a row you get a 6: this has no influence on what the dice is going to do on the next throw. So is there some way of knowing how my dice is going to land? Or is that knowledge always going to be out of reach? Not according to the revelations of a scientist across the waters in England. THE MATHEMATICS OF NATURE Isaac Newton is my all-time hero in my fight against the unknowable. The idea that I could possibly know everything about the universe has its origins in Newton’s revolutionary work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. First published in 1687, the book is dedicated to developing a new mathematical language that promised the tools to unlock how the universe behaves.

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It is striking that Newton, the person who led us to believe in a clockwork deterministic universe, also felt that there was room in the equations for God’s intervention. He wrote of his belief that God would sometimes have to reset the universe when things looked like they were going off course. He got into a big fight with his German mathematical rival Gottfried Leibniz, who couldn’t see why God wouldn’t have set it up perfectly from the outset: Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS Newton and his mathematics gave me a feeling that I could know the future, that I could shortcut the wait for it to become the present.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

TO THE FRAMEWORK KNITTERS OF NOTTINGHAM, THE COUNTY THEREOF, AND THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES ADJACENT The troubled State to which the above Places are reduced, by the pressure of the Times and the operations of the Frame-Breakers, having at length excited the Attention of the Legislature; and as many Members thereof have expressed a desire to obtain every possible Information as to the probable Cause of these Disturbances, it has been thought prudent by many of the Workmen, that they, and their Fellow-Workmen at large, should contribute all their power toward furnishing such Information. Henson requested that each town, village, and neighborhood send two representatives to the Sign of the Sir Isaac Newton, a pub in Nottingham, the next Tuesday at noon sharp. The meeting would be on the public record, and the intelligence gathered there sent on to Lord Holland, a powerful Whig leader, and other officials, including Samuel Whitbread, a sympathetic Whig MP who had been encouraging the workers to seek reform in Parliament.

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On April 19, Henson arrived in Leicester, where he began collecting samples of the industry’s output to show to politicians in London, to demonstrate the finery of their trade, and meeting with the organization of knitters there, soliciting input and support. He wrote back to the committee HQ at the Sir Isaac Newton pub in Nottingham with his progress. Gravener was obsessively marshaling every scrap of good clothing and bit of data about how it was produced that he could get his hands on. He was gathering thousands of signatures in support of the bill. His meticulous efforts were reflected in the letter he sent that day: When you send the Red Book, send the Minutes of the Evidence which Blackner1 has got; Endeavor to obtain every Species of Warp Nett, Raw and Got up; Cotton Stockings made of Single Cotton, Light Silk Hose, Stiff Silk Hose, Mr Alliotts pair of Pantaloons, from Mr Tutin; The Average Statement of Double Lap which you took.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
by Graham Farmelo
Published 24 Aug 2009

Yet this was a momentous piece of journalism, and it helped to propel Einstein from relative obscurity in Berlin to international celebrity; soon, his moustachioed face and frizzled mane of black hair were familiar to newspaper readers all over the world. The unsigned article reported the apparent verification of a theory by Einstein that ‘would completely revolutionize the accepted fundamental physics’ and thereby overturn the ideas of Isaac Newton that had held sway for over two centuries.26 The observations were made by two teams of British astronomers who had found that the deflection by the Sun of distant starlight during the recent solar eclipse was consistent with Einstein’s theory but not Newton’s. When he was an old man, Dirac remembered this as a time of special excitement: ‘Suddenly Einstein was on everyone’s lips […] [E] veryone was sick and tired of the war.

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In the summer of 1969, Dirac prepared to leave his post and say his goodbyes to the few friends left in Cambridge, including Charlie Broad, the philosopher who gave him his first proper introduction to the theory of relativity. Broad, aged eighty-one, still lived in Trinity College, where he died two years later. On Tuesday 30 September, Dirac spent his final day in Cambridge as its Lucasian Professor, the most distinguished holder of the Chair since Sir Isaac Newton. Dirac’s retirement passed without ceremony, probably because the university authorities assumed that Dirac would feel uncomfortable if he was the cynosure of a leaving party. This was an error, though an understandable one: Dirac would have liked his contribution to the university to be marked officially as his sense of propriety was, contrary to the impression he gave, stronger than his aversion to ceremony.51 Manci was disgusted.

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Weisskopf, V. (1990) The Joy of Insight, New York: Basic Books. Wells, H. G. (2005) The Time Machine, London: Penguin. Wells, J. C. (1982) Accents of English 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werskey, G. (1978) The Visible College, London: Allen Lane. Westfall, R. S. (1993) The Life of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, J. A. (1985) ‘Physics in Copenhagen in 1934 and 1935’, in A. P. French and P. G. Kennedy (eds), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 221–6. – (1998) Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, New York: W. W.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
by Peter Barnes
Published 29 Sep 2006

But they also arise from the culture in which that genius lives. The instrumentation, the notation system, and the prevalent musical forms are the dough from which composers bake their cakes. So too with ideas. All thinkers and writers draw on stories and discoveries that have been developed by countless men and women before them. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, each generation sees a little farther because it stands on the shoulders of its predecessors. In this way, all new work draws from the commons and then enriches it. To keep art and science flourishing, we have to make sure the cultural commons is cared for. S | 117 | 118 | A SOLUTION In addition, unlike most natural commons, the cultural commons is inexhaustible.

The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named (Text Only)
by John Keay
Published 1 Jan 2000

For example, the length of a degree of longitude as calculated from that short arc carried south from Madras in 1802 was soon revised when the Great Arc produced a more refined value. That in turn meant that the earliest triangles based on the Madras measurement had also to be revised. As the Arc got longer, other assumptions about the curvature of the earth were reassessed, and these in turn meant more recalculation. Lambton had at first accepted Sir Isaac Newton’s figure of 1/230 for the compression of the earth’s spheroid at the poles. However this ‘constant’ proved anything but. It was revised down to 1/304 in 1812 and by Lambton himself to 1/310 when in 1818 his Great Arc had embraced nearly ten degrees of latitude. Everest in turn would come up with his own constants; and every new constant meant recalculating all previous work.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance of the sort that the mechanical physics ascendant since the seventeenth century had sought to banish, but never fully succeeded in banishing. After all, what is Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity but action at a distance? It is precisely the evident non-mechanical implications of gravitational theory that caused Leibniz to reject Newton’s theory, to insist that no body may attract any other body from afar, since to move by attraction, rather than by the pulling or pushing of subvisible corpuscles, is to have the sort of internal soul-like power that modern physics was intent on denying to bodies.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
by William Thorndike
Published 14 Sep 2012

They rarely appeared on the covers of business publications and did not write books of management advice. They were not cheerleaders or marketers or backslappers, and they did not exude charisma. They were very different from high-profile CEOs such as Steve Jobs or Sam Walton or Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines or Mark Zuckerberg. These geniuses are the Isaac Newtons of business, struck apple-like by enormously powerful ideas that they proceed to execute with maniacal focus and determination. Their situations and circumstances, however, are not remotely similar (nor are the lessons from their careers remotely transferable) to those of the vast majority of business executives.

The Interior Design Handbook
by Frida Ramstedt
Published 27 Oct 2020

And once you’ve identified the colors you really like, based on your own preferences rather than the transient fashion of the day, you’ll be that much more sales-resistant and less likely to buy the wrong things. Which is a bonus in itself! A Note About Color It was the scientist Sir Isaac Newton who laid the foundation for our modern understanding of color: he shone a beam of white light through a prism in his laboratory, and it resolved into the colors of the rainbow on the other side. He then used another prism to refract the colors back to white. This is the principle behind the Newton color wheel, and his discovery helped us understand both the nuances of color and the connection between light and color.

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration
by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees
Published 18 Apr 2022

Its protagonist travels in a dream to Levania, the moon (in Hebrew, the name connotes the whiteness of the full moon), where he notes correctly that one-half of the moon’s population, because they inhabit the side of the moon that always faces away from the Earth, never has the chance to see our blue planet. In the century after Kepler’s time, Isaac Newton and other astronomers established that Earth’s natural satellite has only 27 percent of Earth’s diameter, 1 / 50 of its volume, and 1 / 81 of its mass. WHY GO TO THE MOON? Astronomically speaking, the moon orbits in our own backyard; Mars and Venus lie a hundred times farther from us, on average.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Luckombe is describing the then common practice of “literary piracy,” in which unscrupulous printers took advantage of the functional limits of copyright enforcement and produced unauthorized editions of popular books for sale at a considerable discount, relative to the authorized edition. A later example, drawn from Sir David Brewster’s 1855 biography, Memoirs of Newton, refers to Isaac Newton’s efforts to protect his invention of the reflecting telescope from “foreign piracy.” In each of these examples, the mechanism by which the “pirates” profit is the production and distribution of substitute goods, whether goods subject to copyright, like books, or goods subject to patent, like telescopes and other mechanical inventions.

The Lights in the Tunnel
by Martin Ford
Published 28 May 2011

This rule of thumb has become known as Moore’s Law,* and it can be expressed as follows: As technology progresses, the computational capability of a computer will roughly double every two years. *[ Some versions of Moore’s Law use 18 months rather than 2 years as the doubling standard. I have chosen the more conservative number. ] Moore’s Law is, of course, not a “law” at all—certainly not in the sense that physical rules like the ones postulated by Isaac Newton are laws. It is, however, an accurate observation and projection, and nearly everyone in the technology field accepts it. Moore’s Law is an overall estimate. Different facets of technology, in fact, progress at different rates. Still, we can probably agree that it is our expanding ability to manipulate and communicate information that is the driving force behind the technical innovation we see all around us—and Moore’s Law does an especially good job of capturing the rate of progress in that arena.

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life
by Emanuel Derman
Published 13 Oct 2011

Intuition is a merging of the understander with the understood. In the words of the Upanishads, Tat tvam asi, Thou art that. Perfection via Intuition “Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection,” wrote Spinoza. No one achieved greater advances in our levels of perfection than Isaac Newton, born in 1642, only ten years later than Spinoza. John Maynard Keynes wrote a speech about Newton for the tercentenary of his birth, celebrated belatedly by the Royal Society in 1946, after World War II. By then Keynes had died, and his brother Geoffrey delivered the speech. It was based on Keynes’s reading of a box of Newton’s notes, many of them cryptic and mystical, concerning his attempts to understand not just the physical but the entire world.

Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers
by John Elder Robison
Published 22 Mar 2011

That’s the same thing other inventors have realized since the beginning of time. A math professor called me out on that one day. He said, “How can you say you understand calculus concepts if you can’t even pass algebra?” Years ago, I was demeaned by comments like that, but today I understand the answer. Modern math teachers say Isaac Newton invented calculus in the seventeenth century. The implication of that statement is that advanced math did not exist before that day. That’s not true. Math is merely a set of tools to represent complex things that have always happened in the real world. If you can see into the patterns of nature, like the movements of the planets or the interplay of musical notes to make a melody … you are seeing the foundation that modern representational math was built upon.

No One Succeeds Alone
by Robert Reffkin
Published 4 May 2021

Once I learned to see it that way, I realized that slowing down to appreciate a moment is not failing to move fast—it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep moving fast day after day after day. 3 Learn from reality You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing. —Stella Adler Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing. —Salvador Dalí If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. —Isaac Newton The greatest advantage you have in life is the speed at which you learn—so you have to learn fast. One of the best places to learn is from your customers. Learn everything you possibly can from the people you serve. Think of the restaurant owner who gets to know the regulars. The DJ who watches carefully for which tracks keep people dancing.

The Wordy Shipmates
by Sarah Vowell
Published 30 Sep 2008

Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell. Certainly the Puritans believed and said and did many unreasonable things. That kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason. Ponder all the cockamamie notions we moderns have been spared simply by coming into this world after an apple conked Sir Isaac Newton in the head. The Puritans’ yearning for knowledge, especially their establishment of a college so early on, was self-correcting. In fact, it is Puritan father John Winthrop’s great-great-grandson, the Harvard scientist who taught John Adams, who would be nicknamed the father of seismology. (After an earthquake shook Boston in 1755 and prompted the usual religious flip-outs about the wrath of God, Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth.

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
by Ray Jayawardhana
Published 10 Dec 2013

They have also confirmed the phenomenon many times over by measuring the change in the lifetime of subatomic particles traveling at different speeds. Ten years after he introduced the special theory, Einstein went on to present the general theory of relativity to describe gravity in a novel way. Two and a half centuries earlier, Isaac Newton had treated gravity as an attractive force between objects, and his approximations are still plenty good enough for most practical purposes, even for sending spacecraft to the Moon. With his general theory, however, Einstein proposed to look at gravity as geometry, a curvature in space-time caused by the presence of a mass.

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 22 Aug 2016

The owner of the appartement was the Marquise du Châtelet, whom Graffigny archly referred to as la belle dame. In fact, Émilie du Châtelet was no great beauty, but she possessed something rarer, a formidable intellect—she was an accomplished mathematician and physicist, whose translation and commentary on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica remains the standard French text to this day. She was also a talented singer and musician, a collector of books, diamonds, and snuffboxes, and an inveterate (though not very successful) gambler. In addition, this remarkable woman, as Nancy Mitford indelicately put it, “always had something of the whore.”

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

In 2007 he won the title of Print Journalist of the Year in the same awards. In 2013 his book, Brilliant Economics, was published by Pearson Education. He lives in London with his wife and three sons. vii Introduction ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Sir Isaac Newton, British mathematician and physicist (1642–1727) All intellectual disciplines require great thinkers, writers, experimenters and cogitators who seem single-handedly to advance knowledge and understanding within their particular subject area. Of course the process of intellectual development is often a collaborative process.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

The same cannot be said for activities like painting, poetry, music, or architecture: it is not clear that Rauschenberg is a better painter than Michelangelo or Schoenberg superior to Bach, simply because they lived in the twentieth century; Shakespeare and the Parthenon represent a certain kind of perfection and it makes no sense to speak of “advancing” beyond them. Natural science, on the other hand, builds upon itself: there are certain “facts” about nature that were hidden from the great Sir Isaac Newton, that are accessible to any undergraduate physics student today simply because he or she was born later. The scientific understanding of nature is neither cyclical nor random; mankind does not return periodically to the same state of ignorance, nor are the results of modern natural science subject to human caprice.

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Thus Hobbes does not in the end believe that man is free in the sense of having a capacity for moral choice. He can be more or less rational in his behavior, but that rationality simply serves ends like self-preservation that are given by nature. And nature, in turn, can be fully explained by the laws of matter-in-motion, laws that had been recently explicated by Sir Isaac Newton. Hegel, by contrast, starts with a completely different understanding of man. Not only is man not determined by his physical or animal nature, but his very humanity consists in his ability to overcome or negate that animal nature. He is free not just in Hobbes’s formal sense of being physically unconstrained, but free in the metaphysical sense of being radically un-determined by nature.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

It may very well have happened anyway, but it was while he was under house arrest that he wrote what is perhaps his finest work, one of the truly great books in the scientific literature, titled Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences.1 The book is basically his legacy from the preceding forty years during which he grappled with how to systematically address the challenge of understanding the natural world around us in a logical, rational framework. As such, it laid the groundwork for the equally monumental contribution of Isaac Newton and pretty much for all of the science that followed. Indeed, in praising the book, Einstein was not exaggerating when he called Galileo “the Father of Modern Science.”2 It’s a great book. Despite its forbidding title and somewhat archaic language and style, it’s surprisingly readable and a lot of fun.

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Such was the case in the history of shipbuilding and the origins of modeling theory and the role played by an extraordinary man with an extraordinary name: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In 2002 the BBC conducted a nationwide poll to select the “100 Greatest Britons.” Perhaps predictably, Winston Churchill came in first with Princess Diana third (she had only been dead for five years at that time), followed by Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, and Isaac Newton, a pretty impressive triumvirate. But who was second? None other than the remarkable Isambard Kingdom Brunel! On occasions when I mention Brunel’s name in lectures outside of the United Kingdom I usually ask the audience if they’ve ever heard of him. At best, there is a small smattering of hands, usually by people from Britain.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

Quoted in Damian Carrington, Suzanne Goldenberg, Juliette Jowit, Jonathan Watts, Alok Jha, James Randerson, David Smith, David Adam, and Tom Hennigan, “Global deal on climate change in 2010 ‘all but impossible,’” The Guardian (February 2, 2010). 17. http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy Chapter 2 1. Gutenberg was not the first to invent printing. Asian cultures had previously developed printing but it was not as sophisticated or flexible as Gutenberg’s wonder. 2. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 3.

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On top of all that, broad participation in projects like Galaxy Zoo helps boost the public’s general understanding of science, a nice side effect at a time when some degree of scientific literacy is required just to understand, let alone solve, some of our biggest public policy issues. 3. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 4.

Turing's Cathedral
by George Dyson
Published 6 Mar 2012

“I can see no essential difference between the materialism which includes soul as a complicated type of material particle and a spiritualism which includes material particles as a primitive type of soul,” Wiener added in 1934.43 Leibniz believed, following Hobbes and in advance of Hilbert, that a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics could be formalized by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to mechanical rules. In 1675 he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and his go-between with Isaac Newton, that “the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.” Envisioning what we now term software, he saw that the correspondence between logic and mechanism worked both ways.

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Powell, Office of the Chief of Ordnance, May 12, 1947, IAS. 43. Norbert Wiener, “Back to Leibniz!” Technology Review 34 (1932): 201; Norbert Wiener, “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” Philosophy of Science 1, no. 4 (October 1934): 480. 44. G. W. Leibniz to Henry Oldenburg, December 18, 1675, in H. W. Turnbull, ed., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 401; G. W. Leibniz, supplement to a letter to Christiaan Huygens, September 8, 1679, in Leroy E. Loemker, trans. and ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 384–85. 45. G. W. Leibniz to Nicolas Remond, January 10, 1714, in Loemker, trans. and ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:1,063; G.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

Cool’s scope of articles read: “Cool only publishes articles that it deems to be astonishingly cool beyond belief. Any dorky shit submitted will be returned immediately to the authors postage due; there is just too much cool shit submitted (mostly by Cool Dudes) to waste our precious thick glossy sexy stock on it.” II. Scientists do love to trot out Isaac Newton’s famous quote about “standing on the shoulders of giants” to acknowledge the scientific contributions of their colleagues and predecessors, although there is a school of thought that says Newton was actually trolling his diminutive rival, Robert Hooke. CHAPTER 6 FIELD OF DREAMS One could say that Feng Zhang’s immigrant story—from China to Iowa, Harvard to Stanford, back to Harvard, to MIT, 60 Minutes and scientific celebrity, fame, and a fortune in the making—is the quintessential American Dream.

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CEO Sek Kathiresan reported a dramatic lowering of “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in animals targeted at the PCSK9 and ANGPTL3 genes, respectively.20 The results need to be confirmed and extended in humans, which is some years away. But base editing could help realize Kathiresan’s dream of a “one-and-done genome editing medicine for heart disease,” providing an alternative to chronic statins and reduce the 18 million cardiovascular deaths each year. * * * From Archimedes in the bath to Isaac Newton’s bruised head, there are many legendary aha moments in science history. Perhaps the most bizarre episode belongs to the late Kary Mullis, who recalled the invention of the polymerase chain reaction in a quite extraordinary Nobel lecture. It’s too good not to relive here: One Friday night I was driving, as was my custom, from Berkeley up to Mendocino where I had a cabin far away from everything off in the woods… As I drove through the mountains that night, the stalks of the California buckeyes heavily in blossom leaned over into the road.

The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness
by Peter Ralston
Published 30 Aug 2010

Like traversing a switchback trail, we will encounter the same views again and again, but always from a slightly higher vantage point. Knowing and Not-Knowing Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. —William James 1:16 Certain names are synonymous with genius. Names like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo live on in our culture because of the remarkable discoveries these people made. Although their fields of expertise were different from one another, each of their impressive contributions began with one simple principle. People like Gautama Buddha, Solomon, and Aristotle are known as sages, people with extraordinary insight and wisdom.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Contemplation To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know. —George Spencer Brown, on Sir Isaac Newton Creating a Place to Stand 21:1 The ultimate purpose of our work is to experience the truth—the true nature of our own existence. This is done primarily through the use of contemplation, although if we have no real desire to know for ourselves whatever is true, then we won’t contemplate in earnest.

Great Britain
by David Else and Fionn Davenport
Published 2 Jan 2007

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poet’s Corner where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. The octagonal Chapter House ( 10.30am-4pm) dates from the 1250s and was where the monks would meet for daily prayer before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Used as a treasury and ‘Royal Wardrobe’, the cryptlike Pyx Chamber ( 10.30am-4pm) dates from about 1070. The neighbouring Abbey Museum ( 10.30am-4pm) has as its centrepiece death masks of generations of royalty.

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The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. The university celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009; look out for special events, lectures and concerts to mark its intriguing eight centuries.

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It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 31 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).

When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
Published 15 Feb 1999

The base of the machine was larger than it appeared; there was room for a small (but very able) chess player to squeeze in and operate the machine. While the Turk might have been a fake, the motivation behind it was genuine. A more credible attempt to build an intelligent machine was made by Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. This is the seat that was held by Sir Isaac Newton, and is now occupied by Stephen Hawking. Just in case there was any doubt about his credentials, his full title was "Charles Babbage, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., F. Stat. S., Hon. M.R.I.A., M.C.P.S., Commander of the Italian Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Inst. Imp. (Acad. Moral.)

AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War
by Tom McNichol
Published 31 Aug 2006

“I started with the first book on the bottom shelf and went through the lot, one by one,” he recalled. “I didn’t read a few books. I read the library.” Edison inhaled thick popular reference books like The Penny Library Encyclopedia and burrowed through serious tomes like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Isaac Newton’s Principia. He was utterly baffled by Newton’s work, finding the abstruse calculations incomprehensible. “I kept at mathematics till I got a distaste for it,” Edison would later say. Edison would credit his deafness with being instrumental in developing some of his greatest inventions. He spent long hours c03.qxp 7/15/06 30 8:46 PM Page 30 AC/DC devising an improved telephone transmitter because he couldn’t hear the sounds produced by the first Bell phones.

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos
by Dava Sobel
Published 1 Sep 2011

For the very reason, to be sure, that they are moved in other circles than the one eccentric to the Earth (that is, in concentrics and epicycles), they effect this present irregularity.” Gingerich points out that Kepler’s notes, though sparse, crop up at critical places, uncovering fundamental flaws in Copernicus’s theories. And although Kepler could be trusted to locate those points without help from anyone, nevertheless a trail was marked for him. If Isaac Newton owned a copy of On the Revolutions, it has not survived. In his student days, he undoubtedly consulted one of the three Trinity College first editions still held by that venerable library. After Newton established universal gravitation as the force that kept the planets in their orbits around the Sun, copies of Copernicus’s book came into the possession of many other giants in astronomy, such as comet namesake Edmond Halley, his successor as astronomer royal George Biddell Airy, computing pioneer Charles Babbage, and twentieth-century cosmologist Edwin Hubble, who was first to appreciate the infinite extent and continuing expansion of the universe.

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return
by Mihir Desai
Published 22 May 2017

A theory is proposed to explain a mysterious social institution (the Paris Bourse). It is then used to resolve a mid-level mystery in physics (Brownian motion). Finally, it clears up an even deeper mystery in physics (quantum behavior). The implication is plain: Market weirdness explains quantum weirdness, not the other way around. Think of it this way: If Isaac Newton had worked at Goldman Sachs instead of sitting under an apple tree, he would have discovered the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” Aside from an interesting reversal of conventional wisdom, the story of Bachelier’s discovery is also the story of the two most important risk management strategies—options and diversification.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market
by John Allen Paulos
Published 1 Jan 2003

On public television one sometimes sees a fantasia in which diverse historical figures are assembled for an imaginary conversation. Think, for example, of Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin discussing innovation. Sometimes a contemporary is added to the mix or simply paired with an illustrious precursor—maybe Karl Popper and David Hume, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, or Henry Kissinger and Machiavelli. Recently I tried to think with whom I might pair a present-day ace CEO, investor, or analyst. There are a number of books about the supposed relevance to contemporary business practices of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient wise men, but the conversation I’d be most interested in would be one between a current wheeler-dealer and some accomplished hoaxer of the past, maybe Dennis Koslowski and P.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

A scan of “The Development of Abstract Art” is available at <http://www.arthistory-online.info/imagepages/ahom03w07/ahom03w07barrdiagram.htm>. A downloadable movie of a Lorenz strange attractor is available at <http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/movies/lorenz.mov>. 28 . Here I am caging the title of the third book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Stephenson was of course caging Isaac Newton. Neal Stephenson, The System of the World (New York: William Morrow, 2004). 29 . In The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), neoliberal journalist Thomas L. Friedman looks at these same conditions and sees within them the seeds of what he calls Globalism 3.0. 30.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

The obvious answer is "ethical standards rooted in Enlightenment values (liberty, justice, equality, and so on)," but the challenge to thinking about individuals and ethics ought to be obvious by now: when it comes to technological systems, the connections between decisions and outcomes are so attenuated as to render any notion of ethical accountability meaningless. A cognitive scientist working to incrementally improve integration of neurons and electronic circuits is no more accountable for the future impacts of human-machine hybrids-cyborgsthan Isaac Newton, formulating his laws of gravitation, was responsible for the use of those laws in calculating the trajectories of artillery shells and bombs. But the fact that much thinking about ethics is constrained by homage to simplistic Enlightenment values in much the same way as is thinking about technology or policy does not mean that there is no reasonable path forward.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

Time flows in one direction: from past to present, from young to old, from life to death.1 The irreversibility of time, much like the attraction of gravity, is a physical reality so conspicuous that it seems it must have an obvious explanation. But it does not. In fact, up until the twentieth century, the irreversible march of time was a puzzle that left some of the most brilliant minds of our species at a loss. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both produced successful theories of motion, which are technically time-reversible.2 They explain the motion of cannonballs, planets, and satellites without a clear distinction between where an object is and where it is going. This symmetry, which is true for simple systems, fails to explain why lions eat and digest gazelles instead of regurgitating whole live animals, and why crashed Bugattis do not self-assemble back into functioning vehicles.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles
by Bruce H. Lipton
Published 1 Jan 2005

But what great and marvelous advances in biomedical sciences can we attribute to the quantum revolution? Let’s list them in order of their importance: It is a very short list—there haven’t been any. Though I stress the need to apply the principles of quantum mechanics in bioscience, I’m not advocating that medicine throw out the valuable lessons they have learned using the principles of Isaac Newton. The newer laws of quantum mechanics do not negate the results of classical physics. The planets are still moving in paths that were predicted by Newton’s mathematics. The difference between the two physics is that quantum mechanics more specifically applies to molecular and atomic realms while Newtonian laws apply to higher levels of organization, such as organ systems, people, or populations of people.

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife
by Marc Freedman
Published 15 Dec 2011

He was eighty at the time, but without the slightest trace of infirmity; one colleague remarked that despite Laslett’s great interest in the question of aging, the historian himself never seemed to age. He was carrying an edition of A Fresh Map of Life, inscribed to me, “In Friendly Solidarity.” For the balance of the afternoon, I sat with him in Trinity’s dining hall under portraits of Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other distinguished alumni of the college. Laslett proudly noted that Trinity could claim more Nobel laureates than all of France. What I came to realize that day and in later conversations is that just as Laslett saw the Third Age as a kind of culmination for society, the Third Age work was a personal culmination, drawing on all the strands of a remarkable career.

Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam
by David Hall and Fred Dibnah
Published 1 Jan 2003

Around this time Napoleon’s conquests in Europe had caused the price of animal feed to rocket, so why not, reasoned Trevithick, replace live horses with an ‘iron horse’ – one that mine owners could feed with their own coal? An early sketch showing Newton’s idea for a boiler mounted on a carriage. The very first scheme for applying steam to locomotion was probably that of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1680 proposed a machine which consisted of a spherical boiler mounted on a carriage. But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century, when the stationary steam engine had become so well developed, that the possibility of its successful application to locomotion began to be fully recognized, and it was at this time that many inventors tried to tackle the problem.

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
by Johan Norberg
Published 31 Aug 2016

Considering what humanity has been able to accomplish when only a fraction of us had access to a fraction of that knowledge, and could collaborate with only the people we met and knew of, it is easy to predict that a world without such limitations will unleash incredible creativity. Using a classic metaphor of science as a collaborative venture, Isaac Newton wrote, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ In his era, only a small élite of brilliant scientists lived in this world of connected knowledge, where they could make use of the accumulated knowledge of strangers. Now billions do. This time, we do not just stand on the shoulders of giants, we are all helping each other up.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System
by Ray Jayawardhana
Published 3 Feb 2011

Those advances not only paved the way for measuring the composition and temperature of stars, but they also underpin today’s exploration of planetary systems in their midst. Decoding Light One critical breakthrough was the discovery by the German-born English astronomer William Herschel in 1800 of a new form of light, while experimenting with a prism and several thermometers. He spread sunlight into a rainbow of colors with the prism, as Isaac Newton had done two centuries earlier, and took the temperature of the different colors. To his surprise, the temperature was highest just beyond red, where he could not see any sunlight. He correctly surmised that a new form of radiation, which he called “calorifc rays” from the Latin word for heat, must be responsible.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh
Published 29 Oct 2013

He constructs various gadgets, ranging from an alarm that beeps every three seconds just to let you know that everything is all right to a shotgun that applies makeup by shooting it directly onto the face. It is during this intense research and development phase that we glimpse Homer standing at a blackboard and scribbling down several mathematical equations. This should not be a surprise, because many amateur inventors have been keen mathematicians, and vice versa. Consider Sir Isaac Newton, who incidentally made a cameo appearance on The Simpsons in an episode titled “The Last Temptation of Homer” (1993). Newton is one of the fathers of modern mathematics, but he was also a part-time inventor. Some have credited him with installing the first rudimentary flapless cat flap—a hole in the base of his door to allow his cat to wander in and out at will.

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein
by James Patterson , John Connolly and Tim Malloy
Published 10 Oct 2016

Al and Isabel met on a blind date and married in Malibu in or “around” 2007 (“I don’t keep the dates in my head,” Seckel explained). A few years later, they moved to the South of France, where Seckel continued to trade in rare books and papers. While living in France, he was sued by a Virgin Islands company that accused him and Isabel of fraudulently attempting to sell rare books and a seventeenth-century portrait of Isaac Newton. Seckel had also been trying to sell papers belonging to Isabel’s father. Isabel is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister and the daughter of Robert Maxwell. It was an odd thing, Epstein’s association with this self-professed PhD who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a bit of a grifter. But the Mindshift conference that Epstein and Seckel hosted in the Virgin Islands did take place, in 2010.

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures
by Roma Agrawal
Published 8 Feb 2018

It took nearly 4,000 years to beat the height of the pyramids – shaky spires notwithstanding. But in the past 150 years, our structures have grown from about 150m tall to over 1000m. Plotting the heights of the tallest buildings over time demonstrates how technical innovations over the past century have accelerated how high we can build. Isaac Newton famously said that ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Standing at the top of the tallest tower in western Europe (310m), and aware of all the material and techniques that had gone into its making – the clanging steel and beeping cranes to name a couple – I was vividly reminded of how we got here, of the key people in our history who helped unlock the sky.

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
by Mark Miodownik
Published 5 Jun 2013

Through the centuries all glass makers must have noticed that glass could create mini-rainbows on the wall as sunlight hit it at particular angles, but no one could explain the cause, except to state the blindingly obvious, which is that the colors were somehow being generated within the glass. It wasn’t until 1666 that Isaac Newton realized that what was blindingly obvious was blindingly wrong and came up with the real explanation. Newton’s moment of genius was to notice that a glass prism not only turned “white” light into a mixture of colors, but could also reverse the process. From this, he deduced that all of the colors created by a piece of glass were already in the light in the first place.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
by James R. Doty, Md
Published 2 Feb 2016

That might not sound like a lot, but it’s very powerful. It can change everything.” “I don’t know.” “You will. Keep coming back. Keep practicing everything you learn this summer, and someday you will.” I nodded yes, but I didn’t know if I would come back or not. This wasn’t like the magic tricks I wanted to learn. “Do you know who Isaac Newton is?” she asked. “Some kind of scientist?” “Yes, very good. He was a physicist and a mathematician. Maybe one of the greatest scientists of all time. There’s a story about him you might like. He didn’t have a great life. His father died three months before he was born. He was premature and without a father, so you could say he didn’t really get a fair start in life.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

Good for the kids, bad for England. The British mathematician Edmond Halley knew of the work of Pascal and Fermat and figured the math for annuities should be solvable. By the time he was thirty-three years old, Halley had already traveled halfway around the world to map the stars, and helped his pal Isaac Newton publish The Principia, the book that laid out the theory of gravity. (Predicting the return of an as-yet-unnamed comet was still a few years off for Halley.) Around this time, he became editor of this new kind of thing, a scientific journal, and he had the same problem that every editor of every publication has had for all of history: he had to find stuff to fill up his pages.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
by Moiya McTier
Published 14 Aug 2022

Even if you don’t find the exact particles you’re looking for, I’m positive you’re going to discover something new, because I know there’s more to find. There is a small faction of physicists who theorize that dark matter isn’t matter at all, and that the answer to its riddle won’t be found in a particle accelerator. Instead, they reason the effects of dark matter can be explained by tweaking Isaac Newton’s definition of gravity. An Israeli physicist named Mordehai Milgrom conceived the idea in 1983, when he called for a theory of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. MOND advocates believe that Newtonian gravity works only in high-acceleration environments, like Earth and your solar system. Low-acceleration environments like the outer edges of galaxies operate under different gravitational rules.

The Art of Computer Programming
by Donald Ervin Knuth
Published 15 Jan 2001

Panario, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 1099 A996), 232-243. Factoring over the integers. It is somewhat more difficult to find the complete factorization of polynomials with integer coefficients when we are not working modulo p, but some reasonably efficient methods are available for this purpose. Isaac Newton gave a method for finding linear and quadratic factors of polynomials with integer coefficients in his Arithmetica Universalis A707). His method was extended by an astronomer named Friedrich von Schubert in 1793, 450 ARITHMETIC 4.6.2 who showed how to find all factors of degree n in a finite number of steps; see M.

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Homer gave this rule early in the nineteenth century [Philosophical Transactions, Royal Society of London 109 A819), 308-335] in connection with a procedure for calculating polynomial roots. The fame of the latter method [see J. L. Coolidge, Mathematics of Great Amateurs (Oxford, 1949), Chapter 15] accounts for the fact that Horner's name has been attached to B); but actually Isaac Newton had made use of the same idea more than 150 years earlier. For example, in a well-known work entitled De Analysi per JEquationes InBnitas, originally written in 1669, Newton wrote y — Ax y: + b x y: - 12 x y: + 17 for the polynomial y4 — 4y3 + by2 — Yly + 17, while illustrating what later came to be known as Newton's method for rootfinding.

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For example, in a well-known work entitled De Analysi per JEquationes InBnitas, originally written in 1669, Newton wrote y — Ax y: + b x y: - 12 x y: + 17 for the polynomial y4 — 4y3 + by2 — Yly + 17, while illustrating what later came to be known as Newton's method for rootfinding. This clearly shows the idea of B), since he often denoted grouping by using horizontal lines and colons instead of parentheses. Newton had been using the idea for several years in unpublished notes. [See The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, edited by D. T. Whiteside, 1 A967), 490, 531; 2 A968), 222.] Independently, a method equivalent to Horner's had in fact been used in 13th-century China by Ch'in Chiu Shao [see Y. Mikami, The Development of Mathematics in China and Japan A913), 73-77]. 4.6.4 EVALUATION OF POLYNOMIALS 487 Several generalizations of Horner's rule have been suggested.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson
Published 25 Mar 2014

Uranium, thorium, and their ilk aren’t biological, yet they have half-lives, the amount of time it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its radiant force, which is followed by a loss of a quarter, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, then a thirty-second, and on and on . . . mathematically immortal. That seemingly “dead” rocks can send out powerful rays without external stimulus is counterintuitive, reminiscent of quicksilver, the half-liquid, half-metal state of room-temperature mercury that so transfixed Isaac Newton, he died, poisoned by it. This fundamental condition is nothing less than magical—matter spontaneously converting itself into energy; atoms flying apart all of their own volition; a process disturbing to our common sense of the world. Radiation’s powers rise from a simple condition: fat atoms.

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I’d like to thank for their remarkable professional courtesies and hard work both in person and in absentia the staffs of the American Museum of Science and Energy, Niels Bohr Library and Emilio Segrè Visual Archives of the American Center for Physics, Bradbury Science Museum, Bureau of Atomic Tourism, Churchill College Archives Centre, Library of Congress, Los Alamos Historical Society and Museum, Mandeville Department of Special Collections at the University of California at San Diego, Harvey Mudd College Oral History Project on the Atomic Age at Claremont, National Archives and Records Administration, National Atomic Museum, National Security Archive at George Washington University, Nuclear Weapons Archive, Society of Nuclear Medicine, Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, US Department of Energy, Titan Missile Museum, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, and Woodrow Wilson Center. Isaac Newton thanked giants who supported him with their shoulders, and though I’m no Newton, there are indeed giants, starting with the magisterial Richard Rhodes, the fundamental overviews of Amir Aczel, Jim Baggott, David Lindley, James Mahaffey, Marjorie Malley, John Mueller, Jay Orear, Jon Palfreman, N.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

These breakthroughs include game theory, general equilibrium theory, the economics of uncertainty, long-term economic growth theory, portfolio theory and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, option pricing theory, macroeconometric modeling, computable general equilibrium modeling, and rational expectations.21 Many of these contributions have been recognized by the Nobel Prize committee, and they’ve permanently changed the field of economics from an obscure branch of moral philosophy pursued by gentlemen-scholars, to a full-fledged scientific endeavor not entirely unlike the deductive process with which Isaac Newton explained the motion of the planets from three simple laws. The mathematization of economics is now largely complete, with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, rational expectations, and sophisticated econometric techniques replacing the less rigorous arguments of the previous generation of economists.

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ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS Despite the fact that physics and theory envy may have led economists to unrealistic mathematical extremes, there’s little doubt that we economists have drawn tremendous inspiration from the success of the physical and natural sciences, and that this inspiration has paid off handsomely. In a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676, Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” a particularly humble statement coming from one giant to another. Progress in academia rarely happens in a vacuum, but occurs sequentially as we build on ideas and tools from others, the wisdom of the crowds through time.

Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare
by Paul Lockhart
Published 15 Mar 2021

There was no such thing as a weapons designer or a ballistics engineer; in fact, there was no such thing as a science of ballistics, because—outside of architecture, which was still more art than science—there was no such thing as engineering. There was not even an intellectual framework for comprehending the physics of a projectile in flight, because an understanding of motion and the forces that act upon it was just not there before Sir Isaac Newton. Craftsmen, not engineers or scientists, designed firearms, and so innovations were more the result of accidental discoveries or eccentric experimentation, not of planned research. Even as the dynastic states of post-Renaissance Europe were already in the throes of building large and complex bureaucracies, including vast military establishments, this did not translate to government involvement in weapons technology.

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Later examination revealed that the guns themselves were just fine, the problems stemming entirely from operator error on the part of poorly trained gun crews. But the bad reputation stuck anyway. Besides the Madsen, the only other light machine gun that found a ready audience was the American-designed Lewis gun, invented by army officer Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911. The gas-operated Lewis gun, fed by means of a high-capacity (47- or 96-round) rotary magazine, was solid and reliable, and at twenty-eight pounds much more portable than the water-cooled guns of the time. It did not find a warm reception in the United States, but the British and the Belgians liked it well enough to place substantial orders just before the outbreak of the First World War.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

The harm came from changes in the standard, which ‘unreasonably and unjustly gives away and transfers men’s properties, disorders trade, puzzles accounts, and needs a new arithmetic to cast up reckonings, and keep accounts in; besides a thousand other inconveniences’5 – certainly valid concerns. Both sides in the debate accepted the fact that changing the quantity of money would have real effects. Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint, accepted the case for devaluation, arguing that if the coinage was revalued, as Locke wanted it to be, the money supply would fall, resulting in trade depression: fixed costs required flexible money. Locke, too, understood that halving the money supply would lead either to the halving of output and employment or a halving of wages, prices and rents, though he did not say which.

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The 1810 Bullion Report concluded that a ‘rise in the market price of gold above its mint price will take place if the local currency of this particular country, being no longer convertible into gold, should at any time be issued to excess’; the Bank, a private corporation, had failed to restrict its loans out of concern for its own profits.19 It was vain to think that the issue of a discretionary currency could be limited. The Report advocated an immediate resumption of convertibility of notes into gold at the pre-suspension price set by Isaac Newton a hundred years previously – ‘the only true, intelligible, and adequate standard of 47 H i s t ory of E c onom ic T houg h t value’, as Robert Peel called it.20 Bank lending would be automatically curtailed; most of the notes issued in the period of suspension would simply cease to be legal tender.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition
by Michael Collins and Charles A. Lindbergh
Published 15 Apr 2019

I remember last December, during the flight of Apollo 8, my five-year-old son had one, and only one, specific question: who was driving? Was it his friend Mr. Borman? One night when it was quiet in Mission Control I relayed this concern of his to the spacecraft, and Bill Anders promptly replied that no, not Borman, but Isaac Newton was driving. A truer or more concise description of flying between earth and moon is not possible. The sun is pulling us, the earth is pulling us, the moon is pulling us, just as Newton predicted they would. Our path bends from its initial direction and velocity after TLI in response to these three magnets.

…

Up until now the earth’s influence has been dominant, but by late tomorrow the moon will take over and our speed will begin to increase again. In the meantime, we have to correct our course slightly, as we have slowly been drifting off since TLI. For the three brief seconds of service module engine firing, Mike Collins will be driving instead of Sir Isaac Newton. Three seconds’ worth! I wonder at the precision of this journey, which people keep comparing with Columbus’s. I recall that as his crew grew more and more restless, with no land in sight, and as the pressure to turn back increased, Columbus is supposed to have doctored the daily log to show that the Niña really hadn’t traveled all that far, and therefore it was reasonable still to be out of sight of land.

The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms
by Donald E. Knuth
Published 1 Jan 1974

.; (8) therefore if b = 10 and x = 0.30102999..., we know the value of 10x with an accuracy of better than one part in 10 million (although we still don't even know whether the decimal expansion of 10x is 1.999... or 2.000...). When b < 1, we define bx = A/&)~X; and when b = 1, lx = 1. With these definitions, it can be proved that the laws of exponents E) hold for any real values of x and y. These ideas for defining bx were first formulated by John Wallis A655) and Isaac Newton A669). Now we come to an important question. Suppose that a positive real number y is given; can we find a real number x such that y = bxl The answer is "yes" (provided that 6^1), for we simply use Eq. G) in reverse to determine n and di,d,2,... when bx = y is given. The resulting number x is called the logarithm of y to the base b, and we write this asa; = logby.

…

A3) is valid for all r, if \x/y\ < 1. It should be noted that formula A3) gives 0° = 1. A4) We will use this convention consistently. The special case y = 1 in Eq. A3) is so important, we state it specially: k = A + x)r, integer r > 0 or \x\ < 1. A5) The discovery of the binomial theorem was announced by Isaac Newton in letters to Oldenburg on June 13, 1676 and October 24, 1676. [See D. Struik, Source Book in Mathematics (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 284-291.] But he apparently had no real proof of the formula; at that time the necessity for rigorous proof was not fully realized. The first attempted proof was given by L.

…

We have a\ = Si, 12 = ^l — ^52, O3 = g5x — 2<Sl52 + 3 53, 04 = 2^5! — j5152 + g52 + |5l53 — |54. (See exercise 9.) The recurrence analogous to C9) is nan = Sian-i — 52an_2 + • • •. 1.2.9 ANSWERS TO EXERCISES 497 Note: The equations in this recurrence are called Newton's identities, since they were first published in Isaac Newton's Arithmetica Universalis A707); see D. J. Struik's Source Booic in Matiiematics (Harvard University Press, 1969), 94-95. 11. Since J2m>i Smzm/m = lnG(z) = Efc>i(-l)fc~1(^ + /*222 + - • • )k/k, the desired coefficient is (-i)kl+k*+-+km-1m(k1 + k2 + ¦ ¦ ¦ + km - l)!/fci! fc2!... km\. [Multiply by (—I)™" to get the coefficient of a*1 a*2- ¦ . cfy?

Last Chance to See
by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Published 1 Jan 1990

What I could never get used to, however, was this situation: the vehicle in front of you is overtaking the vehicle in front of him, and your driver pulls out and overtakes the overtaking vehicle, just as three other vehicles are coming toward you performing exactly the same maneuver. Presumably Sir Isaac Newton has long ago been discredited as a bourgeois capitalist running-dog lackey. Tongling, in turn, made us long wistfully for the cheerful, familiar hominess of Nanjing. To quote the welcoming brochure for tourists that I found in my bleak hotel bedroom: “As a new rising industrial mining city, Tongling has already founded a rather [sic] scale of non-ferrous metallurgical, chemical, textile, building material, electronics, machinery, iron and steel and coal industries; especially the non-ferrous metallurgical building material and chemical industries, which, with a broad prospect of development, have already made or been on the way of making Tongling the major production centre.”

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

“For complicated historical reasons,” he writes, “they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.” There’s no question that Johnson was right: The old, unpersonalized web offered an environment of unparalleled richness and diversity. “Visit the ‘serendipity’ article in Wikipedia,” he writes, and “you are one click away from entries on LSD, Teflon, Parkinson’s disease, Sri Lanka, Isaac Newton, and about two hundred other topics of comparable diversity.” But the filter bubble has dramatically changed the informational physics that determines which ideas we come in contact with. And the new, personalized Web may no longer be as well suited for creative discovery as it once was. In the early days of the World Wide Web, when Yahoo was its king, the online terrain felt like an unmapped continent, and its users considered themselves discoverers and explorers.

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Published 15 Feb 2009

Someone’s work can be immortalized, as in the paintings of the great masters, buildings by a brilliant architect, or some notable equation. Going deeper, the way they worked may be immortalized: their techniques, their approaches, their professional relationships, and the stories of them at work. For instance, we know a fair bit about the work of Isaac Newton, including the story of him in his early twenties, going to the countryside to avoid an outbreak of the plague and, like any typical young man with too much time on his hands, whiling away his time—inventing calculus and discovering the law of gravitation. Jim Gray’s Web site reveals a lot about him as a computer scientist.

The Numerati
by Stephen Baker
Published 11 Aug 2008

Kaplan Publishing, 2006 Brin, David. The Transparent Society. Basic Books, 1998 Courant, Richard, and Herbert Robbins (revised by Ian Stewart). What Is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1996 (originally published in 1941) Dantzig, Tobias. Number: The Language of Science. Fourth edition. The Free Press, 1967 Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Vintage Books, 2003 Hamm, Steve. Bangalore Tiger. McGraw-Hill, 2007 Henshaw, John M. Does Measurement Measure Up? The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O'Reilly Media, 2005 O'Harrow, Robert Jr. No Place to Hide. Free Press, 2005 Schultz, Don E., Stanley I.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Sounds brazen, but in the annals of counterfeiting lore, Chen is a small fish compared with, say, the $7 million worth of fake notes a Los Angeles man produced in the early 2000s on an inkjet printer that he bought at Staples, or the millions of forged $100 notes printed by Art Williams in the 1990s, or the $16.5 million in fake bills printed by the German graphic artist Hans-Jürgen Kuhl between 2003 and 2005. Certainly Chen wasn’t as daring as counterfeiters who forged coin of the realm back when the crime was punishable by death.3 One such forger was William Chaloner, an enterprising seventeenth-century British charlatan and sex-toy salesman. After his capture and conviction by Sir Isaac Newton, then head of the Royal Mint, Chaloner was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Yet the story of Chen’s parcel is ominous because of its link to more end-of-days-style threats: nukes and terrorism.4 The counterfeits she tried to smuggle into the United States are part of a sprawling investigation that has spanned twenty years, led U.S. authorities to 130 countries, and resulted in more than 200 arrests.

Free as in Freedom
by Sam Williams
Published 16 Nov 2015

Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux? "In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.Young uses the term "public domain" incorrectly here. Public domain means not protected by copyright. GPL-protected programs are by definition protected by copyright.

The Cloudspotter's Guide
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Published 1 Jan 2006

You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow…What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination? 5 Thoreau was echoing the sentiments of the poet, John Keats, who hated Isaac Newton for explaining the rainbow with dispassionate reference to wavelengths of light passing through water droplets. For Keats, there was no soul in the ‘cold philosophy’ of Newton’s explanations: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?… Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine– Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into the shade.6 Altostratus sometimes exhibits supplementary features called ‘mamma’.

Bitcoin for the Befuddled
by Conrad Barski
Published 13 Nov 2014

You might have thought that a world built entirely on decentralized Bitcoin transactions would be a horrific dystopia. But after reading the awesome description of a day in the life of a typical bitcoiner in the year 2030, where everything operates via Bitcoin, we’re sure your worries have been conclusively put to rest. The Bitcoin End Game In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia, arguably the single greatest piece of intellectual writing in the history of mankind. This book made Newton famous because for the first time in history, someone had discovered simple mathematical formulas that could precisely describe the motion of the planets and other objects under the influence of gravity.

The Bend of the World: A Novel
by Jacob Bacharach
Published 13 Apr 2014

Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either is or is manipulating, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn Remembrances of Conspiracies Past.

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History
by Stephen Jay Gould
Published 1 Jan 1977

It had rivals that failed under the weight of contrary evidence and changing attitudes about the nature of life. It has rivals that may succeed, at least in limiting its scope. If I am right, how can Bethell claim, “Darwin, I suggest, is in the process of being discarded, but perhaps in deference to the venerable old gentleman, resting comfortably in Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton, it is being done as discreetly and gently as possible with a minimum of publicity.” I’m afraid I must say that Bethell has not been quite fair in his report of prevailing opinion. He cites the gadflies C. H. Waddington and H.J. Muller as though they epitomized a consensus. He never mentions the leading selectionists of our present generation—E.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Although the Arab Spring uprising and the hacktivist group Anonymous may seem like exceptions in a world still rife with authoritarian power structures, they’re really just discrete, colorful manifestations of a well-established phenomenon. Paradigms, belief systems, prejudices—all exhibit the hallmarks of an emergent phenomenon. An individual can have a breakthrough, but an entire system of ideas, what we called an episteme, these emerge from the multitude, none of them conscious of the act. Gravity is an idea. Isaac Newton, with a hat tip to Galileo, was its author. But the scientific revolution was a gut renovation of mankind’s epistemological beliefs—how we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. In short, it was a new set of principles, the brainchild of no one and everyone. It’s no accident that this newfound fascination with emergent systems has coincided with our current historical moment.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein , Randall Collins , Michael Mann , Georgi Derluguian , Craig Calhoun , Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios
Published 15 Nov 2013

It was this military and ideological stalemate rather than the Protestantism in itself that secured the survival of the first capitalist states like the Netherlands and England. Peter the Great launched his absolutist reformation of Russia only a couple generations after capitalism’s breakthrough in the West. The incredible Tsar Peter, who worked in disguise as apprentice carpenter at the Amsterdam shipyards and probably met Isaac Newton in London, was determined to learn from the best. Holland remained Peter’s first and most ardent love. To appreciate the power of this hegemonic example one might notice that the flag of Russia is a slightly modified Dutch flag, and the canals of Sankt Pietersburg (the original Dutch spelling) have no other reason than Peter’s ferocious belief that a modern capital must have canals like Amsterdam.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 30 Sep 2009

THE FIRST BUBBLE Everybody who has even a passing interest in economic history has a favorite folly. I confess that the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s is my own top pick, although the extraordinary adventures of the Scots financier John Law in France during the same period makes for even more exciting reading in Ferguson’s hands. In London, bubble mania even swept up Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the smartest man who ever lived. (While most of us struggled with calculus in school, he largely invented it from scratch.) Like most of the dot.com stocks of the 1990s, the South Sea Company was a company that important people said would make a fortune without ever being quite able to explain how (the story kept changing, from the Latin American slave trade to government debt refinancing, and it never really did much or showed a profit).

The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley
Published 18 Oct 2010

In calculus, the operations change functions into functions. In the mid-1600s, two brilliant men independently invented the mathematics we now call calculus. Just as the question of who contributed most to the invention of the modern computer is the subject of argument, so is the question of who deserves the most credit for developing calculus. Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany both made groundbreaking contributions but were not aware of each other’s work. Newton developed calculus as a way to describe physics in mathematical terms. For example, if a mathematical expression describes the position of an object as a function of time, what is the mathematical expression that describes the speed of the object?

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
by David Kadavy
Published 5 Sep 2011

Sakurambo (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sakurambo) The electromagnetic radiation that humans can generally see is called the visible spectrum. These wavelengths range from about 390 to 750 nanometers in amplitude and cycle at 400 to 790 terahertz. Around the early 1700s, Isaac Newton discovered that white light refracted through a triangular prism disperses into the visible spectrum of color. By showing that portions of this spectrum traveled through an additional prism unchanged in color, and by recomposing this spectrum back into white light using a lens, he proved that this spectrum truly was the separation of white light, rather than colors somehow created by the prism.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

That's roughly the temperature on the surface of Jupiter's moons—much too cold for life. Jupiter and most of the other planets in our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same plane, as if they were confined to separate grooves on a phonograph record or a compact disc. Why should this be? Why shouldn't the orbital planes be tilted at all angles? Isaac Newton, the mathematical genius who first understood how gravity makes the planets move, was puzzled by the absence of much tilt in the orbital planes of the planets, and deduced that, at the beginning of the Solar System, God must have started the planets out all orbiting in the same plane. But the mathematician Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace, and later the celebrated philosopher Immanuel Kant, discovered how it could have happened without recourse to divine intervention.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
Published 4 Mar 2014

He looked like he wanted to get up and leave the interview right then and there. I felt like offering him an aspirin or maybe some Abilify. His reaction surprised me, because he’d done such an excellent job up to that point. I later realized that for me to ask Mark Cranney to describe the proper way to train sales reps was like a layman asking Isaac Newton to explain the laws of physics. Where to begin? After what seemed like five minutes of silence, Mark reached into his bag and pulled out a giant training manual he had designed. He said he couldn’t possibly explain what I needed to know about training in the time we had left, but if I wanted to schedule a follow-up meeting, he would explain the nuances of training salespeople to be elite across a broad set of disciplines including process, products, and organizational selling.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Between 1817 and 1823, Comte had worked on a manuscript entitled Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. In it he argued that the ideal method for determining how best to run a society would come from studying it in the manner of the natural sciences. In the same way that Isaac Newton could formulate how physical forces might impact upon an object, so did Comte posit that social scientists should be able to discover the universal laws of “social physics” that would predict human behavior. 9 This idea appealed immensely to Guerry and Quetelet, who had a shared interest in subjects like criminology.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

For an excellent introduction to the information commons, and the complexities and possibilities for managing it, see Hess and Ostrom (2006), chapter 1. 150 as copyrights and patents have been extended: For a critique of intellectual property in the global context, see especially the work of Vandana Shiva on biopiracy (Shiva 1999). 150 the “on the shoulders of giants” effect: The phrase comes from Isaac Newton, who famously noted, “If I have seen far, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” For discussions of the “on the shoulders of giants” effect, see Scotchmer (1991), Caballero and Jaffe (1993), and Benkler (2006). This is one reason even market-oriented economists often support government funding of basic research and subsidies even for applied research. 151 a wide swath of the economy: The list of sectors where information sharing is becoming common is from Benkler (2006), p. 121. 151 In its online form, this has been dubbed peer production: Peer production is Benkler’s term.

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman
Published 6 Apr 2014

That’s how we unleash a blossoming of curiosity, and all the benefits that come with it. • • • ROBERT HOOKE WAS A brilliant seventeenth-century English scientist who helped usher in the era of scientific inquiry—moving society away from religious explanations of how the world worked toward a scientific understanding. Hooke was a contemporary and fierce rival of Isaac Newton; some have compared Hooke’s range of interests and skills to Leonardo da Vinci. Hooke contributed discoveries, advances, and lasting insights to physics, architecture, astronomy, paleontology, and biology. He lived from 1635 to 1703, but although he’s been dead three hundred years, he contributed to the engineering of modern clocks, microscopes, and cars.

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything
by Stephen Baker
Published 17 Feb 2011

In order to speed up the machine’s processing of its 75 gigabytes of data, the IBM team processed it all beforehand. This meant that instead of the machine figuring out on the fly the subjects and objects of sentences, this work was done in advance. Watson didn’t need to parse a sentence to conclude that the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and not vice versa. Looking at it from a culinary perspective, the researchers performed for Watson the job that pet food manufacturers like Purina carry out for animals: They converted a rich, varied, and complex diet into the informational equivalent of kibbles. “When we want to run a question,” Ferrucci said, “the evidence is already analyzed.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

The belief is that on most occasions, the full truth is inaccessible to the few, and hence deference to autocrats and confident planners is a big mistake. 216 / Infotopia Conclusion / Realizing Promises Is human knowledge a wiki? What is known is certainly a product of countless minds, constantly adding to existing information. Each of us depends on those who came before. Sir Isaac Newton famously captured the point, writing in 1676 to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much. . . . If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Biology, chemistry, physics, economics, psychology, linguistics, history, and many other fields are easily seen as large wikis, in which existing entries, reflecting the stock of knowledge, are “edited” all the time.

Raw Data Is an Oxymoron
by Lisa Gitelman
Published 25 Jan 2013

Henry Hammond, “A Brief Vindication of Three Passages in the Practical Catechisme,” in The Workes of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond (London: 1674), 248. 13. Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam,Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High-Chancellor of England, vol. 2 (London: 1733), 397. 14. Isaac Newton, The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series (London: 1736), xx. 15. In this vast literature, see, for example, Nicholson Baker, The Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002); Robert Darnton, The Case for Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009). 16. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K.

The Money Machine: How the City Works
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Jul 2009

For a while it had a whole network of self-regulatory bodies before it settled on the FSA. In the US, supervision has been hampered by the existence of a network of overlapping bodies. It is, in any case, inevitable that the private sector will be able to pay more than the regulators and will attract people who will find ways around the rules. People like to speculate; even Sir Isaac Newton lost money in the South Sea Bubble. Without speculation, Britain would be a far less vibrant society. Fewer new businesses would be started and new products invented. Busts are a price worth paying, the creative destruction that allows an economy to start anew. But the 2007–9 bust is a severe test of that thesis.

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

—THOMAS BROWNE 18 | CHEATING DEATH In the 21st-century world of Silicon Valley, not many people had heard of Benjamin Gompertz, and there was a good reason for it. Born in the 17th century, he was a little known, self-taught mathematician. Because he was a British Jew, he had been barred from a university education, so he took up work at the London Stock Exchange. In his spare time, though, he absorbed all the writings of Isaac Newton and mastered every kind of advanced mathematics. When a couple of his close relatives founded the Alliance Assurance Company in 1824, Gompertz became its head actuary. Insurance companies like to know when, as a group, people die, and the central duty of an actuary is to figure that out. And that was how the young math whiz came up with an equation known as Gompertz’s Law of Mortality.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Published 6 Dec 2016

It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that Hume did encounter inner speech, but regarded it as one part of the wash of sensations, not as anything special. There are colors and shapes and emotions in there, and echoes of speech as well. Hume’s inattention to inner speech may also have been guided by his overall agenda in philosophy, by the shape of the theory he wanted to defend. Hume was inspired by Isaac Newton’s theories in physics, unleashed about fifty years before. Newton saw the world as made up of tiny objects ruled by laws of motion and a principle of attraction between them, also known as gravity. Hume aimed at an explanation of the same kind of the contents of the mind, and thought that he had discovered a “power of attraction” between sensory impressions and ideas, a complement to Newton’s attraction between physical objects.

The Behavioral Investor
by Daniel Crosby
Published 15 Feb 2018

Martin Heidegger, a well-respected philosopher, used his keen mind in support of the Nazi party, using spurious arguments to defend reprehensible behavior. William Crookes, who discovered the element thallium, was repeatedly swindled by spiritual mediums but could never be persuaded to give up his spiritualist beliefs. And Isaac Newton, a scientist without equal, lost his fortune in the South Sea Bubble through a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of markets and human behavior. Smarts, it would seem, are no guarantee of being a rational actor. Yes, the lessons you have just learned will be least available to your mind when they are most needed.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Just as the earlier development of agriculture transformed human society, industry allowed previously unimaginable feats of both creation and destruction. This Second Disruption was powered as much by a transformation in energy as it was in production. Even as late as the 1600s – the century of Isaac Newton and Galileo – the primary sources of power remained much the same as in antiquity: water, wind, animals and humans. While there had been an energy revolution in medieval Europe, centred around the vertical windmill, this was unevenly distributed and far from exercising a regional, let alone global, impact.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

I even negotiated with the former deposed dictator of Egypt to spend a night in the nearly 5,000-year-old Cheops Pyramid in Giza, Egypt. I spent the night alone in the King’s Chamber of the pyramid and slept in the sarcophagus in total darkness. The very same sarcophagus that Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Herodotus, Sir Isaac Newton, and other giants of history had slept in. Media outlets dubbed me the “Thrillionaire.” My Worldwide Business Over the last two decades, my companies have impacted over one million people in more than fifty-seven countries. I deliver keynote speeches and facilitate entrepreneurial training courses around the world.

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change
by Ehsan Masood
Published 4 Mar 2021

You won’t have been taught this in school mathematics, but until the 1500s algebra was written down using words.2 Historians say that the trend for writers to use symbols for “plus” and “minus” began from around 1400. Symbols such as those used for “equals,” multiplication, and division found use between 1525 and 1687 with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia. Interestingly, many of the symbols we now use in everyday arithmetic were conceived and adopted in this relatively short 150-year spurt.3 That isn’t the full story, however, as it doesn’t explain how symbols became mainstream in writing, teaching, and research in the social sciences and humanities.

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture
by Bernardo Kastrup
Published 28 May 2015

As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, scientists began trying to explain every phenomenon in terms of interactions between concrete material particles through direct contact. Any explanation that did not conform to this template was considered ‘magical’ and, therefore, invalid. That is why the ideas of an English scientist called Isaac Newton were ignored and even ridiculed at first: Newton dared to propose that objects attracted one another at a distance through an ethereal force he called ‘gravity.’ Yet we know how that story developed. You see, magic is not really a taboo in science. It has never been. After all, the chain of reduction has to end somewhere.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
by Robin Dunbar and Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
Published 2 Nov 2010

One way of asking the question, then, is to separate out the capacity for culture (apes can develop variations in behaviour that are random, casual innovations of no particular ecological relevance – a bit like wearing baseball caps backwards) but only humans have the potential for culture that allows them to exploit novel innovations which build progressively on what people have done before – the thing that made possible Isaac Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ view of how science, a cultural activity if ever there was one, evolves. [Page 194] Speak easy It is obvious that what we often view as culture in humans is deeply embedded in language. We use language to describe, to teach, to intone our rituals. Animals, as Descartes observed, do not.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

University Transport Studies Group Annual Conference, July 2021, Loughborough University. URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7520712/does-traffic-really-disappear-when-roads-are-closed. Chapter 12 Optimism bias I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. — Isaac Newton1 By early 1720 Isaac Newton had become suspicious of the stock market hype surrounding the South Sea Company but he made a modest investment nevertheless, and it paid off.2 Seeing the stock rise further he reappraised his views and went all in on what came to be known as the South Sea Bubble, returning to invest more many times.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
by Charles de Ganahl Koch
Published 14 Sep 2015

A second, that November, was fatal. On July 1, 1968, we renamed Rock Island in his honor and our company has been known as Koch Industries ever since. I still feel blessed to have worked with my father for those six years. Often when we see farther it’s not because of our own keen sight but, as Isaac Newton said, because we stand on the shoulders of giants. In his own unique way, Fred Koch was such a giant. Virtually all of us learn lessons from our parents, and I’m no different. My lessons weren’t specific to business, but they were fundamental values—integrity, humility, responsibility, work ethic, entrepreneurship, a thirst for knowledge, the desire to make a contribution, and concern for others—that profoundly influenced the way I do business and live my life to this day.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. ’Bout the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things—they push the human race forward.” Even an early (unused) design for the company’s logo had a trippy, hippie vibe to it: a Victorian-style woodcut, depicting Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree with a quotation from Wordsworth’s Prelude, “a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Steve Jobs’s affinity with the counterculture was hardly unique in his circle. Silicon Valley emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area, ground zero for antiestablishment culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and its founding generation was indelibly shaped by that era’s zeitgeist of rebellion and utopian hopes.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Newton Graham in France,” New York Times, August 3, 1954. The entire text of the item read: “Frankfurt, Germany, Aug. 2 (Reuters)—Pvt. Newton Graham of Scarsdale, N.Y., committed suicide at La Rochelle, France, the United States Army announced today.” Newton—named after Sir Isaac Newton—was the second of Graham’s sons to be named Isaac Newton; the first had died of meningitis at age nine. Noting Newton’s increasing mental instability, which he labeled “highly neurotic, even probably schizophrenic,” Graham had written letters trying to get him discharged from the army, but failed. (Benjamin Graham, The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street.

…

It was so understandable and so obvious and such a sure way of making money. Although it didn’t make you huge money necessarily, you knew you were going to make money.”5 What interested Warren about the Wattles model: the way one company could legitimately buy cheap stock in another. “You don’t have to think of everything, you know. It was Isaac Newton who said I’ve seen a little more of the world than others because I stand on the shoulders of giants. There’s nothing wrong with standing on other people’s shoulders.”6 Eventually Wattles had merged his empire into one company, Eltra Corporation, created through the merger of Mergenthaler Linotype and Electric Auto-Lite.

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An unscrupulous operator could milk the subsidiaries for money while saddling the shareholders of the parent company with an unsustainable amount of debt. John S. Tompkins, “Pyramid Devices of 20’s Revived,” New York Times, November 16, 1958. 6. “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.” Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676. 7. “Fighting the Tape,” Forbes, April 1, 1973. “I trust this man [Wattles] to do intelligent things,” Ruane said. Shareholders had sued over the values in the merger, however, illustrating the conflicts created by the Wattles model. 8. Interview with Charlie Munger. 9.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

“This is against the Jesuits and Thomas Aquinas who said we actually have free will. This question is about whether the world is predictable or unpredictable.” The debate about predictability began to be carried out on different terms during the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Isaac Newton’s mechanics had seemed to suggest that the universe was highly orderly and predictable, abiding by relatively simple physical laws. The idea of scientific, technological, and economic progress—which by no means could be taken for granted in the centuries before then—began to emerge, along with the notion that mankind might learn to control its own fate.

…

Gradually, through this purely statistical form of inference, the probability he assigns to his prediction that the sun will rise again tomorrow approaches (although never exactly reaches) 100 percent. The argument made by Bayes and Price is not that the world is intrinsically probabilistic or uncertain. Bayes was a believer in divine perfection; he was also an advocate of Isaac Newton’s work, which had seemed to suggest that nature follows regular and predictable laws. It is, rather, a statement—expressed both mathematically and philosophically—about how we learn about the universe: that we learn about it through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

The fact that two clinicians, working independently on both sides of the Atlantic, discovered it nearly simultaneously is still considered one of the great coincidences of twentieth-century medicine. The annals of science are replete with episodes of multiple discovery, when a long-hidden pattern in nature suddenly reveals itself to independent investigators at the same time. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus in parallel in the last years of the seventeenth century and then fought a bitter war of words for priority that lasted until Leibniz’s death. If it weren’t for astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius, those ingeniously twisted paper loops would be known as “Listing strips,” after Johann Benedict Listing, who published a paper about them first.

…

One year later, the Viennese pediatrician Asperger reported a number of children as autistic psychopaths. We can take it for granted that neither was then aware of the other’s work. A few months later, Kanner mentioned Asperger’s name in print for the first and last time, in a magisterially disdainful review of a book called The Autistic Child by pediatrician Isaac Newton Kugelmass. For daring to credit Asperger (misspelled “Ansperger”) for independently confirming Kanner’s discovery, Kugelmass reaped a whirlwind from Baltimore. Calling the book a “laborious enterprise,” Kanner dispatched the potential competition in a single withering sentence cast in the third person: The name is Asperger, and the man, at that time, could have no knowledge of Kanner’s publication; instead, he independently described what he called “autistic psychopathy,” which, if at all related to infantile autism, is at best a 42nd cousin which merits, and has received, serious attention from investigators.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

In fact, it was really a continuation of Christian rationalism, with a subtle but important shift in emphasis, focusing now on precise mathematical definitions of the laws God had inscribed into the universe.45 Of all the brilliant thinkers of the seventeenth century, probably no one made a greater contribution to deciphering these laws than Isaac Newton. In his major work, he accomplished the final step in transforming God's laws into defined laws of nature. With his three mathematically derived “laws of motion,” he established the concept of “laws” as a foundation of scientific cognition. As mathematicians enthusiastically embraced Newton's findings, it seemed self-evident that the theoretical foundation of Christian rationalism—that God had created the universe according to a fixed set of natural laws—was indisputably true.46 After Newton, the idea of laws of nature would become firmly embedded into the structure of modern thought.

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When Edward Lorenz announced his discovery of deterministic chaos to a conference of leading scientists in 1972, he sent shock waves reverberating through the halls of academia. When he received the distinguished Kyoto Prize two decades later, he was said to have “brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.” In spite of this, many mainstream scientists—not to mention the rest of the public—continue to understand reality according to the predominant reductionist stance. In 2013, readers of a respected British magazine, Prospect, named outspoken reductionist Richard Dawkins as the world's top thinker.

When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A)
by Scott McCleskey
Published 10 Mar 2011

The very thought of imposing mere transparency—to say nothing of actual restrictions— on this market was greeted ferociously not only from the industry but by other government agencies as well.1 The lineage of the notion that regulation reduces the freedom of the market can be traced back through the history of economic thought at least to the Scottish Enlightenment and the birth of modern capitalism, though the connection is actually a bit tenuous. IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ADAM Capitalism existed long before Adam Smith, just as gravity existed long before Isaac Newton. There were even attempts to describe what we now regard as markets and market behavior before The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. But The Wealth of Nations gave the world an aha! moment when it described, in a mere thousand pages or so, the way that markets worked at that time. And so, we rightly attribute the birth of the theory of free markets to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
by Nick Reding
Published 1 Jul 2009

In a May 12, 2008, New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell observes that world-shifting ideas, far from occurring to just one person at a time, crop up in something more akin to clusters. Alexander Graham Bell, Gladwell points out, is credited with inventing the telephone, though Elisha Gray filed a patent for the same invention on the same day. Calculus was discovered independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at approximately the same time. For Gladwell, “the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.” Lori Arnold had certainly had an enormous impact on Ottumwa in her day, as well as on a good deal of the greater Midwest.

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

Scientists who have clearly had a huge positive effect on the world include Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented synthetic fertilizer; Karl Landsteiner, who discovered blood groups, thus allowing blood transfusions to be possible; Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick, who developed the first whooping cough vaccine; and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV. In each of these cases, even after taking into account that these developments would have eventually happened anyway, the good each of these researchers did should be measured in the millions of lives saved. And clearly many other researchers, from Isaac Newton to Daniel Kahneman, have made a huge contribution to human progress even if it’s not easy to quantify their impact in terms of lives saved. Like innovative entrepreneurship, research is an area that is drastically undersupplied by the market because the benefits are open to everyone, and because much of the benefit of research occurs decades into the future.

A Book for Her
by Bridget Christie
Published 1 Jul 2015

He told me not to be blasphemous, and that there was no such thing as gravity. If there was it would have been mentioned in the Bible. I can’t believe I’m forty-three and I’m still not allowed to mention physics. When my friends’ parents stay with them they have to hide their collections of porn. When my dad comes to stay I have to hide my collection of books about Isaac Newton. I hid it up a tree in my garden. But I’d forgotten I’d put it there and one day, my dad was sat underneath it and the whole lot fell on him. And squashed his sausage roll. And it was an expensive London one too. And he was still trying to work out the mystery of it. I met Richard Dawkins, the Head of Atheism, at a benefit at the Bloomsbury Theatre once, and because he was wearing sandals I called him Jesus, for a joke.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World
by Christopher Steiner
Published 29 Aug 2012

More than a hundred books have been published touting the power of the golden mean and its presence within marketplaces as diverse as commodities, stocks, and foreign exchange. And that’s just in the last twenty years. There’s little evidence that any of this is true, but Wall Street is nothing if not a paradox where cockamamie theories and rigid logic happily coexist in equal abundance. THE GODFATHER OF THE MODERN ALGORITHM Gottfried Leibniz, like Isaac Newton, his contemporary, was a polymath. His knowledge and curiosity spanned the European continent and most of its interesting subjects. On philosophy, Leibniz said, there are two simple absolutes: God and nothingness.13 From these two, all other things come. How fitting, then, that Leibniz conceived of a calculating language defined by two and only two figures: 0 and 1.

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds
by Maneet Ahuja , Myron Scholes and Mohamed El-Erian
Published 29 May 2012

Includes index. ISBN 978-1-118-06552-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-16759-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-16758-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-16757-1 (ebk) 1. Hedge funds. 2. Investment advisors. I. Title. HG4530.A389 2012 332.64’524—dc23 2012010363 To God — The Ultimate Alpha Master Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.’ If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

Fodor's Madrid and Side Trips
by Fodor's
Published 16 May 2011

Also be aware that at the beginning, middle, and end of July and August, the country suffers its worst traffic jams (delays of six to eight hours are common) as millions of Spaniards embark on, or return from, their annual vacations. Roadside Emergencies The rental agencies Hertz and Avis have 24-hour breakdown service. If you belong to AAA, you can get emergency assistance from the Spanish counterpart, RACE. Emergency Service RACE (Isaac Newton 4, | Parque Tecnológico de Madrid | 28760 | 902/404545 for info, 902/300505 for assistance | www.race.es). Rules of the Road Spaniards drive on the right and pass on the left, so stay in the right-hand lane when not passing. Children under 12 may not ride in the front seat, and seat belts are compulsory for both front- and backseat riders.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

The oldest habits of sharing will be central to how we innovate together using new technologies. As innovation becomes more central to create less resource-intensive, environmentally damaging forms of economic activity, so will this ethic of sharing. As we will see, time and again, communities that share and develop ideas usually start around someone who donates their knowledge. In 1672 Isaac Newton sent a long letter to Henry Oldenburg at London’s Royal Society, outlining his theory of light and colour. Oldenburg printed the letter immediately in the society’s Philosophical Transactions which he had created to provide for the fast and orderly dissemination of scientific discoveries. Newton’s gift in making his ideas available for publication created a scientific community through which knowledge flowed for centuries to come.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

The early postal service deserves some of the credit, too. 28 For not only documents, but letters circulating and recirculating, copied and recopied, among individuals throughout Europe helped to create what have been called "invisible colleges," with members spread across continents and beyond.29 One of the most influential local groups, forming a subsection in this larger network, was the British "Royal Society." The Society included some eminent figures, among them Isaac Newton (who produced Newton's laws of physics), Robert Boyle (who produced Boyle's law of gases), Robert Hooke (who produced Hooke's law of springs), and Christopher Wren (who produced St. Paul's Cathedral). Circulating documents played a critical role in binding together the members of this group. They also helped to link the group to others in continental Europe.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
by Stephen D. King
Published 14 Jun 2010

The success of the developed world partly rests, then, on freedom of expression and the rule of law (particularly with regard to the establishment of legally enforceable property rights, a point well understood by Adam Smith: the incentive to develop a new product is much reduced if there’s no patent system, for example).14 Meanwhile, contraception has limited population growth in the developed world and, hence, has allowed ever-increasing income to be shared out among the lucky few. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom in the 1980s and 1990s was achieved in part because women were able to go out to work rather than staying at home to endure far too many births: contraception can also play a big role in creating economic opportunity. As Sir Isaac Newton might have said, we benefit economically from standing on the shoulders of centuries of creative, inventive and innovative giants. Each giant made his or her own contribution to the advancement of productivity. Productivity – measured either as output per hour or output per head – is the elixir of economic growth, the magical process that seemingly bypasses the problem of scarce resources.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

The idea is that it doesn’t matter what the underlying realities are, just as long as there’s a Greater Fool down the line. This is a reckless strategy, for the obvious reason that at some point the price is going to stop going up; but it is very difficult thing to resist the momentum of a rising market, especially when everyone around you is coining it. Isaac Newton, who has a claim to be the most intelligent person ever to have lived, and who knew a lot about the operation of money thanks to his day job as master of the King’s Mint, himself fell victim to the Greater Fool theory. When the South Sea bubble came along, Newton could see it was based on nothing and was certain to collapse; it was certain to collapse; it was certain to . . . oh, the hell with it, since everyone else was making to much money, he piled in too.

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski
Published 23 Feb 2016

A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics (2011): 35–39. 128May found that the larger the ecosystem: May, Robert M. “Will a Large, Complex Ecosystem Be Stable?” Nature 238 (1972): 413–414. doi:10.1038/238413a0. 129According to ecologist Andrew Dobson: Dobson, Andrew. “Multi-Host, Multi-Parasite Dynamics” (Infectious Disease Dynamics workshop, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK,. August 19–23, 2013). 129Yet, according to Stefano Allesina and Si Tang: Allesina, Stefano, and Si Tang. “Stability Criteria for Complex Ecosystems.” Nature 483 (2012): 205–208. doi:10.1038/nature10832. 131Doyne Farmer has pointed out: Farmer, J. Doyne. “Market Force, Ecology and Evolution.”

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

As we have researched the paradigm, we have uncovered over sixty organizations with scores over our ExO threshold, each achieving at least a 10x performance improvement over others in its space. The following are our top 10 (in alphabetical order): Airbnb, GitHub, Google, Netflix, Quirky, Tesla, Uber, Waze, Valve, Xiaomi. It may seem odd to look back four centuries to capture the essence of the most modern of company organizations. Nevertheless, Isaac Newton’s second law precisely summarizes the overall concept of an Exponential Organization. The law, F = MA, states that force causes acceleration in inverse proportion to mass. A small mass allows dramatic acceleration and quick changes in direction—precisely what we’re seeing with many ExOs today. With very little internal inertia (that is, number of employees, assets or organizational structures), they demonstrate extraordinary flexibility, which is a critical quality in today’s volatile world.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

“The task left to me was to marry them together.”45 The fruit of that marriage was the World Wide Web, the information management system so integral to the Internet that many people think that the Web actually is the Internet. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton once said. And Berners-Lee not only built upon the achievements of the Internet’s founding fathers, but he designed the Web to ride on top of the Internet to create what the Sussex University economist Mariana Mazzucato calls a “foundational technology.”46 His program leveraged the Internet’s preexisting packet-switching technology, its TCP/IP protocols, and, above all, its completely decentralized structure and commitment to treating all data equally.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

It was in Britain that theologian and philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century preached a philosophy of empirical knowledge of nature, and where his namesake and perhaps distant relation Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century put forward the modern idea of human progress through science and technology, with science based on the experimental method. This empirical approach underpinned the new physics that arrived with Galileo and Isaac Newton in the next century. As poet Alexander Pope wrote of Newton, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton explained the cosmos with his new physics and made possible many of the scientific breakthroughs that were to come. Newton did his work at the University of Cambridge, an institution that continues to be a pioneer in the basic sciences today.

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
by Mario Livio
Published 23 Sep 2003

Kepler's Second Law establishes that the planet moves fastest when it is closest to the Sun (the point known as perihelion) and slowest when it is farthest (aphelion), in such a way that the line joining the planet to the Sun sweeps equal areas in equal time intervals (Figure 62). The question of what causes Kepler's laws to hold true was the outstanding unsolved problem of science for almost seventy years after Kepler published the laws. It took the genius of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to deduce that the force holding the planets in their orbits is gravity. Newton explained Kepler's laws by solving together the laws that describe the motion of bodies with the law of universal gravitation. He showed that elliptical orbits with varying speeds (as described by Kepler's laws) represent one possible solution to these equations.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

Parry O’Brien broke the world shot put record seventeen times by rotating his body through 180 degrees rather than rocking back and forth before releasing the shot. The question is: Where do these paradigm shifts come from? How do these creative leaps, which transform performance by circumventing seemingly immovable constraints, emerge? It is easy to suppose, following the apocryphal story of Isaac Newton, who was said to have invented the theory of gravity after being hit on the head by an apple, that they are like bolts from the blue: random, capricious, and entirely inexplicable. And when you think about it, there is something deeply mysterious about eureka moments. But careful study has shown that creative innovation follows a very precise pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigors of purposeful practice.

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side
by Howard Marks
Published 30 Sep 2018

No more buyers means the end of the bull market, and vice versa. The last capitulator makes the top or bottom and sets the scene for a cyclical swing in the opposite direction. He is the “fool in the end.” The following account from history shows that even the most brilliant among us can fall prey to capitulation: Sir Isaac Newton, who was the Master of the Mint at the time of the “South Sea Bubble,” joined many other wealthy Englishmen in investing in the stock [of the South Sea Company]. It rose from £128 in January of 1720 to £1,050 in June. Early in this rise, however, Newton realized the speculative nature of the boom and sold his £7,000 worth of stock.

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's
by Joseph Jebelli
Published 30 Oct 2017

Rational therapies, such as diets, baths and herbal medicines, came into practice: salad greens, barley water and milk, for example, were encouraged to replace red meat and wine; others endorsed a blend of aloes, black hellebore and colocynth.7 When the Enlightenment began, a string of discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine–by Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, John Dalton, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and Edward Jenner–pointed towards the possibility of physical explanations for mental phenomena. The French philosopher René Descartes thought that experiences make tiny pores in the brain like needles making a pattern of holes in a linen cloth.8 David Hartley, the eighteenth-century English physician, claimed that nerve vibrations create sensations and memory, and that violent vibrations are the cause of mental illness.9 These ideas were vague and incomplete, but they were free of mysticism and the supernatural.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott
Published 14 Apr 2016

It seems most reasonable when the object of desire is something like territorial conquests, wealth, power, fame, glory, influence, sex, expensive art objects, fancy clothes, sports cars, and so on. But what if the object of desire is knowledge, understanding, artistic satisfaction, the eradication of a disease, or the elimination of injustice? Is the fact that these desires cannot be finally satisfied a reason for reining them in? Isaac Newton famously lamented that his quest for insight into the nature of things could be compared to the actions of a boy playing on the seashore “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Would it have been better for him to have kept his desire for understanding in check so as to avoid this abiding feeling of disappointment?

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

My friend Elon Musk is a great example. He dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in applied physics because he thought he could learn more on his own! He started SpaceX and Tesla by learning literal rocket science and carmaking. So how do you accelerate your learning curve so that you can learn more faster? The key is to stand, as Isaac Newton wrote, “on the shoulders of giants.” This means talking with other smart people, often, so that you can learn from their successes and failures. It’s usually easier and less painful to learn from another’s mistakes than from your own. When I need to learn about a new subject, I’ll definitely devour some books on the topic, but I almost always supplement this reading by seeking out dialogue with leading experts in the field.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

The blast furnace appeared in China in the first century CE and in Scandinavia in the twelfth – the possibility of its transference exists, but the Haya people of northwestern Tanzania have also been making steel for 2,000 years, long before the technology developed in Europe. In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and others independently formulated the rules of calculus. In the eighteenth, the realisation of oxygen emerged almost simultaneously in the work of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, and others, while in the nineteenth, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin both advanced the theory of evolution.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

Wilson wrote that “the great scientist who works for himself in a hidden laboratory does not exist.”15 Although many scientists might like to believe they work in ingenious solitude, they in fact operate in a vast web of interdependency. Even the problems they take to be important are influenced by the larger creative community. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest mind of his time, spent much of his life trying to master alchemy, as that was a prevalent preoccupation in his era. We’re exquisitely social creatures. We labor without pause to surprise each other. Imagine that each time your friend asked you what you did today, you answered precisely the same way.

Busy
by Tony Crabbe
Published 7 Jul 2015

I will start by addressing inertia, because I think that’s the biggest issue for most of us. Inertia Inertia “is a power of resisting by which everybody, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.” The above quote comes from Sir Isaac Newton’s seminal work, Principia Mathematica, which became the cornerstone of classical physics. His first law of motion, in that work, was inertia. It’s rightfully first, because without the ability to overcome inertia, nothing will move or change. Inertia applies to objects, but it also applies to getting started on anything, and it can cripple our effectiveness.

Smarter Investing
by Tim Hale
Published 2 Sep 2014

With class ‘A’ drugs encouraging bad behaviour on the upside, and the part of the brain that responds to mortal danger processing losses on the downside, it is not hard to see the emotional perils that lie in wait for us all as investors. Perhaps surprisingly, success in investing is not about deep investment knowledge or intelligence. After all, Sir Isaac Newton managed to lose all his money on the stock market when the South Sea Bubble collapsed, despite his ability to calculate the motion of heavenly bodies. It is about the ability to understand human nature, as suggested by Henry Ford, and to control the harmful decisions that it often drives. Warren Buffett too, concurs.

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal
by Erik Vance
Published 14 Sep 2016

Finding the right imagery to induce hypnosis is tough, and finding the right kind of story to make the suggestion really stick is even tougher. And even if a hypnotist gets the voice, pacing, and storytelling, he has to adapt well on the fly and follow his gut as to what is resonating with the patient. This makes it almost impossible to standardize an experiment. Imagine Sir Isaac Newton measuring the speed of a falling object, but Earth’s gravity keeps changing. That’s what it’s like studying hypnosis. Nevertheless, Patterson and his research partner Mark Jensen have made considerable strides by examining the neural underpinnings of a hypnotic trance. Jensen offers to show me one of the tools he uses in his work, called electroencephalography, or EEG, which measures electricity in the brain.

Dinosaurs Rediscovered
by Michael J. Benton
Published 14 Sep 2019

It’s all about interpreting the skeleton, finding a plausible posture for the limbs, and choosing the appropriate modern examples. We may treat the older images with humour – how could they ever have believed that? – but palaeontologists of the future will likely mock our best efforts. Nevertheless, we might still hope that our hypotheses improve through time: ‘we stand on the shoulders’ of previous researchers, as Isaac Newton said. When dinosaurs were first reconstructed, palaeontologists thought they were looking at outsized lizards or crocodiles. About 1830, Gideon Mantell even reconstructed his Iguanodon as an enormous lizard, over 61 metres (200 feet) long, walking on all fours and with its body close to the ground.

DIY Investor: How to Take Control of Your Investments & Plan for a Financially Secure Future
by Andy Bell
Published 12 Sep 2013

Blinded by greed, investors rich and poor ploughed their savings into what they believed was a one-way bet, without regard to the fact that the territories the company held the rights to exploit were all controlled by Spain, with whom Britain was at war. When promised dividends didn’t materialise, investors started running for the door and the shares were decimated, falling back down to £100 again by the end of the year. And it wasn’t just stupid people who lost money – the very clever Sir Isaac Newton is said to have lost today’s equivalent of £2.4m in the company. The 19th and 20th centuries have also had their fair share of market collapses, with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 perhaps the most famous of them all, kicking off the Great Depression of the 1930s. Within living memory for anyone over the age of 50 is the crash of 1973 and 1974, which was caused by the devaluation of the US dollar and a spike in the price of oil.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Lawrence’s belief in material success as a manifestation of inner clarity, conviction, or drive was shared by just about everyone in the Bay Area tech scene. Silicon Valley prefers to tell its story in terms of individualistic entrepreneurial achievement against the odds, marked by dramatic moments of insight, in the mythical tradition of Isaac Newton and the Buddha—not as I see it: as a twisted multigenerational shovel-selling enterprise that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush. Code is pure, but politics is messy. Although a klutz with computers, Rome understood the nature of the tech industry more clearly because he did not shy from the gritty work of sorting out who gets what, when, and how.

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
by Ian Leslie
Published 23 Feb 2021

Scientists try to knock down each other’s arguments, at the same time as they learn from each other. Science makes the most of reason’s social nature. Much as we celebrate great individual scientists, it is scientists as a group who make progress. Confirmation bias runs amok when an individual is isolated from people who disagree with them, no matter how brilliant their mind. Isaac Newton spent the last decades of his life immersed in a futile quest to turn base metals into gold. If that work didn’t lead anywhere, it was at least partly because he did it alone, without collaborators or reviewers. When he published his groundbreaking work in physics, by contrast, Newton was drawing on the published work of others (‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as he put it), and doing so in the knowledge that mathematicians and astronomers across Europe would pounce on any weak arguments.

Perfect Sound Whatever
by James. Acaster
Published 21 Aug 2019

And who introduced him to that album? You guessed it. Me, baby! Am I suggesting that hipping James to this record was the key catalyst in his realisation that 2016 was the Greatest Year For Music Of All Time? Yes, I am. Why not, eh? If James is allowed to publish his own wild hypothesis, why can’t I? Isaac Newton will get his chance in just a few pages; first let’s hear from the apple. Maybe it’s part of getting older, maybe it’s just life getting under my feet, but it seems like fewer and fewer albums grab me by the throat and kiss me on the lips these days. Of course, when I was a kid it seemed that every week a handful of such albums would arrive in my local record shop.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

“It’s the most famous and wealthiest college in Cambridge,” Price tells me, not without a hint of pride about Trinity, where he is a fellow. Over the last five hundred years Trinity has been one the world’s most exclusive and powerful clubs—educating generation after generation of elites, including the inventor of the theory of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton; the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon; thirty-one Nobel Prize–winning scientists; British monarchs and prime ministers; and even the current Singapore prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who was awarded a mathematics and computer science degree from Trinity in 1974. Price, a gangly, down-to-earth Australian whose only ornamentation is an expensive-looking timepiece wrapped around his wrist, is a most gracious host.

The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life
by Paul Davies
Published 31 Jan 2019

Unlike the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic period which pre-dated it by several thousand years, the Industrial Revolution did not proceed by trial and error. Machines such as the steam engine and the diesel engine were carefully designed by scientists and engineers familiar with the principles of mechanics first enunciated by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. Newton had discovered the laws of motion, which relate the force acting on a material body to the nature of its movement, all encapsulated in a simple mathematical formula. By the nineteenth century it was commonplace to use Newton’s laws to design tunnels and bridges or to predict the behaviour of pistons and wheels, the traction they would deliver and the energy they would need.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

CASINO HACKS 35He modified over thirty machines: Las Vegas Sun (21 Feb 1997), “Slot cheat, former casino regulator, reputed mob figure added to Black Book,” https://lasvegassun.com/news/1997/feb/21/slot-cheat-former-casino-regulator-reputed-mob-fig. 36wearable computer with toe switches: Paul Halpern (23 May 2017), “Isaac Newton vs. Las Vegas: How physicists used science to beat the odds at roulette,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/23/how-physicists-used-science-to-beat-the-odds-at-roulette. 36Nevada banned the use of devices: Don Melanson (18 Sep 2013), “Gaming the system: Edward Thorp and the wearable computer that beat Vegas,” Engadget, https://www.engadget.com/2013-09-18-edward-thorp-father-of-wearable-computing.html. 36Casinos have responded: Grant Uline (1 Oct 2016), “Card counting and the casino’s reaction,” Gaming Law Review and Economics, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/glre.2016.2088. 37Laws were passed banning: David W.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win
by Spencer Jakab
Published 21 Jun 2016

One is that you’ve got to be in it to win it. Unless you’re unbelievably lucky, prolonged periods on the sidelines will cost you. The other is that financial markets can make a fool out of the smartest person you know. In fact, they made a fool out of the smartest person almost anyone has known. No less a genius than Isaac Newton took a bath in a speculative mania. He even sold for a nice gain but jumped back in near the peak. It was called the South Sea Bubble, and at one point it was worth about five times all the money in Europe. And you thought Pets.com was loony! “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,” said Newton at the time.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 1 Jan 2006

Why have we had so much success in some scientific realms and so little in others, such as unveiling the mysteries of consciousness? Not all systems are alike, and we can’t understand the workings of all systems on the same level. Let’s start with the systems that we do understand. Many of science’s triumphs over the past few centuries are rooted in Isaac Newton’s principles. Newton’s world is a mechanical one, where cause and effect are clear and systems follow universal laws. With sufficient understanding of a system’s underlying components, we can predict precisely how the system will behave. Reductionism is the cornerstone of discovery in the Newtonian world, the basis for much of science’s breathtaking advance in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

Because of these major differences, it was a very bold act of Vitruvius to apply the same word to two phenomena of which one was very well known and the other was hardly known at all (much like Galileo’s daring extension of the word “Moon” to infinitesimal dots that moved, when he observed them through his telescope). It took many centuries more, however, before the theory of sound waves was further advanced, thanks to the work of such insightful scientists as Galileo, Marin Mersenne, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Leonhard Euler. Not surprisingly, there were some significant discrepancies between sound waves in air and waves on water. Among the most important is the fact that, unlike water waves, sound waves are longitudinal, meaning that they involve motions of air molecules along the direction of propagation of the noise.

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As mathematicians gradually got used to the fact that these mysterious expressions acted in many ways just as ordinary numbers do, that they were not going to lead people into paradoxical waters, and moreover that they enriched our collective understanding of the world of mathematics, the objecting voices slowly faded away and the mathematical community opened up to them, although not unanimously. Here, for example, is how Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, co-inventor with Isaac Newton of the infinitesimal calculus, described, in 1702, the numbers that René Descartes had dubbed “imaginary”: “an elegant and marvelous trick found in the miracle of Analysis: a monster of the ideal world, almost an amphibian located somewhere between Being and non-Being.” And even Leonhard Euler, the Swiss genius who deserves enormous credit for putting the theory of complex numbers on a solid footing, declared, on the subject of the square roots of negative numbers, that they are “not nothing, nor less than nothing, which makes them imaginary, indeed impossible.”

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In essence, the problem was to figure out how changes in gravity’s intensity are propagated across space, and at what speed — finite or infinite? — such “news” travels from one point to another. This boils down to asking “What is the formula for the gravitational attraction between two moving objects?” This was a question that had already been of serious concern to Isaac Newton, the first person to offer a quantitative theory of gravitation, but in all the years since him, no one had yet solved the problem. Einstein, in an attempt to answer this riddle, turned to the analogy between Newton’s formula for static gravitational attraction and Coulomb’s formula for static electrical attraction (the two formulas we mentioned above), and threw in an extra term that seemed exceedingly natural, and which came from his theory of (special) relativity.

Frommer's London 2009
by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince
Published 25 Aug 2008

Bus: 52. 3 The Pursuit of Science: Cambridge £ 89km (55 miles) N of London, 129km (80 miles) NE of Oxford The university town of Cambridge is a collage of images: the Bridge of Sighs; spires and turrets; willows; dusty secondhand bookshops; the lilt of Elizabethan madrigals; lanes where Darwin, Newton, and Cromwell walked; the grassy Backs of the colleges, sweeping down to the banks of the Cam; punters; and the tattered robes of hurried upperclassmen flying in the wind. Along with Oxford, Cambridge is one of Britain’s ancient seats of knowledge. In many ways their stories are similar. However, beyond its campus, Cambridge has a thriving, high-tech industry. And while Oxford concentrates on the arts, Cambridge has embraced the sciences. Both Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking are graduates, joined by luminaries in every field. There is much to explore in Cambridge, so give yourself time to wander. ESSENTIALS GETTING THERE Trains depart frequently from London’s Liverpool Street and King’s Cross stations, arriving an hour later. For inquiries, call & 0845/748-4950.

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It was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, who consolidated a number of smaller colleges that had existed on the site. The courtyard is the most spacious in Cambridge. Sir Christopher Wren designed the library. Insider’s Tip: It’s fun to contemplate what went on here before you arrived. Pause at Neville’s Court where Isaac Newton first calculated the speed of sound. Take in the delicate fountain of the Great Court where Lord Byron used to bathe naked with his pet bear. Why a bear? The university forbade students from having dogs, but there was no proviso for bears. Years later, Vladimir Nabokov walked through that same courtyard dreaming of the young lady he would later immortalize as Lolita.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science. This meant that not only did economics have its own peculiar domain of study—what we now call “the economy,” though the idea that there even was something called an “economy” was very new in Smith’s day—but that this economy operated according to laws of much the same sort as Sir Isaac Newton had so recently identified as governing the physical world. Newton had represented God as a cosmic watchmaker who had created the physical machinery of the universe in such a way that it would operate for the ultimate benefit of humans, and then let it run on its own. Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument.2 God—or Divine Providence, as he put it—had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided “as if by an invisible hand” to promote the general welfare.

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Many who supported this position took explicitly Chartalist positions, insisting that silver has no intrinsic value anyway, and that money is simply a measure established by the state.81 The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a “shilling” than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot. Gold and silver had a value recognized by everyone on earth; the government stamp simply attested to the weight and purity of a coin, and—as he added in words veritably shivering with indignation—for governments to tamper with this for their own advantage was just as criminal as the coin-clippers themselves: The use and end of the public stamp is only to be a guard and voucher of the quality of silver which men contract for; and the injury done to the public faith, in this point, is that which in clipping and false coining heightens the robbery into treason.82 Therefore, he argued, the only recourse was to recall the currency and restrike it at exactly the same value that it had before.

Lonely Planet London City Guide
by Tom Masters , Steve Fallon and Vesna Maric
Published 31 Jan 2010

The Abbey Museum ( 10.30am-4pm) exhibits the death masks of generations of royalty, wax effigies representing Charles II and William III (who is on a stool to make him as tall as his wife Mary), as well as armour and stained glass. To reach the 900-year-old College Garden ( 10am-6pm Tue-Thu Apr-Sep, to 4pm Tue-Thu Oct-Mar), enter Dean’s Yard and the Little Cloisters off Great College St. On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner, where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle. The two towers above the west door are the ones through which you exit. These were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1745. Just above the door, perched in 15th-century niches, are the latest sacred additions to the abbey: 10 stone statues of international 20th-century martyrs.

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Return to beginning of chapter CAMBRIDGE 01223 Even though Oxford students wouldn’t like to admit it, Cambridge beats Oxford as the quintessential English university town. Whereas Oxford has a solid record in educating political grandees, Cambridge’s reputation lies more in the technological sphere. Past names to have worked and studied here range from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin to the discoverers of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick, and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. In some senses it’s the mother of English scientific ideas. And even though you may think all those medieval and neo-Gothic buildings look serious, Cambridge was where English humour was nurtured, producing John Cleese, Michael Palin and others of the Monty Python team.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Published 1 Jan 1992

He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys. This strength could have been a crippling weakness had it not been redeemed, time and again, by a powerful intelligence. “Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart,” a theorist said. “He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot.” Isaac Newton spoke of having stood on the shoulders of giants. Feynman tried to stand on his own, through various acts of contortion, or so it seemed to the mathematician Mark Kac, who was watching Feynman at Cornell: There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better.

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Now Einstein’s image drew on a colorful and absentminded appearance—wild hair, ill-fitting clothes, the legendary socklessness. The mythologizing of Einstein occasionally extended to others. When Paul A. M. Dirac, the British quantum theorist, visited the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the Wisconsin State Journal published a mocking piece about “a fellow they have up at the U. this spring … who is pushing Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein and all the others off the front page.” An American scientist, the reporter said, would be busy and active, “but Dirac is different. He seems to have all the time there is in the world and his heaviest work is looking out the window.” Dirac’s end of the dialogue was suitably monosyllabic.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

• To how many of these people would you feel comfortable reaching out and mobilizing in a new initiative related to your shared passions and interests? • For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other’s activities? Chapter 3 Attracting What We Need Only when the apple fell from the tree did Sir Isaac Newton begin pondering the nature of gravity. Only by setting sail for India did Christopher Columbus find America. Only by going to a conference to hear presentations on the future of the Internet did Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, who later gave them an important key for monetizing search results.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think
by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley
Published 1 Jan 2006

Real science has a just entitlement to the tingle in the spine which, at a lower level, attracts the fans of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Doctor Who’ and which, at the lowest level of all, has been lucratively high-jacked by astrologists, clairvoyants and television psychics.9 In short, though science might unweave the rainbow, in the sense of helping us to understand why we see the colours of the spectrum in it, we can, in the words of James Thompson’s poem to Sir Isaac Newton say that the setting suns and shifting clouds declare ‘How just, how beauteous the refractive law’. So Richard, who quotes the great Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: This ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.10 A theologian will want to see this phenomenon as grounded in a reality that lies beyond the visible universe.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 1 May 2017

The mass of each planet is fixed, so the only variable of relevance for determining the forces acting on them is the distance between them. We want to analyze this system so that we can determine where the planets will be at any given time in the future, given their current position and velocity. Back in 1687, Isaac Newton made a running start on this problem by solving it for two planets. Then he hit a wall. (It happens, even to the man who discovered the laws of gravity in 1666.) And so did every mathematician after him for the next couple of centuries. The three-body problem was a central topic in mathematical physics from the mid-1700s until the early 1900s, when it was determined that the three-body problem could not be solved in terms of algebraic formulas and other standard mathematical functions.

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking
by Charles Seife
Published 27 Oct 2009

The laws of physics seemed to say one thing, while the observations of biologists seemed to tell another. Physicists would have to follow a tortuous path before they could resolve the contradiction—a path that led, first, to understanding the mystery of matter. By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists and chemists had unraveled many of the mysteries of the universe. Isaac Newton had divined the physical laws that govern how objects move and how gravity works. James Clerk Maxwell had figured out the subtle interrelationships between electric and magnetic forces. Thermodynamicists had codified the laws of energy and heat. At the same time, though, scientists did not know much about matter; they had little idea what sort of stuff made up stars and planets and people.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

Lastly, it means children have figured out an efficient way to fill this gap in their knowledge—by asking someone who might know. Why is the sky blue?5 It may be the ultimate child’s question, one that every parent is asked at some point. If you find it hard to answer, you are in good company: Great minds from Aristotle to Isaac Newton grappled with this query over a span of several centuries, notes Nicholas Christakis, writing for edge.org. Christakis credits Newton and his light-refraction experiments with first showing that “white light could be decomposed into its constituent colors.” But this only raised another question: What might refract more blue light towards our eyes?

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years
by Tom Standage
Published 14 Oct 2013

COFFEE HOUSES AND COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION Hooke and several of his scientific colleagues, including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, had acquired a taste for coffee in Oxford during the 1650s, when they had all been members of a club of science enthusiasts formed by John Wilkins, a senior academic at the university. They continued their tradition of coffeehouse discussion in London, where theirs was one of several groups that came together in 1660 to form the Royal Society, Britain’s pioneering scientific institution. The society’s members, who also included Pepys, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, would often decamp to a coffeehouse after its meetings to continue their discussions. On May 7, 1674, for example, Hooke recorded in his diary that he demonstrated an improved form of astronomical quadrant at a meeting of the Royal Society, and then repeated his demonstration afterward at Garraway’s coffeehouse, where he discussed it with John Flamsteed, an astronomer who was appointed by Charles II as the first Astronomer Royal the following year.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Published 1 Jun 2016

Although in 1899 Charles Duell, the US commissioner of the Office of Patents, may have remarked that ‘Everything that can be invented has been invented’, it is clear that knowledge continues to advance. If each generation is born as smart as the previous one and inherits their stock of knowledge, then by exploring and combining different aspects of that knowledge and creating new insights, the world progresses technologically. As Isaac Newton brilliantly summarized, we stand on the shoulders of giants. New technologies, however, mean an end to past jobs and usually the creation of new tasks and roles. At this point in time people are very aware of the jobs that are about to be lost, but of course they are not yet aware of the jobs that will be created.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg
Published 8 Dec 2015

This provided a bridge between computing and the real world, combining virtual reality with a physical environment, using force fields to simulate real objects and giving the “player” a unique experience that could take them to the African veldt or a nineteenth-century saloon—or, as the character Data famously did, put them in a poker game with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—played by the actual scientist and Star Trek fan. Like much science fiction, Star Trek had, ever since the original series, taken shields and tractor beams for granted. We’ll come back to the difficulties with creating a holodeck a little later, but let’s make a start with the basics that would be needed to make it work.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

The guilds had the political authority to make binding rules and to judge, fine, and punish violations of their rules.25 The rise of the West was made possible by the death of feudalism and the weakening of its all-encompassing regulation of economic life. But the West really came into its own during the Enlightenment. After witnessing the Scientific Revolution, epitomized by Isaac Newton’s epic achievements, Enlightenment thinkers came to see reason, not revelation, as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. The individual was no longer viewed as helpless in the face of an unknowable reality ruled by incomprehensible supernatural forces. He was a rational creature, competent to understand the world, set his own goals, make his own choices, and support his own life.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars
by Nathalia Holt
Published 4 Apr 2016

They had long dreamed of shooting a spacecraft so high that it would reach a perfect balance between the tug of Earth’s gravitational pull and its own inertia. With the forces equalized, the satellite could orbit Earth. Just as the moon carves a gravitational path around our planet, their satellite would need no external power to encircle the globe. The idea of a satellite ceaselessly orbiting Earth had been around since Isaac Newton’s time. The power to achieve it, however, was new. In 1947 William Pickering shared this idea in a paper in which he recommended that “extensive cosmic ray studies be deferred until a satellite rocket can be produced.” Even then he had the project, both its scope and its ultimate scientific goal, clear in his mind.

Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar
by Kelly Oxford
Published 20 Aug 2012

After bringing me my Coke, she escorted us into the cockpit. “Do you want to know what these buttons do?” said the younger pilot. He looked like Woody Harrelson. Natural Born Killers Woody. “No,” I said. I suddenly realized I was leaning against the wall like I was James Dean or something. I’m the Isaac Newton of embarrassing myself with body language. “Do you want to sit in my seat?” Woody asked. His copilot, a Tom Selleck look-alike, shot Woody a WTF look. “I DO!!!” shrieked Aimee, and she jumped onto his lap. Can you imagine the fucking animal sounds that would have come from the passengers if they knew a white girl with dreadlocks was behind the buttons and levers that were keeping them from becoming a pile of shitty pants and flaming metal?

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back
by Jacob Ward
Published 25 Jan 2022

This notion helped to create a mechanical explanation for the behavior of light, and physicists continued to depend on and refine it. While Descartes considered the aether to have a static property, Robert Hooke theorized that it vibrated, Christiaan Huygens theorized that it consisted of spinning particles, and then Isaac Newton wiped them both out with his suggestion, delivered in the same memorandum to the Royal Society in which he explained gravity, that “all space is occupied by an elastic medium, or aether, which is capable of propagating vibrations in the same way that air propagates the vibrations of sound, but with far greater velocity.”4 In Newton’s view, small, rapidly moving corpuscles made up the aether.

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

In our modern world, such a revolutionary device would be written about and photographed ad nauseam. Colleges around the world would try to outdo each other making improvements to the device. Entrepreneurs would be raising money to build Antikythera mechanisms cheaper, smaller, and faster. That’s how technology advances: by making incremental improvements on work done by others, a process Isaac Newton described as seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. In 1687, Newton, on whose shoulders we still stand, published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which describes the laws of motion and gravitation. In just a few formulas, Newton showed that even the planets themselves obey straightforward, mechanistic laws.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

In Shakespeare’s day, these weren’t fringe notions – they were what the best-informed people of that era understood to be true. Among the powerful beliefs of the age was alchemy – the notion that base metals such as lead could be turned into precious metals such as gold. For millennia, alchemy had occupied a significant portion of all scientific research efforts. Even Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than on physics, prompting Keynes to suggest that Newton was ‘not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.’ What saw off alchemy was not a culture of experimentation. Quite the contrary: alchemists had been doing experiments for centuries. The critical shift was the movement from secretive, badly designed experiments to experiments that were rigorous and publicly reported.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

The Old Physics Before we jump into the crux of this chapter’s point about quantum indeterminacy and how it relates to the simulation hypothesis, some background information will be needed. Let’s take a quick look at what’s often called the old (“classical”) physics models, which were built on the works of Sir Isaac Newton, and the new (“relativistic and quantum”) physics, which began with Albert Einstein but was really fleshed out by a number of eminent physicists in the early 20th century, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, and others. In the classical view of physics, the universe operates independently of people like us (or observers) and does so in a purely mechanistic way.

The Alps: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond
by Stephen O'Shea
Published 21 Feb 2017

The Enlightment, then stretching human horizons, had begun touching such young men, or at least those who took their education seriously. Already in the 1680s, an English cleric named Thomas Burnet had posited that the Alps had been formed after the seven days of Creation, thereby explaining the mysterious absence of mountains in Genesis. Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth caused an unholy stir among the learned classes. Isaac Newton, whose Principia on physics (published in the same decade as Burnet’s work) would lead Deists to believe in a clockwork universe, fashioned by God then left alone to keep ticking, felt moved to write a lengthy letter to Burnet and suggest that each “day” of Creation could, in fact, encompass a much, much longer period of time than is customarily understood by that word.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

“To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone. To understand Bitcoin, you only need to understand Bitcoin.” Charlie coughed from behind an epic ring of pot smoke, then grinned. “Gravity doesn’t work because you believe in Isaac Newton.” * * * Ten minutes later, the group had moved out of the Bakery and back into the front office of the small startup, so Charlie could finish his guided tour. He was showing them some of his software, running on a pair of desktop computers. “Our company, BitInstant, is part of the Bitcoin economy’s gravity.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman
Published 29 May 2011

SUM is also available as an eBook: 978-0-307-37802-6 Visit David Eagleman’s website: www.eagleman.com Or follow him on: twitter.com/@davideagleman Notes Works listed in full in the Bibliography are referred to only by short title here. Chapter 1. There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me 1 Music: “Tremendous Magic,” Time December 4, 1950. 2 Something I’ve always found inspiring: the year Galileo died—1642—Isaac Newton was born into the world and completed Galileo’s job by describing the equations underlying the planetary orbits around the sun. 3 Aquinas, Summa theologiae. 4 Specifically, Leibniz envisioned a machine that would use marbles (representing binary numbers) that would be guided by what we now recognize as cousins to punch cards.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

In 2008, Hector Zenil, who coleads the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 3,400 people between the ages of four and ninety-one on their ability to behave randomly. The idea is that random thinking—seeing beyond the obvious—is connected to creative thinking. When an apple falls from a tree, the creative person doesn’t simply think that apple must have been ripe; like Isaac Newton, she sees the apple fall and pictures the invisible force of gravity. How did Hector Zenil and researchers test for random thinking? They developed five short “random item generation” tasks performed on a computer, including twelve simulated coin flips, ten simulated rolls of a die, and arranging boxes on a grid.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

“FARC blamed for Colombia club blast,” BBC News, February 9, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2741105.stm. Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Do You Zoom, 2001), pp. 23–24. Stephen Hawking quote from “Life in the Universe,” 1994 (lecture given by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the transcript of which can be viewed here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/pdf/life.pdf). Dizzee Rascal, interview by author, July 2002 (this interview originally appeared in the August 2002 edition of RWD magazine). Chris Campion, “Inside Grime,” Observer Music Monthly, May 23, 2004. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1219493,00.html.

The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History
by Roland Ennos
Published 18 Feb 2021

Britain’s coal supply had been secured, at least for the next half century, enabling industrialization to continue. The heady early days of the Royal Society could not last. The inevitable process of specialization robbed it of some of its impetus, and Hooke was progressively marginalized by the aristocratic establishment. Under Isaac Newton’s presidency the society became obsessed with the ideal of the “philosopher scientist” and progressively devalued the prestige of applied science, cutting British science off for a century or more from its important role in society. Fortunately, by then applied science had taken off elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France, where the famous Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alambert, stimulated a myriad of encyclopedias of technology that spread knowledge across the world.

Stealth
by Peter Westwick
Published 22 Nov 2019

Founded during the war, the institute boasted a stellar staff, including such luminary physicists as Vladimir Fock, who had made major contributions to quantum mechanics and general relativity.19 Much of the institute’s work was secret, which to the young Ufimtsev suggested that his father had not been guilty of whatever had condemned him to the gulag. Otherwise Pyotr never would have been trusted with a security clearance. Ufimtsev took up the problem of diffraction, a topic of long interest to students of nature (including Isaac Newton, for one) that concerns how waves—whether water, sound, or light—behave around the edges of an object. People often think of physics in the twentieth century as exclusively concerned with the exotic new topics of quantum theory and nuclear physics, but older fields such as electromagnetism and optics continued as active research areas, with renewed relevance thanks to technologies such as radar.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

It soon departs from all known conceptions of automatic inference or computations. Take scientific discovery, or innovation. Human beings invent languages, concepts, and laws to explain the world. This is creative abduction. Creative abductions “leap” to novel conceptual frameworks themselves. Sir Isaac Newton comes to mind. Not only did he extend mathematics to describe instantaneous rates of change on curves (or acceleration), he gave words in English new meanings, to explain physics. Gravity used to mean depth and seriousness—as in gravitas—and the force of attraction we now call gravity was understood as tendency or purpose.

4. A Trail Through Time
by Jodi Taylor
Published 23 Jul 2014

‘No one saw him do it so we still don’t know. It’s very possible he took himself down in the heavy goods lift.’ We both smiled at the memory. ‘Do you remember when John Calvin called you the devil’s strumpet and tried to have you run out of town?’ ‘No,’ I said, regretfully, ‘that didn’t happen to me, but Isaac Newton did once try to have me indicted for stealing his mirror. And it was my bloody mirror in the first place. Do you remember Professor Rapson assembling a Roman tortoise and they all fell into the lake?’ He laughed. ‘We didn’t have that, but I do remember his efforts to invent his own embalming fluid – he never said why and no one dared ask – and he had about twenty sheep’s heads hanging from the trees like wind chimes.

The Warhol Economy
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 15 Jan 2020

Field theory, which originated in the biological and physical sciences, explains how seemingly different variables that are not related to one another are able to affect each other. Or as the University of Wisconsin, Madison sociologist John Levi Martin explains, it is the “transfer of energy to an element that is not necessarily in contact with any other element.” For example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, or Isaac Newton’s understanding of gravity. If we think about the moving of different particles—a positive one moves one way and a negative charge the other way—the way they move is dependent on where the other moves. More generally, as Martin puts it, scientific field theory looks at the relationship between different variables and their ability to “impel” change on other variables.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

Past is prologue “Every amazing creative thing you’ve ever seen or idea you’ve ever heard can be broken down into smaller ideas that existed before,” writes author Scott Berkun in his book The Myths of Innovation. Forget about a “eureka” or “aha” moment, or a “bolt from the blue.” You don’t need to wait, Isaac Newton–style, for an apple to fall on your head, argue tech writers David Kelley and Tom Kelley. The best ideas are often formed via “small steps,” not giant leaps. So says the science. With his team at the University of Pittsburgh, reported Fast Company’s Jessica Hullinger, psychologist Christian Schunn analyzed hours of transcripts recounting brainstorming sessions held by a professional engineering team that had been asked to come up with a new handheld printer for children.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
Published 1 Jun 2001

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

…

Roebling and Rink Committee investigation and New York World (newspaper) attacks New York Bridge Company Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and on cable positioning on Committee of Investigation Kingsley interviewed by Rink Committee investigation and New York’s Novelty Iron Works Newell, Stub Newport Daily News (newspaper) Newport Guide, Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, Gen. John Niagara Bridge (International Suspension Bridge) Ellet and footbridge of plans for Niagara Falls Gazette (newspaper) Nicholas II (Czar of Russia) Nitrogen, effects of sudden release of, in bloodstream Nolan, Samuel Barnes B. North American Review (magazine) Northern Pacific Railroad O’Brien, Jimmy Occupational hazards, see Accidents; Bends; Casualties Odium, Robert E.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

Such a science should contain the primary rudiments of human reason, and its province ought to extend to the eliciting of true results in every subject.6 Descartes looked into God’s creation and saw a rational and calculable domain. “To speak freely, I am convinced that it [mathematics] is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency, as being the source of all things.”7 It was left to Isaac Newton, a deeply religious man and the last of the great medieval alchemists, to discover the mathematical methods Descartes dreamed of for describing the mechanical motions that govern God’s creation. His three laws of matter and motion were meant to explain the workings of the divine blueprint. God was praised for being the grand architect of a rationally and mathematically orchestrated mechanical universe.

…

Quite simply, the ability of individuals to imagine diverse others as if they were oneself does not exist in such societies but does exist in the more complex urban environments from which the Romantics came and of which they were so critical. Shortcomings aside, the Romantic movement offered a sophisticated countercosmology to the mathematical and mechanical universe of René Descartes and Isaac Newton. While Descartes found cosmic unity in mathematical laws and Newton in the laws governing gravitation, the Romantics saw it in the divine interconnectedness of all living beings. Their views anticipated the scientific vision of twentieth-century ecology. Alfred Tennyson wrote:FLOWER in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.59 The Romantics, like the Enlightenment rationalists, believed in progress, but for them it had nothing to do with accumulation of wealth but, rather, the accumulation of natural wisdom.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
by Robert McCrum
Published 24 May 2010

From 1717 to 1731 the South Sea Company sold no fewer than 64,000 slaves in North America, and the list of its investors reads like a roll-call of British society under George I: the Speaker of the House, more than half the lords and commons, the lord chancellor, and the entire royal family. From the artistic community, John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Vanbrugh were all investors. Their involvement speaks of a deep national association with slavery that touched all classes. When the crash came in 1720 Sir Isaac Newton lost £20,000 and was said to have been unreconciled, to the end of his life, to the fateful words ‘South Sea’. Even the shabby, contrarian figure of the journalist Daniel Defoe was caught up in the fever of slave capitalism. In his time, Defoe had been imprisoned for debt and pilloried for his satire, but for the launch of the South Sea Company he composed a pamphlet puffing its potential, and declaring that he could not recall ‘an undertaking of such consequence’.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture
by Taylor Clark
Published 5 Nov 2007

For their frenetic intellectual activity and egalitarian atmosphere, these establishments were called “Penny Universities,” because for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons could hear the latest news, participate in debate, or witness, say, Adam Smith writing his “Wealth of Nations.” If a Londoner was in the mood for science, he could wander over to a place like the Grecian Coffee House, where Isaac Newton, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the physician Hans Sloane once dissected a dolphin that had wandered into the Thames river. Edification came free with every purchase. Historians disagree about why the Brits switched so abruptly to tea, terminating the London coffee-house phenomenon, but one possible cause is this: the coffee tasted repulsive. * Since the government taxed coffee by the gallon, proprietors had to make it in advance — first roasting the beans in frying pans over a fire, which left them half scorched and half raw — and then reheat the brew later.

One Up on Wall Street
by Peter Lynch
Published 11 May 2012

Johnson II, also known as Mister Johnson, who founded the company. Ned Johnson’s Fidelity Trend and Gerry Tsai’s Fidelity Capital outperformed the competition by a big margin and were the envy of the industry over the period from 1958 to 1965. With these sorts of people training and supporting me, I felt as if I understood what Isaac Newton was talking about when he said: “If I have seen further...it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.” Long before Ned’s great successes, his father, Mister Johnson, had changed America’s mind about investing in stocks. Mister Johnson believed that you invest in stocks not to preserve capital, but to make money.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

Shocking though these examples may be, the consequences of the lowering of originality bar is not the biggest problem with the recent unbalancing of the intellectual property rights system. The most serious problem is that the IPR system has begun to be an obstacle, rather than a spur, to technological innovation. The tyranny of interlocking patents Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, ‘if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.42 He was referring to the fact that ideas develop in a cumulative manner. In the early controversy around patents, some people used this as an argument against them – when new ideas emerge from a ferment of intellectual endeavour, how can we say that the person who put the ‘finishing touches’ to an invention should take all the glory – and the profit?

The rough guide to walks in London and southeast England
by Helena Smith and Judith Bamber
Published 29 Dec 2008

Next up is Clare College, founded in 1325 and thus the city’s second oldest college. Beyond Clare College lies Trinity College, the city’s largest, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546. Trinity has more famous alumni than any other college – from poets and writers such as Byron and Dryden, to the spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, and scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton and Bertrand Russell. Most of the colleges are open to visitors at limited times and for a small entrance fee (around £2). Beyond the gates to Clare College, turn right along pedestrianized Garret Hostel Lane, over the Cam and onto Trinity Lane. Here, bear left then right and, at Trinity Street, right again to head down King’s Parade, the narrow medieval street that runs past the front of these colleges.

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 3 Nov 2009

History is littered with legendary investors who gave in to temptation and rode financial waves to their ruin, or attempted gutsy maneuvers to profit from what they viewed as inevitable crashes, only to suffer humiliating losses that sometimes haunted them for years. In the early eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, the man who discovered gravity as a fundamental force in nature and became the highest officer of Britain’'s Royal Mint, decried the growing passion for shares of the South Sea Company, a British company that gained a monopoly on trade in South America. Newton sold his own stock holdings of the company, worth £PS7,000, for a 100 percent profit, sure the shares would fall with a thud.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain
by Werner Loewenstein
Published 29 Jan 2013

But how do these rhodopsins manage to sense all that? It’s not only that the waveband is so wide, but it goes far beyond what their primary sensory component, the retinal, can sense by itself. This question goes to the heart of the problem of how we see colors—an old puzzler, but besides quondam perplexities, there are new ones. Isaac Newton opened the subject 300 years ago when he found that white sunlight splits up into a rainbow as it gets refracted. But why we see it in all its glorious polychrome, we have only begun to understand in recent years through refined probings of rhodopsin’s inner structure. A trenchant and singularly fruitful hypothesis was offered as early as 1802 by Thomas Young.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
by John de Graaf , David Wann , Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey
Published 1 Jan 2001

But what hidden costs do we pay? ACCIDENTAL CONCOCTIONS Ever since the days of alchemy, the field of chemistry has suffered from a tragic flaw: its isolation from the field of biology. Humans were deploying technology long before they understood what causes disease, or how living things interrelate. Sir Isaac Newton may have discovered gravity, but he didn’t seem to have a clue that the heavy metals he experimented with could kill him. In a 1692 letter to colleague John Locke, he blamed his insomnia, depression, poor digestion, amnesia, and paranoia on “sleeping too often by my fire.” We found out otherwise three hundred years later, when scientists analyzed a lock of his hair, passed along as a family heirloom.

The Curse of Cash
by Kenneth S Rogoff
Published 29 Aug 2016

His discussion is eerily similar in many ways to issues that treasuries discuss today in their constant search for more counterfeit-proof paper currencies, a quest that has resulted in ever more colorful and complicated-looking paper (or now in many countries, polymer plastic) currencies. If anyone doubts the importance of technology in coinage, one only has to note that England turned to Sir Isaac Newton in 1696 to serve as warden of the Royal Mint, and later master of the Mint in1699. Newton helped Britain recoin its currency after debasement and counterfeiting during the Nine Years’ War; he also invented the milled edge, aimed at discouraging counterfeiting and clipping, a version of which still appears on many of today’s coins.11 As we shall see later with paper currency in chapter 6, however, nothing seems to defeat the counterfeiters forever.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
by Stephen Cave
Published 2 Apr 2012

Until well into the Renaissance in Europe, there was no distinction between chemistry and alchemy or scientist and wizard. What we now see as the rigors of the scientific method, the antithesis of all superstition, emerged only slowly from the alchemical quest for immortality. Many of the great figures at the dawn of the scientific age, such as Robert Boyle and even Sir Isaac Newton, were steeped in alchemical teachings—Newton himself saw his contributions to alchemy as more important than his discoveries in physics. As the successes of the new evidence-based methods rapidly grew, faith in ancient wisdom and the occult eventually declined. If nature’s secrets were to be unlocked, it was through testing new theories against methodically acquired experimental data—not through deciphering old hieroglyphs.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

That’s why large geographical centers of trade—Athens and Rome, for example—have produced so much innovation. Today communities of experts, like Silicon Valley and the Internet, are critical to the evolution of technology. Success bubbles up from a community of hardworking innovators all pursuing the next advancement, learning from the insights of others, and competing with one another. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus at the same time. Samuel Morse patented the telegraph hours before someone else applied for the same patent. And Hendrik Lorentz published the equation E=mc2 before Albert Einstein. Each shared a common base of knowledge. The evolution of that knowledge and their familiarity with it was critical to their success.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller
Published 14 Jun 2012

The stronger the correlation between bathroom and dining room quality, the better the dining room you will get if you succeed in getting a home with fantastic bathrooms. SELECTING AGAINST CERTAIN TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE Embryo selection against autism would likely reduce the number of geniuses. High-functioning autistics often excel at pattern recognition, a skill vital to success in science and mathematics. Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Socrates have all been linked to Asperger syndrome, a disorder (or at least a difference) on the autism spectrum.206 Parents with strong math backgrounds are far more likely to have autistic children, perhaps an indication that having lots of “math genes” makes one susceptible to autism.207 Magnetic resonance imaging has shown that on average, autistic two-year-olds have larger brains than their non-autistic peers do.208 A Korean study found the percentage of autistics who had a superior IQ was greater than that found in the general population.209 Some autistics have an ability called “hyperlexia,” characterized by having average or above-average IQs and word-reading ability well above what would be expected given their ages.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

Of course, like any clever bureaucracy, the neocortex often deals with the problems it is assigned by redefining them. On that note, let’s review the information processing in the old brain. The Sensory Pathway Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision. —Isaac Newton Each of us lives within the universe—the prison—of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive
by Brian Christian
Published 1 Mar 2011

And I’m like, Damn—that’s, one, quite far from reality, and, two, it’s stretching, like, x number of dollars’ worth of computing at it and barely even making it. So.” Devon laughs. “It feels … It definitely feels good at the end of the day that I can open my eyes and look at something that’s, like, many orders of magnitude more complex.” And to be able to know where to look for it— And how to recognize it. Acknowledgments It was Isaac Newton who famously said (though it was actually a common expression at the time), “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I want to say, more neurologically, that if I’ve been able to conduct a good signal to my axon terminal, I owe it to the people at my dendrites.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

Shocking though these examples may be, the consequences of the lowering of originality bar is not the biggest problem with the recent unbalancing of the intellectual property rights system. The most serious problem is that the IPR system has begun to be an obstacle, rather than a spur, to technological innovation. The tyranny of interlocking patents Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, ‘if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.42 He was referring to the fact that ideas develop in a cumulative manner. In the early controversy around patents, some people used this as an argument against them – when new ideas emerge from a ferment of intellectual endeavour, how can we say that the person who put the ‘finishing touches’ to an invention should take all the glory – and the profit?

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ...
by David Barrie
Published 12 May 2014

The sextant is also versatile. Unlike the astrolabe or quadrant it can be used for measuring angles in any plane—for example, between two heavenly bodies, or between two objects on the surface of the earth. The sextant was the offspring of an earlier invention, the so-called reflecting quadrant. Sir Isaac Newton can take credit for designing the first device of this kind, plans for which were shown to the Royal Society in 1699.12 Another Fellow of the Royal Society, John Hadley (1682–1744), came up with two designs, similar to Newton’s though apparently not derived from them, which he presented to that institution in May 1731.13 One of these was widely adopted following successful sea trials conducted the following year by the Oxford professor of astronomy John Bradley, who was later to become Astronomer Royal.14 By one of those strange coincidences that seem common in the history of science, an American—Thomas Godfrey—independently came up with a similar design almost simultaneously.15 Confusingly, the reflecting quadrant is actually an octant—its arc is one-eighth of a circle (45 degrees) rather than one-quarter.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

Kepler’s third law allowed him to estimate the proportional distances of the planets: he determined, for instance, that Mars was one and a half times the distance from the Sun that our Earth was, and that Jupiter was more than five times as far, though the actual distance from the Earth to the Sun remained unknown. The importance of Kepler’s findings cannot be overstated. Near the end of the 1600s, Isaac Newton would use Kepler’s laws to derive the universal laws of gravity. Today, knowledge of Kepler’s laws is what allows mission planners to chart the courses for interplanetary spacecraft, and is how planet hunters determine whether an exoplanet resides in its star’s habitable zone based on the world’s orbital period alone.

The English
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 29 Jan 2013

‘England may justly lay claim to be the Head of a Philosophical League, above all countries in Europe’, wrote Bishop Sprat in his 1667 History of the Royal Society, ‘Nature will reveal more of its secrets to the English than to others, because it has already furnish’d them with a Genius so well Proportion’d, for the receiving and refining of its mysteries.’14 Others have been far more ready to recognize the English genius than the English have been themselves. Voltaire, in many senses the apotheosis of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, fell in love with the English intellectual tradition, using his Letters from England to compare Isaac Newton with René Descartes. He observed that the Cartesian belief in pure thought was ‘ingenious, at the best only plausible to ignoramuses’ and simply shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath as the genius of Newton. ‘The first is a sketch, the second a masterpiece.’ The distinction continues: until very recently Newton’s Alma Mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, had produced more Nobel Prize winners (twenty-nine) than the whole of France.

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics
by Paul Halpern
Published 13 Apr 2015

Then summon up your grasp of mind, Your fancy scientific, Till sights and sounds with thought combined Become of truth prolific. —James Clerk Maxwell, from “To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode” U ntil the age of relativity and quantum mechanics, the two greatest unifiers of physics were Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Newton’s laws of mechanics demonstrated how the changing motions of objects were governed by their interactions with other objects. His law of gravitation codified one such interaction; the force causing celestial bodies, such as the planets, to follow particular paths, such as elliptical orbits.

The Weather of the Future
by Heidi Cullen
Published 2 Aug 2010

Unfortunately, scientific discoveries are not always good news. And there is a nagging fear among scientists that we’ll prove ourselves to be not so different from the woolly mammoth, the symbol of a climate that no longer exists. Chapter 3 The Science of Prediction If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. —Sir Isaac Newton Prediction is an odd thing. Depending on your personality, predictions are a source of either comfort or anxiety. In one broad stroke, they have the power to reassure or destabilize. Predictions often give us an illusion of control in situations that are inherently out of our control. Nothing exemplifies this better than our relationship to weather forecasts.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Published 16 May 2016

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change. As more people “dared to know,” controversial ideas became irresistible. Evolution, ideas about electricity or politics, all drew a curious audience. John Locke and Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were as notable for the crowd of debating citizens they attracted as they were for their ideas. The arguments were intended to elicit truth, to give individuals that same shocking sense that Luther had felt on discovering a powerful idea. But, just as important, these debates were recorded—they were printed in journals and books or repeated in letters.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Indeed, knowledge builds on knowledge: one of the sources of endogenous growth is that constant or increasing returns to ideas can overcome diminishing returns to physical capital.17 It is very hard to unlearn what has been learned and intellectual capital accumulates, so technical progress tends to push productivity ever upwards. As Isaac Newton famously acknowledged, he saw further only by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. In a virtuous spiral, knowledge begets increased output and liberates resources for further investment. At the same time, as we have dramatically witnessed over recent decades, knowledge and information come to make up a larger and larger portion of GDP.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Would that not generate more innovation than if those same scientists worked separately in small, relatively impoverished start-ups of their own? Not necessarily. Ownership makes a difference. Breakthroughs demand obsession. Success in solving a hard problem comes through thinking about it in the shower, while driving to work, during coffee breaks, over dinner, in front of the television. Isaac Newton, asked how he had arrived at his insights, answered, “By keeping the problem constantly before my mind.” If Newton, possibly the greatest scientific genius of all time, had to keep problems constantly before his mind in order to solve them, then mere mortals need to be at least as focused. A large organization, necessarily bureaucratic, is at a disadvantage in trying to cultivate such fixation in its employees.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

Who has not taken a hike and come across a long-abandoned railway line— someone’s past dream of a path to riches and wealth? Who has not heard of the Great Tulip Bubble of the seventeenth-century Netherlands— a country famous, we might add, for its stalwart Rembrandt burghers and often caricatured as the home of the world’s most cautious people. Who does not know that even Isaac Newton—the father of modern physics and of the calculus—lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble of the eighteenth century? All of which takes us back to Trondheim. Akerlof had stored the observation prompted by his relative’s million-dollar home in the wrong place in his brain. He should have seen that home prices in Trondheim were not merely indicative of curiously high real estate prices in Scandinavia; they were part of a worldwide real estate bubble.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

Whether it be the circulation of the planets or of the blood (or, as we will see, of money), the underlying reality was always the same, namely the mathematical laws that governed bodies in motion. Geometry revealed the basic rules of physical existence. This is not to say that the study of mathematics and geometry had no religious dimensions. Scientific pioneers, including Sir Isaac Newton and Bacon, believed that the study of nature’s physical mechanics was a way of getting closer to God. For many Protestant sects and for Calvinists in particular, the study of mathematics represented the type of ascetic “good work” that could gain God’s approval.4 According to this philosophy, God produced the world as a machine for human beings to use, and it is our moral duty to understand how it functions.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions
by David Robson
Published 7 Mar 2019

While still working as young patent clerk in 1905, he outlined the foundations for quantum mechanics, special relativity, and the equation for mass?energy equivalence (E=MC2) – the concept for which he is most famous.47 A decade later he would announce his theory of general relativity – tearing through Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity. But his ambitions did not stop there. For the remainder of his life, he planned to build an even grander, all-encompassing understanding of the universe that melded the forces of electromagnetism and gravity into a single, unified theory. ‘I want to know how God created this world.

The Pineapple: King of Fruits
by Francesca Beauman
Published 22 Feb 2011

Dutch intellect had reigned supreme throughout much of the seventeenth century, with the brilliant analytical minds of men like Joseph Scaliger, Hugo Grotius and Daniel Heinsius; but the end of the century saw the resurgence of England in its ability to yield scholars of the calibre of John Locke and Isaac Newton, both of whose most famous works, Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Principia, were published in the year that William and Mary ensconced themselves on the throne. Now that England had been similarly released into religious liberty, it seemed to many that it was also her turn to take over the reins of cultural advance and the garden was one area in which this was seen to manifest itself.

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

The Copernican revolution which Wilkins had been prosecuting in prose had by then been won by other means. By the end of the 17th century, the manner in which the Moon represented a new way of seeing the cosmos had changed from being a question of what it might be to live there, or how it looked, to a matter of the force that governed its movement. ISAAC NEWTON’S “PRINCIPIA” OF 1687 TIED THE MOON TO THE Earth not by similarity but by gravity. Kepler had discovered that the planets moved in ellipses round the Sun; in the decades which followed it was confirmed that moons did the same around the planets fortunate enough to have them. He also found that orbiting objects moved faster when closer to the object they were orbiting than they did when farther away in a mathematically well-defined way.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum
by Lee Smolin
Published 31 Mar 2019

Matrix mechanics: An approach to quantum mechanics in which observables are represented by matrices. Momentum: A quantity defined for moving particles, which is exchanged in collisions so as to conserve the total. In Newtonian physics it is equal to the product of the mass and velocity. Newtonian physics: A framework for describing and explaining motion, invented by Isaac Newton and presented in his 1687 book Principia Mathematica, which is based on three laws of motion. Nonlocality: Any phenomenon which does not satisfy the principle of locality, and so involves influences transmitted between systems separated in space. Operationalism: An approach to instrumentalism in which one specifies for a physical system a set of operations which include how it is to be prepared and how it is to be measured.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

But while these early microscopes were powerful enough to rule out tubes, they were still too weak to probe nerve structure more precisely. This left a crucial question unanswerable: how could anything be transported through a body without the help of tubes? New theories rushed in to fill the vacuum. Lack of evidence opened the debate to all comers, from the sublimely credentialed to the sublimely questionable. Isaac Newton suggested that the brain’s messages traveled along the nerves by vibration, the way you might pluck a guitar string. At the other end of the spectrum was the conjecture of a spa physician in Bath (these were doctors who took up residence at spas, then at the height of their popularity in England, to prescribe exact drinking and bathing regimes—for a robust fee, of course): David Kinneir claimed in a 1738 tract that, as the animal spirits were carried in the blood, taking the waters at the spa would help to unblock the vessels that carried them.6 It’s worth noting that before the nineteenth century, science was a lot less fussy about its academic boundaries.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame. After a run of nearly four hundred years, the purity of English sterling slid to 75 percent, then 50 percent, then 33 percent, then 25 percent. Coins issued in 1551 retained just 17 percent of the silver that coins a decade earlier contained.16 No less a luminary than Sir Isaac Newton, as Warden of the Mint, led the effort to restore the health of British coins. Advanced nations do not melt down or “clip” coins these days to make more money, because they don’t need to. Printing money at a stunning pace is easier and causes more harm. Debasement of fiat currencies is always a temptation.

Inheritance
by Leo Hollis

But just as stocks rocket up, they can plummet with similar velocity. The selloff began in July as confidence started to wobble. By September, the price was back at £175. It was not just investors who lost out, but also bankers and goldsmiths who could no longer recover their loans. Even a genius such as Sir Isaac Newton was burned, forced to write off £20,000, claiming that: ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.’11 By December, there were calls for a government inquiry, which inevitably uncovered widespread fraud. In the end, the enterprise was folded into the East India Company, and recorded as the first financial ‘bubble’.

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska
Published 5 Jun 2024

By the seventeenth century, Europeans suspected that the Earth wasn’t a perfect sphere, but they couldn’t agree on the exact shape. The French philosopher René Descartes claimed that our planet was elongated at the poles, which would give it the shape of an egg.* On the other side of the English Channel, the British scientist Isaac Newton was arguing that the forces acting as the Earth spins flatten it at the poles and make it bulge along the Equator, so the planet resembles a grapefruit. In 1687, in his groundbreaking Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), Newton discussed the theory of gravity, an almost magical attracting force.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

OVER BUDGET, OVER TIME, OVER AND OVER AGAIN The pattern was so clear that I started calling it the “Iron Law of Megaprojects”: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.13 The Iron Law is not a “law” like in Newtonian physics, meaning something that invariably produces the same outcome. I study people. In the social sciences, “laws” are probabilistic (they are in natural science, too, but Isaac Newton didn’t pay much attention to that). And the probability that any big project will blow its budget and schedule and deliver disappointing benefits is very high and very reliable. The database that started with 258 projects now contains more than 16,000 projects from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries on all continents except Antarctica, and it continues to grow.

The Power Makers
by Maury Klein
Published 26 May 2008

Early theories of heat fell into two distinct categories. Some considered it a distinct type of matter, while others regarded it simply as a condition that could be produced in certain bodies. In the seventeenth century Robert Hooke declared that “heat is a property of a body arising from the motion or agitation of its parts.” Isaac Newton agreed. “Do not all fixed Bodies,” he asked, “when heated beyond a certain Degree, emit light and shine; and is not this Emission performed by the vibrating Motion of their Parts?” One prominent follower of Newton, Wilhelm Jacob ’sGravesande [sic], tried to meld these opposing views by describing heat as a form of motion containing a particular kind of matter similar to that of light.

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News of the “Leyden jar,” the first device capable of storing static electricity, spread rapidly and enabled still more imaginative research into the mysterious force.18 In the United States those interested in electricity, most notably Benjamin Franklin, knew little about what was happening in Europe. Franklin, however, did have a thorough knowledge of Isaac Newton’s Opticks. From it he learned not only important concepts, such as the notion of an elastic fluid, but also the rigor of performing and reporting experiments carefully. After hearing a lecture on the subject by Archibald Spencer, a visiting Scotsman, Franklin bought the man’s equipment and plunged eagerly into experimenting.

A Man on the Moon
by Andrew Chaikin
Published 1 Jan 1994

But in that memory lay coded instructions for a flight to the moon, permanently written on bundles of magnetized wire encased in plastic, so that not even a total power failure would erase them. Although the computer was incapable of adding two numbers, when it came to getting to the moon and back it was as good as putting Isaac Newton himself to work on the problem. It could calculate the command module’s position and path through space with the same equations of motion used by Newton to study the orbits of celestial bodies. And it was so essential to flying the command module that the astronauts thought of it as a fourth crew member.

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From Marilyn Lovell there were cuff links and a man-in-the-moon tie tack, and from Valerie Anders, a gold “8" tie tack, replete with moonstone. For Bill Anders, the trip home was a long, quiet, and boring fall. At one point, Mike Collins mentioned that his son Michael had asked who was driving up there. Anders replied, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now." This should have been a welcome chance to catch up on all the sleep he'd missed on the way out, but Anders, at least, wasn't having much luck there. Somehow it worked out that when he was trying to sleep Borman and Lovell were awake, and they got into small talk.

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017
by Rick Steves
Published 8 Nov 2016

A metal rod sticking out of the top of the jar gave off a small charge when touched, enough to create a spark, shock a party guest, or tenderize a turkey (as Ben Franklin attempted one Thanksgiving). But such static generators could never produce enough electricity for practical use. • In the corner near where you entered, look for a... Model for Demonstrating Newton’s Mechanics: Isaac Newton (1642-1727) explained all of the universe’s motion (“mechanics”)—from spinning planets to rolling rocks—in a few simple mathematical formulas. The museum’s collision balls (the big wooden frame with hanging balls—labeled Elastic and Inelastic Collisions Apparatus), a popular desktop toy in the 1970s, demonstrate Newton’s three famous laws. 1.

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In doing so, he shattered the conventional wisdom, established by Aristotle, that heavier objects accelerate faster. We don’t know whether Galileo actually dropped those orbs from this Tower, but we do know he tested this theory of gravity by rolling balls of different weights down ramps, which would have been easier to time (see here). These experiments led to Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity. Moreover, by forging theories through rigorous testing rather than through reasoning alone (as Aristotle had), Galileo helped reenvision science itself. Around 1272, the next architect continued, trying to correct the problem by angling the next three stories backward, in the opposite direction of the lean.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg
Published 1 Jun 2011

Economic philosophers, for their part, could point to price as arbiter of supply and demand, acting everywhere to allocate resources far more effectively than any human manager or bureaucrat could ever possibly do. Surely this was a principle as universal and impersonal as the force of gravitation! Isaac Newton had shown there was more to the motions of the stars and planets than could be found in the book of Genesis; similarly, Adam Smith was revealing more potential in the principles and practice of trade than had ever been realized through the ancient, formal relations between princes and peasants, or among members of the medieval crafts guilds.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World
by Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic
Published 5 Jan 2010