specialtrio.blogg.se - Sir isaac newton ii

Newton once said that if he had achieved anything in his research, it was "by standing on the shoulders of giants." The quote was prophetic.

"To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.".

"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.".

This article originally appeared at RealClearScience. It's far too easy to cherry pick Newton's personality and diagnose him accordingly.Īll we'll probably ever be able to say conclusively is that Newton was a bit of a jerk, and probably deserved to have an apple dropped on his head. Newton certainly suffered from all three of these symptoms at one time or another, but Keynes warns against such retrospective analysis. The clinical features of Asperger's syndrome are (i) social impairment shown by poor nonverbal communication, poor empathy and failure to develop friendship, (ii) lack of interest in communication with others, and (iii) an all-absorbing dominant interest and strong adherence to routine. According to the Royal Society's Milo Keynes: Yet a new theory gaining traction is that Newton had Asperger's Syndrome. What was the reason for all the hatred? Newton's upbringing may have been a contributor - his father died before he was born and his mother abandoned him at the age of three. MIT professor and science historian Thomas Levenson respectfully disagrees with Manuel's melodramatic, macabre assessment, though he willingly acknowledges that Newton was a "good hater." nourished him," historian Frank Manuel gorily described. "At the Mint he could hurt and kill without doing violence to his scrupulous puritan conscience.

Under Newton's stern tenure, twenty-eight others would visit the hangman's gallows or be burned at the stake for counterfeiting. He even had one notorious but slippery 'coiner,' William Chaloner. "A pious Christian, Newton prosecuted the wrongdoings he uncovered with the wrath of the Old Testament God, refusing pleas for clemency. As Sam Kean recounted in The Disappearing Spoon: The positions were notoriously cushy, but in these roles, he tirelessly hunted down coin counterfeiters. In the last few years of the 1600s, Newton became Warden, and later Master, of the Royal Mint of England. Newton's merciless nature served him even better outside of science. As Alasdair Wilkins noted in io9, the reason that everyone knows the name of Newton and not Leibniz or Hooke may simply be because he outlived them. These grudges persisted even after Hooke and Leibniz were in their graves, with Newton trashing the reputations and discoveries of both Leibniz and Hooke while elevating his own. When two other scientists, Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, offered criticism or competed with Newton for claim over the revolutionary ideas of gravity and calculus, Newton pursued personal vendettas against them. Ruthlessness is a surprising bedfellow to scientific success. Though his personality didn't endear him to almost anyone, it served his career remarkably well.

When angered, he became unbalanced and, it must be said, vindictive and petty." He was not given to lightness of manner, nor did he show any capacity for self-irony. He lived the extraordinarily narrow life of a dedicated auto-didact, hardly ever travelling outside London, Cambridge, Woolsthorpe. Though generous enough with his time and money when he had both to spare, he did not give with tenderness - either to relatives or acquaintances. He did not, with a single brief exception, form any warm friendships. Qureshi summed up Newton's personality in The Fountain Magazine: Cold and calculating, cunning and quick-tempered, he just was not a nice guy. The inescapable truth is that Isaac Newton wasn't the flower sniffing, rosy individual our elementary teachers portrayed him to be.