Posted on 07/12/2014 11:14:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Nearly three hundred years since his death, Isaac Newton is as much a myth as a man. The mythical Newton abounds in contradictions; he is a semi-divine genius and a mad alchemist, a somber and solitary thinker and a passionate religious heretic.
Myths usually have an element of truth to them but how many Newtonian varieties are true? Here are ten of the most common, debunked or confirmed by the evidence of his own private papers, kept hidden for centuries and now freely available online.
10. Newton was a heretic who had to keep his religious beliefs secret.
True. While Newton regularly attended chapel, he abstained from taking holy orders at Trinity College. No official excuse survives, but numerous theological treatises he left make perfectly clear why he refused to become an ordained clergyman, as College fellows were normally obliged to do. Newton believed that the doctrine of the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were given equal status, was the result of centuries of corruption of the original Christian message and therefore false. Trinity College’s most famous fellow was, in fact, an anti-Trinitarian.
9. Newton never laughed.
False, but only just. There are only two specific instances that we know of when the great man laughed. One was when a friend to whom he had lent a volume of Euclid’s Elements asked what the point of it was, ‘upon which Sir Isaac was very merry.’ (The point being that if you have to ask what the point of Euclid is, you have already missed it.) So far, so moderately funny. The second time Newton laughed was during a conversation about his theory that comets inevitably crash into the stars around which they orbit.
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Thanks, both of you!
Best thread I’ve seen anywhere in ages. Thank you!
Genesis: It took six days.
Big Bang Theory: Day one was a b!tch.
No one has every accused Newton of denying Christ. Newton only did not believe in the theology of the “Trinity” as taught in Trinity College. Trinity College was a divinity school. Newton believed in Christ and believed that Christ was the Savior of the world. He believed that God was Christs Father and a separate being from Christ Himself. He also believed that the Holy Ghost likewise was a separate being.
Newton was an avid student of the Holy Bible and believed mostly in the literal meaning of it.
Not ascribing to the Catholic interpretation of the Holy Trinity in Newton’s day would however classify him as a “heretic”. By the time of Newton however the classification of being a heretic was not the same as it was just a hundred years earlier.
What about the Fig Newton? Did he invent it, yes or no?
Indeed!
True story: Isaac Newton did not like apples again after one fell on his head....
Man is not told how long a Day was during the Creation. I doubt very much that it was one of “our” days. But it could have been millennia or an instant.
We won’t know this until we are Resurrected when “all things will be made known” to us.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
From the article, sounds like that’s how Newton saw it as well.
Big Bang Theory
Penny: Actually, that’s not true, Leonard. In fact, recently I’ve been thinking that given the parameters of your experiment, the transport of electrons through the aperture the nano-fabricated metal rings is qualitatively no different than the experiment already conducted in the Netherlands.
Their observed phase shift in the diffusing electrons inside the metal ring already conclusively demonstrated the electric analogue of the Aharonov-Bohm quantum-interference effect.
That’s it. That’s all I know. Oh, wait! Fig Newtons were named after a town in Massachusetts, not the scientist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gA-ZzVgmRc
I say he was not an Alchemist, although he took the Alchemical writings very seriously, believing that the reflected some kind of encoded or remanant knowledge from a previous Age of Wisdom. So his beliefs were not mystcial or magical, and he was searching for a rational interpretation of the alchemical results, which he tried to reproduce.
Certainly, he was on the wrong track.
The word “day” can also mean “period of time”, or era in the Hebrew iirc. Of course there is also a passage in there that talks about it was dark and then light, the first day, which implies one revolution.
I am of the mind that the Creation story is just that - a story. Revealed to man in the terms they could understand at the time. And pretty amazing how close it matches up with our theories of today (”big bang” vs. riding around on a turtle’s back). (The first use of the word “light”, I wonder if it is trying to describe energy and matter - E=MC2).
If it was just made up, I think I would have created man first (because we are “most important”), and then figured out a place to live, things to eat, etc. afterwards.
Reminds me of the list of sins that he compiled, which included the remembrances, “Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer,” and “Denying that I did so.”
Perhaps part of his Fig Bar research.
I think I said that, kinda. Since we don't KNOW, we can only speculate and that is often dangerous.
So I like to think that God's "Time" is not necessarily "OUR Time," and that there are many things we are still "in the dark about."
I just figure when Mankind is mature enough, Information will abound, and all "things hidden" will be shown, and at that time, we will understand it.
Until then, I reserve the right to give God the Benefit of my doubt. He will tell us all when the Time is Right.
That's a massive amount of projection, but Genesis 1 is impressive on many accounts, starting with the word "beginning", recalling that a "steady state" theory of the universe was in vogue through the 1950's.
I also note, as I've stated on this forum before, that it has a naturalistic bent, in that God speaks or commands, but does not tinker - "the earth brought forth grass"
Discernment between Creation and the Big Bang theory recognizes the latter presupposes a continuity of being, whereas Creation identifies a beginning point attributed to the Creator.
I recommend reading The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, by Leon Kass. Kass is a Jewish professor of Old Testament. In his book, he treats Genesis as literature, and tries to understand it on its own terms. In dealing with the "seven days of creation," he doesn't get wrapped around the axle on whether it means seven calendar days of 24 hours each, but asks, what was the writer tryin to get across?
He points out that the Babylonians and all other cultures of the Middle East believed that the stars, planets, sun and moon were gods. The writer of Genesis is saying they aren't gods, they are created entities. The enumeration of created things starts with separating the land (fixed) from water (not fixed). Then come the celestial objects: things that move but are not alive. Then come the plants: things that are alive but don't move. Then come the animals, birds and fish: things that are both alive and move. You can't think of anything that doesn't fit in one of those categories.
The issue, according to Kass, is not time units as such, but seven (counting the day of rest) categories of created things, which are exhaustive and include everything in the universe.
In short, Kass is not treating Genesis literally, but recognizing that it is written in poetic language, and asking, what did the writer intend to convey to his readers?
Is he right? I don't know. However, it makes a lot more sense to me than trying to shoehorn the creation of the universe into seven calendar days, especially given what we know about the Big Bang and the age of the universe.
My year in a Catholic high school provided me with one unexpected perspective: The Religion Class (for that year, at least) combined religion with world history. That particular class had a logic all its own, and I have, since then, based my religious beliefs on logic.
Because of that one nine-month period in my teens, I have explored and discarded several religions as not being logical. The Universe is logical. Earth is logical. Therefore, God must be logical. If so, then it is my “job” to learn from Him, rather than tell Him what I want to believe.
Time, as the Bible states, was introduced for Man; Man did not invent Time. Because of that statement, and because of the logic of the Creation, I say that God, in His Wisdom, can tell us through His prophets that he created the Universe in six “days,” and that on the seventh, He rested. Those six “days” are not Monday through Saturday, as we perceive it. Those six “days” are God’s Days, and we are really silly to try and second-guess Him and pigeonhole His Creation into a format that we are able to explain.
I understand the need for theologians of any ilk to tidily tuck certain events of the Bible into little cubbyholes and try to explain away the things they don’t understand. If you have ever watched a “marathon” of religious programs in the six weeks before Christmas or Easter, you will understand what I’m saying. There are as many theories as there are theorists, but rather than debunk them, I watch, listen and glean. That’s my job, as I see it, on this earth.
Sounds like Newton may have had Aspergers
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