Posted on 08/02/2009 2:43:15 PM PDT by neverdem
Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success
It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon.
There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall - it took Newton to explain why.
Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight - it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.”
Although biographers have long celebrated Newton’s intellect - he also pioneered calculus - it’s clear that his achievements aren’t solely a byproduct of his piercing intelligence. Newton also had an astonishing ability to persist in the face of obstacles, to stick with the same stubborn mystery - why did the apple...
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
/johnny
Newton also wrote a discourse on the Book of Revelation; I haven’t read the article but I wonder if phantom incompatibility of science and religion was addressed.
Good article.
parsy.
Gee, don't racism and privilege have something to do with it? ;->
I love grits....
The trouble with a lot of modern science these days is that it used to be called common sense.
Good article. Well worth reading to the end.
Mewton’s religous beliefs were way off beam - he was extremely adept at inventing excuses for not taking the oath of belief required of scholars at Cambridge. He essentially thought God was so great and supreme that nothing and no-one else was needed - including Jesus.
He was a very strange man. He was a fervent and secret alchemist (he wasted an enormous amount of time and energy trying to interpret passages in old books that would enable him to turn lead into gold). He was also, apparently, an appallingly boring lecturer. He had such a bad delivery that sometimes no students would turn up to his lectures at all, and yet, by the terms of his contract with the University, he would still have to deliver the lecture to empty rooms!
“In recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit.”
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This line kills me! Yeah, psychologists have come up with the term grit in recent years, my achin’ arse. The use of the word grit to mean perseverance, determination, courage etc. goes back as far as I can remember and I am certain it goes a lot farther back than that. I wonder if these geniuses ever saw the movie, “True Grit” starring John Wayne. I actually read the story in the, “Grit” newspaper, believe it or not, before the movie hit the theatre.
The following is definition number four for “Grit” from Merriam-Webster.
4: firmness of mind or spirit : unyielding courage in the face of hardship or danger
I agree with you, far too much of “modern science” is just old fashioned common sense.
So was, I'm told, St. John Vianney.
As for Newton's religion, I couldn't guess. I couldn't understand the cover of that book I mentioned, much less its contents.
Well, of course, Jesus is God, so that much of the idea is ridiculous. But as to His Supremacy and self-sufficiency, that's right the mark, right? It's for man "that he humbled himself, taking on the very form of man..."
Tenacity is all well and good but curiosity is the vital ingredient. The world is filled with stubborn people that trudge along day by day, with the days piling endlessly until the very last, having accomplished nothing by living.
The essential factor is a childlike curiosity that tickles your mind and asks "why". That spark is often enough to start a chain of events which leads beyond imagination to a more basic understanding of the world we inhabit so briefly.
It is necessary to look up in order to see the stars!
Regards,
GtG
I think your source is a little off about Newtons religion
go read some of his own writings
I don’t think your argument holds water ,he may have had a few doctoral errors but he was no slouch
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/texts/viewtext.php?id=THEM00003&mode=normalized
Years ago, I looked at a biography of him (can't remember the author) which, iirc, contained some of his notes on certain doctrines. I could see the progression from one misread sentence to a chain of inferences that led up to his wrong conclusion. The man was nothing if not a supremely logical and disciplined thinker. He just wasn't a good exegete, and therefore, not a particularly good theologian.
As for the apple-gravity story, that seems to confuse more than to illustrate the issue. People seem to have this idea that before Newton, nobody noticed that things fall down when you let them. Of course, when they think about it, they realize that it's dumb, but then, they're lost if they are asked to explain what Newton actually did.
An old teacher of mine pointed out once that he didn’t think that psychologists were really “scientists” to begin with.
He is also the inventor of the cat flap.
For that invention alone, he deserves our thanks.
What I meant by that is that Newton denied the divinity of Jesus. He was a unitarian.
He was a unitarian and therefore, strictly speaking, a heretic.
That doesn’t mean he couldn’t be enormously right in other aspects of his theology of course. He was an extremely clever man.
If you recall the book or author please post me. I’d like to read it.
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