The Greatest And The Luckiest Of Mortals 167
sgant writes "So says the 18th-century French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange about Sir Isaac Newton. The New York Times has a piece on 'The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture' which is a new exhibit at the NY Public Library. It includes a number of Newton's manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library, including a first edition of his most famous work, "Principia," bearing the author's corrections and additions for the next printing, have never before been shown in the United States."
'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:1, Interesting)
Given the resources he had availible, it's simply amazing he accomplished what he did
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
also, Leibniz also independantly devised the system of calculus at the same time
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
That was the old view. There were some problems with their use of infinitesimals, but those problems have been cleared up more recently. The modern version of calculus via infinitesimals is known as nonstandard analysis [wolfram.com]. The landmark work on the subject is Robinson's 1966 book "Non-standard analysis".
Moreover, that sort of hen-pecking at Newton and Leibniz is not really productive. No one cares more about precision and correctness in definitions than mathematicians, and yet mathematicians still assign credit to those two.
Have you read the Principia? I have only read portions, but Newton does some pretty amazing stuff in there, besides just the use of calculus and the derivation of the inverse square law for gravity. For example, he proves that there is no closed form for elliptic integrals of a certain kind.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Welcome to the point sherlock. I'm not henpecking, I'm just stating a fact. They're not perfect, knowone is. People seem to be under the impression that they are 100% responcible for calculus as we know it. They certainly deserve credit for the bulk of it, but they had help along
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Funny)
No, but I saw the movie. I thought it was pretty good. Definitely one of Tor Johnson's better roles. I also liked how Bela Lugosi keeps a cape over his face in most of his scenes - it gives him a real aura of mystery.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Funny)
Everybody duck!
young nerds, pay attention to this thread and learn. This is teh bottom of the well, the dregs of the coffee, the vapors in the gas tank. It does not get any nerdier than this.
Re:infinitesimals (Score:5, Insightful)
And Latin. We now know Latin to be a dead language. What real scientist uses Latin?
And the English system of weights and measures. He didn't even use the Metric system, or bother to convert the values!
How the great learned history critics and scientists of the future will scoff at our inaccurate decimal system, our clunky wire-based infosystems, and our use of BASIC.
We use the tools we have. The best of us modify them to fit our own needs. Every once in a while, someone comes up with a mod that everyone agrees is really cool. On that measure, Isaac Newton is the greatest hacker of all time. OK, maybe Edison was greater, or the woman who invented the stick.
I picking on your fine post (a bit unfairly, to be sure) because if someone comes up with a mod, how does that make everything that went before it "incorrect"?
Re:infinitesimals (Score:2)
It doesn't. What makes it incorrect is the fact that it was incorrect. Incorrect might not be the right word, it was not mathematically rigorous. There were instances when he treated an infintesimal as a zero and discarded it, there were instances where he treated it as a non-zero and divided it. Math is rigorous. You need a set of rules that hold in all situations.
Did you bother to read the rest of the po
Re:infinitesimals (Score:2)
Yes, and I'm sorry for slighting you for using the word "incorrect". I should have been more Charitable - and on Sunday, no less.
Re:infinitesimals (Score:2)
Re:infinitesimals (Score:5, Insightful)
A set of rules that hold in all situations means that there are no paradoxes.
There is nothing non-rigorous about infintesimals which behave in some cases identically with zero when added to something and in other cases behave like non-zeros when dividing two of them. What is non-rigorous and non-defensible is the attempted distinction between zero and non-zero. Not everything mathematical is a number. In fact most mathematical things are not numbers. It all has to do with functions from spaces to spaces that preserve interesting properties.
Re:infinitesimals (Score:2)
So "incorrect" was incorrect then?? I'm confused ...
Re:infinitesimals (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps. But mathematical definitions are not necessarily rigorous. Try to formulate a rigorous definition of a set.
Another interesting case of the non-rigorous use of mathematics was by Dirac. He used the delta-function comfortably for a while, while the mathematicians cried foul (IIRC, the great von Neumann was one of them). Eventually they realized that, while not rigorous, he was right. Of course, he knew he had to be.
I
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
To quote the author himself [about.com]:
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Funny)
(and thus, the science's oldest flame war is brought into the 21st century!)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just Newton though. I had to take a math history class as part of my "capstone" courses to get my CS degree. It was a fascinating course and we learned of so many people who developed different areas of math. One thing I remember well because it was funny is that pretty much everyone who's done significant work on set theory has spent time in mental hospitals, most after they did the work. :)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
(This phrase is engraved round the edge of £2 coins in the UK, since Newton also invented milling the edges of coins to prevent people from clipping them.)
However, he was probably being too modest. It wasn't just calc: this guy basically went away at some point in his life and came up with:
His laws of motion, which explained pretty much every physical phenomenom then studied.
His theory of gravity, which relates the movement of celestial bodies back to the laws of motion.
and
The differential calculus, which provided the maths necessary to apply all this.
He also did work in optics and other fields, and invented the catflap.
If anyone surpasses him as a physicist, it must be Einstein.
If anyone surpasses him both as a physicist and a mathematician, it's news to me.
Respect is due.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Hawking claims that this was a caustic remark on the shortness of physical build of Robert Hooke.
As far as I know, it is not about his work on Mechanics that Newton said this, but about his work on Optics.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
I have also read that Newton's phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" was a veiled insult to Robert Hooke, who was apparently not the tallest of people.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:4, Informative)
Newton's phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" was a veiled insult to Robert Hooke...
This allegation is made almost every time Newton is mentioned on Slashdot but it has no historical basis.
As this analysis [mathforum.org] points out, when Newton uses the phrase he is refering to both Descarte and Hook. The most obvious interpretation is that he is complementing Hook by comparing him to Descarte and referring to them both as giants.
Furthermore, Hook was not especially short and in other cases where Newton engaged in scientific debate he specifically avoided what he called "oblique and glancing expressions".
There is thus every reason to suppose that when Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants, he was acknowledging his debt to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Hook, who was at the time England's most eminent scientist.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Funny)
Not at all !
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
Hooke was a hunchback and sensetive about his height. It was in a letter sent by Newton to his rival that he said:
" If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Interesting)
That's three posts now claiming the "shoulders of giants" remark was a dig at Hooke. The context doesn't really bear it out. Newton sent the letter to diffuse a dispute over attribution, really a simple apology, with this remark as a "no hard feelings" conclusion.
They did have a serious row shortly before the publication of Principia Mathematica when Hooke provoked another argument in a more obnoxious way, and Newton responded by deleting all the (originally generous) citations to Hooke. From this poin
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
shoulders of giants (Score:3, Funny)
Re:shoulders of giants (Score:2)
Or even "If I have failed to see further, it is because I am standing in a giant's footsteps."
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
Sir Isaac Newton, MP (Score:2)
Re:Sir Isaac Newton, MP (Score:2)
If you want to claim to be greatest physicist ever there is pretty serious competition, but the competition for most useless MP is several orders of magnitude harder.
His greatest achievement (Score:3, Insightful)
You omit his greatest contribution to science, which was establishing that the laws of nature are universal. He saw that the force of gravity which makes things fall to the ground is exactly the same force, obeying the same law, as the force of gravity between celestial bodies. It seems obvious today, but it was not at all obvious in the seventeenth century. Most people took it for granted that the celestial bodies were ruled by quite different laws from th
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
I think there's a few mathematicians that are contenders: Gauss and Poincare did incredible work in both mathematics and physics. Riemann is my favorite "also ran". I think he was fairly close to discovering general relativity more than half a century before Einstein. But alas, he died in his fifties.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2, Funny)
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
--Isaac Newton
And let us not forget the greatest one-liner in the history of science:
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing on my shoulders.
--Hal Abelson
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because they don't teach it the way it was developed. What you learn is a santised version and you learn it in the wrong order (compared to order of discovery and development).
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Informative)
To learn it the other way around, as mentioned above, pick up Tom Apostol's Calculus [amazon.com] (2 vols).
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:2)
Fortunately.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
The story about him and Robert Hooke [madasafish.com] is quite and interesting one and makes you think about how much he actually did do. Robert Hooke did infact accuse Newton of plagiarism but the charge was dropped because Hooke didn't have proof of his own theory and made some assumptions on intuitive grounds.
Makes one think that if
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
I do agree that Newton discovered/invented a large part of our mathematics
No he didn't! Elementary calculus may be useful but it's only a teardrop in the ocean of mathematics. Compare to Gauss who contributed to nearly everything mathematics was studying in his time and most of which is still relevant, while Newton's formulations have long since been surpassed by more modern constructions.
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' is crap (Score:2)
Re:'Greatest and Luckiest of Mortals' is crap (Score:2)
Can you imagine what a Tudor pubic region would look and smell like? Remember, we're talking about a culture in which everyone knew that bathing gave you the plague.
I suspect that if I had seen his wife's pussy -- hell, any pussy of the time -- I would never want to have sex again.
luckiest? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:luckiest? (Score:1)
Re:luckiest? (Score:3, Funny)
Perhaps it was the fact that he didn't have access to /. that allowed him the time to make all those great discoveries.
Re:luckiest? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:luckiest? (Score:2)
Re:luckiest? (Score:2)
I guess that would explain how he got so much done. Remember the episode of Seinfield where George Crastansa decides to stop thinking about sex, and becomes some great intellectual?
Re:luckiest? (Score:2)
Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:1)
I recall a quote where Newton wrote that he just needed a bigger fire to accomplish the feat. I read that to say that he understood that he needed more applied energy. It took another couple of hundred years to organize it.
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:2)
You are confusing alchemy with transmutation.
Alchemy was just chemistry (same root, btw), however transmutation was one of its primary goals.
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:2)
And astrology is quite common nowadays.
That's not an excuse.
Re:Great and luck, yes...but... (Score:1)
"Principia" (Score:1)
Good BBC programme yesterday on Newton (Score:5, Informative)
Listen to it here (starts 1 min 50 secs in) [bbc.co.uk]
Various bits about Newton and my youth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Various bits about Newton and my youth (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a place with great "power", even though, over time the building has been greatly altered and the surrounding countryside is now covered in houses, there is still something magical about the place.
Going out on windy days I knew I was possibly standing on the exact same spots where young Isaac did his own first rudimentary experiments (jumping into the wind, to see if affected how far he could
A weird guy (Score:1, Interesting)
In this book het tells how strang guy Newton was. Newton once poked with a needle behind his eyers becease he wanne know what happends. Just by sheer luck nothing happend. He also discovered some verry inportant things but he kept is secret for almost 30 years.
He was briliant but he was also solitary,sombre and nearly paranoea.
Re:A weird guy (Score:2, Funny)
Although a work of fiction, Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver" mentions the needles-in-eyes incident and covers many other episodes in Newton's life (and much more besides, I should add) - I'm sure by now most SlashDot readers have either loved it or loathed it, but if you haven't tried, give it a whirl....
Neal Stephenson is fond of using odd spellings in the book, so you should be right at home...
Re:A weird guy (Score:1)
Beceause English is not mine native language
Many years ago there was a internet rule that it was rude to critize others about spelling mistakes, beceause English is not the native language of most people. Sadly that's changed beside many other things.
Re:A weird guy (Score:1, Interesting)
Newton vs. Einstein (Score:3, Informative)
The author of the site is (or at least was) highly reputed. It was also him who first pointed out that the so-called gravitational anomaly [slashdot.org], found by Pioneer spacecrafts, probably has a simple (Newtonian) explanation: dust in the Kuiper Belt [newtonphysics.on.ca]--and this explanation has been entirely ignored by most physicists.
Some physicists seem to prefer complicated explanations over simple ones.
Re:Newton vs. Einstein (Score:3, Insightful)
It was once conventional wisdom that the earth was flat, that black people were stupid and so on. Most people now scoff at such notions, but happily accepts the new "conventional wi
Re:Newton vs. Einstein (Score:3, Insightful)
When making "top ten" lists of physics, usually Newton, Einstein and Maxwell are among the top three physicists of all time. But such lists are in general dubious; for one thing, Einstein needed the results by Newton and Maxwell to do his own work. Beside, the three worked in very different periods of time with different problems facing physics.
What makes Newton unique, is that Newton would in general make the top ten list of all time
The Indian Roots of Calculus (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah.... (Score:2)
It's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathemat (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing how Newton's status has changed. In the early 70s the Cambridge Union Society actually sold off a copy of the Principia cheap (as the guy who beat me to it gloated at me at considerable length). They wouldn't do that nowadays when virtually every Latin edition is worth a great deal of money.
Just as it's extremely difficult to spend any time in Florence without becoming aware of the Dante connection, it's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton. Whatever his faults - and he was clearly not an easy person to get on with - he made major contributions to optics, pure physics, chemistry, mathematics and the running of the Royal Mint. Other people around at the time did remarkable work - Hooke, Boyle, Liebniz - but Newton surpassed them al for sheer output, breadth and depth. Logically, nowadays, with a much larger and better educated population we should be throwing up lots of Newtons. Why aren't we? Is it because all the relatively easy science and maths has now been done and it takes large organisations and computing power to make any advance at all? Or is it because clever people get pulled off into business or celebrity before they really have a chance to do any work that will really endure?
typo [Re:It's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principi] (Score:3, Interesting)
[I]t's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton.
Well, hard to not encounter anyone who has a King Kong sized statue in his old college's chapel.
I wonder whether the discovery of the Turing Machine, the machine that can be all machines, at the very same place might not be an equally impressive achievement.
--
Try Nuggets [mynuggets.net], out mobile search engine: answer your questions via SMS, across the UK.
105 comments and no reg-free link... sad. (Score:2)
The Man Who Grasped the Heavens' Gravitas
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: October 8, 2004
If Einstein is today's personification of scientific genius, he inherited that exalted role from none other than Isaac Newton, of whom it was said that this was "the greatest and the luckiest of mortals."
In the tribute, credited to the 18th-century French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Newton (1642-1727) was deemed the greatest because he discovered th
Re:I know I'd be pissed... (Score:2)
Which practice? Physics? Museum exhibits in public libraries? Because those cats are already pretty much out of the bag...
Oh, and the exhibit's in New York, not Germany.
(did you mean to go here [slashdot.org]?)
Shouldn't that be? (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be: The cats are already out of the FLAP
ba da bing
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2, Redundant)
Don't know much indeed, apparently you should add Math to that as well.
While some of Newtons ideas were later proven to be incorrect by Einstein, most of his work on Calculus (which he pretty much invented) are still perfectly valid today. Most of Newton's calculus stuff that isn't used nowadays is simply because quicker/better methods have
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:4, Insightful)
Without the imperfect (but functional) model developed by Newton (which we still use today with some refinements! very few situations require a more complex model of forces and effects) it seems unlikley that Einstein would have been able to develop relativity, indeed many other advances would not have been made until someone else replicated Newton's work.
Newton himself said "If I have seen further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (which is etched onto the Brish pound coin) - and he is definatly one of the giants upon which later physists stood. Science is a process, not a product, and viewing it in terms of right and wrong is foolish - it's a series of advances leading to a more and more accurate understanding of the universe. No step towards that goal is any less worthy than another.
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:1, Insightful)
but weren't Newton's ideas debunked by Einstein's theory of relativity?
Not really. Newton's classic mechanics work fine at the macroscopic level. Same for Galileo's relativity. The model doesn't work at the atomic level, and that's where the relativistic model enters. Both are true in a sense.
Also, it doesn't really matter if one model is wrong or not if it helps understanding how things work. Take for example Bohr's Hydrogen model. It wasn't totally correct, but a necessary step to develop a fully
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2, Informative)
You are confusing Relativity and Quantum Theory, Classical physics and Modern.
Relativity is a classical theory of gravitational, i.e. macro, masses.
KFG
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:5, Informative)
These speeds (or more properly velocities perhaps) are those anything less than a significant fraction of the speed of light (or very close to a massive object for gravitational calculations). So, you only need Newton's equations for almost all practical applications.
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:1)
No, no, no. Einstein revised, extended and made Newton's mathmatical model of observable phenomenon (not his ideas) more accurate. Newton's "laws" simply turn out to be a limited case, not inapplicable or "wrong."
In fact, Newton himself was perfectly aware of this and published unexplained phenonenom which his model could not handle.
Relativity is not even considered modern physics, it is classical. Einstein did not kill Newton, he
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2)
Actually, Newton did get it "right" based on measurement technology and information at the time. His laws of motion described things "perfectly" based on his data. It was this simplicity and accuracy that makes his discovery famous.
Though it is true that his discoveries do not hold true at extreme (relativistic) speeds, Newton could not know anyt
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:1)
Newton's equations work in the normal world. It's not until you start playing with extremes that any difference is present. Newtonian physics is still tought in schools. What does that tell you?
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:3, Informative)
Newton's classical mechanics is amazingly accurate when familiar scales and speeds are involved, but breaks down when large speeds are involved. Relativity fixes this; however, both theories break down at the subatomic scale, where we need quantum mechanics instead. (Unfortunately, though, quantum mechanics ONLY holds for the
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2)
There are some assumptions which are not correct for v->c. There is no universal inertial system, everything is related to the position of the observer (that's w
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:5, Funny)
As an engineer, I frequently use Newton's laws of motion. I can't say that I have ever had the need to consider bodies travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light in my work.
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2)
but weren't Newton's ideas debunked by Einstein's theory of relativity? Shouldn't we be focusing on the physicists who got it right, not the ones who were wrong.
In that sense , even Einstein didnt get it completely correct.His special and then the general theories didnt answer all the quantum phenomena.He spent most of his working life trying to find a grand unified theory , infact it was his holy grail.
Remember , Einstein's Nobel prize (in physics) was for his work on the photoelectric effect , bec
Re:I may not know much about physics, (Score:2)