{"quotes":[{"text":"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.","author":"John Maynard Keynes","tags":["isaac-newton","magic","science"],"id":41575,"author_id":"John+Maynard+Keynes"},{"text":"There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["albert-einstein","disprove","einstein","honor","imperfection","interesting","isaac-newton","newton","revere","reward","science","structure"],"id":158210,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.","author":"Geoffrey Miller","tags":["alchemy","asperger-s","asperger-s-syndrome","asperger-syndrome","awkwardness","backlash","clickbait","cryptography","depression","dignity","disrespect","diversity","eccentric","equity","expulsion","inclusion","inquisition","intellectual","isaac-newton","laws","literary-agent","mania","moods","mysticism","obsessive","offensive","outrage","paranoid","psychotic","publish","social-media","speech-codes","stutter","time-jump","time-travelling","twitter","universe","unstable","virtue-signal","virtue-signalling"],"id":179572,"author_id":"Geoffrey+Miller"},{"text":"As to your Newton, I confess I do not understand his void and his gravity; I admit he has demonstrated the movement of the heavenly bodies with more exactitude than his forerunners; but you will admit it is an absurdity to maintain the existence of No.","author":"Frederick the Great","tags":["absurdity","first-law-of-motion","isaac-newton","nothing","physics","void"],"id":185548,"author_id":"Frederick+the+Great"},{"text":"And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curve but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put it another way, Isaac wanted to be able to walk up to a blank wall on a cloudy day, stab a gnomom into it, and draw all of the curves simply by knowing where shadow would pass. This was the same thing as knowing where the sun would be in the sky and that was the same as knowing where the Earth was in its circuit around the sun, and in its daily rotation. Though as months went on, Daniel understood that Isaac wanted to be able to do the same thing even if the blank wall happened to be situated on, say, the moon that Christiaan Huygens had lately discovered revolving around Saturn. Exactly how this might be accomplished was a question with ramifications that extended into such fields as would Isaac, and Daniel for that matter, be thrown out of Trinity College? Were the Earth and all the works of man nearing the end of a long, relentless decay that had begun with the expulsion from Eden, and that would very soon culminate in the apocalypse? Or might things actually be getting better, with the promise of continuing to do so? Did people have souls? Did they have free will?","author":"Neal Stephenson","tags":["christiaan-huygens","free-will","isaac-newton","science"],"id":186539,"author_id":"Neal+Stephenson"},{"text":"...The Presidential election has given me less anxiety than I myself could have imagined. The next administration will be a troublesome one, to whomsoever it falls, and our John has been too much worn to contend much longer with conflicting factions. I call him our John, because, when you were at the Cul de sac at Paris, he appeared to me to be almost as much your boy as.","author":"John Adams","tags":["agnosticism","belief","blasphemy","confessions-of-faith","creeds","episcopal","europeans","flourens","golden-rule","herschel","isaac-newton","jean-pierre-flourens","jefferson","jews","judaism","liberal-science","matter-and-spirit","newton","presbyterian","science","thomas-jefferson","university-of-virginia","virginia","william-herschel"],"id":192799,"author_id":"John+Adams"},{"text":"There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... The want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.","author":"George Boole","tags":["formula","inquiry","isaac-newton","joseph-louis-lagrange","lagrange","math","mathematics","motion-of-the-planets","newton","physics","science"],"id":198914,"author_id":"George+Boole"},{"text":"The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.","author":"Nicholas Murray Butler","tags":["analytical-geometry","calculus","carl-friedrich-gauss","descartes","gauss","geometry","gottfried-leibniz","gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz","isaac-newton","leibniz","lobachevsky","mathematics","newton","philosophers","philosophy","reason","rene-descartes","riemann","science","scientists","supremacy","sylvester"],"id":205185,"author_id":"Nicholas+Murray+Butler"},{"text":"Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.","author":"Isaac Newton","tags":["friend","isaac-newton","truth"],"id":205486,"author_id":"Isaac+Newton"},{"text":"There was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach; yet, for the same master, he would have gladly gone to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifice of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.","author":"Robert Leckie","tags":["guadalcanal","isaac-newton","sacrifice","victims","world-war-ii"],"id":270415,"author_id":"Robert+Leckie"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":16,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}