Holy Hell Isaac Newton was one weird dude..

[Aureon]

I'm inclined to think Newton was more important. Or even Maxwell or Bohr. Certainly Maxwell is responsible for the foundations upon which Einstein made his discoveries.

If we're talking physicists I mean. I'm not well positioned to judge the accomplishments of other fields.

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I don't think anyone has gone over Galileo.
The scientific method is the rockstone of all science, and it really wasn't that obvious.
Funnily enough, Alder's razor, also known as Newton's Flaming Laser Sword, didn't really apply to Newton's way of doing things.
(Alder's Razor states that what cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating, in a heuristic and not absolute way)

 

[Aaronrules380]

Taking alchemy and the occult seriously during a time where the concept of atoms, cells, electricity, and spectroscopy didn't exist is hardly scandalous. 31 was old age and they washed their ass like once a month, it was a different time.

Imagine formalizing a branch of mathematical principles that hundreds of years later serves as the foundation of the modern description of the universe, and having people balance that against believing in the fucking aether or whatever the fuck.

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Seriously. We know those things are ridiculous now because scientists in the past have taken the time to study them and their results concluded as much. While doubt and skepticism are important for scientists, the ideal scientist should never inherently assume something is true or not before it's been tested, and the role of skepticism is to question the results even after the tests are out to see if they might've done something wrong or missed out on an important detail

 

[Deleted member 57578]

Why are you so weirdly hung up on "inventor".

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I wouldn't call it a weird hang up- I like the history of math and science, and I think the "Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy" is one of the more interesting episodes. The difference between the logical and historical development of calculus is one of the best examples of the difference between how a subject is taught vs how it was developed/discovered/invented.

I think it parallels the difference between Newton as he was, vs Newton as we'd be inclined to imagine a 'great scientist'- as many people have also discussed in the thread.

 

[Spinluck]

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lmfao

 

[III-V]

I'm not sure "hardline rationalism" really exists as a thing that perniciously choked out occultism or occult-scholarly syncretism. It was a hardline rational thing to believe in alchemy when alchemy was en vogue, because alchemy is in part an experimentalist practice that produced stuff. Believing that herbs could cure peoples' diseases has literally never NOT been rational, but the explanatory basis for why has changed over the centuries from spirits to correspondences to molecular makeup. Graeco-Egyptian magic has the marks of empiricism all over it-- the priests were interested in success and failure rates for their spells and wrote them on their papyri. The scientific method dates back to al-Haytham back in the 10th century or so. The late 18th, early 19th century is around when we start getting philosophical materialism as a concrete movement, starting with Deism and then working towards a wholly naturalistic description of the universe. But materialists have been around for eons. The original priesthood of the temple in Jerusalem were materialists, after a fashion-- while they believed in God, they didn't believe in an afterlife and thought of keeping Torah as just a good way to live. The dualism we associate with believing in these things of course didn't really exist because the range of observable phenomena was such that you don't have this "non-overlapping ministeria" thing we have today. Gautama Buddha had to produce arguments against the wholly materialist viewpoint which he obviously must have encountered often enough. Materialism has been around for as long as religion has, really.

Simultaneously, Church pushback to science really ramped up around the 18th and 19h centuries. Stuff like Darwin, but also stuff like just reacting to the Deists in the first place. I imagine that had more to do with the problems. There's also the skeptical movement to consider. Ultimately, that has its roots in hunting down frauds. You literally have no idea just how bad the spiritualist movement was when it came to fraud. Similarly, there's been snake oil salesmen of all kinds making extraordinary claims. The dogged pursuit of these scam artists is a good thing, and it's probably part of the culture that you describe as "hardline rationalism." The best inoculation against frauds like them is simply to demand evidence for all claims. As people kept more desperately clamoring for there to be "proof" of magical phenomena, frauds managed to take all kinds of advantage and simultaneously scientifically-minded individuals became that much more rigorous in their pursuit of the truth. This, of course, does tend to devalue mystical insights in the eyes of the scientific community.

In the US the skeptical tradition has a lot to do with popular communicators of science. Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the name of science" is a good example and the inspiration for later groups like the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

So in short: "hardline skepticism" began wherever one group of people made extraordinary claims about having abilities unexplained by current science, another group of people believed them to the point where it would have been unhealthy if they were wrong, and a third group decided they needed to check if the first group was telling the truth.

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As was already mentioned in the thread, if you think THAT'S wild, look up Jack Parsons, one of the earliest figures in the history of the US's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Directly mentored by Aleister Crowley, had L. Ron Hubbard as his lab assistant, LOST HIS FIRST WIFE TO L. RON HUBBARD, and then got blown up by fulminate of mercury like in breaking bad. He made L. Ron watch him as he nutted all over some stone tablets, though, so I guess he got one on him.



I mean, not only that, but like... you ever looked into Hegel's, erm, "interests?" If you connect Hegel's thought to his ACTUAL intellectual antecedents, it becomes no great stretch of the imagination to say that Hegel's successors are just as much inheritors of the Western Mystery Tradition as anything else. My NUCLEAR TAKE is that Marxism, Dialectical Materialism especially, is effectively a materialist Hermeticism without a law of correspondences. A lot more of the world we live in today comes from these weird mystical traditions than you might expect.

It's not even a "past" thing, really. I'm aware of at least a few dudes with PHDs in stuff like neuropsychology who take this occultism stuff seriously. And at least one PhD in history who's recognized for his work in charting the migratory path of ceremonial magic in the West who got that PhD because he was a ceremonial magician.



I hard agree on this. I'm of the opinion that these people probably COULDN'T do the accomplishments that they did if they didn't believe what they did. Look at Srinivasa Ramanujan and how his religious experiences connected intimately with his mathematical proofs. Or look at John Dee's understanding of mathematics, which is pretty much what ended up leading him to where he ended up. Or, again, Jack Parsons. A lot of the time we see people connecting these powerful, internal, and numinous experiences and then bringing something immensely practical into our shared world.

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Thanks for the reflective posts.

 

[Spinluck]

My Physics teacher, who had a degree in Chemistry, was religious as all get out. He was a good teacher too. Humans can be that way.

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Yup, I had a godtier Chemistry teacher who was by the books and fundamentals know Chemistry like the back of his hand.

He also told us Satan buried dinosaur bones to trick us into thinking the world wasn't 6000yrs old.

He would also bust out a terrible towel and spin whenever the Steelers would win-- this was in Florida lol.

Can't make this up.

 

[Freedom = $1.05]

It's all relative really

 

[Deleted member 18360]

Thanks for the reflective posts.

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Yeah Deffers posts in this thread were rather good. A lot of stuff I didn't know or connections I hadn't formed despite us both apparently having really similar interests. Though I've for a long time wanted to connect the Hegelian tradition to the western occult tradition just because it seemed apparent to me that the modes or styles of thought are quite similar. I also would typically think of the Greek and Egyptian traditions/Hermeticism as being idealist (matter decidedly derivative from mind stuff), but that's exactly the sort of quasi-apocryphal explanation you might expect because it seems to satisfy the desire to tie up loose ends, or to make it seem more intelligible to a more modern audience since that would have been a more active question in the renaissance or whatever.

 

[Pau]

You guys now got me interested in Escaflowne, what's the best way to watch?

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Pretty sure it's still on the Funimation app. I think you can watch it free, but it has ads.

 

[RangerBAD]

Hahaha, yes. It's fucking great. Even though it's old, I don't want to spoil people telling them the main villain is actually Isaac Newton, but I haven't been able to get anyone to keep watching until the reveal.

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You can't get people to finish watching Escaflowne?!

 

[Threadkular]

If this leads to cancelling Isaac Newton I'm done with the internet.

Imagine feeling superior to Newton.

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Yeah I don't know what it is but it's this thread where I'm realizing maybe we all need to be more humble and self aware when looking at the past.

 

[Pau]

You can't get people to finish watching Escaflowne?!

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My friends who like anime can't get over the character designs, and everyone else doesn't want to watch anime. :/

Luckily my boyfriend watched it all with me and we had an utter blast.

 

[The Albatross]

Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything is just full of these kinds of anecdotes and stories of the brilliant people who changed the world through their discoveries and creations as well as just how fucking crazy many of them were.

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One of my favorite books. I forgot this aspect of it.

Bryson has a new book about the body that comes out soon

 

[The Albatross]

Taking alchemy and the occult seriously during a time where the concept of atoms, cells, electricity, and spectroscopy didn't exist is hardly scandalous. 31 was old age and they washed their ass like once a month, it was a different time.

Imagine formalizing a branch of mathematical principles that hundreds of years later serves as the foundation of the modern description of the universe, and having people balance that against believing in the fucking aether or whatever the fuck.

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Yeah the people discounting Newton in this thread are hilarious.

 

[Deffers]

Thanks for the reflective posts.

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Yeah Deffers posts in this thread were rather good. A lot of stuff I didn't know or connections I hadn't formed despite us both apparently having really similar interests. Though I've for a long time wanted to connect the Hegelian tradition to the western occult tradition just because it seemed apparent to me that the modes or styles of thought are quite similar. I also would typically think of the Greek and Egyptian traditions/Hermeticism as being idealist (matter decidedly derivative from mind stuff), but that's exactly the sort of quasi-apocryphal explanation you might expect because it seems to satisfy the desire to tie up loose ends, or to make it seem more intelligible to a more modern audience since that would have been a more active question in the renaissance or whatever.

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Aw, thanks, guys! And yeah, umop, if you're interested in Hegel's antecedents, Marxists.org hosts a nice overview of the Hermeticism inherent to Hegel. I was actually gonna send you a followup PM to our earlier discussions where I was going to mention how my commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah mentions a rabbi's comparison of the three-element system inherent to Jewish mysticism as a burning piece of coal and how that's connected to the description of the dialectic you quoted from Hegel some months back... but then I forgot. But now I remember! And yeah, the question of idealism is quite odd in the Graeco-Egyptian tradition, and not improved by the fact that sometimes people try to "innovate" on Hermetic philosophy without actually letting anybody know that's what they're trying to do, making it very hard to see what the philosophical origins of any given tradition are.

 

[BossAttack]

Imagine feeling superior to Newton.

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LOL.

Only on Era.

 

[RangerBAD]

My friends who like anime can't get over the character designs, and everyone else doesn't want to watch anime. :/

Luckily my boyfriend watched it all with me and we had an utter blast.

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I guess the designs are too shoujo? I don't get it. lol

 

[Landy828]

He died a virgin, you know.

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[Jroc]

Kind of shocked that Newton isn't on any of the British banknotes.

 

[Sunster]

Genius' are like always weird I think.

 

[Deleted member 40797]

I'm inclined to think Newton was more important. Or even Maxwell or Bohr. Certainly Maxwell is responsible for the foundations upon which Einstein made his discoveries.

If we're talking physicists I mean. I'm not well positioned to judge the accomplishments of other fields.

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The discovery of analytic geometry by Descartes and Fermat (independently of its development in Greece and Persia) was arguably more important than the description of gravitation, electromagnetism or relativity - the notion that we can systematically translate between geometric and algebraic descriptions of the world is non-trivial, and forms the mathematical foundations of those physical theories (and the mathematics in which they are expressed).

 

[ThousandEyes]

The discovery of analytic geometry by Descartes and Fermat (independently of its development in Greece and Persia) was arguably more important than the description of gravitation, electromagnetism or relativity - the notion that we can systematically translate between geometric and algebraic descriptions of the world is non-trivial, and forms the mathematical foundations of those physical theories (and the mathematics in which they are expressed).

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do you stil consider Newton a greater scientist than Descartes?

 

[Deleted member 40797]

do you stil consider Newton a greater scientist than Descartes?

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Probably. However, it's more useful to think in terms of "better or worse ideas" than "better or worse scientists."

 

[ThousandEyes]

My professor said Newton was what really caused the break between Europe and the rest of the world in terms of modern science..

India, China, Middle East etc. were all much more sophisticated and advanced in science then Europe for centuries and then somehow that entirely shifted. what caused that shift?

Joseph Needham tried answering this question known as the "Needham Question"


"Needham's Grand Question", also known as "The Needham Question", is this: why had China and India been overtaken by the West in science and technology, despite their earlier successes? In Needham's words, "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo [but] had not developed in Chinese civilisation or Indian civilisation?"[17] [18]
"Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the four most important inventions facilitating the West's transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China".[19] Needham's works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasises the "diffusionist" approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world. Needham thought the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was "grossly overrated".[20]

 

[Pau]

The difference between Isaac Newton and me is that if I lived during his time I would have believed most of the crazy shit he did without coming up with anything useful like calculus. At most I would have doubted some stuff and substituted my own dumb theories that wouldn't hold until today. :P

I guess the designs are too shoujo? I don't get it. lol

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The noses are weird? I honestly don't know. I think part of it is that Escaflowne isn't really in the current zeitgeist so they aren't interested in overlooking its flaws like they will for other newer and more popular shows.

 

[RangerBAD]

The difference between Isaac Newton and me is that if I lived during his time I would have believed most of the crazy shit he did without coming up with anything useful like calculus. At most I would have doubted some stuff and substituted my own dumb theories that wouldn't hold until today. :P


The noses are weird? I honestly don't know. I think part of it is that Escaflowne isn't really in the current zeitgeist so they aren't interested in overlooking its flaws like they will for other newer and more popular shows.

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Their loss. One of my favorites. Such a memorable first episode too.

 

[ThousandEyes]

Tier: Newton,Darwin,Eisntein

 

[ThousandEyes]

would you guys agree he is the greatest intellect of all time?

 

[Fatoy]

would you guys agree he is the greatest intellect of all time?

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Probably not. Everything is relative to its time, of course, but the greatest would arguably be someone like Aristotle who wrestled with fundamental concepts almost two and a half millennia ago, but whose work is still actively taught and considered a cornerstone of ethics, logic, and philosophy. It's no small feat to tackle the biggest questions and to come away with ideas that hold water in a world unimaginably different from your own.

 

[ThousandEyes]

Probably not. Everything is relative to its time, of course, but the greatest would arguably be someone like Aristotle who wrestled with fundamental concepts almost two and a half millennia ago, but whose work is still actively taught and considered a cornerstone of ethics, logic, and philosophy.

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I heard somewhere, it seems like a meme, but that Aristotle held back science for thousands of years...is this true?

 

[Fatoy]

I heard somewhere, it seems like a meme, but that Aristotle held back science for thousands of years...is this true?

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Again, you have to consider these people as products of their time, and Aristotle definitely espoused some stuff about different types of souls that is patently nonsense today. He was also, apparently, the kind of thinker that ranked intuition, or a historical analogue of it, just as highly as objective evidence - something that also makes sense when you consider that he lived in an era where there was no such thing as a codified scientific method.

Where you can point more direct blame at Aristotle, though, is coming up with an "elemental" taxonomy that included a divine element and that gave rise to a lot of the magical thinking that drove alchemy for centuries afterwards. Arguably, if he hadn't done that, we might have arrived at actual chemistry a lot quicker.

When you're reaching back this far, though, everyone is wrong about something. Like you've already said about Newton, having some stuff figured out doesn't automatically qualify you for figuring out everything. But I'd still argue that Aristotle is one of the polymaths with the most enduring impact.

 

[WeAreStarStuff]

I mean the dude created calculus. You've got to be a little crazy when you're at that level.

 

[PJV3]

Kind of shocked that Newton isn't on any of the British banknotes.

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He used to be on the one quid note when i was a nipper.

 

[Stinkles]

He used to be on the one quid note when i was a nipper.

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he was replaced by Songs of Praise and Farmer's Outlook by thatcher. Then ginger spice during the last time Britain actually voted cleanly* for a primeminister (Tony Blair) which was literally 22 years ago which is crazy if you think about it.

*incumbency, replacement, coalitions, replacements for the next 22 years.

 

[ThousandEyes]

what did Newton mean by hypothesis non fingo

here is what he said in the Principia

"

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea."​

 

[TheMan]

what did Newton mean by hypothesis non fingo

here is what he said in the Principia

"

I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea."​

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I think he's saying that can explain what happens but not why

 

[ThousandEyes]

I think he's saying that can explain what happens but not why

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this seems to be the area that scientists and physicists are inadequate in

they can only explain what causes something but never why, this is where the philosophers and metaphysicians are more equipped for such questions

 

[LookAtMeGo]

Speaking of weird dudes. John Dee and Edward Kelly were pretty strange.
Edward Kelly
John Dee

Trivia: They came up with a language called "Enochian" which was said to be the language spoken by angels. TOOL had a song called " Faaip de Oiad" which was the last song on the Laturalus album is Enochian and a lot of their imagery they use is influenced by Enochian magic.

 

[danmaku]

Speaking of weird dudes. John Dee and Edward Kelly were pretty strange.
Edward Kelly
John Dee

Trivia: They came up with a language called "Enochian" which was said to be the language spoken by angels. TOOL had a song called " Faaip de Oiad" which was the last song on the Laturalus album is Enochian and a lot of their imagery they use is influenced by Enochian magic.

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Also, all the angels in Bayonetta speak Enochian.

 

[Ragnar]

I heard somewhere, it seems like a meme, but that Aristotle held back science for thousands of years...is this true?

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I don't know how one could quantify such a thing. It's certainly true that he was such an authority that (for that more or less two millennia following his death) whenever there was a clash between his word on one side and repeated experimental results/"common sense" on the other side, scientists often had a tendency to defer to Aristotle rather than look at what was in front of them.

 

[LookAtMeGo]

Also, all the angels in Bayonetta speak Enochian.

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Cool. Didn't know that.

 

[Shiloh]

My professor said Newton was what really caused the break between Europe and the rest of the world in terms of modern science..

India, China, Middle East etc. were all much more sophisticated and advanced in science then Europe for centuries and then somehow that entirely shifted. what caused that shift?

Joseph Needham tried answering this question known as the "Needham Question"


"Needham's Grand Question", also known as "The Needham Question", is this: why had China and India been overtaken by the West in science and technology, despite their earlier successes? In Needham's words, "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo [but] had not developed in Chinese civilisation or Indian civilisation?"[17] [18]
"Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and paper and printing, which Francis Bacon considered as the four most important inventions facilitating the West's transformation from the Dark Ages to the modern world, were invented in China".[19] Needham's works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasises the "diffusionist" approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world. Needham thought the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was "grossly overrated".[20]

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Now reading up on this, and it's some neat stuff

 

[BebopCola]

Newton was, perhaps, the first true prophet of the Machine God, and thus was he showered with rewards for the betterment of Terra

 

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I roleplay as Newton when I play Cultist Simulator.

 

[ilium]

I don't think this was weird at all for that time. This should help bring some clarity into the matter: The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science

 

[ThousandEyes]

I don't think this was weird at all for that time. This should help bring some clarity into the matter: The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science

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Interesting read

 

[Sheepinator]

As smart as Newton was, he still lost millions in the stock market. There was a bubble in South Sea shares in 1720, and he made £7K. A few months later he got back in, and ended up losing £20K, which is the equivalent of over $3M now. Apparently he forbade anyone from speaking the words "South Sea" in his presence for the rest of his life.

 

[Kay]

would you guys agree he is the greatest intellect of all time?

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probably rate Aristotle above in terms of pure breadth of topics and enduring legacy.

 

[Tawpgun]

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I audibly laughed

 

[Jmdajr]

"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."- John Maynard Keynes

Been Reading a lot about Newton lately. It's crazy to think that he is arguably the greatest scientist in history and yet looked at his scientific work as lesser importance then his religious studies or occult studies

He was into weird stuff, we all know the story of how he stuck a needle in his eye for an experiment. Some of his occult studies are crazy though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies#Newton's_chronology

He studied intensively on the philosopher's stone. His biblical studies focused on numerology, the dimensions of Solomon's Temple, his 2060 prophecy. He wrote extensively on chronology, Atlantis, etc.

http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/ you can see all his alchemy, religious and mathematical/scientific work on this page. It's just incredible to read about this stuff. There's this conception that Newton was the king of reason and paradigm of rationality but he was nothing but the sort. In fact he didn't make a distinction between science and religion, to him it was all part of one grand project in trying to decipher reality

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What happens in 2060?