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Holy Hell Isaac Newton was one weird dude..
- Thread starter ThousandEyes
- Start date
maybe all those weird things are real and they were what they made discover all the other things?
we will never know!
lets cancel newton
we will never know!
lets cancel newton
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my life has been a lieExcept he didn't die, in the anime documentary Vision of Escaflowne we clearly see he traveled to another planet and through science he became the leader of the biggest empire that world had ever known
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Feel like this all says far more about the narrow and prescriptive ways we codify and represent human creativity and intelligence and the interplay between faith, reason, morals, social mores, etc etc etc...
'I am surprised' says more about the speaker than anything or anyone else.
'I am surprised' says more about the speaker than anything or anyone else.
From Wikipedia:
Now I want a detective series with Isaac Newton hunting coin forgers.
Imagine the potential for puns
"I think you haven't grasped the gravity of your situation..."
Now I want a detective series with Isaac Newton hunting coin forgers.
Imagine the potential for puns
"I think you haven't grasped the gravity of your situation..."
yeah, like if a person pursuing the truths of universe is supposed to be this cold "only facts" matter entity that dont care about anything else
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.
One of my favourite anecdotes about Newton is how when approached by astronomer (and many other things) Edmond Halley about proving Kepler's Law, good old Isaac was like: "Oh yeah the planet's orbits are ellipses, I already calculated and proved that on a piece of paper I can't find right now".
And with Halley's encouragement he wrote and published the Principia 2 years later.
And with Halley's encouragement he wrote and published the Principia 2 years later.
"My fist will continue to travel indefinitely until stopped by your face!"
What is this supposed to mean? I would argue he was pretty smart about everything, granted he had some out there views, but faith in some unknown does not equate to a lack of intelligence. He knew what he believed.
You do realize that pretty much all scientists during that time period were exactly as you described? Alchemy was a legitimate study of field during this time and any self-respecting scientists was expected to be well versed in its study.
When I started telling people that is when I finally got them to watch it lol
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Except he didn't die, in the anime documentary Vision of Escaflowne we clearly see he traveled to another planet and through science he became the leader of the biggest empire that world had ever known
Thank-you. I've been saying this for ages! He's still out there!!
Well, why not? Why on earth would someone need to be perfect in everything they do in order to receive praise for amazing things they've done?
Not only did he die a virgin, he considered life long celibacy his greatest achievement.
the anime doesn't follow him closely, he starts appearing on the regular in the second half of the series, but anyways Escaflowne is a great anime if you like steampunk, great music and giant robots
Newton intercepts a gang of forgers and upon discovering that the head of the counterfeiting enterprise has compelled his son to join the operation:
"I see the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!"
Bit of a dick tbh. Why did he have to go and invent gravity? If he hadn't, we'd all be able to fly everywhere.
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.
There's also a throughline from esoteric orders like the Rosicrucians - > the Invisible College -> the Royal Society. It sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel, but it's pretty funny to think about how much science owes to the weirdo mystics who preserved a lot of the mathematical/philosophical/scientific concepts that were largely shunned in the West before the Enlightenment.
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In many ways the enlightenment would of shunned someone like Newton
These are not on the same spectrum. Einstein was an agnostic atheist. He clearly said he didn't believe in any kind of a personal god.
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
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All I can say is those were wild times and it's a crime that Hollywood insists on making Sherlock Holmes movies instead.
I get it...Wild Wild West, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were duds but why give up so quickly?
I get it...Wild Wild West, Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen were duds but why give up so quickly?
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.
People in here seem nuts to me. Like, they think of they had lived in Newton's time they would have been paragons of rationalism or something?
On the one hand, there are very few people out there who were as kooky as Newton. But at the same time there is no one who has such staggering achievements either. I think that it's easy to celebrate those achievements even though it's attached to such a kooky person.