Isaac Newton

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Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, Astronomia nova, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Richard Feynman, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

PUBLISHED WORKS OF NEWTON There is no such thing as The Collected Works of Isaac Newton. The Newton Project, at Imperial College, London, has long-term plans for the theological, alchemical, and Mint writings. Meanwhile two monuments of scholarship are the collected correspondence and the collected mathematical papers: Turnbull, Herbert W.; Scott, John F.; Hall, A. Rupert; and Tilling, Laura, eds. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (cited as Corres). Seven volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. Whiteside, D. T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (cited as Math). Eight volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967–80.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall. New York: Norton, 1995. The Preliminary Manuscripts for Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, 1684–85. Introduction by D. T. Whiteside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Unpublished First Version of Isaac Newton’s Cambridge Lectures on Optics, 1670–1672.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2001. Manuel, Frank. Isaac Newton, Historian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. ———. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. McGuire, J. E. Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics of Nature. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. McGuire, J. E.; and Rattansi, Piyo M., “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan.’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21-2: 108–42 McKnight, Stephen A. ed. Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. McLachlan, H., ed. Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts.

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

See Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 24. 45 “When one . . . compares”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 45 Frederick the Great declared: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 414. 46 “I invariably took”: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 43. 46 His favorite wedding gift: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 582. 46 slept in his clothes: Gale Christianson, Isaac Newton, p. 65. 46 seventeen portraits: Peter Ackroyd, Newton, p. 98. 46 so much time working with mercury: Milo Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” p. 27. 46 “It’s so rare,” the Duchess: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 47 “a Machine for walking on water”: The drawing comes from a 1637 text by Daniel Schwenter, a German mathematician and inventor, titled Deliciae physico-mathematicae.

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., p. 117, quoting Eike Hirsch. 319 “stone dolls”: Milo Keynes discusses Newton’s views on art and literature in “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” pp. 26–27. 319 “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons”: from an interview with Huxley in J. W. N. Sullivan, Contemporary Mind (London: Toulmin, 1934), p. 143. 319 “The more I learned”: I interviewed Westfall in connection with an article marking the three hundredth anniversary of the Principia. See Edward Dolnick, “Sir Isaac Newton,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1987. Westfall used the same “wholly other” phrase in the preface to Never at Rest, p. x, where he discussed Newton’s uniqueness in a bit more detail. 320 “He cried out with admiration”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 473. 320 His fellow professors did not know: Ibid., p. 194.

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Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. “Newton and the Scientific Revolution.” In Stayer, ed., Newton’s Dream. ———. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. ———. “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience, 1662 (1).” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18, no. 1 (June 1963), pp. 10–16. White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Perseus, 1997. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1925. Whiteside, D. T. “Isaac Newton: Birth of a Mathematician.”

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

THE TRICKS THAT SCHOOLMASTERS USED Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 132. THE “GENERATION OF FIGURES BY MOTION” Isaac Newton, in a document written as part of the conflict with Gottfried Leibniz on who first invented calculus, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 55n to chapter 4. THE “INFINITELY LITTLE LINES” Isaac Newton, Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, 1664–1666, D. T. Whiteside, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 382 et seq. AS HE TOLD THE STORY SIXTY YEARS LATER William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752), MS/142, Royal Society Library, London, p. 15r. SUDDENLY, AN APPLE FELL No anecdotes about an apple survive from near the time Newton claims to have been inspired by its fall.

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id=0AzP9WLLJLcC&pg=PA67&dq=zeno+achilles&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFtcvXnurhAhVIwlkKHXQ3CocQ6AEINjAC#v=onepage&q=zeno%20achilles&f=false. BUT NEITHER PHILOSOPHICAL RIGOR NOR COMMON SENSE See Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 42. GALILEO KNEW THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING VITAL Quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 41. NEWTON HIMSELF, IN HIS FIRST MONTHS AT WOOLSTHORPE Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 131. “THE CROOKEDNESS IN LINES” Isaac Newton, “Newton’s Waste Book,” http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/​view/​texts/​normalized/​NATP00221. BUT NEWTON’S THINKING IN THE LAST MONTHS OF 1665 The interplay between mechanical constructions of curves and Newton’s analytic approach is a gloss on Richard Westfall’s more technical exposition in Never at Rest, pp. 126–34.

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I also consulted James Gleick’s treatment of the same material in Isaac Newton, pp. 54–59. My Newton and the Counterfeiter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) also discusses these events on pp. 15–20. HE “FOUND THEM ANSWER PRETTY NEARLY” Isaac Newton, draft of a letter to Pierre des Maiseaux, probably in the summer of 1718, quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Newton produced several drafts of this letter, many of which are cited in the notes to the version in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 6, 1713–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), document 1295 pp. 454–562.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 7. The Secret Fountain 167 Isaac Newton: For biographical information, see Gleick, Isaac Newton. See also Westfall, Never at Rest, and I. B. Cohen, “Isaac Newton,” in vol. 10 of Gillispie, Complete Dictionary, with amendments by G. E. Smith and W. Newman in vol. 23. For Newton’s mathematics, see Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers, vols. 1 and 2; Edwards, The Historical Development; Grattan-Guinness, From the Calculus; Rickey, “Isaac Newton”; Dunham, Journey Through Genius; Katz, History of Mathematics; Guicciardini, Reading the Principia; Dunham, The Calculus Gallery; Simmons, Calculus Gems; Guicciardini, Isaac Newton; Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History; and Burton, History of Mathematics. 168 “between straight and curved lines”: René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes: With a Facsimile of the First Edition, translated by David E.

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Chapter 7 focuses on Hobbes as would-be geometer. 196 a “scab of symbols”: Quoted in Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History, 164. 196 “scurvy book”: Ibid. 196 not “worthy of public utterance”: Quoted in Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 343. 196 “Our specious algebra”: Ibid. 8. Fictions of the Mind 199 “His name is Mr. Newton”: Letter from Isaac Barrow to John Collins, August 20, 1669, quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, 68. 199 “send me the proof”: Letter 158, from Leibniz to Oldenburg, May 2, 1676, in Turnbull, Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 4. For more on the Newton-Leibniz correspondence, see Mackinnon, “Newton’s Teaser.” Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 354–61, offers a particularly clear and helpful analysis of the mathematical cat-and-mouse game taking place between Newton and Leibniz in the letters.

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The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 2, 1676–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Wardhaugh, Benjamin. “Musical Logarithms in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes, Mercator, Newton.” Historia Mathematica 35 (2008): 19–36. Wasserman, Steven A., and Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. “Biochemical Topology: Applications to DNA Recombination and Replication.” Science 232, no. 4753 (1986): 951–60. Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Whiteside, Derek T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———.

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

MacDougall be found, I wonder?” “The Theater Royal, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively. “Say no more, Miss Barton.” Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London LATER THAT DAY “I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton. He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting would best suit the gravity of the occasion, how much time to spend reminiscing about student days in Cambridge, and whether to say anything about their last encounter, which had gone as badly as any social encounter, short of homicide, could go.

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For it seems to me that if such Herculean efforts are to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude anywhere.” Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an excellent sea-going chronometer, which no one knew how to make yet; or by watching the satellites of Jupiter through an excellent sea-going telescope, which no one knew how to make yet; or by looking at the position of the moon and comparing it against calculations derived from his, i.e., Sir Isaac Newton’s, lunar theory, which was not quite finished yet but would be coming out any minute now in a book.

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“Even if I did, my lord, ’twould never stand; for the record now shows that the true butt at which Jack the Coiner aimed his shaft was not the Jewels but the Mint—to be specific, the Pyx. And how would I benefit from some compromise of the Pyx?” “How could anyone conceivably benefit from it?” Bolingbroke wanted to know. “It is of no account,” Isaac Newton broke in, “as the Pyx was never compromised!” “Sir Isaac Newton! We’ve not heard from you yet. For the benefit of those here who have never seen the Pyx, would you be so good as to explain its workings?” “It would be my pleasure, my lord,” said Newton, stepping forward, eluding the hand of the Marquis of Ravenscar who had groped forward, out of some instinct, trying to yank him back from the abyss.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

CHAPTER 2 Human Frailty Scientists are too contentious and too morally and intellectually fragile to follow any method consistently. AS THE MOON’S DISK CREPT across the face of the sun on May 29, 1919, a new science of gravity hung in the balance. Just a few years earlier, Albert Einstein had formulated his theory of general relativity, a conceptually radical replacement for the gravitational theory that made Isaac Newton famous at the beginning of modern science, more than two hundred years before. Whereas Newton held that massive bodies exert upon each other a “force of gravity,” Einstein said that they rather bend the space and time around them, giving it a characteristic curvature. When objects do their best to trace straight lines through this twisted medium, they move in a way that suggests the existence of gravitational force—but there is in fact no such thing.

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Ernst Haeckel embellished his careful drawings of animal embryos around the same time to support his thesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that a human embryo, for example, passes through stages in which it takes on forms more or less identical to those of fish embryos, then amphibian embryos, then bird embryos. Robert Millikan, in pulling together the data from which he inferred the electric charge of a single electron—work that earned him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics—omitted many measurements that did not “look right,” while claiming to have included everything. Even Isaac Newton manipulated certain empirical quantities to better fit his theories, tactics that in one case amounted, wrote his biographer Richard Westfall, to “nothing short of deliberate fraud.” There is one respect, I must note, in which Eddington and other modern scientists are almost exceptionlessly careful and methodical.

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The war in Europe was over. Germany lay in ruins; France was triumphant; England, having executed its king, Charles I, was a republic. Over the silent battlefields settled a peace born of exhaustion. In the universities and learned societies, by contrast, the gravity wars were poised to begin. Isaac Newton was 7 years old. By the age of 11, he was ranked the second worst pupil in his class at King’s School in Grantham, Lincolnshire. At some point, however—possibly in reaction to his bullying by the third worst pupil—he threw himself into his studies, which drew him to Cambridge University’s Trinity College.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

. … This Oeconomy depends on attractive power first discovered by the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton” (Keill, 1708, pp. v–vi, 8). 6 Boerhaave serves as another classic example of the kind of epigone that is instrumental in disseminating the ideas of the true cultural entrepreneurs, in his case Descartes and Newton. Famous and celebrated in his own days, his original contributions were few and middling, yet he helped spread the main cultural beliefs of the Enlightenment, not only in his own country but throughout Europe. 7 In his History of Astronomy, Smith wrote that “Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis …His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system.

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—David Hume, 1742 Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii Part I: Evolution, Culture, and Economic History Chapter 1: Culture and Economics 3 Chapter 2: Nature and Technology 16 Chapter 3: Cultural Evolution and Economics 22 Chapter 4: Choice-based Cultural Evolution 34 Chapter 5: Biases in Cultural Evolution 43 Part II: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Economic Change, 1500–1700 Chapter 6: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Choice-based Cultural Evolution 59 Chapter 7: Francis Bacon, Cultural Entrepreneur 70 Chapter 8: Isaac Newton, Cultural Entrepreneur 99 Part III: Innovation, Competition, and Pluralism in Europe, 1500–1700 Chapter 9: Cultural Choice in Action: Human Capital and Religion 119 Chapter 10: Cultural Change and the Growth of Useful Knowledge, 1500–1700 142 Chapter 11: Fragmentation, Competition, and Cultural Change 165 Chapter 12: Competition and the Republic of Letters 179 Part IV: Prelude to the Enlightenment Chapter 13: Puritanism and British Exceptionalism 227 Chapter 14: A Culture of Progress 247 Chapter 15: The Enlightenment and Economic Change 267 Part V: Cultural Change in the East and West Chapter 16: China and Europe 287 Chapter 17: China and the Enlightenment 321 Epilogue: Useful Knowledge and Economic Growth 339 References 343 Index 381 Acknowledgments This book had its origins in the Joseph Schumpeter lectures I delivered in Graz in November 2010 and I am deeply grateful to my hosts at the Schumpeter Society for their hospitality and penetrating comments at an early stage.

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The deep significance of the institutions that governed the market for ideas resides here. In chapters 7 and 8, I will take a closer look at two of the cultural entrepreneurs whose influence I consider as supremely important for the rise of the Industrial Enlightenment and eventually the emergence of useful knowledge as the main engine of modern economic growth—Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. It should be made clear, however, that between 1500 and 1700, the European intellectual scene included other remarkable individuals, who dramatically changed the cultural menu of European society. Besides the obvious religious entrepreneurs such as Luther and Calvin, I could have easily picked Descartes or Spinoza as intellectuals whose work left an indelible print on the evolution of culture in Europe both on their contemporaries and future intellectuals.

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

T. 47 Mozans, H.J. 119 musical harmony, principles of 14–17 My Philosophical Development (Russell) 154 natural numbers 91 negative numbers 90–94 network formula 85–8 New York, subway graffiti 257 New York Times 254, 272–3, 282 Newton, Isaac 18, 47, 80, 81 Nixon, Richard Milhous 46–7 Noether, Emmy 110–11 nothingness, concept of 59 number line 92, 94–5, 185–6 numbers definition of 150, 152 relationships between 11 numerals, Indo-Arab 59–60 Oberwolfach symposium (1984) 215–19, 221 Olbers, Heinrich 115 order and chaos 17 overestimated prime conjecture 179 Paganini, Nicolò 63 parallelism, philosophy of 254, 257 parasites, life-cycles 106–7 particle physics 22–3 Pascal, Blaise 40, 43–4, 45–6 Penrose, Roger 198 Penrose tilings 198–9 People 274, 290–91 perfect numbers 11–13 philosopher, word coined by Pythagoras 10 pi (π) 17–18, 50–53, 166 Picturegoers, The (Lodge) 177–8 Pillow Problems (Dodgson) 138 Pinch, Richard 285 Plato 109 Poges, Arthur 37, 74 Poincaré, Jules Henri 199 points (dice game) 43 polynomials 237 Portraits from Memory (Russell) 160 prime numbers 70–71 almost primes 308 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 99–100 Germain primes 116 infinity of 100–101, 102–3 irregular primes 126–7, 177 practical applications 103–7 333,333,331 not prime 178 twin primes 308 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead) 156–7 probability 43–7 counter-intuitive 44–5 Problèmes plaisants et delectables (Bachet) 61 puzzles, compendiums of 138 Pythagoras abhors irrational numbers 50, 54–5 at Croton 9–10, 27–8 death 28 and mathematical proof 26 and musical harmony 14–17 and perfect numbers 12–13 and study of numbers 7 travels 7–8 Pythagoras’ equation 28 ‘cubed’ version 30–32 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 32, 65–6 whole number solutions 28–30 Pythagoras’ theorem 6–7, 19–20, 26, 333–4 Pythagorean Brotherhood 9–11, 13, 27–8, 49, 50, 108 Pythagorean triples 28–30, 65, 338 quadratic equations 236–7 quantum physics 162 quartic equations 237 quintic equations 237–8, 239–40, 245, 248–9 Ramanujan, Srinivasa 3 Raspail, François 242–3 rational numbers 11 rearrangement of equations 216 recipes, mathematical 8, 237 reductio ad absurdum 49–50, 53–4 reflectional symmetry 196 Reidemeister, Kurt 142 religion, and probability 46 Reynolds 323 Ribenboim, Paulo 144 Ribet, Ken 220, 229, 267, 270–71, 272, 276, 288–9, 304 Fermat Information Service 282 and significance of Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 221–3 Riemann hypothesis 73 river ratio 17–18 Rivest, Ronald 104 Rosetta stone 212 Rossi, Hugo 46–7 rotational symmetry 195–6 Rubin, Professor Karl 268–9, 300 Russell, Bertrand, 22, 44, 147, 153, 160 Russell’s paradox 152, 154–7 St Augustine (of Hippo) 12 Sam Loyd and his Puzzles: An Autobiographical Review 138 Samos, Greece 8–9 Sarnak, Peter 285–6, 291 Schlichting, Dr F. 144–6 scientific proof 21–2 scientific theories 22–3 scrambling and unscrambling messages 103–5, 168, 170–75 Segre 314 Selmer groups 287 Shamir, Adi 104 Shimura, Goro 193, 191–5, 202, 203, 206 relationship with Taniyama 205, 207, 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 209–10, 272, 274 Shimura-Taniyama conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Silverman, Bob 284 Sir Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge 4–5, 266 Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of Ladies (Algarotti) 112 6, perfection of 11–12 Skewes, S. 179–80 Skewes’s number 180 sociable numbers 63–4 Socrates 109 Somerville, Mary 113 square, symmetries of 195–6 square-cube sandwiches 64, 184 square root of one 93 square root of two 53–4, 91–2, 312–4 strings and particles 23 vibrating 15–17, 16 Suzuki, Misako 207, 208 symmetry 195–202 Taniyama, Yutaka 190, 191–5, 202, 203 death 205, 207–8 influence of 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 202, 204–5 Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 205, 209–15 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 216–19, 221–3 Wiles and 215, 223, 225–31, 232, 258–61, 263–5, 274, 304 Taniyama-Weil conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Tartaglia, Niccolò 40–41 Taylor, Richard 285, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299–300 Thales 26 Theano 9–10, 107–8 theorems 21, 71–2 Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, The (von Neumann) 167 13 Lectures on Fermat’s Last Theorem (Ribenboim) 144 Thomson, J.

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Various libraries and archives have gone out of their way to help me, and in particular I would like to thank Susan Oakes of the London Mathematical Society, Sandra Cumming of the Royal Society and Ian Stewart of Warwick University. I am also grateful to Jacquelyn Savani of Princeton University, Duncan McAngus, Jeremy Gray, Paul Balister and the Isaac Newton Institute for their help in finding research material. Thanks also go to Patrick Walsh, Christopher Potter, Bernadette Alves, Sanjida O’Connell and my parents for their comments and support throughout the last year. Finally, many of the interviews quoted in this book were obtained while I was working on a television documentary on the subject of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

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The price he had to pay for his secrecy was that he had not previously discussed or tested any of his ideas with the mathematics community and therefore there was a significant chance that he had made some fundamental error. Ideally Wiles had wanted to spend more time going over his work to allow him to check fully his final manuscript. Then the unique opportunity arose to announce his discovery at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge and he abandoned caution. The sole aim of the institute’s existence is to bring together the world’s greatest intellects for a few weeks in order to hold seminars on a cutting-edge research topic of their choice. Situated on the outskirts of the university, away from students and other distractions, the building is especially designed to encourage the academics to concentrate on collaboration and brainstorming.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Humankind was awakening from a dream of immobility to find itself in a waking fall, its planet plummeting through boundless space. The weight of authority that brought Galileo to his knees succeeded only in halting the growth of science in the Mediterranean. Thereafter, the great advances came in the north countries. The physics of the Copernican universe was to be elucidated by Isaac Newton, born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642, the year of Galileo’s death. * Ruled not by a feudal aristocracy but by a thriving merchant class, Venice was relatively liberal, innovative, and inquisitive, an excellent place for a freethinker like Galileo. The difference was evident in the way the anatomy classes were conducted: The proscription against dissection, generally obeyed in Pisa, was circumvented at Padua by means of a laboratory table that could be lowered to an underground river, where corpses brought to the university by boat in the dark of night were raised into the hall for dissection in the advanced anatomy class.

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The thoroughness and assurance with which he accomplished this task were such that his theory came to be regarded, for more than two centuries thereafter, as something close to the received word of God. Even today, when Newtonian dynamics is viewed as but a part of the broader canvas painted by Einstein’s relativity, most of us continue to think in Newtonian terms, and Newton’s laws still work well enough to guide spacecraft to the moon and planets. (“I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now,” said astronaut Bill Anders, when asked by his son who was “driving” the Apollo 8 spacecraft carrying him to the moon.) Yet the man whose explication of the cosmos lives on in a billion minds was himself one of the strangest and most remotely inaccessible individuals who ever lived.

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This he did, and three months later, in November, he sent Halley a paper that successfully derived all three of Kepler’s laws from the precept of universal gravitation obeying an inverse-square law. Halley, immediately recognizing the tremendous importance of Newton’s accomplishment, hastened to Cambridge and urged him to write a book on gravitation and the dynamics of the solar system. Thus was born Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World—the Principia. Work on the book took over Newton’s life. “Now I am upon this subject,” he wrote the astronomer John Flamsteed, in a letter soliciting data on the orbits of Saturn’s satellites, “I would gladly know the bottom of it before I publish my papers.”16 The effort only intensified his air of preoccupation.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

He checked it again two months later. Nothing. At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin. This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments. Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony OCTOBER 12, 1713 Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate —MILTON, Paradise Lost LIKE A GOOD CARTESIAN who measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings.

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To us both, opaque. What’s constituted so, only a pen Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go. BOOK ONE Quicksilver Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations . . . may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713 Boston Common OCTOBER 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M. ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUST as the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place.

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As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships. As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell.

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

. ———. ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake’. Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32–65. Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Ed. HW Turnbull. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. ———. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents. Ed. IB Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. ———. ‘A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors: Sent by the Author to the Publisher From Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; in Order to be Communicated to the R.

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.: Harvard University Press, 1953: 227–45. Snobelen, Stephen D. ‘ “God of Gods, and Lord of Lords”: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia’. Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208. ———. ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’. British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419. ———. ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’. In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. CL Firestone and N Jacobs. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012: 49–184. ———. ‘William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the Crisis of Publicity’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (2004): 573–603.

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All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance.’41 10 Hypotheses/Theories . . . an accompt of a Philosophicall discovery . . . being in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detectioni which hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature. – Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, 18 January 1672 § 1 ‘In the beginning of the Year 1666’ Isaac Newton had just turned twenty-three (his birthday was Christmas Day). The year before, he had obtained his BA degree; a year or so later he began to develop his theory of gravity; less than four years later, in October 1669, he became Lucasian professor of mathematics (at the time the only chair in mathematics at Cambridge), and exactly four years later, in the beginning of 1670, he gave his first university lectures, on the subject of optics.

The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

Maddening Creativity 1 Historical information relevant to the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple can be found in Steve Connor, “The Core of Truth Behind Sir Isaac Newton’s Apple,” The Independent, January 18, 2010. The quote from Humphrey Newton, Isaac Newton’s secretary and copyist, can be found on page 406 of S. Westphall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The quote from James Gleick came from an episode of the BBC Television series Horizon entitled “Isaac Newton: The Last Magician.” The quote by Milo Keynes about Sir Isaac Newton’s personality is from M. Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 49 (1995): 1–56.

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It’s the sudden experience of comprehending something that you didn’t understand before, thinking about a familiar thing in a novel way, or combining familiar things to form something new. Insights are quantum leaps of thought, creative breakthroughs that power our lives and our history. Insight conveyed a theory of gravity to Sir Isaac Newton, the melody of a Beatles ballad to Sir Paul McCartney, and an understanding of the cause of human suffering to the Buddha. Nearly everyone has had aha moments of sudden clarity. They can and do change our lives. Much has been written purporting to explain how insight works and how you can make it work better.

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But there is another source of evidence for the idea that insightfulness is a relatively stable characteristic. It seems that insightfulness is a blood relative of madness, and madness is firmly rooted in one’s biology. MADDENING CREATIVITY * * * It would be difficult to find an informed person who would disagree with the notion that Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was one of the greatest geniuses ever to walk among mere mortals. His contributions to physics (optics and classical mechanics) and mathematics (calculus) are monumental and seminal, securing him a permanent place in the pantheon of great achievements. Sir Isaac also had the distinction of experiencing the second most celebrated aha moment in scientific history (after Archimedes, a genius of comparable stature).

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

., General Introduction to Volume 20, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968), pp. xi–xii. 2. Ibid., Volume 2, footnote, pp. 206–7; and Volume 3, pp. 6–7. 3. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest—A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 14. 4. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1987). 5. Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 143. 6. Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 6, p. 485. 7. Quoted in James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Pantheon, New York, 2003), p. 120. 8.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956). Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. W. Hazlitt (H. G. Bohn, London, 1857). Moses ben Maimon, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919). Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. D. Thomas Whiteside (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968). , Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Florian Cajori, rev. trans. Andrew Motte (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962). , Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730)

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Today we understand that the precession of the equinoxes is caused by a wobble of the Earth’s axis (like the wobble of the axis of a spinning top) around a direction perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, with the angle between this direction and the Earth’s axis remaining nearly fixed at 23.5°. The equinoxes are the dates when the line separating the Earth and the Sun is perpendicular to the Earth’s axis, so a wobble of the Earth’s axis causes the equinoxes to precess. We will see in Chapter 14 that this wobble was first explained by Isaac Newton, as an effect of the gravitational attraction of the Sun and Moon for the equatorial bulge of the Earth. It actually takes 25,727 years for the Earth’s axis to wobble by a full 360°. It is remarkable how accurately the work of Hipparchus predicted this great span of time. (By the way, it is the precession of the equinoxes that explains why ancient navigators had to judge the direction of north from the position in the sky of constellations near the north celestial pole, rather from the position of the North Star, Polaris.

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Mathematics under the Microscope. http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/%7Eavb/micromathematics/downloads. Brewster, D. 1831. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street). Bukowski, J. 2008. The College Mathematics Journal, 39(1), 2. Burger, E. B., and Starbird, M. 2005. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton). Burkert, W. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Cajori, F. 1926. The American Mathematical Monthly, 33(8), 397. ———. 1928. In The History of Science Society. Sir Isaac Newton 1727–1927: A Bicentenary Evaluation of His Work (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company).

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This unsurpassed genius had more opportunities to experience the “pleasure of discovery” than probably any other individual in the history of the human race. Figure 26 And There Was Light The great eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was thirty-nine years old when Isaac Newton (1642–1727) died (figure 27 shows Newton’s tomb inside Westminster Abbey). In a well-known couplet, Pope attempted to encapsulate Newton’s achievements: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. Almost a hundred years after Newton’s death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) added in his epic poem Don Juan the lines: And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

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How was that masterpiece—Principia—born? I Began to Think of Gravity Extending to the Orb of the Moon William Stukeley (1687–1765), an antiquary and physician who was Newton’s friend (in spite of the more than four decades in age separating them), eventually became the great scientist’s first biographer. In his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life we find an account of one of the most celebrated legends in the history of science: On 15 April 1726 I paid a visit to Sir Isaac at his lodgings in Orbels buildings in Kensington, dined with him and spent the whole day with him, alone…After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Jobs had no idea that those engineers held the key to rescuing him from the Moses Trap. And it would have nothing to do with their machine. ISAAC NEWTON VS. STEVE JOBS: A BRIEF INTERLUDE Stories of great breakthroughs tend to coalesce around one person, one genius, and often one moment. Those stories are fun to tell and easy to digest. Occasionally they are true. More often, they contain a kernel of truth, but omit a much richer and more interesting picture. Isaac Newton, for example, is often celebrated for discovering universal gravity, explaining the motion of the planets, and inventing calculus. But well before Newton’s Principia, it was Johannes Kepler who first suggested the idea of a force from the sun driving the motion of the planets, Robert Hooke who first suggested a principle of universal gravity, Christiaan Huygens who showed that circular motion generates a centrifugal force, many who used Huygens’s law to derive the now-familiar form of gravity, Giovanni Borelli who explained the elliptical motion of Jupiter’s moons using gravitational forces, John Wallis and others who created the differential mathematics Newton used, and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus in the form we use today.

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Smith analyzes competing theories of planetary motion and ends with a deep bow to Newton, whose theory of gravity he describes as “the greatest discovery that ever was made by man.” (Newton worship was all the rage at the time. For a taste, see the wonderfully titled Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies.) The complete works of Isaac Newton (abridged), 1739 The idea of an underlying force that can explain complex behaviors, as gravity explained the motion of planets and tides, fascinated Smith. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) proposes an underlying force that explains how humans behave.

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And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water. Which will give all of us the tools to become the initiators, not the victims, of innovative surprise. Along the way, you will learn how chickens saved millions of lives, what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, and where Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs got their ideas. I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

This system, called the “Trial of the Pyx,” was designed to prevent fraud at the Royal Mint, where English money was manufactured. It is fascinating precisely because it failed: it missed anomalies left and right, for centuries on end, playing an important yet underappreciated role in an economic crisis that caused widespread suffering and anger. And in 1696, the person at the center of it all was Isaac Newton. Yes, that Isaac Newton—inventor of calculus, explainer of gravity, and the man immortalized in Alexander Pope’s famous couplet: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.” In 1696, Newton was a 54-year-old scientific rock star, with a professorship at Cambridge guaranteed for life.

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No doubt her great-grandfather the admiral would have been proud. Through her efforts to bring people and machines a bit closer together through language, Grace Hopper played an enormous role in inventing the modern world. 5 THE GENIUS AT THE ROYAL MINT Real-time monitoring, from sports to policing to financial fraud: what Isaac Newton’s worst mathematical mistake can teach you about the search for anomalies in massive data sets. IF YOU’RE AN NFL fan, and you live outside a narrow strip of land from mid-Connecticut to Maine, then you probably view the New England Patriots—the most successful football team of the last 15 years—with a mix of peevishness and suspicion.

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A late-seventeenth-century crisis in the English economy, in which the Mint played a subtle but fundamental role. 2. The Great Recoinage of 1696, a drastic step in English monetary policy designed to stanch the crisis, and which Newton had to rescue from disaster. 3. The importance of statistical variability in detecting anomalies—the subject of the worst mathematical mistake that Newton ever made. Isaac Newton’s Second Career Newton arrived at the Royal Mint in 1696 in the middle of a full-fledged currency crisis, one that threatened to bring England’s economy grinding to a halt. To appreciate Newton’s experience at the Mint, you have to understand the roots of that crisis. The problem was this: by 1696, English money had been disappearing from circulation for at least three decades.

Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability With Solutions by Frederick Mosteller

Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, stochastic process

Isaac Newlon Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least I six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled What is the answer? Solution for Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Yes, Samuel Pepys wrote Isaac Newton a long, complicated letter about a wager he planned to make. To decide which option was the favorable one, Pepys needed the answer to the above question. You may wish to read the correspondence in American Statistician, Vol. 14, No.4, Oct., 1960, 33 pp. 27-30, "Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, and Probability," discussion by Emil D. ScheIl in "Questions and Answers," edited by Ernest Rubin; and further comment in the issue of Feb., 1961, Vol. 15, No.

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Craps An experiment in personal taste for money Silent cooperation Quo vadis? . The prisoner's dilemma 14. Collecting coupons, including Euler's approximation for harmonic sums 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Twin knights . An even split at coin tossing, including Stirling's approximation Isaac Newton helps Samuel Pepys The three-cornered duel Should you sample with or without replacement? . The ballot box Ties in matching pennies The unfair subway Lengths of random chords The hurried duelers. Catching the cautious counterfeiter Catching the greedy counterfeiter, including the Poisson distribution.

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(b) Replace 8 by 2B in the above problem. Now what is the chance that they meet? 18. An Even Split at Coin Tossing When 100 coins are tossed, what is the probability that exactly 50 are heads? -According to Arthurian legend, they were so evenly matched that on another occasion they slew each other. 5 19. Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least 1 six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled. What is the answer? 20. The Three-Cornered Duel A, B, and C are to fight a three-cornered pistol duel.

Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics by David Berlinski

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam

For a very long time, the Elements was known to every educated man and woman, so much so that when, seven centuries after Euclid’s death, a philosopher addressing a gathering of Roman intellectuals asked slyly “how to construct an equilateral triangle given a straight line,” the company at once caught the reference to the very first proposition of the Elements, and with the satisfaction of men congratulating one another for being well read, broke into Greek in order to comment on the masterpiece that had formed their character. Warm throaty chuckles all around. When, in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton completed his majestic Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and so created the first and the greatest of physical theories, he chose to express his thoughts in the language of Euclidean geometry, covering up as many traces of his own mathematical inventions as he could, so great was Euclid’s authority still.

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If this is so, the universe must be filled either with material objects or with structures capable of placing material objects in contact with one another. Such are the Cartesian vortices. In Descartes’ view, it is the various vortices, whose effects resemble on a grand scale the spiral sweep of bathwater swirling an errant bar of soap drainward, that brings about the required contact. Isaac Newton demolished Cartesian physics with all the immense power of his genius. He did nothing to assuage the Cartesian scruple about action at a distance, and having with a snort of derision dismissed the Cartesian vortices, he replaced them with the force of universal gravitation, which acts at a distance and throughout the whole of space.

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Many mathematicians had a hand in the development of the calculus—Gilles Personne de Roberval, Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Barrow, Bonaventura Cavalieri, John Wallis—and every one has acquired a contemporary scholar willing to insist that his boy had seen it all along; but it is Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton who are the most closely associated with the pause between heartbeats when everything changed. It is the second half of the seventeenth century. Shall we say roughly 1680 or so? Time has long since promoted both Newton and Leibniz into the pantheon of the great explorers. Like two immense polar bears, they remain forever frozen on the tundra of time.

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Chapter Two Physics before Schrödinger The physics that Schrödinger learned as an undergraduate rested, like a tripod, on three legs: the understanding of mechanics developed by Isaac Newton; the understanding of electromagnetism developed by James Clerk Maxwell; and the understanding of thermodynamics to which Ludwig Boltzmann was a major contributor. He was taught nothing about the new ideas of Albert Einstein, whose special theory of relativity was only published in 1905, and very little about Max Planck’s investigation of electromagnetic radiation, published in 1900, which came to be seen as the birth of quantum theory. For our purposes, physics before Schrödinger means physics before 1900. And it begins with Isaac Newton. Newton and the world of particles Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely regarded as the founder of modern science.

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.), Collected Papers on Wave Mechanics (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1928) van der Waerden, B. L. (ed.), Sources of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1968) Weber, Robert, Pioneers of Science, 2nd edn (Bristol: Adam Hilger/Institute of Physics, 1988) Westfall, Richard, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); a shorter version of this book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993 under the title The Life of Isaac Newton Wheeler, John, and Wojciech Zurek (eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Woolf, Harry (ed.), Some Strangeness in the Proportion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1980) Zeilinger, Anton, Dance of the Photons (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010) Index action at a distance Aharonov, Yakir Aigentler, Henriette von Alpbach American Philosophical Society Anderson, Carl Annalen der Physik Annales de physique anti-particles Arosa Arzberger, Hans Arzberger, Rhoda (née Bauer, aunt) Aspect, Alain atoms: Bohr model; Boltzmann’s work; concept; Copenhagen Interpretation; decoherence; Einstein’s work; entanglement experiments; “green pamphlet”; Mach’s view; Maxwell’s work; nuclear model; Planck’s work; Poincaré’s work; quantum chemistry; quantum computing; quantum physics; quantum spin of electron; quantum teleportation experiments; Rutherford’s work; Schrödinger’s work; structure Austria: Anschluss (1938); army; First World War and aftermath; International Atomic Energy Agency representation; Nazism; religion; Schrödinger’s flight from; Schrödinger’s return to; Second World War aftermath Austria-Hungary Austrian Empire Austrian Physical Society Baird, John Logie Ballot, Christoph Buys Bamberger, Emily (Minnie, née Bauer, aunt) Bamberger, Helga (cousin) Bamberger, Max Bär, Richard Bauer, Alexander (grandfather) Bauer, Alexander (great-grandfather) Bauer, Emily (Minnie, aunt), see Bamberger Bauer, Emily (Minnie, née Russell, grandmother) Bauer, Friedrich (Fritz) Bauer, Georgie, see Schrödinger Bauer, Johanna (Hansi), see Bohm Bauer, Josepha (née Wittmann-Denglass, great-grandmother) Bauer, Rhoda (aunt), see Arzberger BBC Becquerel, Henri Bell, John Bell’s inequality Bennett, Charles Berlin: Academy of Sciences; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry; Schrödinger’s departure; Schrödinger’s professorship; Schrödinger’s work; University of Bernstein, Jeremy Bertel, Annemarie (Anny), see Schrödinger Besso, Michele birds, vision Bitbol, Michel Blackett, Patrick Blair, Linda Bloch, Felix Bohm, David Bohm, Franz Bohm, Johanna (Hansi, née Bauer): escape from Austria to London; escape from Germany to London; marriage; memories of Schrödinger; pregnancy; relationship with Schrödinger; in Vienna Bohr, Niels: on collapse of wave function; on complementarity; Copenhagen Institute; Copenhagen Interpretation; Einstein’s views of his work; Festival; honours; influence; “Light and Life” lecture; model of the atom; Nobel Prize; quantization rules; relationship with Schrödinger; Schrödinger’s views of his work; work with Heisenberg Boltzmann, Ludwig: background; career; depression; education; on entropy; influence on Schrödinger; on international nature of physics; marriage; relationship with Mach; research; statistical approach; Stefan–Boltzmann Law of black body radiation; suicide; work on atoms; work on thermodynamics Born, Max: background and education; in Cambridge; career; on chance and probability; on Copenhagen school; on Dirac’s work; Edinburgh professorship; in Göttingen; Heisenberg’s studies; in Italy; matrix mechanics; Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance; Nobel controversy; Nobel Prize; on quantum mechanics; quantum revolution; relationship with Schrödinger; retirement; sacked under Nazis; Schrödinger’s response to his work; statistics; on von Neumann’s work; work on wave function Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose–Einstein statistics bosons Bragg, Lawrence Bragg, William Braunizer, Andreas (grandson) Braunizer, Arnulf Braunizer, Ruth (née March, daughter): in Belgium; birth; birth of son; care of Arthur; in Dublin; in Graz; half-sisters; in Innsbruck; marriage; in Oxford; pregnancy; relationship with Anny; relationship with father; relationship with mother Brecht, Bertolt Breslau Bristol University Brown, Robert Browne, Monsignor Paddy Brownian motion Bunsen, Robert Cahill & Company California: Institute of Technology; University of Cambridge: Born in; Cavendish Laboratory; Heisenberg’s lectures; Maxwell at; Newton at; Philosophical Society; Schrödinger’s visits; Tarner Lectures Cambridge University Press (CUP) “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”

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Our special thanks go to the following people who and places that helped us, over the years, in our search for Schrödinger: Michel Bitbol; Dominic Byrne; John Cramer; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Einstein Archive, Princeton; Johns Hopkins University Archive; Sir William McCrea; Oxford University Archive; Rudolf Peierls; Terry Rudolph; Schrödinger Archive, Alpbach; Schrödinger Archive, Vienna; Christine Sutton; University of Berlin Archive; University of Wisconsin Archive; Vienna University Archive. Introduction It’s Not Rocket Science Rocket science is the purest expression of the laws of physics spelled out by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, often referred to as “classical” science. Newton explained that any object stays still or moves in a straight line at constant speed unless it is affected by an outside force, such as gravity. He taught us that if you push something it pushes back—action and reaction are equal and opposite, as when a rifle kicks back against your shoulder while the bullet flies off in the opposite direction.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clockwork universe, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius

Seafaring men such as Captain William Bligh of the Bounty and the great circumnavigator Captain James Cook, who made three long voyages of exploration and experimentation before his violent death in Hawaii, took the more promising methods to sea to test their accuracy and practicability. Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christiaan Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help. Palatial observatories were founded at Paris, London, and Berlin for the express purpose of determining longitude by the heavens. Meanwhile, lesser minds devised schemes that depended on the yelps of wounded dogs, or the cannon blasts of signal ships strategically anchored—somehow—on the open ocean.

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Flamsteed took up residence the following May (in a building still called Flamsteed House today) and collected enough instruments to get to work in earnest by October. He toiled at his task for more than four decades. The excellent star catalog he compiled was published posthumously in 1725. By then, Sir Isaac Newton had begun to subdue the confusion over the moon’s motion with his theory of gravitation. This progress bolstered the dream that the heavens would one day reveal longitude. Meanwhile, far from the hilltop haunts of astronomers, craftsmen and clockmakers pursued an alternate path to a longitude solution.

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Admiral Shovell’s disastrous multishipwreck on the Scilly Isles after the turn of the eighteenth century intensified the pressure to solve the longitude problem. Two infamous entrants into the fray in the aftermath of this accident were William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton, mathematicians and friends, who often engaged each other in wide-ranging discussions. Whiston had already succeeded his mentor, Isaac Newton, as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge—and then lost the post on account of his unorthodox religious views, such as his natural explanation for Noah’s flood. Ditton served as master of the mathematics school at Christ’s Hospital, London. In a long afternoon of pleasant conversation, this pair hit on a scheme for solving the longitude problem.

A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

A Second Chance A novel by Jodi Taylor Warning: This product contains nuts. St Mary’s is back and nothing is going right for Max. Once again, it’s just one damned thing after another. The action jumps from an encounter with a mirror-stealing Isaac Newton to the bloody battlefield at Agincourt. Discover how a simple fact-finding assignment to witness the ancient and murderous cheese- rolling ceremony in Gloucester can result in CBC – concussion by cheese. The long awaited jump to Bronze Age Troy ends in personal catastrophe for Max and just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse – it’s back to the Cretaceous Period again to confront an old enemy who has nothing to lose.

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And what does he have to do with us?’ ‘Oh, you’ll love him, Max. He’s a really decent old buffer. He did a lot of the background science stuff when the Boss was setting up St Mary’s and now, finally, he’s retiring, and the Boss is giving him this jump as a going-away present. Apparently, his big ambition has always been to meet Isaac Newton – a big hero of his – and the Boss said yes. So, tomorrow, a quick dash to seventeenth-century Cambridge and a glimpse of the great man. Nothing to it.’ ‘Aha!’ I said, indulging in Olympic standard straw-clutching, ‘I’ve already done that period. In 1666 I was in Mauritius chasing dodos, so I can’t go.

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God bless my soul,’ over and over again, while his senses got to grips with the sights, sounds, and, especially, the smells of 17th-century Cambridge. He pulled himself together eventually. ‘Sorry, Max. That was unprofessional of me.’ ‘Not at all, Eddie. On my first jump I was turning cartwheels.’ We set off for Trinity College, where a young Fellow named Isaac Newton was, with luck, about to make an appearance. Cambridge was every bit as wet and dreary as I thought it would be. I shivered inside my cloak as we picked our way carefully along Trinity Street, easing our way through the crowds. The place was packed as students, townspeople, tradesmen, and livestock noisily shoved their way along the uneven cobbles.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

For all his extraordinary range of achievements (not only was he Christopher Wren’s surveyor and colleague during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, an early advocate of evolutionary theory, the first to see that organic matter was made up of the building blocks that he named “cells,” and probably England’s most gifted mathematician,16 able to turn his hand to everything from describing the catenary curve of the ideal arch to the best way to trim sails), he is frequently remembered today, as he was known during his lifetime, as the world’s best second fiddle. The shadow cast by Wren, by Boyle, and even by Isaac Newton, with whom Hooke engaged in a long-running and ultimately futile dispute over the authorship of the law of gravitational attraction, is unaccountable without considering the class difference between them. James Aubrey, the seventeenth-century memoirist, paid Hooke something of a backhanded compliment when he called him “the best Mechanick this day in the world.”17 When the informal assembly at Oxford whose meetings were generally led by the clergyman John Wilkins was chartered, two years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, each Fellow was explicitly to be a “Gentleman, free, and unconfin’d.”18 Hooke’s need to make a living disqualified him from fellowship, though his talent made him indispensable.

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The two evidently hit it off, and Papin joined Boyle as his secretary, though a better term would have been “experimental assistant.” While Papin was no Hooke (this is scarcely an insult: by 1675, Hooke had explained the twinkling of stars, described the earth’s elliptical orbit, rebuilt the fire-destroyed Royal College of Physicians, disputed with Sir Isaac Newton over the discovery of the diffraction of light, and invented the anemometer, and he still had twenty productive years in front of him), he did excel at both experimental design and mechanical gadgetry. Most famously, in 1681 he invented a steam digester, or “machine for softening bones” as he described it, which was essentially a pressure cooker designed to clean bones rapidly for medical study.

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Bad luck for the universities, good luck for the nation. Only decades after a tidal wave of scientific knowledge started washing over Britain—the first English translation of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences was published in the 1660s, nearly seventy years before an English edition of the Principia of Isaac Newton (Latin edition, 1687)—some of the nation’s most ambitious and practical young were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Entretiens sur la Nature, les Sciences, les Métamorhphoses de la Terre et du Ciel, l’Humanité, l’Ame, et la Vie eternelle. That certainly covered it. ♣ What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this-that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind…that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton…Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if indeed it be made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense-the image of the Creator-there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system’ (23 March 1801, Letters, Vol. 2, p.709).

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This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it. The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely close-cropped hair, that still dominates the stone-flagged entrance hall to the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. As Wordsworth originally put it, he could see, a few yards from his bedroom window, over the brick wall of St John’s College, The Antechapel, where the Statue stood Of Newton, with his Prism and silent Face.

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This was a tantalising prospect for both of them. Davy had one further scientific seduction to offer. He confided to Jane that the Prince Regent was about to confer a knighthood upon him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage to Jane Apreece was at last accepted. He reacted with genuine rapture. T have passed a night sleepless from excess of happiness. It seems to me as if I began to live only a few hours ago…The great future object of my life will be your happiness…My happiness will be entirely in your will.’20 Congratulations were now in order, and Sir Joseph Banks was pleased and rather amused that one of his young scientific protégés had made such a fine-and wealthy-match: ‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves…It will give to Science a new kind of eclat; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’21 Banks evidently teased the bridegroom in a worldly way.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

It seemed finished—in every edition. It has no equivalent in any other language. Even so, the experts responsible for the third edition (“in Eighteen Volumes, Greatly Improved”), a full century after Isaac Newton’s Principia, could not bring themselves to endorse his, or any, theory of gravity, or gravitation. “There have been great disputes,” the Britannica stated. Many eminent philosophers, and among the rest Sir Isaac Newton himself, have considered it as the first of all second causes; an incorporeal or spiritual substance, which never can be perceived any other way than by its effects; an universal property of matter, &c.

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Yaunde language YouTube ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. His previous books include Chaos and Genius, both Pulitzer Prize finalists and National Book Award nominees. His last book, Isaac Newton, was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. They have been translated into more than twenty languages. His Web site is at www.around.com. ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 4.1 Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 6.1 The New York Times Archive/Redux 7.1 Copyright Robert Lord 7.2 Reprinted with permission from Journal Franklin Institute, vol. 262, E.

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A few engineers, especially in the telephone labs, began speaking of information. They used the word in a way suggesting something technical: quantity of information, or measure of information. Shannon adopted this usage. For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

For the first time, scientific thinkers in sixteenth-century Europe started to challenge ancient wisdom. Copernicus was followed by other pioneers of what is often called the ‘scientific revolution’ – the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed the moons of Jupiter in 1609, and the English mathematician Isaac Newton, who set out the laws of motion in 1687. Most historians would then tell you that this pattern continued for the next 400 years. The history of modern science, as traditionally told, is a story focused almost exclusively on men like Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century British naturalist who advanced the theory of evolution by natural selection, and Albert Einstein, the twentieth-century German physicist who proposed the theory of special relativity.

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In Italy, Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter, whilst in England, Robert Boyle first described the behaviour of gases. In France, René Descartes developed a new way of doing geometry, whilst in Holland, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed bacteria under a microscope. Typically, this story culminates with the work of Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician who set out the laws of motion in 1687.7 Historians have long argued over the nature and causes of the scientific revolution. Some see this as a period of intellectual advance, one in which a few lone geniuses made new observations and challenged medieval superstition.

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Over the next 200 years, European empires began to expand more and more aggressively, particularly in Asia and Africa. This, coupled with the gradual weakening of the Ottomans, the Songhay, the Ming, and the Mughals, brought about the next great transformation in the history of science. The Silk Road couldn’t go on forever. Part Two Empire and Enlightenment, c. 1650–1800 3.Newton’s Slaves Isaac Newton invested in the slave trade. In the early eighteenth century, Newton – the famous English mathematician – purchased over £20,000 of shares in the South Sea Company. This was an incredible sum of money, equivalent to well over £2 million today. The South Sea Company had been established in 1711 to help raise funds to pay off the British national debt, which was soaring following years of expensive wars with France and Spain.

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 87. 9. John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 108, 104. 10. Stephen D. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 381–419. 11. Isaac Newton to Robert Bentley, December 10, 1692, 189.R.4.47, ff. 4A–5, Trinity College Library, Cambridge. 12. Sir Isaac Newton, Newton’s System of the World, translated by Andrew Motte and edited by N. W. Chittenden (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1850), 486. 13. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 329. 14.

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The earth might seem different now in looks, vegetation, animal population, coastlines, and terrain, but, ignoring those slow changes in appearance, it has always worked in the same way that it works now. Many cultures claimed starting times for time. For the Mayans, it was August 13, 3114 BC, as translated in Gregorian calendar dating. In the seventeenth century, the impression was that the universe is infinite in size and therefore time must also be infinite. Isaac Newton certainly believed that the universe is infinite. Lacking any historical records dating back further than the Trojan War or the great pyramids, many intelligent thinkers of Newton’s generation believed that—if not the universe—then at least the earth must have been formed recently. It’s difficult to know Newton’s religious belief; some biographers say that he was a heretic and that he surely did not believe that God recently created the planet we live on.10 To him, the earth was formed by an accident of gravity and it just happened to fall into a particular spin and orbit giving us, roughly, a 365-day year.

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An asteroid could hit it at any time. With the world being so much older, we can feel that it has survived for such an extraordinarily long time without too many overwhelming consequences that the chances of surviving further are quite certain, if we treat it wisely, and don’t blow it up ourselves. Isaac Newton felt that true mathematical time was the mover of everything from stars to humans. To him it was some continuously flowing, enigmatic, forward-direction driver, an invisible river that propels everything to happen in lockstep with the myriad actions and events of the universe. He believed that, somehow, we can measure that mathematical time through observations of motion, as if the mysterious driver could never be known but its consequences could be measured.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

The fluently written article “Newton and the Eötvös Experiment” by Curtis Wilson, in his collected works Astronomy from Kepler to Newton: Historical Studies, (London: Variorum Reprints, 1989), is especially good on the subtleties Newton still had to work through. Chapter five of Westfall’s Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) further examines Newton’s actual accomplishments during the plague years in Lincolnshire; see also The “Annus Mirabilis” of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666-1966, ed. Robert Palter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). 86 They would learn what was on offer . . . : What I like about Veblen is that he concentrates on a particular so- notes ciointellectual cusp—the intersection of religion with science—which is liable to be especially laden with meaning.

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There are accounts of Knut Haukelid and a team of fellow young Norwegians, forced to attack their own countrymen to avert a greater Nazi evil; Cecilia Payne, an Englishwoman who finds her career destroyed after daring to glimpse the sun’s fate in the year A.D. 6 billion; and a nineteen-year-old Brahmin, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovers something even more fearful, out in the beating heat of the Arabian Sea in midsummer. Through all their stories—as well as highlights from those of Isaac Newton, Werner Heisenberg, and other researchers—the meaning of each part of the equation becomes clear. P A R T Birth 1 Bern Patent Office, 1905 1 E=mc From THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME I: 13 April 1901 Professor Wilhelm Ostwald University of Leipzig Leipzig, Germany Esteemed Herr Professor!

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m Is for mass 4 E=mc For a long time the concept of “mass” had been like the concept of energy before Faraday and the other nineteenth-century scientists did their work. There were a lot of different material substances around—ice and rock and rusted metal—but it was not clear how they related to each other, if they did at all. What helped researchers believe that there had to be some grand links was that in the 1600s, Isaac Newton had shown that all the planets and moons and comets we see could be described as being cranked along inside an immense, God-created machine. The only problem was that this majestic vision seemed far away from the nittygritty of dusty, solid substances down here on earth. To find out if Newton’s vision really did apply on Earth—to find out, that is, if the separate types of substance around us really were interconnected in detail—it would take a person with a great sense of finicky precision; someone willing to spend time measuring even tiny shifts in weight or size.

Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

As a self-professed strong, successful, educated, bloated (ugh!) woman, I am the perfect person to attack an institution of gender inequality in the sciences. And everyone loves when a woman gets on a soapbox! You can see up her skirt! Thank you very much for getting through my introduction. In the immortal words of Isaac Newton: “Please enjoy the rest of Megan Amram’s book. I’m Isaac Newton.” Now set your biological clocks to study time, because here we go! MEGAN AMRAM Writer / Alleged “Astronaut Killer” Letters to the Editor * * * Biology Introduction Reproduction How to Build a Biological Clock out of a Potato How Long Should You Wait?

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FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian. He is best remembered for the Galileo, a sex move where the man enters the woman as both are falling at an equal gravitational rate from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (This chapter’s bonus sex move!) * * * ISAAC NEWTON (classical mechanics/gravitation) Sir Isaac Newton, an all-around science genius, was alive from 1643 to 1726, which means that his lifetime spanned the year 1690, the ultimate 69. By all accounts, he spent the year 1690 giving oral pleasure to several British babes at once. He is famous for the three laws of sex, including: a penis in motion tends to stay in motion.

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Make sure that your wrong shade of foundation doesn’t turn into the right shade of blackface! Laws of Physics . . . Jude Laws of Physics! I’m Talkin’ Hotties of Physics! ;) * * * There are laws for physics, just like there are laws for how many carbs you’re supposed to eat. First law of both physics and carbs is “EAT NO CARBS.” FIG. 3.4 Sir Isaac Newton (9 body, 4 face) invented Three Laws of Physics. But, hey, laws, shmaws. Physics should be done by following the heart. Here are some of the most eligible bachelors of physicsdom! (Dead people count as bachelors.) FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Copyright © 2016 by James Gleick All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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It was true then and it’s true now. Also no one knows what time is. Augustine stated this pseudoparadox in the fourth century and people have been quoting him, wittingly and unwittingly, ever since: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.*2 Isaac Newton said at the outset of the Principia that everyone knew what time was, but he proceeded to alter what everyone knew. Sean Carroll, a modern physicist, says (tongue in cheek), “Everybody knows what time is. It’s what you find out by looking at a clock.” He also says, “Time is the label we stick on different moments in the life of the world.”

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Dark Satanic Mills, but either way, before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress. Technological change had not always seemed like a one-way street. Now it did. The children of the Industrial Revolution witnessed vast transformations within their lifetimes. To the past there was no return. Surrounded by advancing machinery, Blake blamed, more than anyone else, Isaac Newton—the blinkered rationalist imposing his new order*5—but Newton himself had not believed in progress. He studied a great deal of history, mostly biblical, and if anything he supposed that his own era represented a fall from grace, a tattered remnant of past glories. When he invented vast swaths of new mathematics, he thought he was rediscovering secrets known to the ancients and later forgotten.

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

The studies of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, and some of the later true greats of physics – Huygens, Hooke and Newton – were all fuelled by the desire to build better lenses for microscopes and telescopes to enable them to explore the Universe on every scale, and to make great scientific discoveries and advances in the basic science itself. YOUNG’S DOUBLE-SLIT EXPERIMENT By the end of the seventeenth century, two competing theories for light had emerged – both of which are correct. On one side was Sir Isaac Newton, who believed that light was composed of particles – or ‘corpuscles’, as he called them in his Hypothesis of Light, published in 1675. On the other were Newton’s great scientific adversary, Robert Hooke, and the Dutch physicist and astronomer, Christiaan Huygens. The particle/wave debate rumbled on until the turn of the nineteenth century, with most physicists siding with Newton.

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Our old friend Ibn al-Haytham was one of the first to attempt to explain the physical basis of a rainbow in the tenth century. He described them as being produced by the ‘light from the Sun as it is reflected by a cloud before reaching the eye’. This isn’t too far from the truth. The basis of our modern understanding was delivered by Isaac Newton, who observed that white light is split into its component colours when passed through a glass prism. He correctly surmised that white light is made up of light of all colours, mixed together. The physics behind the production of a rainbow is essentially the same as that of the prism. Light from the Sun is a mixture of all colours, and water droplets in the sky act like tiny prisms, splitting up the sunlight again.

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We can measure the precise constituents of any and every visible star in the sky, because encoded in the light that rains down on Earth is the key to understanding what they are made of. It is all made possible by a particularly beautiful property of the elements. The tale of how we learnt to read the history of the stars in their light began with the work of Isaac Newton in 1670. In his ‘Theory of Colour’, Newton demonstrated that light is made up of a spectrum of colours, and that with nothing more complicated than a glass prism you can split the white light of the Sun into its colourful components. Almost 150 years later, the German scientist Joseph von Fraunhofer made a startling discovery about the solar spectrum whilst calibrating some of his state-of-the-art telescopic lenses and prisms.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Devil take the hindmost: A history of financial speculation. New York, NY: Plume. 5 See Thompson, E. (2007). The tulipmania: Fact or artifact? Public Choice, 130(1–2), 99–114. 6 Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html 7 Cutts, R. L. (1990). Power from the ground up: Japan's land bubble. The Harvard Business Review [online]. Available at https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land-bubble 8 Johnston, E. (2009). Lessons from when the bubble burst.

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.), The American business cycle: Continuity and change (pp. 39–122). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. The end of the Bretton Woods System. IMF [online]. Available at https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html Fama, E. F. (1970). Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417. Fama, E. F., and French, K. (1998). Value versus growth: The international evidence. Journal of Finance, 53(6), 1975–1999.

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Many high-profile celebrities and politicians became investors in the railway stocks. The Brontë sisters were among them, as were several leading thinkers and politicians such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Disraeli.14 They were in good company: King George I was an investor in the South Sea bubble (see Chancellor 2000, p. 73), as was Sir Isaac Newton, who reportedly lost £20,000, equivalent to about £3m in today's terms, when the market collapsed.15 This breadth of interest had led more people to believe in the ‘sure bet’ of the investment. In 1845 an author known as ‘successful operator’ wrote, ‘A short and sure guide to railroad speculation – a few plain rules how to speculate with safety and profit in railway shares’.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 20. White, M. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. 21. Anonymous. The World Will End in 2060, According to Newton. London Evening Standard, June 19, 2007. www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23401099-the-world-will-end-in-2060-according-to-newton.do. 22. White. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. 23. Ibid. 24. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 25.

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Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory. Gallup. com, November 19, 2004. www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Newton, I. Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts. Ed. H. McLachlan. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1950. Nicolay, J. G., & Hay, J. Abraham Lincoln: A History. Volume 2. New York: Cosimo Classics, 1917. Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

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After the civil wars ended and the Church of England was restored, many Puritans broke away. At first these “nonconformists” were again persecuted, but by the 1660s, they were tolerated. Because of their emphasis on individual liberty, their adherents included some of the greatest minds of the age, including Isaac Newton. Newton provides an example of how the idea of “science” had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word “scientist” was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called “natural philosophers”16 in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature.

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

And today those explorers, human and robot, employ as unerring guides on their voyages through the vastness of space the three laws of planetary motion that Kepler uncovered during a lifetime of personal travail and ecstatic discovery. The lifelong quest of Johannes Kepler, to understand the motions of the planets, to seek a harmony in the heavens, culminated thirty-six years after his death, in the work of Isaac Newton. Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. Even as a young man, Newton was impatient with insubstantial questions, such as whether light was “a substance or an accident,” or how gravitation could act over an intervening vacuum.

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v3.1 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: American Folklore Society: Excerpt from “Chukchee Tales” by Waldemar Borgoras from Journal of American Folklore, volume 41 (1928). Reprinted by permission of the American Folklore Society. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.: Quote by Isaac Newton (Optics), quote by Joseph Fourier (Analytic Theory of Heat), and A Question Put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.). Reprinted with permission from Great Books of the Western World. Copyright 1952 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Harvard University Press: Quote by Democritus of Abdera taken from Loeb Classical Library.

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Even this may be an accurate prophecy: If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us. *In 1938, a radio version, produced by Orson Welles, transposed the Martian invasion from England to the eastern United States, and frightened millions in war-jittery America into believing that the Martians were in fact attacking. †Isaac Newton had written “If the Theory of making Telescopes could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in perpetual tremor.… The only remedy is the most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser Clouds.”

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren

Albert Einstein, George Santayana, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, land tenure, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Departments of the history of science have become respectable, and excellent scientists study and write about the history of their subject. An example is what has been called the “Newton industry.” At the present time, intensive and extensive research is being undertaken in many countries on the work and strange personality of Sir Isaac Newton. Half a dozen books have been recently published or announced. The reason is that scientists are more concerned than ever before about the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. Thus we have no hesitation in recommending that you try to read at least some of the great scientific classics of our tradition.

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Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) * Ethics 63. John Locke (1632-1704) * Letter Concerning Toleration * “Of Civil Government” (second treatise in Two Treatises on Government) * Essay Concerning Human Understanding Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699) Tragedies (esp. Andromache, Phaedra) 65. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) * Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy * Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) Discourse on Metaphysics New Essays Concerning Human Understanding Monadology 67. * *Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe 68. * *Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) A Tale of a Tub Journal to Stella * Gulliver’s Travels A Modest Proposal 69.

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However, it can perhaps go a certain way toward suggesting what such exercises would be, and how to get the most out of them. The Appendix contains brief exercises and test questions at each of the four levels of reading: At the First Level of Reading—Elementary Reading—the texts used are biographical notes about two of the authors included in Great Books of the Western World, John Stuart Mill and Sir Isaac Newton. At the Second Level of Reading—Inspectional Reading—the texts used are the tables of contents of two works included in Great Books of the Western World, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Darwin’s The Origin of Species. At the Third Level of Reading—Analytical Reading—the text used is How to Read a Book itself.

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

With Galileo, the scientific revolution, with experimental observations at its core, was definitively launched. The most important person in the history of dynamics was Isaac Newton. Newton, who was born the year after Galileo died, can be said to have invented, on his own, the science of dynamics. Along the way he also had to invent calculus, the branch of mathematics that describes motion and change. Galileo, 1564–1642 (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, E. Scott Barr Collection) Isaac Newton, 1643–1727 (Original engraving by unknown artist, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives) Physicists call the general study of motion mechanics.

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This is work that largely remains to be done, perhaps by those shocked and frustrated students as they take over from the older generation of scientists. I don’t think the students should have been shocked and frustrated. Any perusal of the history of science will show that the lack of a universally accepted definition of a central term is more common than not. Isaac Newton did not have a good definition of force, and in fact, was not happy about the concept since it seemed to require a kind of magical “action at a distance,” which was not allowed in mechanistic explanations of nature. While genetics is one of the largest and fastest growing fields of biology, geneticists still do not agree on precisely what the term gene refers to at the molecular level.

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Sadi Carnot was a physicist of the early nineteenth century who originated some of the key concepts of thermodynamics. Similarly, we are waiting for the right concepts and mathematics to be formulated to describe the many forms of complexity we see in nature. Accomplishing all of this will require something more like a modern Isaac Newton than a modern Carnot. Before the invention of calculus, Newton faced a conceptual problem similar to what we face today. In his biography of Newton, the science writer James Gleick describes it thus: “He was hampered by the chaos of language—words still vaguely defined and words not quite existing….

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

It would still be resonating in 1821, when Britain officially established the gold standard; it was at the root of William Jennings Bryan's famous cry of defiance about crucifying labor on a cross of gold; it would come back to haunt Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s; and it would continue to stir controversy over expansionary versus contractionary economic policies throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Nor can we expect these kinds of disputes to vanish in the twenty-first century. At this point, an unexpected character appears on center stage: the most distinguished scientist of his age, and surely among the most influential scientists who ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton. In March 1696, just a few months into the turbulence of the Great Recoinage, Newton took on the post of Warden of the Mint at the invitation of his good friend Charles Montagu, Chancellor of the Exchequer. What could possibly have been the Chancellor's motivation in choosing Newton for such a task?

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Renewed fighting with France cut off the imports of gold for a while and made any further changes in the coinage unnecessary until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. At that point, the flood of gold imports gathered renewed strength. Over £4 million came in over the next three years. When the East India Company exported three million ounces of silver in 1717, the authorities once again turned hopefully to the wisdoms of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's "Representation to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Revenue" has become a famous document in the history of money. The reading of it is a tedious business, and the essence of the content is no more than simple arithmetic reciting the values of various weights of gold and silver in different countries.

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From the moment when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558 to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, a period of 136 years, the Mint had issued no more than £15 million in gold coinage, of which half was in guineas that appeared after 1663. During the 45 years from 1695 to 1740, the Mint produced £17 million gold coins. The story on silver is precisely the opposite: L20 million in the earlier period versus rl million in the latter.52 Isaac Newton is the anti-hero of this chapter of our story. Quite aside from his scientific achievements, he deserves heroic status as the first civil servant in history bold enough to employ the laws of supply and demand to make an economic forecast that would determine public policy. He is the anti-hero, nevertheless, because he inaugurated a tradition that will haunt future chapters of this history: economic forecasts by policymakers that turn out to be wrong!

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

. *** Simple arithmetic and patterns for looms are one thing, but if mathematicians wanted to do anything more, they did it by hand. The Holy Grail for scientists at the time was to solve differential equations. Astronomers who studied the skies needed differential equations to predict orbits. The invention of the steam engine would have gone a lot faster if James Watt had been able to solve differentials in Isaac Newton’s law of cooling. Newton stated that if an object, hot or cold, is in an area of constant temperature, then its rate of temperature change is proportional to the difference between the object’s temperature and the ambient temperature. Newton figured this out empirically with a thermometer. Watt ran experiments to figure out how fast steam would cool.

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All bubbles end, and usually for no good reason except an economically unsustainable business is, well, unsustainable. As soon as 70 HOW WE GOT HERE the stock starts dropping, if only because it has exhausted its buyers, the whole thing unwinds. People who had borrowed money sold the stock to pay off the loans, which sent the stock price lower, the upside in exact reverse. Gravity works. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton himself dropped 20,000 pounds faster than an apple falls from a tree. The South Sea bubble is a great story, especially in relation to the Internet Bubble of 1999-2000, when shares of Priceline.com, which sold discount tickets on airlines such as Delta Airlines, were worth more than the airline companies themselves.

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More gold meant the money supply could increase as more of this fiduciary money was created. It wasn’t a bad system, money supply had to come from somewhere. Using gold as a store of wealth was already a sleight of hand, money only fractionally backed by gold was a sleight of a sleight. So what. But then someone messed it all up. *** Sir Isaac Newton had leveraged his planetary dreaming into a real job, as Master of the Mint. In 1717, the Newt decided that the Guinea would represent 129.4 grains of gold. Put another way, an ounce of gold was worth 4 pounds, 4 shillings and 11½ pence. You can tell Sir Isaac was a scientist, if he was an engineer he would have rounded it down to 4 pounds per ounce and called it a day.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo’s and Kepler’s unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens. Newton’s Theory of Forces Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, “It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.” In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything—that is, the theory that described all motion.

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A blazing comet sailed over London. Everyone, from kings and queens to beggars, was buzzing with the news. Where did it come from? Where was it going? What did it portend? One man who took an interest in this comet was astronomer Edmond Halley. He took a trip to Cambridge to meet the famous Isaac Newton, already well-known for his theory of light. (By shining sunlight through a glass prism, Newton showed that white light separated into all the colors of the rainbow, thereby demonstrating that white light is actually a composite color. He also invented a new type of telescope that used reflecting mirrors rather than lenses.)

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It makes no mention of the Standard Model, because it lacks matter fields. Also, it is not clear if the scattering of multiloops in this formalism is truly finite. There is speculation that the collision between two loops yields divergent results. Chapter 1: Unification—The Ancient Dream “It is with Isaac Newton”: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 11. So the equations of Newton: Because Newton’s Principia was written in a purely geometric fashion, it is clear that Newton was aware of the power of symmetry. It is also clear that he exploited the power of symmetry intuitively to calculate the motion of the planets.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Very quickly it became so valuable that it was preserved in the face of even the blatant contraventions alleged by Hooke (who denounced Oldenburg as a spy, selling English secrets to the philosopher of Louis XIV, Christiaan Huygens). And the resolutions, too, of some of the most important of those disputes hung on the management of the archives that had been created by the Society’s reading practices. The greatest exponent of such management was to be Isaac Newton. isaac newton and the rejection of perusal Newton was, of course, the dominant figure to emerge in English natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His emergence took shape through repeated episodes of engagement with the perusalregistrationcirculation sequence. The first of these spanned the period from his initial introduction to the Royal Society in early 1672 to his declaration six years later that he was withdrawing and ceasing all philosophical correspondence.

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It was a university enterprise, devoted to explaining routine natural processes by means of an Aristotelian causal analysis. It was qualitative (the mathematical sciences occupied a lower disciplinary level), discursive, and disputational. Between the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, every aspect of this enterprise came under challenge, and most were overthrown. The claims of astronomers, mathematical practitioners, physicians, and natural magicians cast doubt not only on existing knowledge but also on the processes, personnel, and institutions that should be granted intellectual authority.

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That word, nowhere used in the original law of 1710, was copyright. Piracy flourished so scandalously in a city that saw the origins not only of capitalism, but also of the modern natural sciences and mechanical arts. The London of Atkyns and Henry Hills was also the London of Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton. The question of how this could possibly be – of how experimental science could be created in the same place, and sometimes in the same bookshops and printing houses, that saw piracy boom – is the subject of the next chapter. For now, however, it is important to insist that the origin of the concept in struggles of the book trade was never forgotten.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

He became a mathematician by way of reputation, yet remained a courtier by way of life. “Leibniz’s tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” concluded E. T. Bell.4 Nonetheless, Leibniz made fundamental contributions to mathematics on several fronts. The development of a calculus of continuous functions he shared, controversially, with Isaac Newton, while in combinatorial analysis—the study of relations among discrete sets—Leibniz had the field to himself. Leibniz continued reasoning about reasoning where Hobbes left off. He attempted to formalize a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to definite rules.

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A fascination with formal systems and an insight into mechanical computation were combined in the person of Leibniz from the start. Encouraged by his initial steps toward symbolic logic—and by a working model of a calculating machine—Leibniz declared in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and Leibniz’s go-between with Isaac Newton, that “the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.”5 Leibniz thus helped set in motion the two great movements that led to the age of digital computers in which we live.

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The three-ton device “flawlessly performed its first major calculation,” and “affirmed that Babbage’s failures were ones of practical accomplishment, not of design.”22 Babbage associated with the famous and powerful of his day (“I . . . regularly attended his famous evening parties,” recalled Charles Darwin)23 and held Isaac Newton’s Lucasian chair at Cambridge University from 1828 to 1839. His most celebrated collaboration was with the mathematically gifted Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and protégée not only of Babbage but, to a lesser extent, of logician Augustus de Morgan, who was at the same time encouraging work on the Laws of Thought by George Boole.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Two thousand years ago, long before we understood how and why the planets moved the way they do in the night sky, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy could not restrain his reverence as he contemplated them. In the Almagest he writes: “When I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.” People no longer wax poetic about the orbital paths of planets. Isaac Newton solved that mystery in the seventeenth century with his universal law of gravitation. That Newton’s law is now taught in high school physics classes stands as a simple reminder that on the ever-advancing frontier of discovery, on Earth and in the heavens, the wonders of nature and of human creativity know no bounds, forcing us periodically to reassess what to call the most wondrous

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Whether you’re playing baseball, cricket, football, golf, jai alai, soccer, tennis, or water polo, a ball gets thrown, smacked, or kicked and then briefly becomes airborne before returning to Earth. Air resistance affects the trajectories of all these balls, but regardless of what set them in motion or where they might land, their basic path is described by a simple equation found in Isaac Newton’s Principia, his seminal 1687 book on motion and gravity. Some years later, Newton interpreted his discoveries for the Latin-literate lay reader in The System of the World, which includes a description of what would happen if you hurled stones horizontally at higher and higher speeds. Newton first notes the obvious: the stones would hit the ground farther and farther away from the release point, eventually landing beyond the horizon.

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They successfully installed two new instruments, repaired two others, replaced gyroscopes and batteries, added new thermal insulation to protect the most celebrated telescope since the era of Galileo. It was the crowning achievement of what can happen when the manned space program is in synchrony with the robotic program. Space Tweet #21 Space Shuttle Atlantis – final trip before retirement today. On board, a chunk from Isaac Newton’s apple tree. Cool May 14, 2010 2:22 AM By the way, Hubble is beloved not only because it has taken such great pictures, but because it’s been around a long time. No other space telescopes were designed to be serviced. You put them up; the coolant runs out after three years; the gyros go out after five; they drop in the Pacific after six.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Conselice, Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End (New York: Springer, 2014), 30–32. 41. William Herschel, The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel, vol. 1 (London: Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, 1912), xxix–xxx. 42. Ethan Siegel, “When Did Isaac Newton Finally Fail?,” Forbes, May 20, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/#8c0137648e7e; Michael W. Begun, “Einstein’s Masterpiece,” New Atlantis, fall 2015, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/einsteins-masterpiece. 43. Ethan Siegel, “Happy Birthday to Urbain Le Verrier, Who Discovered Neptune with Math Alone,” Forbes, March 11, 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/11/happy-birthday-to-urbain-le-verrier-who-discovered-neptune-with-math-alone/#6674bcd7586d. 44.

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On average, it takes roughly twelve minutes for a signal from Mars to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light.7 If something is wrong, and a scientist on Earth spots and responds to the problem in a split second, another twelve minutes will pass for that command to reach Mars. That’s twenty-four minutes round trip, but it takes about six minutes for a spacecraft to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface. All we can do is load up the spacecraft with instructions ahead of time and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat. That’s where the peanuts come in. In the early 1960s, JPL was in charge of the unmanned Ranger missions, which were designed to study the Moon to pave the way for the Apollo astronauts. The Ranger spacecraft would be launched toward the Moon, take close-up photos of the lunar surface, and beam those images back to Earth before plummeting into the Moon.8 The first six missions ended in failure, leading critics to accuse JPL officials of adopting a cavalier “shoot-and-hope” approach.9 But a later mission succeeded when a JPL engineer happened to bring peanuts to the mission control room.

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But it was another composition—of a nonmusical kind—that would overshadow Herschel’s music career. Herschel was fascinated with math. Lacking a university education, he turned to books for answers. He devoured volumes on trigonometry, optics, mechanics—and my favorite, James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics. This was the eighteenth-century version of Astronomy for Dummies. He read books on how to construct telescopes and asked a local mirror-builder to teach him how to build one. Herschel began making telescopes, grinding mirrors for sixteen hours a day and making molds out of manure and straw.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, vol. 1 (1802; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 7. Quoted in V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Morrow, 1998), 227. 8. Isaac Newton, Principia, General Scholium (1713). 9. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; repr., Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 479–80. 10. Ibid., 488; Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1693, in Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–3. 11. For more detailed analysis, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, chap. 3. 12.

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All are instances of the “political guardianship” that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a libertarian tradition that has deep roots—and, like Marx’s old mole, is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to peek through, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, seeking to bring about what seems to me at least to be a reasonable approximation to the common good. 4 | THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN? THE TITLE FOR this chapter is drawn from Hume’s observations about the man he called “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species,” Isaac Newton. In Hume’s judgment, Newton’s greatest achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.”

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And in a later discussion, “In my opinion there is just the same reason to conclude that the brain thinks, as that it is white, and soft.”51 Priestley criticizes Locke for being hesitant in putting forth his speculation about thinking matter, since the conclusion follows so directly from “the universally accepted rules of philosophizing such as are laid down by Sir Isaac Newton.” He urges that we abandon the methodological dualism that deters us from applying to thought and sensation the rules that we follow “in our inquiries into the causes of particular appearances in nature” and expresses his hope “that when this is plainly pointed out the inconsistency of our conduct cannot fail to strike us and be the means of inducing” philosophers to apply the same maxim to investigation of mental aspects of the world that they do in other domains—a hope that has yet to be realized, I think.52 Priestley clearly “wished the disappearance of solid matter to signal an end to matter-spirit dualism,” Thackray writes.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Only in 1940 did the American geophysicist Chaim Leib Pekeris realize it was a consequence of the fact that the moon creates tides not only in the earth’s oceans but in its rocks as well (to be precise, the tides are caused by both the moon and the sun, with those of the moon being twice as big as those of the sun). As Isaac Newton first understood, tides are a distortion in the shape of the earth caused by the pull of the moon being stronger on parts of the earth closer to it. Imagine the ocean immediately beneath the moon. The pull on water at the surface is greater than the pull on water at the seabed. The difference causes the sea to bulge upwards towards the moon.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF FALLING Though it does not look like it, the moon is perpetually plummeting towards the earth “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” —DOUGLAS ADAMS1 WHY DON’T SATELLITES FALL down? More than once I have been asked this question by schoolchildren. The answer, surprisingly, is that they are falling down—but they never reach the ground! The first person to realize this far-from-obvious fact was Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. He was of course not thinking about artificial satellites but rather the earth’s natural satellite: the moon. Newton wondered why the moon orbits the earth, and he came up with the following explanation. Imagine a cannon that fires a cannonball horizontally across the ground.

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A WONDERFUL THING IS A PIECE OF STRING The universe may have at least ten dimensions “Technically, you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn’t like them too much, but they’ve got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.” —EDWARD WITTEN ISAAC NEWTON WAS FIRST to realize that, at a fundamental level, all there is to the universe is particles of matter and the forces that bind them together. We now know of four fundamental forces, of which gravity and the electromagnetic force that glues together the atoms in your body and powers our electrical world are the most familiar.

Letters From an Astrophysicist by Neil Degrasse Tyson

dark matter, do what you love, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, microaggression, Pluto: dwarf planet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unbiased observer

Since any two people in the world have a common ancestor—depending on how far back you look, the line we draw to establish family lineage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of as a human being, I don’t look to “relatives,” I look to all human beings. That is the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Joan of Arc and Gandhi, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. I don’t care if I am a descendent of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the brave or cowardly.

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I ranked the Bible No. 1, but my comment irked many a believer. A few years later, catching up with the comments in the thread, I posted a response. The list . . . 1.The Bible “ . . . to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself” 2.The System of the World by Isaac Newton “ . . . to learn that the universe is a knowable place.” 3.On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin “ . . . to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.” 4.Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift “ . . . to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.” 5.The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine “ . . . to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.” 6.The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith “ . . . to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.” 7.The Art of War by Sun Tzu “ . . . to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.” 8.The Prince by Machiavelli “ . . . to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”

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Six moons, including our Moon, are bigger than Pluto. Not only that, several objects in the outer solar system are almost the same size of Pluto (within a factor of two). So what matters more than “how many?” is “what are their various properties?” and “what features do they have in common?” And how about the question of when Isaac Newton was born? This too, does not have an unambiguous answer. According to his mother and all local records, he was born on December 25, 1642. But at the time, England (where Newton was born) used the Julian calendar. Today we use the Gregorian calendar (introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582), which is shifted by ten days from the Julian calendar, and not yet adopted in Protestant England in Newton’s time.

The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

Our President is the Marquis of Ravenscar, a very powerful Whig, and he has been assiduous in finding ways to harness the ingenuity of the Fellows of the Royal Society for practical ends. Some of these, I gad, have to do with money, revenue, banks, stocks, and other subjects that fascinate you. But I must confess I have fallen quite out of touch with such matters. Isaac Newton was elected to Parliament a year ago, in the wake of our Revolution. He had made a name for himself in Cambridge opposing the former King’s efforts to salt the University with Jesuits. He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica.

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He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica. He and your friend Fatio have become the closest of companions, and share lodgings here. POST-SCRIPT—FEB. 1690 After I wrote the above, but before I could post this, King William and Queen Mary prorogued and dissolved Parliament. There have been new elections and the Tories have won. Isaac Newton is no longer M.P. He divides his time between Cambridge, where he toils on Alchemy, and London, where he and Fatio are reading Treatise on Light by our friend and erstwhile dinner-companion Huygens. All of which is to say that I am now even more useless to you than I was a month ago; for I am in a failing Society linked to a Party that has lost power and that has no money, there being none in the kingdom to be had.

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And I will thank you to keep Daniel out of it as well.” Fatio had turned red. “The only thing I wish to snare is a clearer understanding of what has passed between you and Isaac.” “You want to know if you have a rival.” Fatio said nothing. “The answer is: you do not.” “That is well.” “You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.” Ireland 1690–1691 THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history.

The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

Though WmC's report was made three years earlier, its truth regarding the events of 1845 and 1846 were clearly born out. For contemporary evidence of Drew's partnership with Newton in Hudson River steamboats, see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York and Erie Rail Road Company, September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, and Caleb F. Lindsley and George E. Cock v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, March 20, 1848, file 1848-#951A, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC (the latter referring to an incident in 1846); also entries for August 1846, pages 336–6, in vol. 2 of the William D. Murphy Account Books, NYHS. 19 Curtis Peck v.

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Daniel Drew, January 7, 1850, file PL-1850-P 3, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, January 31, 1848, file PL-1848-P 256, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC. 20 Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, June 27, 1848, file PL-1848-R, and Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, November 2, 1848, file PL-1848-R 2, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Medbery 312; Edmund Clarence Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange (New York: Stock Exchange Hstorical Company, 1905), 104. Interestingly, the court filings cited here make clear that manipulation of the road's traffic and its stock price were part of the initial investment plan. 21 Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1845.

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On the loss of the Independence, see AltaC, April 1, 1853, and a report from the San Francisco Whig, reprinted in the LT, May 13, 1853. 48 NYT, October 12, 1853; EP, quoted in the HC, October 17, 1853; RGD, NYC, 341:184. Drew was not new to transactions with the Erie Railroad. As early as February 10, 1842, he and Isaac Newton supplied a steamboat connection to the Erie's terminus at Piermont; see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York & Erie Rail Road Co., September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, NYCC. 49 LW Dictation. 50 CV v. ATC, January 12, 1854, file PL 1854-V9, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; NYH, December 2, 7, 8, 1853; NYTr, December 9, 1853. 51 NYH, January 6, 7, 1854. 52 NYT, January 17, 23, 1854; NYH, November 11, 18, 1853.

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

Thus, while it is technically an overstatement, I will assume throughout that the error made in asserting that the laws treat past and future on equal footing is minimal—at least as far as explaining the puzzle of time’s arrow is concerned. 6. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Anchor, 1989). Chapter 2 1. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), vol. 1, p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 12. 5. Albert Einstein, in Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The Histories of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: Dover, 1993). 6. A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton, Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 27. 7. Ibid. 8.

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And since the angle associated with causally related events is always greater than 45 degrees, the time slices of an observer, who necessarily travels at less than light speed, cannot first encounter the effect and then later encounter the cause. To all observers, cause will precede effect. 12. The notion that causes precede their effects (see the preceding note) would, among other things, be challenged if influences could travel faster than the speed of light. 13. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), vol. 1, p. 634. 14. Because the gravitational pull of the earth differs from one location to another, a spatially extended, freely falling observer can still detect a residual gravitational influence.

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New York: Viking, 1997. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Gott, J. Richard. Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe. Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1997. Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage, 2000. Gribbin, John. Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Halliwell, J. J., J. Pérez-Mercader, and W. H. Zurek. Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 13–17, 20; Michael J. Sheehan, The International Politics of Space—Space Power and Politics series (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 2. 110.Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, 4th ed. (London, 1730), bk. 1, pt. 1, prop. viii, prob. 2; see p. 110 of the Project Gutenberg ebook at sirisaacnewton.info/writings/opticks-by-sir-isaac-newton (accessed Jan. 13, 2018). 111.Robert W. Duffner, The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), ix. 112.For more detail, see, e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Star Magic,” Natural History 104:9 (Sept. 1995), 18–20, digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6501 (accessed Jan. 14, 2018).

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And I told you, that the Theory, which I propounded, was evinced to me, not by inferring ’tis thus because not otherwise, that is, not by deducing it only from a confutation of contrary suppositions, but by deriving it from Experiments concluding positively and directly. The way therefore to examin it is, by considering, whether the Experiments which I propound do prove those parts of the Theory, to which they are applyed; or by prosecuting other Experiments which the Theory may suggest for its examination.” Isaac Newton, “A Serie’s of Quere’s propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be determin’d by Experiments, positively and directly concluding his new Theory of Light and Colours; and here recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they were generously imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the said Mr. Newtons of July 8. 1672,” Philosophical Transac.

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Although none of the seventeenth-century telescopes measured up to those of later centuries, and not everyone could master the knack of seeing through them, the telescope and its cousin the binocular nonetheless brimmed with potential, both astronomical and military. But the breadth of astronomical possibilities surfaced only gradually and incidentally. Passable wide-field astronomical telescopes barely existed until the second half of the century, by which time Isaac Newton’s nemesis, the talented British scientist Robert Hooke, would have good cause to speculate that “there may be yet invented several other helps for the eye, as much exceeding those already found, as those do the bare eye, such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets [italics in original].”

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Ultimately, neglect of science and technology caused the Chinese to lose their edge. By the late fourteenth century, Europe had caught up. For warfare, Europeans developed and perfected the smooth-bore cannon. Rockets were relegated to firework displays.6 Wan Hu’s dreams of traveling to the stars were forgotten. They were given a firm theoretical basis in the work of Isaac Newton, the author of a theory of gravity and laws of motion that would be the basis for space travel centuries later. Newton’s 1687 masterwork, Principia, unified the terrestrial and celestial realms. Drop an apple and it falls in one second 3,600 times farther than the Moon curves in its orbit, both caused by the action of the Earth’s gravity.

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With no friction or air resistance, the only force operating is gravity.7 Fired at modest speed, the cannonball will land at the base of the mountain. As the initial speed is increased, the ball travels farther and farther before landing. Newton calculated the speed where the ball falls toward the Earth’s surface at the same rate as the Earth’s surface is “falling away” from it (Figure 5). Figure 5. In the thought experiment of Isaac Newton, a cannonball is launched horizontally from a mountain tall enough to be above the Earth’s atmosphere. As the velocity increases, the surface curves at the same rate the cannonball falls, creating a circular orbit. This is the concept of an orbit. Any projectile shot from Newton’s hypothetical cannon at 7.9 kilometers per second or 17,650 mph would remain a captive of the Earth’s gravity but would never hit the ground.

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Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”17 Forty-nine years after ripping Goddard, and a day after the launch of Apollo 11, the paper issued a brief correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”18 The apology was too late for Goddard, who died of throat cancer in 1945. Wernher von Braun Warfare and space exploration merged again in the 1940s.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

Two hydrogen nuclei have to be able to get very close in order to fuse; but the closer they get, the stronger the repulsive force between them becomes, as each carries a positive electric charge and “like” charges repel. In fact, for them to get close enough to fuse, the particles have to be able to get through the subatomic equivalent of a brick wall: an apparently impenetrable energy barrier. Classical physics*1—built upon Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, mechanics and gravity, which describe very well the everyday world of balls, springs, steam engines (and even planets)—would predict that this shouldn’t happen; particles should not be able to pass through walls and therefore the sun shouldn’t shine. But particles that obey the rules of quantum mechanics, such as atomic nuclei, have a neat trick up their sleeve: they can easily pass through such barriers via a process called “quantum tunneling.”

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One could argue over who was responsible for this extraordinarily productive shift in human thought; medieval Arab and Persian scholars, such as Alhazen and Avicenna, certainly played a role, and the trend was then taken up in the emerging scholarly institutions of Europe such as the universities of Paris and Oxford. But this way of describing the world probably bore its first great fruit in the University of Padua in Italy, where Galileo enshrined simple laws of motion in mathematical formulae. In the year he died, 1642, Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England, and went on to provide an extraordinarily successful mathematical description of how the motion of inanimate objects could be changed by forces, a system which is to this day referred to as Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s forces were initially rather mysterious notions, but over the following centuries they became increasingly identified with the concept of energy.

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Descartes exempted the human mind from his mechanistic view, leaving it with an immortal soul; but his philosophy did at least attempt to provide a scientific framework that accounted for life in terms of the physical laws that were being discovered to govern inanimate objects. The mechanistic biological approach was continued by a near-contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton’s: the physician William Harvey, who discovered that the heart was nothing more than a mechanical pump. A century later, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated that a respiring guinea pig consumes oxygen and generates carbon dioxide, just like the fire that provided the motive force of the new technology of steam engines.

Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, William of Occam

As both an amateur astronomer and a geodeist, a profession that took him to towering mountain sites, he had long been convinced that astronomy would best be served by taking its instruments to the highest elevations possible, where a telescope's resolution would improve immensely in the clear, more rarefied atmosphere. Isaac Newton first pointed this out in the eighteenth century. “For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual Tremor,” he wrote in his Opticks. “… The only remedy is a most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds.”

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Barnard in a notice to the Royal Astronomical Society. “… [Keeler] has a real artistic ability such as very few observers possess.” Keeler's real forte, however, was in using a spectroscope, which was a relatively recent addition to astronomy's instrumental arsenal. The scientific basis for it was established in the seventeenth century. A young Isaac Newton, sitting in a darkened room in 1666, let a small stream of sunlight enter through a hole in his window shutter. He then passed it through a triangular prism of glass. Beholding a rainbow of colors on the wall behind him, an enchanting phenomenon observed with pieces of glass since antiquity, Newton clearly demonstrated that white light was a mixture of many hues: On one end was a band of red, followed by orange, yellow, green, and blue, until it reached a deep violet on the other end.

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Over that time scholars only occasionally reflected on the possibility of a universe significantly bigger. In the sixteenth century, for example, Thomas Digges in England imagined the stars scattered throughout a boundless space, while in Italy Giordano Bruno presciently declared that “the center of the universe is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.” Even Isaac Newton had a good scientific reason to prefer a cosmos without end. If the universe had a border, gravity would gradually draw all its matter inward, and ultimately the universe would collapse. To keep the cosmos stable—immutable and immovable—required that the stars be spread infinitely outward in all directions.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature”: Nathanael Fairfax, “Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature, Both in Men and Brutes; Communicated by the Same,” Philosophical Transactions 1666–67, 2 (1666): 549–51. back in Woolsthorpe: Newton also spent some time at Cambridge during these plague years, where he did work as well. Information on Newton’s life and work can be found in these sources: George Smith, “Isaac Newton,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/newton/; V. Frederick Rickey, “Isaac Newton: Man, Myth, and Mathematics,” The College Mathematics Journal 18, no. 5 (1987): 362–89. “great tragedy of Science”: Tania Lombrozo, “Must Science Murder Its Darlings?” NPR 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/01/26/266784786/must-science-murder-its-darlings.

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According to the scholar Daniel Boorstin, “Before he was twenty-six, Leibniz had devised a program of legal reform for the Holy Roman Empire, had designed a calculating machine, and had developed a plan to divert Louis XIV from his attacks on the Rhineland by inducing him to build a Suez Canal.” In the words of Frederick the Great, Leibniz was “a whole academy in himself.” Similarly, Isaac Newton stitched together a whole host of phenomena—from how objects fall to the orbit of Mars—through his theory of gravitation. Around the same time, Gresham College, one of the oldest colleges in England, and devoted to providing public lectures on various topics, had a small faculty in areas such as astronomy, geometry, and music.

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He did not speculate about why thunder might have this effect on a woman, noting only, “And thus it hath been with this Gentlewoman from a Girl.” One gets the sense that while Fairfax wanted to eventually learn something from these observations and facts he recorded, the act of making the observations was itself enough, at least as a first step toward understanding. Around this same time, a young physicist named Isaac Newton was thinking about how objects move and how light works. While Newton was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, a plague began to sweep through the country. As a precaution, the university closed. So Newton spent the next couple of years primarily at home, back in Woolsthorpe in the countryside.

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

But this should be far from obvious. To explore this further, I will introduce three concepts that are not always taught to students of physics, but which most certainly should be: universality, symmetry, and reductionism. UNIVERSALITY The first ‘universal’6 law of physics was discovered by Isaac Newton.7 Whether or not he saw an apple fall from a tree on his mother’s farm, triggering him to develop his law of gravitation, or what the mathematical formula articulating this law looks like, are not of importance here. The crucial point is that Newton realised that the force that pulls an apple to the ground has the same origin as the force that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth—that a simple mathematical relation can describe both processes equally well.

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And what if we now get rid of the physical walls of both boxes, and everything else in this imaginary universe, so that all that is left is nothingness? Is that nothingness still something? Does this empty space exist ready to be filled with matter, or to be contained within the confines of a box? Maybe I am just asking the same question in different ways, but only because it is by no means a trivial one. Isaac Newton believed that space has to exist in order for matter and energy to be contained within it and for events to take place within it. But space exists, he argued, only as an empty nothingness, independently of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of matter and energy within it. For Newton, space is the canvas on which reality is painted.

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These two statements sound contradictory … until you learn about Einsteinian relativity. Einstein proved that absolute space and absolute time do not exist as separate entities. But to appreciate why this notion is necessary, I need to introduce you to the first of his two theories of relativity. EINSTEIN’S SPECIAL THEORY Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion, debates about the nature of time were considered to be the domain of philosophy and metaphysics rather than proper science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all motion or change requires time to make any sense, time had to be included as a fundamental part of his mathematical description of the world.

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

In the West, theory was unconstrained by new observations, and in the East, observations were unguided by theory. Then came the great awakening in the West, when Bacon and Descartes together led the way to the flowering of modern science. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the heyday of the scientific amateurs. During those two centuries, professional scientists like Isaac Newton were the exception and gentleman amateurs like his rival Gottfried Leibniz were the rule. Amateurs had the freedom to jump from one area of science to another and start new enterprises without waiting for official approval. But in the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of amateur leadership, science became increasingly professional.

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Random House, 2002. 3. The theme of amateur biology is explored further in my forthcoming book, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (University of Virginia Press, 2006). 17 A NEW NEWTON IT WAS A strange juxtaposition. A big metal box filled with the manuscripts of Isaac Newton, hidden by Newton during his lifetime and unread for two hundred years afterward, and a fat young man with red hair and khaki shorts, strutting on the stage at meetings of the British Union of Fascists. The big metal box was packed up by Newton in 1696, when he left Cambridge and moved to London.

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He quotes with approval Westfall’s judgment that The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a book written by Newton in his old age and published after his death, is “a work of colossal tedium.” Anyone who would like a more sympathetic and more detailed account of Newton’s religious studies, based on the Yahuda papers in Jerusalem, should read the book The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel.4 Manuel’s book is, so far as I know, the only important work about Newton that does not appear in Gleick’s bibliography. For several years after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Newton was deeply involved in national politics. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was a turning point in English constitutional history, as important for England as the revolution of 1776 was for America.

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

But on the other hand, some sections of the public also grew wary of science because many of its practitioners, such as Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, publicly supported the radical politics of the French Revolution. He paid dearly for his views. In 1791, an angry mob burned down his house and laboratory. Moreover, England’s two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, offered no courses in subjects that resemble modern-day physics and engineering. Cambridge, being Isaac Newton’s alma mater, did rigorously train students in the mathematical principles that great scientist had discovered. But basking in Newton’s legacy, professors there saw no need to extend his work and were suspicious of novel mathematical techniques being developed abroad. In 1806, when one progressive scholar, Robert Woodhouse, urged the adoption of a European style of mathematics, he was condemned as unpatriotic in the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review.

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Intrigued, Bernoulli turned to mathematics for an explanation. Specifically, Bernoulli looked first at the one aspect of the physical world the mathematics of the day could describe, namely the way solid objects such as cannonballs and billiard balls move—the so-called principles of mechanics. These had been established by Isaac Newton in the 1680s and had become a sophisticated tool by the time Bernoulli was writing in the 1730s. Bernoulli applied these principles to fluids such as blood and water and showed that they predicted what he’d observed. Now known as Bernoulli’s principle, the idea can be extended beyond liquids to gases.

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Hilbert then allowed Noether to lecture in his name, thus frustrating the Göttingen Senate’s desire to prevent her from teaching. Noether worked in this way for four years without pay—her family covered her living expenses. The year Noether arrived in Göttingen, 1915, was the same year Einstein published his general theory of relativity, overturning Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Hilbert found the mathematical implications of Einstein’s work fascinating. In fact, one reason he had invited Noether to Göttingen was because she was an expert in the theory of invariants, a key technique Einstein had used in his work. Hilbert, in essence, asked Noether to assess the validity of Einstein’s mathematics.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, even more than his support for Copernicus, that was to be the genesis of modern physics. ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man. His relations with other academics were notorious, with most of his later life spent embroiled in heated disputes. Following publication of Principia Mathematica—surely the most influential book ever written in physics—Newton had risen rapidly into public prominence.

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v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright FOREWORD Chapter One Our Picture of the Universe Chapter Two Space and Time Chapter Three The Expanding Universe Chapter Four The Uncertainty Principle Chapter Five Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature Chapter Six Black Holes Chapter Seven Black Holes Ain’t So Black Chapter Eight The Origin and Fate of the Universe Chapter Nine The Arrow of Time Chapter Ten Wormholes and Time Travel Chapter Eleven The Unification of Physics Chapter Twelve Conclusion ALBERT EINSTEIN GALILEO GALILEI ISAAC NEWTON GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author FOREWORD I didn’t write a foreword to the original edition of A Brief History of Time. That was done by Carl Sagan. Instead, I wrote a short piece titled “Acknowledgments” in which I was advised to thank everyone. Some of the foundations that had given me support weren’t too pleased to have been mentioned, however, because it led to a great increase in applications.

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As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The History began with a stirring argument for why electricity was so interesting in the first place: Hitherto philosophy has been chiefly conversant about the more sensible properties of bodies; electricity, together with chemistry, and the doctrine of light and colours, seems to be giving us an inlet into their internal structure, on which all their sensible properties depend. By pursuing this new light, therefore, the bounds of natural science may possibly be extended, beyond what we can now form an idea of. New worlds may open to our view, and the glory of the great Sir Isaac Newton himself, and all his contemporaries, be eclipsed, by a new set of philosophers, in quite a new field of speculation. Could that great man revisit the earth, and view the experiments of the present race of electricians, he would be no less amazed than Roger Bacon, or Sir Francis, would have been at his.

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Priestley aimed to popularize not simply by helping ordinary readers understand the new science of electricity, but also by encouraging them to become scientists themselves. While he wanted to celebrate the electricians’ discoveries, he deliberately avoided establishing an aura of otherworldly genius around them: Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. . . . [T]he interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered; and . . . an opinion of the greater equality of mankind in point of genius would be of real service in the present age.

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Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on. . . . [S]o capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers. . . . The classic image of Franklin with his electrified kite, ingrained in the minds of countless American schoolchildren over the past two centuries, dates back to this paragraph from Priestley’s History. Franklin himself had only published a brief third-person account of his experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette, without specifying that he himself had performed it.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Through my youthful eyes, the biggest appeal of Voyager was indeed this idea of exploring the truly unknown—throwing a bottle, of sorts, into the cosmic ocean and seeing where the eddies and currents of nature would take it. In my telescope, on a clear cold night, I could make out the reddish-brown belts and bands of Jupiter, as well as its famous Great Red Spot. It was a good-sized instrument for a young amateur astronomer, a so-called Newtonian telescope (designed by Isaac Newton, and using mirrors instead of lenses) made by a company called Meade Instruments, with a main mirror about eight inches in diameter and a tube about four feet long. With that tube held by a metal mounting post and three wide metal legs, it was a heavy, bulky, cumbersome thing to schlep outside and in from the garage and to set up every time I wanted to use it (especially in the snow), but it was so worth the effort.

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But no one recognized it as a planetes asteres, a wandering star. At least, not until March of 1781. That’s when the German-born English musician and astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) single-handedly doubled the size of the solar system. Herschel is one of those almost mythic characters from the early history of Western astronomy. Like Isaac Newton in the century before him, Herschel was a prominent polymath—a person with many different kinds of technical and academic skills. He focused much of his energy on, and made his living by, composing and performing music (twenty-four symphonies, fourteen concertos, and many other pieces) and also dabbled in astronomy, optics, and other areas of science.

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Notable examples from the history of Western astronomy include pioneers like the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus; Danish observer Tycho Brahe and German astronomer Johannes Kepler working together in the late sixteenth century; the late-seventeenth-century English physicist Isaac Newton; and of course the first loner at the telescope, Galileo Galilei, in the early 1600s. But the history of individual, or “small,” science pushed forward mostly by key individuals goes much farther back in time and crosses many cultures, including notable Greek, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Indian, and other thinkers.

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Building his conclusions through experiment after experiment, he amassed a huge body of data in order to reach those proofs. In the words of the historian of science Park Benjamin, “…he, first of all men, systematically replaced the great doctrine of words by the great doctrine of works.” De Magnete marked the beginning of modern science, opening the door for Galileo and Isaac Newton. In particular, Newton took to experimentation with sometimes frightening gusto—at one point staring at the sun with one eye to study the afterimages, nearly blinding himself in the process. In another series of experiments, he inserted various instruments around his eye, including a bodkin (an ivory toothpick) as well as his finger to change the shape of his eyeball.

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Landed gentry, noblemen, and successful tradesmen with social ambitions who possessed the time and resources enthusiastically took to science, reading the details of the latest discoveries, supporting research, attending lectures, and even setting up small laboratories of their own to conduct experiments. Not surprisingly, with the popularity of science on the rise among the aristocracy, interest grew among the less fortunate classes. Ben Jonson—a friend of Bacon’s—wrote a popular comic play called The Magnetick Lady or Humours Reconcil’d, featuring Lady Lodestone as the lead character. Sir Isaac Newton, an intensely private and often paranoid man, paradoxically became something of a pop culture icon of the day with his likeness adorning an endless stream of portraits and commemorative medals. A kind of cottage industry began to flourish with itinerant men of science offering demonstrations for small towns and villages.

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Charlatans and natural philosophers of dubious merit soon took to presenting demonstrations in parlors and lecture halls, many of them making up theories as they went along. To feed the curiosity of a public eager for the latest news of scientific discovery, publications also multiplied, ranging from the serious science of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions to popular titles such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explained for the Ladies. In the mid-1600s, a London physician named Thomas Brown published Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. Like Gilbert, he intended to discredit unproven and untested beliefs. Although an instant bestseller, quickly selling out multiple printings, the book is generally seen as a mishmash of solid experimentation and confusing explanations, though he did manage to coin several new words.

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

So Zeno’s argument that a finite duration of time is just made up of a sequence of such consecutive instants is wrong. It would take advances in mathematics as well as physics for this paradox to be finally laid to rest. More specifically, it was an understanding of calculus, the field of mathematics developed by Isaac Newton and others in the seventeenth century, which describes how to add up tiny quantities in order to describe the notion of change correctly, that would lay Zeno’s naïve ideas to rest. Well, almost. In 1977, two physicists at the University of Texas published a surprising research paper that suggested Zeno’s Arrow Paradox might have been laid to rest too prematurely.

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OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE In 1915 Einstein published his greatest work. It wasn’t his famous equation, E = mc2; nor was it his work on light, which won him the Nobel Prize. It is called his General Theory of Relativity, and in it he describes how the force of gravity affects space and time. We learn at school a description of gravity that Isaac Newton gave us: that it is an invisible force acting to pull all objects together. Of course, this is quite right, and we live our lives under the influence of our planet’s gravity holding us to its surface. Newton’s law of gravity also explains how the Moon orbits the Earth and how its gravitational pull affects the ocean tides; and it explains how the Earth orbits the Sun, thus confirming Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system.

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But even our most powerful scientific theories often fall short when we try to push them too far in trying to answer such deep metaphysical questions as: “Does time really flow, or is that just an illusion?” and: “Is there an absolute rate to the flow of time, or even an unambiguous direction to this flow?” Clearly, statements such as “time points from the past to the future” or “time goes by at a rate of one second every second” are somewhat unhelpful. Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion more than three centuries ago in his Principia mathematica, time was considered to be the domain of philosophy rather than science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all movement and change require the notion of time to make sense, time had to be included as an integral part of his mathematical description of nature.

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

Chapter 11: Everything’s Different The American Museum of Natural History’s website on the Sloan is at http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/astro/f/sdss.20051208/. The information about the large surveys PanSTARRS and LSST came from their excellent websites: PanSTARRS, http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/, and LSST, http://www.lsst.org/lsst. Chapter 12: Jim Again The quote from Isaac Newton came from “Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Richard Bentley Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity” (between 1692 and 1756); quoted in Joseph Silk, “How Big Is the Universe,” Historical Development in Modern Cosmology. Vicent J. Martínez, Virginia Trimble, and María Jesús, ed., ASP Conference Series 252 (2001): 117.

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And for every dollar that Princeton puts in, Chicago matches it. And then for every dollar the universities put in, NSF matches it. And for every dollar NSF puts in, Sloan matches it. OK? The multiplicative factors add up. —Jerry Ostriker, Princeton University God, they’ve been doing this since Isaac Newton, can’t they get it right? —Hirsh Cohen, Sloan Foundation ABOUT THE TIME the University of Chicago was founded, Princeton University turned 150 years old. Nassau Hall, its main building, had been the venue for the Continental Congress in 1783, just after the university amended its charter so that its trustees no longer needed to swear allegiance to the king of England.

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Chapter 12 Jim Again But if the matter were evenly disposed throughout an infinite space, it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered throughout all that infinite space. —Isaac Newton It’s easier if you’re smart, but I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. I think dedication really matters more. —Jim Gunn, Princeton University START NOW NOT with scale, small to large, but with time, at the beginning—though not at the very beginning, which is the province not of cosmology but of theoretical physics, some of it highly theoretical.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

The average world market price of gold in 2009 was about £20,500 per kilogram. Who invented the catflap? It wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton. It’s an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. Sadly, the evidence doesn’t stack up. To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes in the door of his lodgings – a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens.

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The trick was to remove small amounts of metal from legal coinage, melt down the scraps and recast new coins. There were three ways of doing this: ‘clipping’ (filing tiny fragments from the coin’s edges); ‘drilling’ (taking the coin and punching small holes in it, which were then hammered shut); and ‘sweating’ (shaking a bag of coins for long enough to create a dust of gold and copper). Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) became obsessed with the underworld of counterfeiting gangs after he was made Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696. His secret career as an alchemist had made him something on an expert at assessing the purity of metals. By his reckoning, one in five coins in circulation in England were false.

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Whatever afflicted him, it didn’t prevent Newton from producing Principia Mathematica (1687), the most influential scientific book of all time, or from building a successful second career as a civil servant and administrator. He lived until he was eighty-four and died a very wealthy man, leaving assets worth £31,821 (equivalent to £49 million in today’s money). STEPHEN There are people in history who were said to be agelastic, including Isaac Newton, who was supposed to have laughed only once in his life. CLIVE ANDERSON When an apple fell on his head. STEPHEN No, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid, and he burst out laughing. JIMMY CARR Yeah, that is a good one, though. What did Molotov invent? Molotov didn’t invent his ‘cocktails’.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In fact, atoms stayed out of fashion right up until 1800, when the English chemist John Dalton proved that they were real (he didn’t know, and couldn’t know, that atoms do indeed exist, but are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are in turn made of quarks, and none of it can be called solid). * * * The no-atom business made it difficult for Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to talk about what he understood as small, solid masses moving about in a void. But really, Democritus and Newton were positing the same kind of system – there is a void, or empty space, and there are solid, indestructible bits of matter moving about in the void. Newton’s great idea was to add the force of gravity to explain movement. * * * In the 17th century, Isaac Newton built his mighty model of how the world works on the notion of empty space that was exactly that – a void – with solid matter moving about inside the empty space, worked upon by gravity.

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His idea, like so many innovations of the Industrial Revolution, was to mechanise repetitive work. The word ‘computer’ at this time was used for human operators doing the tedious arithmetical tabling that Babbage imagined (correctly) could be done by his Difference Engine. Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post held by both Isaac Newton before him and Stephen Hawking after him (and still never held by a woman, btw). Babbage had a fascination for mechanical automata, as well as numbers. Building a cogs-and-wheels calculating machine was perfect for him. And for Ada, as it turned out. To be invited to a Babbage party you had to be beautiful, clever or aristocratic.

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Ross Ashby, 1956 Buddhism for Beginners, Thubten Chodron, 2001 A Simple Path: Basic Buddhist Teachings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 2000 The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra, 1975 The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, 2014 Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm, 1980 Reality Is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli, 2014 A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945 The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch, 1970 A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton, 2011 The Symposium, Plato On the Soul and Poetics, Aristotle Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, Edith Hall, 2018 Shakespeare’s sonnets Opticks, Isaac Newton, 1704 The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind, Michio Kaku, 2014 (I am just about to read Kaku’s The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, 2021. I recommend all his books.) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, 1999 Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, James Lovelock, 2019 (and everything he has written) Coal-Fired Vampire Epic of Gilgamesh (world’s earliest surviving text) Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice, 1976 The Twilight saga, Stephenie Meyer 2005–20 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890 Faust, Goethe, 1808 The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1472 ‘Piers Plowman’ (poem), William Langland, 1370–90 ‘The Vampyre’ (short story), John William Polidori, 1819 How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Ray Kurzweil, 2012 ‘Transhumanism’ (article), Julian Huxley, 1968 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom, 2014 To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, Mark O’Connell, 2017 Selected poems of Andrew Marvell, 1995 (I should have included ‘To His Coy Mistress’ in the essay.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

In 1965, observing the accelerating rate at which individuals were entering the sciences, the junior minister of science and education of Great Britain concluded, "For more than 200 years scientists everywhere were a significant minority of the population. In Britain today they outnumber the clergy and the officers of the armed forces. If the rate of progress which has been maintained ever since the time of Sir Isaac Newton were to continue for another 200 years, every man, woman and child on Earth would be a scientist, and so would every horse, cow, dog, and mule" (in Hardison 1988, p. 14). Transportation speed has also shown geometric progression, with most of the change being made in the last 1 percent of human history.

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"No, I do believe in ghosts." "What?" "The laws of physics and logic, the number system, the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravity existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity." "Of course." "So, before the beginning of the Earth, before people, etc., the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy, and not existing in anyone's mind." "Right."

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It has just passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have, or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. I predict that if you think about it long enough, you will go round and round until you realize that the law of gravity did not exist before Isaac Newton. So the law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads. It is a ghost!" This is what I call Pirsig's Paradox. One of the knottier problems for historians and philosophers of science over the past three decades has been resolving the tension between the view of science as a progressive, culturally independent, objective quest for Truth and the view of science as a nonprogressive, socially constructed, subjective creation of knowledge.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

European kings started: Hutchison, “Copernican Revolution”; Eran Shalev, “A Republic amidst the Stars: Political Astronomy and the Intellectual Origins of the Stars and Stripes,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (2011): 39–73. “system of the world”: Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157–67. “language of mathematics”: Galilei Galileo, Opere 6:232; Douglas Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes and the Book of Nature,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 191–211. “solitary, poor, nasty”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), 97. See also Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes.” Newton replaced this aimless cosmos: Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol. 2 (London, 1729), 388; available at http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00056.

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The minor variations in the Sun’s speed through the sky (which create a discrepancy of up to sixteen minutes between “Sun time” and “clock time”) hadn’t been large enough to matter. But now clocks were more accurate than the Sun. The devices initially built to imitate the cosmos had transcended it, with profound consequences for human thought. Poised to take advantage of this development was the physicist Isaac Newton, working on his theory of gravity. His pioneering work Principia, published in 1687, revolutionized the scientific view of the cosmos, and remains one of the most important scientific publications ever. In it, Newton set out three basic laws of motion and explained how these, combined with his law of gravitational attraction,* could account for all of the movements of the solar system from wandering planets and distant moons to once-in-a-lifetime comets and even the ocean tides.

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Kirchhoff, though just as brilliant in his own field, was in many ways the opposite of Bunsen. Thirteen years younger than the exuberant chemist, Kirchhoff was described by his colleagues as modest and shy. He was interested in how electricity behaves in different circuits and materials, and like Isaac Newton he had a talent for making meticulous observations of complex phenomena, then deriving elegant mathematical laws to describe them. Kirchhoff suggested that instead of comparing different colored flames by eye, Bunsen should pass their light through a glass prism, just as Newton had done in 1666.

New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Chomsky has cut the Gordian knot by emphasizing a more fundamental difficulty: the mind–body problem cannot even be formulated. This is not, as generally supposed, because we have too limited an understanding of the mind, but because we don’t have criteria for what constitutes a body. In a typically radical attempt at clarification he points out that, as Isaac Newton’s insights led to the demise of contact mechanics, the Cartesian notion of body was refuted and nothing since has replaced it. In the absence of a coherent notion of “body”, the traditional mind–body problem has no conceptual status, so no special problems of causality arise. More generally, there is no special metaphysical problem associated with attempts to deal naturalistically with “mental” phenomena (such as knowledge of language), any more than there are metaphysical problems for chemists in defining the “chemical”.

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The enterprise of epistemic naturalism is uncontentious, apart from the term, which is misleading in a peculiarly modern way. The epistemic naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was science, an attempt to construct an empirical theory of mind; Hume, for one, compared his enterprise with Isaac Newton’s. Epistemic naturalism, in Naturalism and dualism 81 contrast, is presented as a “philosophical position,” something apparently different. We plainly cannot read back into earlier periods a distinction between science and philosophy that developed later. We would not use the term “visual naturalism” to refer to the empirical study of the growth and functioning of the visual system (also a topic of earlier rational psychology), implying that there was some coherent alternative for the same realm of problems.

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To account for them, he postulated a new principle; in his framework, a second substance, whose essence is thought. The “unification problem” arose as a question about the interaction of body and mind. This metaphysical dualism was naturalistic in essence, using empirical evidence for factual theses about the world – wrong ones, but then, that is the rule. The Cartesian theory collapsed soon after, when Isaac Newton showed that terrestrial and planetary motion lie beyond the bounds of the mechanical philosophy – beyond what was understood to be body, or matter. What remained was a picture of the world that was “antimaterialist,” and that “relied heavily on spiritual forces,” as Margaret Jacob puts it (M. Jacob 1988: 97).

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

v All from the island of Sulawesi (Alfred Russel Wallace’s Celebes) or its surrounding waters. 18 Opening Up the Razor The maxim which inspires all scientific philosophising… [is] ‘Occam’s razor’: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Bertrand Russell, 19141 In April 1761, thirty-four years after the death of Isaac Newton and 118 years before the birth of Albert Einstein, Richard Price (1723–91), the non-conformist Protestant minister, moral philosopher and mathematician, examined the unpublished papers of his recently deceased friend and mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702–61). Bayes had been a modestly successful scientist. Thirty years earlier, he had rushed to the defence of Isaac Newton’s mathematical method known as calculus, which had been attacked in an article addressed to ‘an infidel mathematician’ by the Irish philosopher and Roman Catholic bishop George Berkeley who feared that Newton’s mechanistic science would undermine religious faith.

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Franklin had shown that lightning, for millennia thought to be a missile of the gods, was just another form of electricity. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Franklin ‘the new Prometheus’, and the English chemist Joseph Priestley described the kite experiment as ‘the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton’, insisting that Franklin was ‘the father of modern electricity’.12 Is life electric? A few years earlier, in 1746, Robert Turner, an English naturalist steeped in the vitalist tradition, had published Electricology: Or a Discourse upon Electricity. Being an Enquiry into the Nature, Causes, Properties and Effects thereof, upon the Principles of the Aether.

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His pamphlet Diatribe du Docteur Akakia is a vicious lampoon of the life and work of another Frenchman, Berlin resident and the president of the Berlin Academy, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759). Maupertuis was born in 1698, four years before Thomas Bayes, in Saint-Malo, a port on the Brittany coast of France. He studied mathematics in Paris and in 1723 was admitted to the Académie des Sciences where he became a champion of the mechanistic laws that Isaac Newton had discovered across the Channel. In the 1730s Maupertuis engaged in a debate over whether the earth was flattened at either equator (prolate) or the poles (oblate). He used Newtonian mechanics to predict that the earth was oblate, in opposition to the opinion of the eminent French astronomer Jacques Cassini (1677–1756).

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

There was one more innovation to come, after which the form of the slide rule was essentially fixed. The so-called cursor, a sliding vertical bar that made it easier to read slide rules with multiple scales, was independently invented at least four times before it finally stuck. First to come up with the idea was Isaac Newton, shortly after logarithmic scales became fashionable, but it was a young French artillery officer named Amédée Mannheim whose 1850 design, bearing a metal cursor and four scales labeled A to D, became the prototype for all that followed.73 The end result of all this tinkering and tweaking—this elaborate ruler, this clever stick—was a portable mathematics powerhouse.

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‡ Coincidentally, Johannes Gutenberg’s father held a similar position in Mainz a century and a half earlier. It is interesting to compare what the two men did with their knowledge of metalworking: Gutenberg perfected movable type; Napier applied it to the practice of alchemy. § In 1687, seventy years after John Napier’s death, Isaac Newton would put an end to more than a millennium of such outlandish theories with the observation that all physical bodies exhibit an attraction to one another in proportion to their mass. For all intents and purposes, the publication of Principia Mathematica was the alchemical act that transmuted astrology into astronomy

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It was the brainchild of a mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a man so argumentative that only his secretary attended his funeral, and whose philosophical assertion that we must necessarily live in “the best of all possible worlds” was mercilessly satirized by, among others, the celebrated French writer Voltaire.8 For all his faults, Leibniz was an indefatigable scholar, vaulting between disciplines as he pleased. He created binary arithmetic, inspired by an ancient Chinese book called the Yì jīng (often spelled “I Ching”).9 And he would later be given dual credit, with Isaac Newton, for having invented “calculus,” the mathematics of gradients, change, integration, and differentiation, whose name descends from the Roman counting tokens called calculi.10 An 1862 drawing of the internals of Charles Xavier Thomas’s arithmometer. Fig. 2 shows a section through one of the device’s counters.

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

So it was that quantum mechanics seemed at the outset to be about this notion of ‘quantized energy’: how it increases in steps, not smoothly, for atoms and molecules and light radiation. This, we’re told, was the fundamental physical content of the early theory; the rest was added as a theoretical apparatus for handling it. That, however, is a little like saying that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation was a theory of how comets move through the solar system. It was indeed the appearance of a comet in 1680 that prompted Newton to think about the shape of their paths and to formulate a law of gravity that explained them. But his gravitational theory is not about comets.

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Wavefunctions Ψ and the corresponding ‘rungs’ on the energy ladder for the first three quantum states of a particle in a box. The amplitudes of all the wavefunctions are zero at the walls themselves. Here, then, is the quantum alternative to the mechanics of classical physics, as embodied in the equations of motion deduced by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. And how abstract and hard to visualize this description has become! Instead of particles and trajectories, we have wavefunctions. Instead of definite predictions, we have probabilities. Instead of stories, we have maths. It doesn’t seem enough. What is the real nature of the electron that underlies these probabilities, this smooth, spread-out wavefunction?

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In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason. They just happen. That sounds like a terribly unscientific thing to say, and seems to go against the grain of everything that scientists and natural philosophers have striven to achieve since well before the time of Isaac Newton: to explain the world. Quantum events don’t appear to have an explanation as such – one in which definable causes lead to specific effects – but only a probability of occurrence. This is what Einstein found unreasonable. Who can pretend that it isn’t? He suspected that this apparent randomness is just like the randomness of a toppling pin: it really does have a specific, deterministic cause (this leads to that), but we can’t see what that is.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

6 That Jābir is regarded in the West as having been ‘just an alchemist’ probably has more to do with the prejudices of the early European translators of his work than with his own scientific leanings. Some of his most influential books were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, at a time when alchemy was still considered a respectable pursuit in Europe (it would continue to be so, well into the Renaissance). Even Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist later in life and is sometimes referred to as the last of the magicians rather than the first scientist of the age of reason – and he lived nine hundred years after Jābir. One distinction that was made between the two disciplines is that while chemistry was regarded as the science of matter, alchemy involved the philosophy of matter.

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In any case, I do not see that such a stance is necessary in order to legitimize the achievements of Jābir in chemistry. After all, was Aristotle a fool for believing in the four elements theory of matter? Was Plato any less of a genius for his adherence to the intromission theory of vision (that claimed we see objects by emitting light from our eyes)? Indeed, was Isaac Newton less worthy of the mantle of the greatest scientist who ever lived for his own obsession with alchemy? Hindsight is wonderful, but we should not project back our modern scientific ideas and values onto a very different time. Referring to Jābir ibn Hayyān as an alchemist rather than a chemist (according to our modern definitions of the two words) is rather like referring to the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy as an astrologer.

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It was during the second half of the tenth century that we see the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam arriving on the scene. The first of these was a man after my own heart: a physicist; in fact, the greatest physicist since Archimedes and the like of whom would not be seen until Isaac Newton seven hundred years later. And acknowledging someone as being the greatest physicist in a span of nearly two thousand years is not done lightly.1 The Arab polymath Abū Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham was born in Basra in southern Iraq in c. 965. He is often said to be Egyptian, because he spent his later, most productive years there.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

New York: Springer Science, p. 24. 23. Soros, G. (2009) ‘Soros: a general theory of reflexivity’, Financial Times, 26 October 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab49a.html#axzz3dtwpK5o2 24. Holodny, E. (2016) ‘Isaac Newton was a genius but even he lost millions in the stock market’, 20 January 2016, Businessinsider.com, available at http://uk.businessinsider.com/isaac-newton-lost-a-fortune-on-englands-hottest-stock-2016-1?r=US&IR=T 25. Keen, S. Rethinking Economics Kingston 2014, 19 November 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR_75cdCujI 26. Brown, G. (1999), Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 27 September 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/458871.stm 27.

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In the sixth century BCE, the oldest known map of the world, the Imago Mundi, was etched into clay with a sharpened stick in Persia, showing Earth as a flat disc and with Babylon firmly at its centre. The Ancient Greek father of geometry, Euclid, mastered the analysis of circles, triangles, curves and rectangles in two-dimensional space, creating a diagrammatic convention that Isaac Newton later used to lay out his groundbreaking laws of motion, and that is still used in maths classes worldwide today. Few people have heard of the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio but Leonardo da Vinci’s visual depiction of his theory of proportion is instantly recognised the world over in the image of Vitruvian Man, standing – naked and open armed – in a circle and square simultaneously.

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Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth – in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today. The idea of economics, and even chrematistics, as an art may have suited Xenophon, Aristotle and their time, but two thousand years later, when Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion, the allure of scientific status became far greater. Perhaps this is why, in 1767 – just forty years after Newton’s death – when the Scottish lawyer James Steuart first proposed the concept of ‘political economy’, he defined it no longer as an art but as ‘the science of domestic policy in free nations’.

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing24 really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God25 as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.”

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Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 139. 18 On the contrary, with a backward glance at John Evelyn, Hutchinson observed that a “masculine wit,” presenting to the public only a single book of the difficult poem, “thought it worth printing his head in a laurel crown.” 19 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation, pp. 24–25. 20 Ibid., p. 23. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 24. 24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, II.ii. 25 The most powerful philosophical expression of this view is in the works of the French priest, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). 26 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 32 (London, 1718), cited in Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, pp. 141–42. 27 To William Short, October 31, 1819: “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

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“Darwin Still Rules, But Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift,” The New York Times, June 26, 2007, p. D2. Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———, and David Money. “Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin Poetry,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), pp. 549–71. Fenves, Peter. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

He got an expensive lesson in just how far intelligence goes when attempting to turn money into even more money. When asked about the direction of the markets, Newton replied, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Isaac Newton actually was one of the smartest people to ever walk the earth, and not even he was able to resist the sight of other people getting rich without him. One of the problems many investors face is that we all feel we have a little Isaac Newton in us. We all feel we're above average. In a classic 1977 study, “Not Can, But Will College Teaching Be Improved,” 94% of professors rated themselves above their peer group average.1 If traders and investors were asked the same question, I would guess that the results would be very similar.

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Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 6. 11. Krass, Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, 197. 12. Ibid., 201. 13. Quoted in Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 67–70. CHAPTER 4 John Meriwether Genius's Limits Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined. —William Bernstein Isaac Newton advanced science and thinking like few others ever have. With an IQ of 190, and the ability to calculate to the 55th decimal by hand, his intellect towered above Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. But powerful as his brain was, it was unable to save him from falling prey to our most basic human instincts, namely, greed and envy.

The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

In the 1930s, the Yale mathematics department had been driven by a bitter split between two leading figures: a Norwegian and a Swede, brothers-in-law who became bitter enemies and pushed everyone to choose a side. That dark era was and remains a spur to a strong collegiality. Isaac Newton Institute The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, bears some similarities to the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden, but it is larger and of a broader scope. In 1999, from January to April, it held a program on fractals. The University of Cambridge kindly offered me a visiting Rothschild Professorship, but had to withdraw the offer after finding that I exceeded its retirement age by ten years.

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After the carnage of World War I, Hadamard and Paul Montel recognized that fresh blood was desperately needed, and were delighted to find themselves a successor who closely shared their interests. Therefore, Szolem encountered open arms rather than competition or discrimination. Later, many foreigners flocked to Paris. Competition revived and discrimination returned. Like Poincaré and Hadamard, and Isaac Newton long before them, Szolem viewed mathematics as almost real, but with a crucial difference. They were fascinated by profound issues of physics and the actual world, but Szolem was not. He befriended a brilliant and driven younger man, André Weil (1906–98), soon to become the founder and forceful leader of a new generation of French mathematicians who emerged just after World War I.

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Matching the sterling quality of their accomplishments was far beyond my ambitions, and I couldn’t think of less exalted advisers. Norbert Wiener of MIT The towering Keplerian achievements of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) were his mathematical theory of Brownian motion and cybernetics—the word and the book. Isaac Newton knew around 1700 that prisms decompose light into components of different colors. But the mathematical theory was given much later, by Wiener. A related achievement, his theory of Brownian motion, strongly affected me later in my life—as a miserable model of the variation of competitive prices, and as a wiggle with an interesting boundary that forms fractal islands.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Because Google, alone among the five, is the protagonist of a new and apparently successful “system of the world.” Represented in all the most prestigious U.S. universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading through the world’s intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. That phrase, “system of the world,” which I borrow from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, denotes a set of ideas that pervade a society’s technology and institutions and inform its civilization.1 In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable.

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Money is a central metric to both, exchange rates mediating cross-border transactions, and interest rates guiding movement through time. When the signs and signals of time and space are muddled by government interventions or by arbitrary “caps” or controls, trade can founder, and the horizons of investment shrink in both dimensions. In scrutinizing this problem, Kendall first became fascinated with Isaac Newton’s system of the world—his perdurable gold standard as the exemplary money—and then became intrigued by Satoshi’s bitcoin as an imitation of gold. To understand the prospects for bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies and tokens, it is necessary to grasp the centrality of gold. Gold resolved both the horizontal and vertical enigmas of money.

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“The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market.” Chapter 2: Google’s System of the World 1. Stephenson borrowed the title from Newton himself, who titled the third volume of his Principia, “De mundi systemate.” 2. D. T. Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xxix. 3. Franz Lieber, “Appointment in Tomorrow,” Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951. 4. For my explorations of this theory see Knowledge and Power (2013), expanded in The Scandal of Money (2016). 5. Nathan K. Lewis, “The World’s Experience with Gold Standard Systems,” Chapter 5 in Gold: The Monetary Polaris (New Berlin, N.Y.: Canyon Maple Publishing, 2013). 6. 

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

With the Restoration in full sway, the English were finally rid of the intellectual repression that the Puritans had imposed on the nation. The death of absolutism and Republicanism led to a new sense of freedom and progress throughout the country. Great wealth was beginning to arrive from the colonies across the Atlantic and from Africa and Asia as well. Isaac Newton, now 28 years old, was leading people to think in new ways about the planet on which they lived. Charles II himself was a free soul, a Merry Monarch who offered no apologies for enjoying the good things of life. It was time to stand up and look around. John Graunt did, and began counting. Although Graunt's book offers interesting bits for students of sociology, medicine, political science, and history, its greatest novelty is in its use of sampling.

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Naumann sent the results of his study to Leibniz, who in turn sent them on to the Royal Society in London. 16 Naumann's data soon attracted the attention of Halley. Halley was then only 35 years old but already one of England's most distinguished astronomers. Indeed, he was responsible for persuading Isaac Newton in 1684 to publish his Principia, the work in which Newton first set forth the laws of gravity. Halley paid all the costs of publication out of his own modest resources, corrected the page proofs, and put his own work aside until the job was done. The historian James Newman conjectures that the Principia might never have appeared without Halley's efforts.

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In his introduction he confesses to the long delay and to frequent prodding by the publishers, but he offers as an excuse of "my absence on travels" and the fact that "I was too young and inexperienced to know how to complete it."' Perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt: he spent those eight years seeking out the opinions of the leading mathematicians of his time, including Isaac Newton. In addition to conducting an active correspondence for the exchange of ideas, he traveled to London and Paris to consult with outstanding scholars in person. And he made a number of contributions to mathematics on his own, including an analysis of the use of conjecture and probability theory in applications of the law.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

(If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative. It was the sacrifice of absolute time that was most stunning. Isaac Newton believed that time was objective, universal, and transcendent of all natural phenomena; “the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change,” he declared at the beginning of his Principia. Einstein, however, realized that our idea of time is something we abstract from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the ticking of clocks.

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“To those of us who believe in physics,” he wrote to the widow of a friend who had recently died, “this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one.” When his own turn came, a couple of weeks later, he said, “It is time to go.” 2 Time—the Grand Illusion? Isaac Newton had a peculiar notion of time. He saw it as a sort of cosmic grandfather clock, one that hovered over the rest of nature in blithe autonomy. And he believed that time advanced at a smooth and constant rate from past to future. “Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” Newton declared at the beginning of his Principia.

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It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a historian at the University of Chicago, “should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science—at a level with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and with Isaac Newton’s of the separation of light.” By 1889, when he published his most influential book, Natural Inheritance, his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. (Regression to the mean even held between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall.)

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

—FRIEDRICH ENGELS, ANTI-DUHRING Zero and infinity had destroyed the Arisotelian philosophy; the void and the infinite cosmos had eliminated the nutshell universe and the idea of nature’s abhorrence of the vacuum. The ancient wisdom was discarded, and scientists began to divine the laws that governed the workings of nature. However, there was a problem with the scientific revolution: zero. Deep within the scientific world’s powerful new tool—calculus—was a paradox. The inventors of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, created the most powerful mathematical method ever by dividing by zero and adding an infinite number of zeros together. Both acts were as illogical as adding 1 + 1 to get 3. Calculus, at its core, defied the logic of mathematics. Accepting it was a leap of faith.

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Calculus, on the other hand, gave scientists a way to express the laws that govern the motion of the celestial bodies—and laws that would eventually tell scientists how those moons and stars had formed. Calculus was the very language of nature, yet its very fabric was infused with zeros and infinities that threatened to destroy the new tool. The first discoverer of calculus nearly died before he ever took a breath. Born prematurely on Christmas Day in 1642, Isaac Newton squirmed into the world, so small that he was able to fit into a quart pot. His father, a farmer, had died two months earlier. Despite a traumatic childhood* and a mother who wanted him to become a farmer, Newton enrolled in Cambridge in the 1660s—and flourished. Within a few years he developed a systematic method of solving the tangent problem; he could figure out the tangent to any smooth curve at any point.

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As you raise the temperature of a gas, the average molecule moves faster and smashes harder into the walls of its container. The gas pushes harder on the walls: the pressure goes up. Statistical mechanics—the theory of wiggles—explained some of the basic properties of matter, and it even seemed to explain the nature of light itself. The nature of light was a problem that had consumed scientists for centuries. Isaac Newton believed that light was composed of little particles that flowed from every bright object. Over time, though, scientists came to believe that light was not in fact a particle, but a wave. In 1801 a British scientist discovered that light interferes with itself, apparently putting the matter to rest once and for all.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Several were now bishops; one, John Tillotson, was even Archbishop of Canterbury. Tillotson and the other “Latitude men” were also closely wired into the new scientific ideas sweeping across seventeenth-century Europe. They were keen admirers of England’s two most famous scientists, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician Isaac Newton, and saw no conflict between religious belief and rational scientific inquiry into the nature of man and the world. To a Scottish Presbyterian of the old school, Latitudinarianism was little different from atheism. And in Aikenhead’s jocose remarks, Lord Advocate Stewart sensed more than a whiff of both.

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But he was also troubled by the radical direction Simson’s teachings sometimes seemed to take. Simson proposed that belief in Jesus as Savior was not necessary for salvation, and that even moral and upright pagans might be saved. He cast doubt on the Trinity and on Jesus Christ as the Son of God—Christian tenets that advanced English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton had also abandoned. At one point in a lecture, Simson was even supposed to have told his students that when they read the passage from the Bible proclaiming Jesus “the highest God,” they should read it “with a grain of salt.” No wonder Simson ran into such trouble with the Kirk authorities, who branded his teachings blasphemy.

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Hutcheson believed there had to be a middle way between these two extremes, one that preserved the notion of an unquestionable moral law governing men’s actions, but without the austere tyranny of a jealous God. He found some of what he was looking for in the classes of another professor, Gershom Carmichael. If Hutcheson is the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment, then Carmichael can claim to be its grandfather. He was one of the first teachers in Scotland to discuss Isaac Newton in his lectures. As Professor of Moral Philosophy, Carmichael intoduced his students to the great natural-law thinkers of the previous century, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius and the German Samuel Pufendorf. Hutcheson came to listen as Carmichael lectured—or, more precisely, read aloud his written notes in Latin, the common form of university teaching in those days.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Parkinson's law, the scientific method

”Oh, the laws of physics and of logic-the number system-the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. ”They seem real to me,” John says. ”I don’t get it,” says Chris. So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.” ”Of course.” ”So when did this law start? Has it always existed?” John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at. ”What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.” ”Sure.” ”Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere this law of gravity still existed?”

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John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.” ”Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense. ”And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.” ”Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”

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He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.” I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentiethcentury lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself. ”But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

This in turn was a relic of a mighty tree that had been blown down in a great historic storm that had devastated a country estate a little farther north, that of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. And Woolsthorpe Manor was the home of Sir Isaac Newton. It was to Lincolnshire that Newton had fled from Cambridge in 1666—and it was here, during the summer of that annus mirabilis, that he famously observed the apple falling from the tree. It was here, and from wondering of the force that might have impelled the apple’s fall, that he came up with the notion of gravity, as a force that affected both this humble fruit and by logical extension affected the constant motion and altitude of the moon in orbit around the planet Earth. So, Isaac Newton’s apple tree—or more properly a child descendant of it—now flowers and fruits in a Beijing garden, beside where the Ming emperors once buried their dead, where one can see the Great Wall running along the mountain ridges, and where China’s latest generation of scientists are confirming their intellectual ambitions by working out, with the greatest accuracy, the effect that gravity has upon the steady beat of time.

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He was about to abandon the quest when, suddenly, one day that October, he had his brain wave: why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear? An idea that would change the world in unimaginable ways had come to Frank Whittle when he was just twenty-two years old. His recent school days, and his later mathematical skills, reminded him that a propelling jet of the kind he was proposing would offer a working demonstration of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, propounded back in 1686. Newton (a Cambridge man, as it happens) had written that “for every force acting on a body, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Under this law, a powerful jet being thrust from the rear of an aircraft engine would drive that aircraft forward with equal power and, in theory, at almost any imaginable speed.

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Since this nine-odd-degree arc was located around the middle of the meridian—Dunkirk is at 51 degrees North and Barcelona 41 degrees North, with the midpoint of 45 degrees North being the village of Saint-Médard-de-Guizières in the Gironde—it was thought likely the oblate nature of the Earth’s shape, the bulge that afflicts its sphericity and makes it resemble more of an orange than a football, would be most evident and so easier to counter with calculation. (To further confirm the Earth’s shape the French Academy of Sciences sent out two more expeditions, one to Peru and the other to Lapland, to see how long a degree of high latitude was: all confirmed the orange shape that Isaac Newton had predicted centuries before.) The story of the triangulation of the meridian in France and Spain, and which was carried out by Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre over six tumultuous years during the worst of the postrevolutionary terror, is the stuff of heroic adventure. On numerous occasions the pair escaped great violence (but not jail time) only by the skin of their teeth.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

But any resulting benefit was probably a mutual one, since Adam Smith was to amass a formidable reputation later in life for absent-mindedness. As Rae drily remarked, ‘He would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy.’ Moments during which the son escaped his mother’s watchful eye were rare. The link between them was exceptionally strong, and lasted over six decades. Adam Smith was born on or before 5 June 1723—like Isaac Newton, a posthumous child. His father, also Adam Smith, had died five months earlier at the age of only forty-three, having worked his way up via public service and the law to be Comptroller of Customs in Kirkcaldy. Information is scarce, but this branch of the Smith family seems to have hailed from Seaton, near Aberdeen, from which Adam senior went to Edinburgh to study law.

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Like his fellow students, Smith studied these subjects as well as the ancient languages and authors, and of course divinity. But his greatest early interest lay in natural philosophy—we should say the sciences today—and specifically in physics and mathematics. These subjects had been revolutionized after 1687 by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which had set out from first principles a new and extraordinarily powerful theory of the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies, and of gravity. The Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow, Robert Simson, nephew of the banned theologian John, was a follower of Newton and an expert on the ancient Greek geometer Euclid, whose Elements was still seen as the gold standard for demonstrative reasoning in the exact sciences.

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But in the seventeenth century it had come under severe criticism from those in and around the new Royal Society, who followed Francis Bacon in seeking to purge science of the false and ‘idolatrous’ influences of human subjectivity, culture and religion, even of language itself. The brilliant mathematician Colin Maclaurin, a student of Isaac Newton and vigorous defender of Newtonianism against religious attack, kept the flame of scientific expression alive in Scotland—as it was remarked, his ‘pure, correct and simple style inducing a taste for chasteness of expression [and]… a disrelish of affected ornaments’. But, if rhetoric was an intellectually contested topic, it was also one of considerable practical importance in lowland Scotland after the disaster of the ’45, and especially so in Edinburgh, whose professional young men needed to be able to communicate well—both in speech and on paper—if they were to make their way in the courts, in politics, in the Church or as soldiers.

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Yet here was one of the most elegant and uncomplicated equations in maths. Pi, the poster boy of disorder, it turned out, had some kind of order in his DNA. Leibniz had devised the formula using ‘the calculus’, a powerful type of mathematics he had discovered, in which a new understanding of infinitesimal amounts was used to calculate areas, curves and gradients. Isaac Newton had also come up with calculus, independently, and the men spent a good deal of time bickering about who had got there first. (For years, Newton was considered to have won the argument, based on the dates of his unpublished manuscripts, but it now appears that a version of calculus was actually first invented in the fourteenth century by the Indian mathematician Madhava.)

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Having become a keen amateur geometer in later life, Hobbes published his solution when he was 67. Even though circle-squaring was still an open question at the time, his proof was received with bemusement by the scientific community. John Wallis, professor at Oxford and the finest British mathematician before Isaac Newton, exposed Hobbes’s errors in a pamphlet, thus setting in motion one of the most entertaining – and pointless – feuds in the history of British intellectual life. Hobbes replied to Wallis’s comments with an addendum to his book entitled Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics. Wallis countered with Due Correction for Mr Hobbes in School Discipline for not saying his Lessons right.

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We have also seen that there are many infinite series that converge on pi. On the other hand, the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +… is divergent, heading off towards infinity. The Greeks may have been wary of infinity, but by the seventeenth century mathematicians were happy to take it on. An understanding of infinite series was required for Isaac Newton to invent calculus, which was one of the most significant developments in mathematics. When I studied maths one of my favourite exercises was being presented with an infinite series and being asked to work out whether it converged or diverged. I always found it incredible that the difference between convergence and divergence was so brutal – the difference between a finite number and infinity is infinity – and yet the elements that decided which path the series took often seemed so insignificant.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

FIGURE 3.2: Parallels in the marked uptake of the printing press and smartphones, with very different x-axis time intervals. Fostering Autonomy When we’re sharing ideas via print or electrons, there’s a lot more chance you can do things yourself. Take Isaac Newton, one of if not the most influential scientists of all time. Amazingly enough he was self-taught in mathematics via books that he either bought or borrowed. Newton himself was responsible for, as Bernard Cohen wrote in The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, “the transformation of a youth who knew no more mathematics than simple arithmetic and who could not read a treatise on astrology for want of trigonometry into the profound creator of higher mathematics.”31 As Eisenstein affirmed, the impact of books to alter the master-apprentice traditional relationship was quite clear, as people could “instruct themselves primarily from books with a minimum of outside help” and “cut the bonds of subordination which kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master.”32 The do-it-yourself (DIY) capabilities took varied forms, from learning to be musicians, self-help in medicine, to autodidact printers like Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin.

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The communal gathering places consisted of reading rooms, coffeehouses, and bookshops.20 The coffeehouses weren’t just for drinking coffee, but were used to discuss the latest books, pamphlets, and new-sheets. By the seventeenth century, many of the coffeehouses were specialized for particular topics such as science, literature, or politics. A coffeehouse argument accounted for Isaac Newton’s canonical book Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, which laid the foundation for classical mechanics, the laws of motion and gravity, and much more.21 We’ll come back to Newton shortly. Later in the 1700s, the preeminent economist Adam Smith actually wrote The Wealth of Nations in a coffeehouse, after having repeatedly circulated drafts for input among the regulars there.

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Hall, The Scientific Renaissance 1450–1630 (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 130. 29. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 268. 30. N. Schmidle, “A Very Rare Book,” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_schmidle. 31. I. Cohen, “Review of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton,” Scientific American 1 (1968): 139–144. 32. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 245. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 74. 35. Ericsson, “On The Pulse of the Networked Society,” Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2014, http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2014/ericsson-mobility-report-june-2014.pdf. 36.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Similar, but subtly different, is the idea that, yes, there was a moment of creation when great forces or beings roamed the universe making things, but since then, nothing much has changed. The elders of Lake Mungo might have seen the universe like this, describing a world brought to life more or less in its current form by their ancestors. Isaac Newton saw God as the “first cause” of everything and argued that He was present in all of space. That is why Newton thought that the universe as a whole did not change much. The universe, he once wrote, was “the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living, and intelligent.”1 Early in the twentieth century, Einstein was so sure the universe was unchanging (at large scales) that he added a special constant to his theory of relativity to make it predict a stable universe.

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Many collected or read about experimental instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, and air pumps; they thought of Newton as the greatest of scientists; they knew Earth orbited the sun; they did not take magic, the histories recounted in ancient legends, the stories of unicorns, or (most) stories of miracles seriously; they believed in the advancement of knowledge and something like progress. New information provided the intellectual bricks and mortar for new types of knowledge. As Isaac Newton developed his laws of gravity, he had access to an unprecedented range of information. He could, for example, compare how pendulums swung in Paris with how they swung in the Americas and Africa. No previous generation of scientists could have tested their ideas so thoroughly or within such wide and varied networks of information.

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Newton’s achievement can be tied to the vast increase in general knowledge that overseas trade and exploration had brought to Europeans. The courage to generalize, to arrive at universals about the natural world, owes much to the immense quantity of information—and self-confidence—that European mastery of the great seas gave land-bound thinkers like Isaac Newton.11 Dazzling new flows of wealth and information had one more powerful effect: they stimulated the commercial forms of mobilization often described as capitalism that were driven by gradients of both wealth and information. For the most part, traditional rulers had mobilized wealth with the threat of coercion, the promise of protection, and appeals to religious and legal authorities.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

But Satoshi was the one who actually coded his idea and put it into practice. Back, Finney, Dai and Szabo were all Cypherpunks. Bitcoin has implemented all of their ideas, and the ideas of many more besides.34 Without these developments, Bitcoin almost certainly could not have happened. It was ‘standing on the shoulders of Cypherpunks’, to misquote Isaac Newton – who, incidentally, also laid down a new system of money: the gold standard on which Britain would thrive in the 18th and 19th centuries. Bitcoin’s first year It was two days before anyone even acknowledged Satoshi’s creation. ‘Announcing the first release of Bitcoin’, he said. ‘A new electronic cash system.’35 Nobody seemed to care.

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From mathematics to computer programming to economics and monetary history to politics to PR and psychology to cryptography to business acumen and vision to plain old written English – in all of these fields he excelled. To cap it all, he’s probably good-looking too. It’s too early in history to be drawing this sort of comparison, I know, but there are many parallels between Satoshi and Isaac Newton. Newton was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, of course. But he was also Master of the Royal Mint. He redesigned England’s monetary system, putting us onto the gold standard on which Britain’s colossal progress during the next 200 years was built. As I continued my hunt for Satoshi, I started asking myself questions not just about who he could be…but also about why he did what he did?

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There are many who will disagree with this interpretation. And, with investment, it is dangerous to have rigid opinions – I reserve the right to change my mind as events unfold. You could still make a mint There seems to be a 100-year cycle in money. 1716 saw the first Great Recoinage, in the years after Isaac Newton had taken over at the Bank of England. A hundred years later, after excess spending on the Napoleonic Wars, there was another Great Recoinage in 1816. 1913-4 saw another fundamental change to the monetary system with the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US and in Europe the move away from the gold standard.

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

However, once word arrived in London that one of the South Seas Trading Company’s initiative in the New World, the Mississippi Scheme, had failed to materialize, rampant profit taking induced a mass sell-off that burst the speculative bubble and caused millions of pounds of losses for all but the earliest purchasers of the stock. After making a handsome profit from early The Times 99 purchases of the stock and rolling the profit over into later purchases and losing everything, Sir Isaac Newton was quoted as having quipped that he could not calculate the madness of people: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”3 The bursting of the South Sea Trading Company bubble and the loss of huge potential profits by legislators as their warrants became worthless induced those legislators bribed with these warrants to put in place waves of regulation that restricted options trading.

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With the faint praise of his highly placed supervisor, Bachelier did not earn the highest thesis grade of très honorable and thus did not carry the weight he might have wished for as he tried to find an academic appointment. The reason for Poincaré’s faint support may have been the subject matter. Bachelier chose to devote his mathematical physics skills to an understanding of the stock market and the options prices listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. Ever since Isaac Newton’s damning of financial markets, serious scientists and mathematicians viewed the stock market as folly at best and gambling at worst. Nonetheless, Bachelier’s life experiences endowed him with a fascination for the financial market and he would not be persuaded to study elsewhere over mere issues of academic snobbery.

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He was the former President of the American Sociological Association and, in 1994, was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, the first sociologist to be granted this award. He also coined such terms as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model” and “focus groups,” which are still used today. And in his epic but undertitled essay, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” he quoted Isaac Newton as having said “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He may have anticipated the work of his son and of a finance discipline grappling with uncertainty through the last book of his life, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Robert King Merton, the first-generation son of Jewish immigrants, married Suzanne Carhart in 1934.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Halley later recalled that Wren offered to "give Mr Hook or me 2 months time to bring him a convincing demonstration thereof, and besides the honour, he of us that did it, should have from him a present of a book of 40 shillings." Neither Halley nor Hooke took up Wren's challenge, however, and this prize went unclaimed. A few months later Halley went to Cambridge, where he visited another scientific colleague, Isaac Newton. Recalling his heated coffeehouse discussion with Wren and Hooke, Halley asked Newton the same question: Would an inverse-square law of gravity give rise to elliptical orbits? Like Hooke, Newton claimed to have proved this already, though he could not find the proof when Halley asked to see it.

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During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thought in France had flowered under thinkers, such as the philosopher and satirist Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, who extended the new scientific rationalism into the social and political spheres. After offending a nobleman with a witticism in 1726, Voltaire had been imprisoned in the Bastille prison in Paris and was only released on condition that he went to England. While there he immersed himself in the scientific rationalism of Isaac Newton and the empiricism espoused by the philosopher John Locke. Just as Newton had rebuilt physics from first principles, Locke set out to do the same for political philosophy. Men were born equal, he believed, were intrinsically good and were entitled to the pursuit of happiness. No man should interfere with another's life, health, liberty, or possessions.

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London: Chatto 8c Windus, 1973. Froissart, Sir John de. Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries. Translated by Thomas Johnes. New York: Colonial Press, 1901. Gaiter, Mary K., and W. A. Speck. Colonial America. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2002. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Gribbin, John. Science: A History, 1543-2001. London: Allen Lane, 2001. Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Press, 2002. Hartman, Louis E, and A. L. Oppenheim. "On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia."

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Made of brick, metal, and stone, they had large windows and a futuristic, Japanese temple look. I liked the windows, and there were a lot of them. The complex had won some design awards, but the design element I’d have liked most would have been arrows on signs saying “This way to Stephen Hawking.” Stephen’s pavilion was adjacent to an older building called the Isaac Newton Institute. Newton’s name came up a lot when you knew Stephen. People even compared him to Newton, which is ironic because Stephen didn’t like Newton. Newton engaged in many petty squabbles, and was conniving and vindictive when in a position of power. He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others.

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He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others. He was also humorless. A relative who’d been his assistant for five years said he’d only seen Newton laugh once, when someone asked him why anyone would want to study Euclid. I’d read several biographies of the man, and though they had various titles, any one of them could have been called Isaac Newton: What an Ass. Perhaps more important than Stephen’s estimation of Newton’s disposition is that, in high school, Stephen had been bored by the Newtonian physics he was taught. What excites a scientist is discovery—the revelation of a type of behavior that no one has ever seen, or the achievement of an understanding no one has ever had.

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question, for two millennia everyone had assumed that the universe had either always been in existence and was unchanging, or else that it was created at some moment—for example, as described in the Bible—and had been relatively unchanging since then.*1 Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, as well as scientists, including even Isaac Newton, believed this. Newton should have known better. How could a collection of galaxies and stars maintain a stationary configuration when each, through the force of gravity, pulls all the others toward it? Shouldn’t the objects coalesce over time? And, since forever is a long time, shouldn’t all matter, by now, be clumped together in a big dense ball?

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

I will demonstrate how legendary investors have been easily led astray by temptations such as a new idea, love or fear – and how the successful ones were able to escape and recover. Anyone who reads this book will be able to use the exact same methods themselves. Lee Freeman-Shor London, 2015 “If I have seen so far it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton * * * 1 Being Right or Making Money, by Ned Davis (2000). 2 As quoted in Ibid. Part I : I’m Losing – What Should I Do? In this part of the book we meet some of the world’s greatest investors in losing situations. These are situations we can all relate to – the investors have lost a lot of money and there is massive uncertainty and negativity surrounding their investments.

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However, if someone yells fire in a theatre with very few people, the people can get up, look for signs of fire, and walk out in an orderly manner. This is another reason that the Connoisseurs’ approach of taking some profit over the years is a good idea. It’s like inching towards the fire exit. Sir Isaac Newton famously lost everything with his investment in the South Sea stock in the 1700s. The amazing thing, however, was that he was early into the trade and sold out completely having made a nice profit. Then the stock kept going up, and Newton saw his friends who had remained invested become very rich.

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

All painters learn from other painters – whether imitating or reacting against them. Learning how to do something means learning to adapt existing ideas in new ways. Practically everything we use in everyday life has been designed and made by someone else, and they too were collaborating. Entirely original and independent creations are astonishingly rare. As Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Technology is the same, but with the dependency even more apparent. Smartphones, for instance, combine thousands, even hundreds of thousands of ideas and innovations, big, small and microscopic, accumulated over decades and even centuries.

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Although it has recently suffered some corruption (notably from proprietary publishers and a creeping pressure to commercialise), publicly funded science remains dedicated to the open creation and sharing of information. The very essence of science is “publication”: the sharing of the results of research with other scientists and the community at large. Openness is central to the cumulative and collaborative nature of science. As Isaac Newton knew, each scientist stands on the shoulders of those who went before. The Secret of Life On 28 February 1953 Francis Crick stood up in the Eagle pub on Benet Street in Cambridge and shouted “we’ve found the secret of life”. Whether any of his fellow drinkers that lunchtime knew what he meant, history does not relate.

Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

The Gold Standard Pound sterling has been the currency denomination of England since 1158 when King Henry introduced a silver coin of 92.5% purity.9 The currency represented a weight in silver until England started minting a gold coin in 1663 called guinea, which was named after the part of West Africa from which the gold was mined. The guinea subjected the pound to the plaguing complications of bimetallism when both the guinea and the English silver coin called shilling carried official values in pounds. But shortly after the creation of the Bank of England, English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint permanently altered the course of bimetallism around the world by setting a new exchange rate between gold guineas and silver shillings in 1717. Newton studied the flow of gold and silver throughout Europe and the exchange rates set forth in other countries’ bimetallic standards, specifically France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

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A Monetary Mix Sixteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the second Congress of the United States of America finally passed the Coinage Act in 1792 to establish the United States dollar as the country’s official unit of account, defining one dollar as both 1.6 grams of gold and 24 grams of silver. For the next 108 years, the United States experimented with a few different monetary regimes. An early adjustment to the exchange rate between gold and silver had the opposite effect of Isaac Newton’s adjustment as Master of the Mint and drove gold out of usage for several decades. Two separate central banks were created in 1791 and 1812, but each ended after its twenty-year charter. Many early Americans didn’t trust central banks to administer their currency. The banks existed in antithesis to limited government ideals and led to a great deal of political vitriol, which prevented the institutions from charter renewal.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

He also, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), anticipated a time when 'The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed'. His collaborator Coleridge said elsewhere that 'the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton'. This can be interpreted as the naked hostility of a leading Romantic against science in general, but the case of Coleridge is more complicated. He read a great deal of science and fancied himself as a scientific thinker, not least on the subject of light and colour, where he claimed to have anticipated Goethe.

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Sir Arthur Eddington, whose own scientific writings were noted for poetic flair, used the solar eclipse of 1919 to test General Relativity and returned from Principe Island to announce, in Banesh Hoffmann's phrase, that Germany was host to the greatest scientist of the age. I read those words with a catch in the throat, but Einstein himself took the triumph in his stride. Any other result and he would have been 'sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.' Isaac Newton made a private rainbow in a dark room. A small hole in a shutter admitted a sunbeam. In its path he placed his famous prism, which refracted (bent) the sunbeam through an angle, once as it penetrated the glass, then again as it passed through the farther facet into the air again. When the light fell on the far wall of Newton's room, the colours of the spectrum were clearly displayed.

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'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1820) Keats and Lamb should have raised their glass to poetry, and to mathematics, and to the poetry of mathematics. Wordsworth would have needed no encouragement. He (and Coleridge) had been inspired by the Scottish poet James Thomson, and might have recalled Thomson's 'To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton' (1727): ... Even Light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And, from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every ray into his kind, To the charmed eye educed the gorgeous train Of parent colours.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Fourth Estate, 2000) An account of the life of Galileo, which includes letters sent to him by his daughter, who lived in a convent from the age of thirteen. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Abacus, 1995) The book based on the famous television series, which must have been the inspiration for numerous careers in astronomy. Chapter 2 James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Fourth Estate, 2003) An accessible and concise account of the life of Isaac Newton. Hans Reichenbach, From Copernicus to Einstein (Dover, 1980) A short history of the ideas that contributed to relativity theory. David Bodanis, E = mc2 (Walker, 2001) The biography of an equation, inspired by Cameron Diaz, who once asked if somebody could explain the meaning of Einstein’s famous formula.

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Day and night I rack my brain in an effort to penetrate more deeply into the things that I gradually discovered in the past two years and that represent an unprecedented advance in the fundamental problems of physics.’ In speaking of ‘truly great things’ and ‘fundamental problems’, Einstein was referring to the fact that the general theory of relativity seemed to be leading him towards an entirely new theory of gravity. If Einstein was right, then physicists would be forced to question the work of Isaac Newton, one of the icons of physics. Newton was born in tragic circumstances on Christmas Day 1642, his father having died just three months earlier. While Isaac was still an infant, his mother married a sixty-three-year-old rector, Barnabas Smith, who refused to accept Isaac into his home. It fell to Isaac’s grandparents to bring him up, and as each year passed he developed a growing hatred towards the mother and stepfather who had abandoned him.

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As discussed in Chapter 1, the scientific establishment at the start of the twentieth century was confident that the universe was static and eternal, not contracting and temporary. Not surprisingly, Einstein disliked the notion of a collapsing universe: ‘To admit such a possibility seems senseless.’ Although Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was different, it also gave rise to a collapsing universe, and Newton had also been troubled by this implication of his theory. One of his solutions was to envisage an infinite, symmetric universe, in which every object would therefore be pulled equally in all directions, and there would be no overall movement and no collapse.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

This would be the ultimate proof by synthesis. 8 Synthesis of the M. mycoides Genome If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. —Richard Feynman, 19881 Many believe that the most important innovations of human creativity are the result of some kind of visionary gift, a gift associated with such extraordinary and singular geniuses as Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. I don’t doubt the incredible impact of individuals who can make great intellectual leaps, who can see further than anyone before them, and who discern patterns where others see only noise. However, there is also a less dramatic kind of creativity that drives science, a humble variety that is no less important: problem-solving.2 Vaulting a single hurdle to achieve one very particular goal can sometimes result in a technology that can prove to have an extraordinary range of other uses.

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We are moving toward a borderless world in which electrons and electromagnetic waves will carry digitized information here, there, and everywhere. Borne upon those waves of information, life will move at the speed of light. 12 Life at the Speed of Light The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations. —Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (1718)1 When life is finally able to travel at the speed of light, the universe will shrink, and our own powers will expand. Simple calculations indicate that we could send electromagnetic sequence information to a digital-biological converter on Mars in as little as 4.3 minutes, at the closest approach of the Red Planet, to provide a settlement of colonists with vaccines, antibiotics, or personalized drugs.

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“A controlled clinical trial of a therapeutic bacteriophage preparation in chronic otitis due to antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa: A preliminary report of efficacy.” Clinical Otolaryngology 34, no. 4 (August 2009): pp. 349–57. 35. L. J. Marinelli, et al. “Propionibacterium acnes bacteriophages display limited genetic diversity and broad killing activity against bacterial skin isolates.” mBio 3, no. 5 (2012): e00279-12. Chapter 12 1. Isaac Newton. Opticks, 2nd edition (1718). Book 3, Query 30, 349. 2. Brett J. Gladman, Joseph A. Burns, Martin Duncan, Pascal Lee, and Harold F. Levison. “The exchange of impact ejecta between terrestrial planets.” Science 271, no. 5254 (March 8, 1996): p. 1387(6). 3. David S. McKay, et al. “Search for past life on Mars: Possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001.”

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

“The man of system,” he wrote, seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand that arranges the different pieces on a chess-board; he does not consider that the different pieces upon a chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own. Altogether different from that which the legislator might choose to impress upon it.2 The “Principle of Motion” Adam Smith and his Scottish contemporaries were part of the Scottish Enlightenment. They founded what we now consider to be the social sciences. They were deeply impressed by Isaac Newton’s achievement in astronomy, delineating the principles upon which the planets moved in a systematic way unaided by any explicit agency. It was said that Newton had discovered God’s system of how the heavens worked. Smith and his fellow Scotsmen wanted to discover the principles of social astronomy, as it were: what made societies function and evolve, grow or decay.

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The invisible hand was a similar idea of a sort of secular rather than divine mechanism to coordinate the myriad activities of separate individuals, buying and selling, working and saving, investing and exporting. But no one is actually in charge; we all are on our separate ways. The idea of society as a self-organizing entity that Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment gifted to posterity comes from such notions about how the world works. Isaac Newton’s theory about the movements of planets also fitted in with this idea. The universe was obeying the laws of motion (implicitly set by God long ago and discovered by Newton) and no one was driving the planets on a daily basis. Once it was understood that the economy was a complex web of mutually interdependent relations, with each person pursuing their own interest and yet arriving at a good outcome, it was easy to see the international system as just an extension of this idea.

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Champions of the French Revolution identified with Godwin, though he admired Edmund Burke, a virulent enemy of the Revolution. But there was economic turbulence as well. Inflation, the old specter of a century ago, had raised its head again. To combat inflation in the earlier century, the pound sterling had been based on its value in terms of gold, £3 17s 10½d per ounce, a price fixed by Sir Isaac Newton when he was Master of the Mint. (This price held until 1933.) Citizens could take gold to be coined at the Mint and offer their coins to get gold if they wanted. The pound was convertible into gold. Banknotes issued by the Bank of England were also convertible into gold – the £20 note still bears the legend “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds.”

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

One simple example of eurekometrics—and one that I was involved in—is examining how discoveries become more difficult over time. . . . IF you look back in history you can get the impression that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes; Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge (and perhaps a lack of squeamishness or regard for one’s own well-being) to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be very simple. Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a ten-thousand-member team that runs a multibillion-dollar atom smasher.

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And now think about your math classes from high school and college. What Tai “discovered,” even being so bold as to term it Tai’s Model, is integral calculus. Tai was not the first person to discover calculus, no doubt to her great disappointment. Rather, it was first developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, more than three hundred years before Tai’s diabetes-related calculations. Specifically, Tai rediscovered something known as the trapezoidal rule for calculating the area below a curve, which seems to have been known to Newton. And yet Tai’s article passed through the editors and has received well over one hundred citations in the scientific literature.

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Luckily, the Times was willing to print a correction. The only hitch: They printed it the day after Apollo 11’s launch in 1969. Three days before humans first walked on the moon, they recanted their editorial with this bit of understatement: Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. Why do we believe in wrong, outdated facts? There are lots of reasons. Kathryn Schulz, in her book Being Wrong, explores reason after reason why we make errors.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Rails translated what Twitter’s programmers wanted to tell all those computer transistors to do—with relatively little effort. And that allowed them to build a company fast. In the world of high tech—like in racing—a tiny time advantage can mean the difference between winning and getting passed. ISAAC NEWTON ATTRIBUTED HIS success as a scientist to “standing on the shoulders of giants”—building off of the work of great thinkers before him. Platforms are tools and environments that let us do just that. It’s clear how using platforms applies in computer programming, but what if we wanted to apply platform thinking to something outside of tech startups?

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I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings.

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If you’re really hungry, the books in this list will keep you going for a while: “A Reading List for the Self-Taught Computer Scientist,” Reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/ch0wt/a_reading_list_for_the_selftaught_computer/ (accessed February 16, 2014). 85 He called it Ruby on Rails: For more information on Ruby on Rails, see http://rubyonrails.org/. 85 a couple of guys at a podcasting startup: For a thorough and dramatic history of Twitter, see Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (Portfolio, 2013). 86 “standing on the shoulders of giants”: The common contemporary quotation comes from a line in one of Sir Isaac Newton’s letters to Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants,” Newton, letter to Hooke, February 5, 1676, http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/essays/Giants. The phrase appears to have originated with Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century: Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (Free Press, 1965). 86 managed to be the best with less effort: Robert Compton directed Dr.

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

The small part of the spectrum that we refer to as ‘light’ in everyday life is just the visible part that our eyes have adapted to, and we use the word colour to talk about the specific wavelengths in that small section. The first person to understand that light was composed of different colours was English physicist Isaac Newton. In 1666, he aligned a glass prism with a beam of sunlight and observed a rainbow emanating from the other side of the prism.15 I’m running low on diagram space so just look up Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover. It had been noted before how a broken piece of glass, or a prism, resulted in different colours when held up to sunlight.

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Had we just looked at Centaurus A in visible wavelengths, the black hole would not have been so obvious, whereas in radio it might as well have an arrow-shaped sign saying ‘Black Hole Here’. Taking the temperature of the stars Let’s go back and colour in our drawing of the Sun. We often depict the Sun as yellow but, as we know from Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Pink Floyd, sunlight comprises a whole range of different wavelengths. The range of wavelengths of light a star emits makes up a barcode unique to that star, a stellar spectrum, with similar types of star having similar spectra. The solar spectrum demonstrates that the Sun radiates across a range of wavelengths, with only 40 per cent being visible to the human eye.

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Chatto & Windus. 13 Klimchuk, J. A. 2006. On Solving the Coronal Heating Problem. Solar Physics, 234 (1): 41–77. 14 G Caspi, A. et al. 2020. A New Facility for Airborne Solar Astronomy: NASA’s WB-57 at the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. The Astrophysical Journal, 895 (2): id.131. 15 Gleick, J. 2004. Isaac Newton. Harper Perennial. 16 Private communication with Royal Society Librarian Keith Moore. 17 Herschel, W. 1800. Experiments on the refrangibility of the invisible rays of the Sun. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 90: 284–292. 18 Einstein, A. 1905. On a heuristic point of view about the creation and conversion of light.

Ye Olde Britain: Best Historical Experiences by Lonely Planet Publications

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Winter of Discontent

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poets’ Corner, where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Austen, Brontë etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. Verger-led tours are held several times a day (except Sundays) and are limited to 25 people per tour; call ahead to secure your place. Of course, admission to the Abbey is free if you wish to attend a service. On weekdays, Matins is at 7.30am, Holy Communion at 8am and 12.30pm, and Choral Evensong at 5pm.

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It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 32 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

If this were a criminal investigation, the detectives assigned to the case would start from the assumption that there was one prime suspect, one likely perpetrator, because the crimes (all the aforementioned diseases) are so closely related. They would only embrace the possibility that there were multiple perpetrators when the single-suspect hypothesis was proved insufficient to explain all the evidence. Scientists know this essential concept as Occam’s Razor. When Isaac Newton said, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” he was saying the same thing that Albert Einstein, three centuries later, said (or was paraphrased as saying): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

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Burkitt and Trowell went along with their peers and adopted a less parsimonious way of viewing the emergence of these Western diseases. But is this perspective justified? Can a host of chronic diseases that cluster together both in individuals and in populations and associate closely with Western diets and lifestyles best be explained by the presence of a single dietary trigger—i.e., sugar—or by multiple triggers? When Isaac Newton paraphrased the concept of Occam’s Razor, he did so by saying, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” This was rule number one of Newton’s “rules of reasoning in natural philosophy” in his Principia. So is it necessary to posit multiple aspects of diet and lifestyle—multiple causes—to explain the presence of these chronic diseases that associate with Western and urban lives, or will one suffice?

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A conservative estimate: The CDC estimates the direct and indirect costs for heart disease and stroke at $315 billion each year, cancer at $157 billion, diabetes at $245 billion, and obesity (in 2008) at $147 billion (CDC 2016a). The Rand Corporation has estimated the total monetary cost of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, at between $157 and $215 billion (Hurd et al. 2013). Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes: See, for instance, Guthrie 2007. “We are to admit”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Isaac_Newton. “Everything should be”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Albert_​Einstein. “multifactorial, complex disorders” or “multidimensional diseases”: See, for instance, NIDDK 2011: 117–38. At least a tenth of all cases of lung cancer: ALA 2014: 5. “all wars combined”: West 1978: ix. Heavy smokers had twenty to thirty times: See, for instance, Doll and Hill 1964.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Indeed, the historian of science Catherine Wilson has argued that the whole of seventeenth-century empiricism, started by Pierre Gassendi in opposition to Descartes, and taken up by the most influential thinkers of the age, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Bishop Berkeley, was fuelled to a remarkable extent by the sudden popularity of Lucretius. As Lucretian ideas percolated, the physicists were the first to see where they led. Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Later he acquired a Latin edition of De Rerum Natura itself, which survives from his library and shows signs of heavy use. He echoed Lucretian ideas about voids between atoms throughout his books, especially the Opticks.

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It could come, dangerously, from small, portable books – and even from ideas you came to yourself.’ Gradually, by reading Lucretius and by experiment and thought, the Enlightenment embraced the idea that you could explain astronomy, biology and society without recourse to intelligent design. Nikolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Baruch Spinoza and Isaac Newton made their tentative steps away from top–down thinking and into the bottom–up world. Then, with gathering excitement, Locke and Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, Hume and Smith, Franklin and Jefferson, Darwin and Wallace, would commit similar heresies against design. Natural explanations displaced supernatural ones.

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It was inevitable that these things would be invented or discovered just about when they were. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is ‘one endless chain of parallel instances’. It’s just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s Law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Wallace having precisely the same idea, after reading precisely the same book (Malthus’s Essay on Population).

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

As long as Newton’s long shadow casts itself over economic theory, it is unlikely that economics, as a discipline, will be able to accommodate the growing schisms that threaten all of its most basic assumptions. Economic historian E. Ray Canterbery notes that taking on the likes of Adam Smith becomes increasingly daunting because he rides on the coattails of the great Sir Isaac Newton. He writes, “From time to time, a cluster of economists consider conventional economics ripe for revolution, but any economic revolutionaries will have to go to the barricades against the genius of Isaac Newton as well as against Adam Smith and his long line of followers.”6 Now however, for the first time, the many cracks in the theoretical foundations of the discipline are threatening to tumble the edifice of classical economic theory.

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In their attempts to understand the new forces let loose by coal-powered steam technology and factory production, the founding fathers of the new discipline—Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the like—looked to the new field of physics for a set of guiding principles and metaphors to fashion their own theories of the workings of the marketplace. NEWTON’S LAWS AND SELF-REGULATING MARKETS Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical method for discussing mechanical motion was all the rage at the time. It was being purloined by virtually every serious thinker to explain away the meaning of existence and the ways of the world. Newton declared that “all the phenomena of nature may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other.”

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N. (1952). Science and the Modern World. New York: New American Library, p. 50. 4.Miller, G. T. (1971). Energetics, Kinetics, and Life: An Ecological Approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, p. 46. 5.Soddy, F. (1911). Matter and Energy New York: H. Holt and Co., pp. 10–11. 6.Canterbery, E. R. (2003). Isaac Newton and the Economics Paradigm: Newton, Natural Law and Adam Smith. In The Making of Economics. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Pub, p. 75. 7.Laslett, P. (1967). Second Treatise. In John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 312. 8.Schrödinger, E. (1947).

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

But we know that a is one of the roots of this equation, and therefore NR, the shorter length, must be a, and CG must be y. Then x = y − a = CG − NR, the first of the required mean proportionals. 233. That is, makes so small an angle with it. 234. This is especially noticeable when there are six real positive roots. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) HIS LIFE AND WORK Galileo died on January 8, 1642, exactly three hundred years before the day I was born. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day of that year in the English industrial town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He would later become Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair I now hold. Newton’s mother did not expect him to live long, as he was born very prematurely; he would later describe himself as having been so small at birth he could fit into a quart pot.

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Heath, courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Diophantus of Alexandria, A Study in the History of Greek Algebra, by Thomas L. Heath, reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. The Geometry of Rene Descartes, trans. David E. Smith and Marcia L. Latham courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Isaac Newton’s Principia, notes by David Eugene Smith, courtesy of New York: Daniel Adee, © 1848. English translation of Leonhard Euler’s On the sums of series of reciprocals (De summis serierum reciprocarum) courtesy of Jordan Bell. Leonhard Euler’s The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and Proof that Every Integer is A Sum of Four Squares courtesy of Dover Publications.

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Alan Turing’s On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society courtesy of the London Mathematical Society. Picture Credits: Euclid: Getty Images. Archimedes: Getty Images. Diophantus: Title page of Diophanti Alexandrini Arthimeticorum libri sex. . . ., 1621: Library of Congress, call number QA31.D5, Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room, (Jefferson LJ239). Rene Descartes: Getty Images. Isaac Newton: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Leonhard Euler: Getty Images. Pierre Simon de Laplace: Getty Images. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Science and Society Picture Library, London. Carl Friedrich Gauss: Getty Images. Augustin-Louis Cauchy: © Bettmann/CORBIS. Évariste Galois: © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the government gave up passing pointless laws about money (such as the 1660 act forbidding the export of bullion) and instead of asking investment bankers or celebrities for advice in the modern fashion, they decided to ask someone clever instead. And so it was that the smartest man that ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton, then the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was appointed the Master of the Mint. Newton quickly figured out what was wrong and changed money in such a way as to set England on a path of economic growth (Levinson 2009). Newton looked to harness more technological innovation to transform money.

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Money of the past Money of the future Physical money Money that exists, at least in part, in a physical means of exchange Electronic money Money that has no physical medium of exchange Cash Money that can be passed from person to person Electronic cash Electronic money that can be passed from person to person Mundane currency Physical money that is a unit of account Virtual currency Electronic money that is a unit of account but only in a virtual world Analogue currency Physical money that is a unit of account Digital currency Electronic money that is a unit of account in mundane and virtual transactions Fiat currency Analogue currency whose value is maintained by the reputation of the issuer Crypto currency Money without an issuer: a currency whose value is maintained by cryptography We are at a similar point now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money in the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place. Just as that machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so we can expect some form of digital money to better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). Mentally, we’re still in the present. But can we look around in the present to find the distributed building blocks of the future?

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We are at a similar cusp now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money from the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place and completely new institutions will manage them. Just as the machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so I have long maintained that we should expect some form of digital money that will better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). But what will it look like? Are we looking at a world of multiple, overlapping communities with a similar variety of values-based currencies?

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Scientific breakthroughs usually rest on a multitude of advances made by researchers building on earlier findings, learning from each other’s mistakes, testing rival theories, adding their own piece to the puzzle. The aim of Philosophical Transactions was to spread scientific knowledge so that hunches, theories and flashes of inspiration could cross-pollinate. One early contributor to the journal, Sir Isaac Newton, summed up the importance of leaning on peers and predecessors in a letter to a rival in 1676. “If I have seen farther,” he wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That remains true today. Study after study suggests that scientists solve problems better when they work together. Nobel laureates collaborate more than less garlanded colleagues.

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Sometimes you just want to find a diamond in the rough, that one person in the crowd armed with a killer app. In the early 18th century Britain’s Royal Navy lost many ships at sea because crews had no way to measure longitude while sailing. Some of the finest scientific minds of the day, including Sir Isaac Newton, had tried in vain to solve this problem. Desperate for a solution, Britain set aside its cosy assumptions about social class and turned to the crowd. In 1714 an Act of Parliament offered £20,000, a vast sum at the time, to anyone who invented a “Practicable and Useful” way of calculating longitude at sea.

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Picasso talked of remaining child-like in order to paint. Henri Matisse noted that “a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play” is the hallmark of creative heavyweights. In science, too, a playful testing of the boundaries is often the first step towards the lightning bolts of genius that win Nobel prizes. Sir Isaac Newton once wrote that “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Albert Einstein put it more pithily: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the child-like inclination for play.”

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

In fact, there are further options. It is possible for the matter to be infinite in extent, but only finite in total mass if matter thins out gradually, leaving space empty beyond a particular distance from the centre (see Figure 7.8). Fig 7.8 The Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean models of the universe. Fig 7.9 Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century picture of the universe.17 Indeed, at the beginning of his work on gravity in the seventeenth century, Newton viewed the Universe as a finite system of stars and planets surrounded by an infinite empty space (Figure 7.9). Others, like Descartes, had argued that where there was no matter there could be no space, but Newton believed that the Divine spirit supported the existence of space in places where there was no matter.

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chapter nine Worlds Without End ‘And since space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions of Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe.’ Isaac Newton 1 OTHER WORLDS IN HISTORY ‘“But do you really mean, sir”, said Peter, “that there could be other worlds – all over the place, just around the corner – like that?” “Nothing is more probable”, said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.” ’ C.S.

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Einstein taught us that there is a fundamental limit to the speed at which information can be transferred in Nature. There is a cosmic speed limit: the speed at which light moves in a perfect vacuum. This simple idea has many unexpected consequences and it underpins all that we know about the physical world. In the world according to Isaac Newton, we can observe light to travel at many different speeds, just like anything else. Stand by the road side and shine a torch down the street. The light will move at a particular speed relative to you on the street. But what happens if a car drives past with its headlights on (see Figure 10.5)? If you were Newton, you would think that relative to you the light from the car would move at the speed at which it radiates from the light bulb (the same as the speed with which it shines from the torch) plus the speed at which the car is moving.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

CHAPTER 2 The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths LOOKING TO THE SKY on a clear, moonless night, the human eye can detect thousands of twinkling sources of light. Nestled among those haphazardly scattered stars are patterns. A lion here, a dipper there. The ability to detect patterns can be both a strength and a weakness. Isaac Newton pondered the patterns of falling objects and created a law of universal gravitation. Others have noted a spike in their athletic performance when they are wearing dirty socks and thenceforth have refused to wear clean ones. Among all the patterns of nature, how do we distinguish the meaningful ones?

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IN 1680 a great comet sailed through our neighborhood of the solar system, close enough that the tiny fraction of sunlight it reflected was sufficient to make it prominent in the night sky of our own planet. It was in that part of earth’s orbit called November that the comet was first spotted, and for months afterward it remained an object of intense scrutiny, its path recorded in great detail. In 1687, Isaac Newton would use these data as an example of his inverse square law of gravity at work. And on one clear night in that parcel of land called Basel, Switzerland, another man destined for greatness was also paying attention. He was a young theologian who, gazing at the bright, hazy light of the comet, realized that it was mathematics, not the church, with which he wanted to occupy his life.8 With that realization sprouted not just Jakob Bernoulli’s own career change but also what would become the greatest family tree in the history of mathematics: in the century and a half between Jakob’s birth and 1800 the Bernoulli family produced a great many offspring, about half of whom were gifted, including eight noted mathematicians, and three (Jakob, his younger brother Johann, and Johann’s son Daniel) who are today counted as among the greatest mathematicians of all times.

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The imprecision of measurement became a major issue in the mid-eighteenth century, when one of the primary occupations of those working in celestial physics and mathematics was the problem of reconciling Newton’s laws with the observed motions of the moon and planets. One way to produce a single number from a set of discordant measurements is to take the average, or mean. It seems to have been young Isaac Newton who, in his optical investigations, first employed it for that purpose.2 But as in many things, Newton was an anomaly. Most scientists in Newton’s day, and in the following century, didn’t take the mean. Instead, they chose the single “golden number” from among their measurements—the number they deemed mainly by hunch to be the most reliable result they had.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The Dundases had played central roles in the Union and they considered themselves to be standard-bearers of the Scottish Enlightenment. His intimacy with this influential family would open up an array of opportunities to the young David Watson. THE ONSET OF an Age of Enlightenment in Britain was enormously helped by two events that had occurred in 1687 and 1688. The publication of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), and the ‘abdication’ of King James II of England, followed by the arrival of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William as joint monarchs, were events that were both widely considered to demonstrate the potential of human powers of reason.

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The Dundases’ enthusiasm for geography was such that they even attended the prestigious lectures on surveying that were delivered by the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin. A child prodigy who was elected Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen University at the age of nineteen, Maclaurin had so impressed Isaac Newton with his work that Newton had even offered to pay his salary. At Edinburgh, Maclaurin devised a rigorous course of mathematical education that emphasised the discipline’s practical applications, especially to map-making. The Scots Magazine described how, in his lectures, Maclaurin ‘begins with demonstrating the grounds of vulgar and decimal arithmetic; then proceeds to Euclid; and after … insists on surveying, fortification and other practical parts’.

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Lind’s ‘spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom’ was praised by his adoring surrogate son, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who, it was rumoured, was saved from the asylum by the physician’s intervention), and Lind gladly agreed to Roy’s request. In 1774 Roy had a friendship with a fellow member of the Royal Society whose ambitious project gave the map-maker an opportunity to take his barometer to Scotland in person. The laws of motion that Isaac Newton had laid out in his Principia Mathematica had sparked a widespread interest in geodesy. Without proof or evidence, Newton had assumed that the earth had originally been a homogeneous fluid mass and he claimed that one of the effects of the law of universal gravitation was that the centrifugal force to which the earth was subject meant that it was not a perfect sphere.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

In our perception, each of those registers ascribes certain magical powers to symbols and meaning; each of them generates cultural power based on the inherent tension between reality and representation. The link between spoken language and abstract symbolic systems, particularly mathematics, has created new avenues for mystical connections between numbers, universal truths, and the fundamental structure of reality. Jewish kabbalah, Isaac Newton’s fascination with alchemy, and biological examples of mathematical figures like the Golden Ratio all reinforce a particular metaphysical notion that some logical order, some grammar and symbolic vocabulary, underlies the universe. In debating these questions, philosophers and mathematicians developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of symbolic languages, laying the groundwork for the contemporary era of computation.

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Historian Nathan Ensmenger recounts how the academic discipline of computer science coalesced only after its advocates embraced the concept of the algorithm, with one of the field’s founders, Donald Knuth, tracing the field’s origins to al-Khwarizmi in his seminal textbook The Art of Computer Programming.6 The algorithm was an ideal object of study, both easily grasped and endlessly puzzling: By suggesting that the algorithm was as fundamental to the technical activity of computing as Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were to physics, Knuth and his fellow computer scientists could claim full fellowship with the larger community of scientists.7 And yet, as mathematician Yiannis Moschovakis points out, Knuth’s argument about what algorithms actually are is an extremely rare instance where the question is foregrounded.8 For computer scientists the term remains more of an intuitive, unexamined notion than a delineated logical concept grounded in a mathematical theory of computation.

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State currencies and central banks added a second layer of trust and directed management to the equation, backing the value of a coin or note with the authority of the state, what in the United States is sometimes called the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.29 Currencies could be supported intrinsically, like Isaac Newton weighing and tracking the precious metals in each British coin, or extrinsically, like a government maintaining a reserve of gold bullion to anchor the value of its paper currency. A state and its central bank might control the introduction of new specie into circulation, manipulate exchange rates, mandate fixed prices for commodities, or simply change its value by fiat (as North Korea did in 2009 by introducing a new currency overnight).

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This feedback phenomenon, which has been better understood by novelists and poets than many Chicago economists, was also at work in the South Sea Bubble, as we saw in my initial quotation from Alexander Pope. Pope, incidentally, was himself one of those irresistibly charmed by the South Sea Bubble. So, too, was the greatest genius of the day, Isaac Newton. As Master of the Royal Mint and the man who put England onto the gold standard when he was not busy discovering the physical laws of the universe, he was hardly a novice in finance. Having made an initial 100 per cent profit of £7,000 on his shares in the South Sea Company, he was unlucky enough to go back into the market close to the top and lost £20,000, equivalent to £2.5 million in today’s money.

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The dottiness of their enterprise consisted, to my mind, not only in the physical challenge but the nonsensical economics. Since a successful alchemist would have been no more able to keep his formula secret than the first claimant in a gold rush, the prospect of infinite supply would have turned gold into a commodity about as valuable as sand. Yet even Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern physical science, devoted much of his career to alchemical research. Few were more immoderate in their blindness than sixteenth-century European adventurers, whom John Maynard Keynes regarded as the originators of capitalism. We owe the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas to gold, for gold was the probable motive that drove Christopher Columbus westward: his diary of a voyage that lasted less than a hundred days mentions gold sixty-five times.

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These great Scottish intellectuals argued that the source of a nation’s wealth was not the amount of gold that its citizens hoarded, but the production of goods and services. Note, though, that for nearly two centuries from 1717, gold provided stable monetary underpinning for the economy after the introduction of the gold standard. This was at the suggestion of Sir Isaac Newton, who persuaded the parliament to fix the price of gold at £3.17s. 10½p an ounce. John Maynard Keynes argued that the success of the gold standard in the nineteenth century was accidental. The supply of gold did not increase in line with economic growth, which was a potential curb on the money supply and thus on economic activity.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

After evidence forced him to give up the beautiful polyhedra, Kepler, in later life, became convinced that the planets play music along their paths. In his 1619 book Harmony of the World he derived the planet’s tunes and concluded that “the Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” It wasn’t his best work. But Kepler’s analysis of the planetary orbits laid a basis for the later studies of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), the first scientist to rigorously use mathematics. Newton believed in the existence of a god whose influence he saw in the rules that nature obeyed: “This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being,” he wrote in 1726, “Every newly found truth, every experiment or theorem, is a new mirror of the beauty of God.”4 Since their inception, Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation have been radically overhauled, but they remain valid today as approximations.

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Can’t be so hard, I tell myself; he probably has a speech lined up anyway. Vaguely I ask, “What is the relevance of beauty in theoretical physics?” And off he goes. “When we come to unfamiliar realms of reality—the subatomic, quantum realms—everyday intuition is unreliable,” Frank begins. “And the idea of just gathering a lot of data, like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton recommended, that’s just not practical because experiments are so hard now. The way forward that has worked very well in the biggest part of the twentieth century was hoping that the equations would be very beautiful, that they would be symmetric and economical, and deriving consequences and then checking them.

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Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3. Quoted in McAllister JW. 1996. Beauty and revolution in science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 178. 4. Newton I. 1729. The general scholium. Motte A, trans. https://isaac-newton.org/general-scholium. 5. Leibniz G. 1686. Discourse on metaphysics. Montgomery GR, trans. In: Leibniz (1902). La Salle, IL: Open Court. 6. Called “the principle of least action.” 7. Quoted by Freeman Dyson in Weyl’s obituary, Nature, March 10, 1956. 8. Rebsdorf S, Kragh H. 2002. “Edward Arthur Milne—the relations of mathematics to science.”

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Then, wherever we went in spacetime, there would be a clock sitting at each point telling us what time it was, once and for all. The real world, as we will see, doesn’t let us construct an absolute universal time coordinate. For a long time people thought it did, under no less an authority than that of Sir Isaac Newton. In Newton’s view of the universe, there was one particular right way to slice up the universe into slices of “space at a particular moment of time.” And we could indeed, at least in a thought-experiment kind of way, send clocks all throughout the universe to set up a time coordinate that would uniquely specify when a certain event was taking place.

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The lesson is that clocks are kind of like odometers, keeping track of some measure of distance traveled (through time or through space) along a particular path. If clocks are kind of like odometers, then time is kind of like space. Remember that even before special relativity, if we believed in absolute space and time à la Isaac Newton, there was nothing stopping us from combining them into one entity called “spacetime.” It was still necessary to give four numbers (three to locate a position in space, and one time) to specify an event in the universe. But in a Newtonian world, space and time had completely separate identities.

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The right-hand side characterizes all the various forms of stuff that make spacetime curve—energy, momentum, pressure, and so on. In one fell swoop, Einstein’s equation reveals how any particular collection of particles and fields in the universe creates a certain kind of curvature in spacetime. According to Isaac Newton, the source of gravity was mass; heavier objects gave rise to stronger gravitational fields. In Einstein’s universe, things are more complicated. Mass gets replaced by energy, but there are also other properties that go into curving spacetime. Vacuum energy, for example, has not only energy, but also tension—a kind of negative pressure.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Long Comment Regarding a Proposed Exemption under 17 U.S.C. 1201 (Proposed Class # 21) at 6, Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works: Second Round of Comments, http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2021/John_Deere_Class21_1201_2014.pdf, accessed September 7, 2015. 23. Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961). 24. Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 15, 1675, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Vol. 1 (1661–1675), ed. H. W. Turnbull (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 416. 25. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 26. See Ethan Zuckerman, “Eric von Hippel and 2.9 Million British Innovators,” ... My Heart’s in Accra (blog), September 14, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/09/14/eric-von-hippel-and-2-9-million-british-innovators/, accessed September 7, 2015. 27.

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Most obviously, by denying farmers the right to repair—a right entrenched enough that even patent protection can’t disturb it23—John Deere has effectively raised the price of its products for farmers. It has also done serious harm to the market for repair services, which are less competitive since farmers have no real choice of mechanics. Less obvious is the harm locking down tractors can have on innovation. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”24 Of course, Newton borrowed the phrase from Bernard of Chartres, but that only underscores the point. Innovation is, in nearly every instance, an incremental affair. Small contributions add up, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

He went so far as to speculate about extraplanetary mathematics, envisioning tables of sines and logarithms, since “there’s no reason but the old one, of our being better than all the World, to hinder them from being as happy in their Discoveries, and as ingenious in their Inventions as we ourselves are.” * * * — MEANWHILE, AT CAMBRIDGE University, Isaac Newton was developing the basic optics of a new telescope: the reflector. Lenses at the time could not bring red and blue light to the same focus, resulting in a haze of color surrounding bright objects. So instead of a lens, he designed a prototype that collected light by way of a curved metal mirror: six parts copper, two parts tin.

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A famous eighteenth-century mineralogist remarked that “in our time it would be unpardonable to consider such fairy tales even probable.” Some believed the bizarre objects were volcanic rocks, lofted like small bombs during an eruption, or rocks that had condensed in hail-filled clouds, or rocks that had been hit by lightning, giving rise to the name “thunderstones.” Isaac Newton’s work, which suggested that no small objects would exist in interplanetary space, wasn’t questioned until the turn of the nineteenth century, when a German physicist first suggested, to great mockery, that meteorites from space caused fireballs and might themselves be “world fragments.” McKay wondered if the rock might in fact be a kind of meteorite called SNC, or “snick”—the shergottite, nakhlites, and chassignites—named for three witnessed falls near the villages of Shergotty in India in 1865, El-Nakhla in Egypt in 1911, and Chassigny in France in 1815.

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“THERE’S NO REASON” Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets (London: Timothy Childe, 1698; Digitized by Utrecht University). A HAZE OF COLOR This is known as chromatic aberration. THIRTY-FIVE TIMES Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (London: William and John Innys at the West End of St. Paul’s, 1721), p. 91. WITHIN A CENTURY In the meantime, with some desperation, astronomers were trying to mitigate the problem of chromatic aberration with increasingly long refracting telescopes.

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood by Dhun Sethna

An Inconvenient Truth, Copley Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

He did use the word circulatio but understood that to mean a to-and-fro movement, as in the rising and falling of fluid: evaporation followed by condensation. PHYSIOLOGY OF CIRCLES The motion of the blood may be called circular in the way that Aristotle says air and rain follow the circular motion of the stars. —William Harvey twenty Prelude to Glory No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess. —Isaac Newton William Harvey was born in a fortunate land at a fortunate time. One may ask whether he was a singular phenomenon, an inexplicable figure of genius that appears only once every few centuries, or whether his arrival was in some sense more explicable. The answer, of course, is both. Harvey was undoubtedly brilliant, but his achievement would have been virtually unthinkable without the Elizabethan culture that surrounded him.

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Working alongside chemists at Oxford, he highlighted a possible particulate (corpuscular) component of air as an explanation for the process of combustion and respiration, setting into motion the quest for such a component that combined with blood to generate life. Boyle, the Anglo-Irish “Skeptical Chymist,” as he was called, was a younger contemporary of Isaac Newton and “the chief wonder of the English scientific world” after Newton. The fourteenth child of the second Earl of Cork, a political nouveau riche of the early Stuart period, he was born at Waterford, Ireland, a year before Harvey published De motu cordis. Educated at Eton and then in France, Switzerland, and Italy, he became familiar with the work of the recently deceased Galileo.1 Tall, pale, and emaciated, he showed poor health, weak sight, and a bad memory.

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Vain and jealous, he was despised by many contemporaries. But behind those unfriendly sunken eyes and disheveled locks burned the fire of genius. The very fact that he served, in turn, as assistant to “that prodigious young scholar” Christopher Wren (to borrow John Evelyn’s phrase), Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton established his greatness as well as his shortcomings. Hooke was not content to make only half the discoveries of his age; being more sensitive than most of his colleagues regarding the increasing importance of priority in scientific discoveries, he also claimed the other half! When Newton’s Principia was in publication, Hooke was so insistent that part of the work had been stolen from him that Newton, furious at the charge of plagiarism, virtually suppressed a third of the volume.

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

Over the next several decades, precise measuring devices mounted on improved telescopes helped astronomers pare Mercury close to its acknowledged current size of three thousand fifty miles across, or less than one three-hundredth the actual diameter of the Sun. By the end of the seventeenth century, mystic and magnetic attractions among the Sun and planets had been replaced with the force of gravity, introduced by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 in his book Principia Mathematica. Newton’s calculus and the universal law of gravitation seemed to give astronomers control over the very heavens. The position of any celestial body could now be computed correctly for any hour of any day, and if observed motions differed from predicted motions, then the heavens might be coerced to yield up a new planet to account for the discrepancy.

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Together, Jupiter and Saturn implied that Galileo would face ideological crises (such as his later clash with the Inquisition, perhaps) and live in seclusion and solitude (as he did under house arrest his last eight years). The ebullient increase and fertility of Jupiter is tempered, in Galileo’s nativity, by the sobering nearness of Saturn. Jupiter assumed its astrological mantle of benevolence and largesse in Babylonian times, around 1000 B.C.—long before Sir Isaac Newton (a Capricorn) grasped the planet’s true physical enormousness by watching it pull on Galileo’s moons. The ancients had no way to assess the sizes of the planets or the distances between them, so their association of Jupiter with grandeur poses a mystery for astronomy and astrology to share. As befits the planet of expansion, Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined.

Pocket London Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, death from overwork, G4S, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, Skype

Royal Wedding On 29 April 2011, Prince William married Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The couple had chosen the Abbey for the relatively intimate setting of the Sanctuary – because of the Quire, three-quarters of the 1900 or so guests couldn’t see a thing! Sir Isaac Newton’s Tomb On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner, where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle, where Baroque composers Henry Purcell and John Blow are buried. Top Tips › Crowds are almost as solid as the Abbey’s unshakeable stonework, so get to the front of the queue first thing in the morning. › Hop on one of the 90-minute tours ( 7654 4834; £3) led by vergers and departing from the north door. › Grab an audio-guide, free with your individual entry tickets at the north door.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Error correction is the basis of all intelligence. As Karl Popper (1902–1994), one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, said, “All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”43 Some of the biggest revolutions in science actually come from small refinements of existing theories. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”44 The biggest “giant” for Newton was Galileo: Newton’s work that resulted in the three laws of motion was influenced by Galileo’s work on forces. The printing press recorded and stored information and, with it, delivered the ability to correct errors to a much wider audience.

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Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Philipp Gunz, “The Evolution of Modern Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances, January 24, 2018. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao5961. 42. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (Verso, 1976). 43. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Penn, Buckinghamshire, 1965). 44. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675. Available at digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/9792. 45. Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752). 46. Karl Popper, as quoted by Mark Damazer, “In Our Time’s Greatest Philosopher Vote,” In Our Time (BBC 4). 47. “The Babbage Engine,” Computer History Museum. computer history.org/babbage. 48.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Predictions will always be flawed, but one way to make them as authoritative as possible is to grasp the four fundamental forces in nature that drive the entire universe. Each time one of them was understood and described, it changed human history. The first force to be explained was the force of gravity. Isaac Newton gave us a mechanics that could explain that objects moved via forces, rather than mystical spirits and metaphysics. This helped to pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam power, especially the locomotive. The second force to be understood was the electromagnetic force, which lights up our cities and powers our appliances.

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Lanza believes that as long as an intact cell can be extracted from a long-dead person, it will be possible to bring this person back to life. In Westminster Abbey, we have the carefully preserved bodies of long-dead kings and queens, as well as poets, religious figures, politicians, and even scientists like Isaac Newton. One day, Lanza confided to me, it may be possible to find intact DNA within their bodies and bring them back to life. In the movie The Boys from Brazil, the plot revolves around bringing back Hitler. One should not believe, however, that one will be able to bring back the genius or notoriety of any of these historic figures.

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All this, however, was covered up by the excitement and drama of competing with the Russians. Spectacular space stunts by brave astronauts hid the true cost of space travel from view, since nations were willing to pay dearly if their national honor was at stake. But even superpowers cannot sustain such costs over many decades. Sadly, it has been over 300 years since Sir Isaac Newton first wrote down the laws of motion, and we are still dogged by a simple calculation. To hurl an object into near-earth orbit, you have to send it 18,000 miles per hour. And to send it into deep space, beyond the gravity field of the earth, you have to propel it 25,000 miles per hour. (And to reach this magic number of 25,000 miles per hour, we have to use Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

But the timing of the siege was significant. For the late seventeenth century was a time of accelerating change in Europe in two crucial fields: natural philosophy (as science was then known) and political theory. The years after 1683 saw profound changes in the way the Western mind conceived of both nature and government. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia. Three years later, his friend John Locke published his Second Treatise of Government. If one thing came to differentiate the West from the East it was the widely differing degrees to which such new and profound knowledge was systematically pursued and applied. The long Ottoman retreat after 1683 was not economically determined.

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Micrographia was a manifesto for the new empiricism, a world away from Faustus’ sorcery. However, the new science was about more than just accurate observation. Beginning with Galileo, it was about systematic experimentation and the identification of mathematical relationships. The possibilities of mathematics were in turn expanded when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz introduced, respectively, infinitesimal and differential calculus. Finally, the Scientific Revolution was also a revolution in philosophy as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza overthrew traditional theories about both perception and reason. Without exaggeration, this cascade of intellectual innovation may be said to have given birth to modern anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, mechanics and physics.

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.* 1530 Paracelsus pioneers the application of chemistry to physiology and pathology 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium states the heliocentric theory of the solar system Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica supplants Galen’s anatomical textbook 1546 Agricola’s De natura fossilium classifies minerals and introduces the term ‘fossil’ 1572 Tycho Brahe records the first European observation of a supernova 1589 Galileo’s tests of falling bodies (published in De motu) revolutionize the experimental method 1600 William Gilbert’s De magnete, magnetisque corporibus describes the magnetic properties of the earth and electricity 1604 Galileo discovers that a free-falling body increases its distance as the square of the time 1608 Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Jansen independently invent the telescope 1609 1609 Galileo conducts the first telescopic observations of the night sky 1610 Galileo discovers four of Jupiter’s moons and infers that the earth is not at the centre of the universe 1614 John Napier’s Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio introduces logarithms 1628 William Harvey writes Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, accurately describing the circulation of blood 1637 René Descartes’ ‘La Géométrie’, an appendix to his Discours de la méthode, founds analytic geometry 1638 Galileo’s Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche founds modern mechanics 1640 Pierre de Fermat founds number theory 1654 Fermat and Blaise Pascal found probability theory 1661 Robert Boyle’s Skeptical Chymist defines elements and chemical analysis 1662 Boyle states Boyle’s Law that the volume occupied by a fixed mass of gas in a container is inversely proportional to the pressure it exerts 1669 Isaac Newton’s De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas presents the first systematic account of the calculus, independently developed by Gottfried Leibniz 1676 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers micro-organisms 1687 Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica states the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion 1735 Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema naturae introduces systematic classification of genera and species of organisms 1738 Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica states Bernoulli’s Principle and founds the mathematical study of fluid flow and the kinetic theory of gases 1746 Jean-Etienne Guettard prepares the first true geological maps 1755 Joseph Black identifies carbon dioxide 1775 Antoine Lavoisier accurately describes combustion 1785 James Hutton’s ‘Concerning the System of the Earth’ states the uniformitarian view of the earth’s development 1789 Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie states the law of conservation of matter By the mid-1600s this kind of scientific knowledge was spreading as rapidly as had the doctrine of the Protestant Reformers a century before.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

He would instead “conceal it for some time, that others might know how to value it.” If he thought any more on the matter, he left no evidence of it. Halley, however, became consumed with finding the answer, to the point that the following year he traveled to Cambridge and boldly called upon the university's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton, in the hope that he could help. Newton was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness.

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Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665.

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The world was about to get its first real master race, Homo sapiens. Things would never be the same again. 30 GOOD-BYE IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia, Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.

8 Day Trips From London by Dee Maldon

Doomsday Book, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, the market place

The first college was Peterhouse, founded in 1284, with the most recent college, Robinson, created in the 1970s. In the Middle Ages, students were expected to pray for their college’s founder. As a result, most of the early colleges have chapels. The university has been home to many academics through the years including Erasmus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and today’s well-known scientist Stephen Hawking. Cambridge University colleges provide the historical backbone of the city, and there have been ‘town and gown’ struggles in the city’s past as townspeople objected to university privileges. Many of the university colleges are clustered along the River Cam, therefore a river punt, or flat-bottomed boat, offers a relaxing and informative journey.

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London by Richard Jones

Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Snow's cholera map, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, moral panic

There was a short-lived renaissance in 1851, when geographer James Wyld erected a model of the Earth in a dome-shaped building that filled the entire square. In 1874, a Member of Parliament, Albert Grant, purchased this land and commissioned James Knowles to design a public garden surrounding a memorial to Shakespeare and the busts of four famous residents: physicist Sir Isaac Newton, artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and surgeon John Hunter. The London plane trees that now tower over the square were planted at this time. In 1975, Leicester Square was permanently closed to traffic, and in 1990, the Westminster County Council had the square renovated. At the center of Leicester Square is: 2.

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Reynolds lived and painted at 47 Leicester Fields. Walk counterclockwise around the square. Be sure to look down at the handprints of various film stars embedded in the pavement. Among the imprints are those of Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellen, Sylvester Stallone, and Billy Crystal. The next gate is Newton Gate, commemorating Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who propounded the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Continue counterclockwise past the Half-Price Ticket Booth, where you can buy discounted same-day theater tickets. The booth is open at noon for tickets to matinees, and from 2:30 to 6:30pm for tickets to evening performances.

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

Bubonic plague strikes Florence. 1631 Michelangelo Galilei (brother) dies of plague in Germany. 1632 Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican. 1633 Galileo stands trial for heresy by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; Dialogue is prohibited. 1634 Suor Maria Celeste Galilei dies in Arcetri on April 2. 1636 Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina is published in Holland, in Latin and Italian. 1637 Galileo discovers lunar libration, loses his eyesight. 1638 Louis Elzevir publishes Galileo’s Two New Sciences in Leiden, Holland. 1641 Vincenzio Galilei draws his father’s design for a pendulum clock. 1642 Galileo dies in Arcetri, January 8. Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.

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What Galileo saw in 1604 would today be termed a “supernova”—the fireball explosion of a dying star. * Given the longevity of the council, its membership naturally changed considerably over the years, while ultimate approval of its decisions passed from Paul III to Julius III to Pius IV. * His successor, Sir Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo died (1642), dignified the idea of action at a distance in 1687 when he published his law of universal gravitation. In fact, the Moon’s gravity would create tides in the Earth’s oceans even if the Earth itself did not rotate or revolve. * No clear, close-up view of any comet could be obtained until 1986, when several spacecraft observed Halley’s comet during its recent return.

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Visitors to the Impruneta church, which was rebuilt following bomb hits during World War II, must content themselves with simply being near the icon, as it reposes inside a marble shrine, behind a blue gilt-embroidered curtain. * Galileo’s last book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences indeed ignited later physicists: Sir Isaac Newton transformed Galileo’s ideas into laws of motion and universal gravitation. * The English translations of these Latin phrases, respectively, are “from the book of the living” and “No one is accepted [as] prophet in his own country.” * Later, Galileo thanked him by dedicating Two New Sciences “To the very illustrious nobleman, my Lord the Count de Noailles, Councilor to his Most Christian Majesty; Knight of the Holy Ghost; Field Marshal of the Armies,” et cetera, et cetera

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.” * * * • • • Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework. Unlike Galileo and Isaac Newton, he documented his confusion. “What matters to me,” Kepler wrote, “is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.” Kepler was a young man when he showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory—so cutting edge at the time that it cost 1 percent of the national budget of Denmark.

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To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. * * * • • • Casadevall leads by example. A single conversation with him is liable to include Anna Karenina, the Federalist Papers, the fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were philosophers as well as scientists, why the Roman Empire wasn’t more innovative, and a point about mentoring in the form of a description of the character Mentor from Homer’s Odyssey. “I work at it,” he said, smirking. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something.

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Markman, “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 45–56. Also, Kepler read a new publication on magnetism: A. Caswell, “Lectures on Astronomy,” Smithsonian Lectures on Astronomy, 1858 (British Museum collection). “the moon’s dominion over the waters”: J. Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage, 2007). no concept of gravity as a force; “Ye physicists”: A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2017). “I especially love analogies”: B. Vickers, “Analogy Versus Identity,” in: Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize