![]() ![]() In fact, far from trying to popularise his subject by teaching it properly, Newton took the very opposite stance. He never enjoyed teaching, and cared little for students. All academics wonder why, and how, and if they dare to. In middle age he dropped out of academic life and became an extremely successful civil servant. What is also intriguing about Newton is that he had two completely different careers. He was horrified by the idea that others might independently acquire the same insights and accomplish the same breakthroughs.īut behind this conflict between introversion and excessive competition was a mental gymnast of astounding ability, a man who could concentrate on a problem for days on end, and who refused to turn away from it until it had succumbed to a solution. Newton maintained an obsessive belief in his own uniqueness. The other was the fear that someone else might catch up with him. Only two things forced Newton to publish anything. He certainly tried to shrink from the world, but he had an almost paralysing fear of exposing his thoughts, beliefs and discoveries to the inspection and criticism of others. His Cambridge days amply revealed his fearful, cautious and suspicious temperament. Newton stood out from the academic crowd by being a genius: and geniuses are very peculiar. So looking back was just as important as looking forward. This, coupled with Newton's rather occultist and esoteric approach, easily led him to believe not only that the universe was a cryptogram sent by the Almighty but also that the ancient "magi" had once held the key to all knowledge, and that this had been lost. So people did not expect to make huge advances, and a rather complacent tenet of intellectual life was that some things will always be unknowable. One generation's science and engineering was very similar to the next. Newton's own flittings between mathematics, alchemy, physics, astronomy and theology were quite unremarkable.Īnd the pace of change was so much slower then. In Newton's time, mental peregrinations over a vast range of scientific topics were commonplace among scholars. We live in an age where alchemy and chemistry are divorced, as are astrology and astronomy, the dentist's surgery and the barber's shop. Today we carry all the 20th-century baggage of modern scientific activity and attitude. Michael White has clearly stumbled across this Keynsian transmutation with whoops of joy. In came Newton "the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago I the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage". Keynes attempted to overturn the concept of Newton as "the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason". John Maynard Keynes really started something in the early 1940s when he tried to change the accepted view of Isaac Newton. ![]()
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