"Python" is not a good name, should rename to "Athon"

[Michael Terry]

!!!

Folks admire Newton for some of his breathtaking insights, not because
of his methods. The scientific method is a tool. The results are far
more important than the tool.

Also, it's not a game. His wacky ideas don't cancel out his brilliant ones.

If you want to say that he technically wasn't a scientist, great. But
to suggest that Newton is a myth of the hard sciences kind of misses
the point of his fame.

Michael

On Dec 3, 2007 1:31 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve at remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:29:58 -0800, Russ P. wrote:
>
> >> He might have been a great intellectual but he was no scientist. It's
> >> only by ignoring the vast bulk of his work -- work which Newton himself
> >> considered *far* more important and interesting than his work on
> >> physics and mathematics -- that we can even *pretend* he was a
> >> scientist.
> >
> > The fact that someone studies theology does not mean that he cannot also
> > be considered a scientist.
>
> He didn't just "study" theology, he considered his work on theology and
> alchemy vastly more important than his work in natural philosophy. To
> Newton, perhaps the most important thing a natural philosopher could do
> was rediscover the wisdom of the ancients -- an attitude diametrically
> opposed to the rationalist, scientific viewpoint of the Enlightenment.
>
> History judges Newton's work completely the opposite he did: his work on
> mechanics had lasting impact on physics, while his work on eschatology
> (the end of the world) and the Trinity had little influence on his
> contemporaries and even less on later generations.
>
>
> > And if the person who discovered the
> > inverse-square law of universal gravitation is not a "scientist," I
> > don't know who is.
>
> Science is defined by the process followed, not the result. The lone
> genius toiling away in secrecy is not science. It is anathema to science,
> *even if the genius turns out to be right*. Newton's secrecy *held back*
> science and mathematics for decades.
>
> The process that we call "science" hadn't been invented while Newton was
> alive. Newton played an important part of the invention of that process,
> but that doesn't make him a scientist. Describing him as a scientist is
> an anachronism: to use an ugly word, it is "presentism".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)
>
> Newton was to the science of physics what the alchemists were to the
> science of chemistry -- an analogy that is especially apt, as Newton was
> himself an alchemist. Newton was there at the paradigm shift from the old
> magical ways to the new rationalist ways, and to some extent he straddled
> the interface, but he was very much a part of the old ways.
>
> We do him a disservice to pretend he was something he wasn't. John
> Maynard Keynes, who bought -- and read -- the largest collection of
> Newton's writings in the world, described him thusly:
>
> "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the
> magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind
> 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."
>
> Newton was one of the creators of the Enlightenment. But he was a pre-
> Enlightenment man: he belonged to the world left behind.
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2108438/
>
> We can't understand Newton if we interpret him in post-Enlightenment
> terms: all that gives us is the 19th Century triumphalist caricature of
> Newton-as-rationalist-scientist. That's not the man, that's just the
> image -- and an image that Newton himself would have hated.
>
> Unfortunately, there is a tradition in physics of treating that
> caricature as real. Scientists themselves are especially prone to it:
> even the hard sciences need their myths.
>
>
>
> --
> Steven.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>