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

[Steven D'Aprano]

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.