Don’t mess with a genius (2010)
shreevatsa.wordpress.com
shreevatsa.wordpress.com
The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 - Sept 2023 (26 comments) - (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499206)
Normally we downweight follow-ups but this is too good. Even the parentheticals are good ("the only thing ever recorded spoken by him [in Parliament] is a request to close the window)".
It's a nice anecdote if nothing else.
What a great quote
There have been a great many minds that have tortured themselves over pondering the things we don't even blink an eye at today.
We admire and idolize those who found the pretty pebbles that light up the shore today, and yet I'm sure many of them would have eagerly traded places just to see what continued to take shape.
It's sad, though also a reminder of just how much is easily taken for granted.
That business about pebbles is Newton showing off. Calculus is Latin for small pebble.
In fact, you can see hints of it even in this quote: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world” — suggests that he thinks of himself in an exalted position wrt the world (= other people, in this context), but a little boy wrt Nature. Something like: I am a little boy collecting pebbles on the shore, while everyone else is a senseless baby not even close to the ocean.
I'm flabbergasted. I can of course believe it's true. I just never thought to question it.
Here is an idea: I can imagine a vessel that looks like an elongated tetrahedron upside-down with one of the isosceles faces open and the point below it beveled to enable it to balance in two positions, position 1 with the long end slightly higher than the short end, and position 2 with the long end exactly the same height as the short end. Start in position 1, fill with water, place the crown to overflow it’s volume, then remove the crown, tip the vessel to position 2, mark the extent (rather than the height) of the water on the elongated end, repeat with the gold, compare.
This could be improvised with something like a large urn and a block to lift the long end a little bit. I’m still not sure about the precision of the overflow and dripping off the water.
If the method from the story doesn’t work, is it possible that it was just a plausible-sounding cover for the actual method that they wouldn’t have wanted to disclose?
> The story of the golden crown does not appear anywhere in Archimedes' known works. The practicality of the method described has been called into question due to the extreme accuracy that would be required to measure water displacement. Archimedes may have instead sought a solution that applied the hydrostatics principle known as Archimedes' principle, found in his treatise On Floating Bodies: a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.[34] Using this principle, it would have been possible to compare the density of the crown to that of pure gold by balancing it on a scale with a pure gold reference sample of the same weight, then immersing the apparatus in water. The difference in density between the two samples would cause the scale to tip accordingly.[12] Galileo Galilei, who invented a hydrostatic balance in 1586 inspired by Archimedes' work, considered it "probable that this method is the same that Archimedes followed, since, besides being very accurate, it is based on demonstrations found by Archimedes himself."
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Archimedes'_princip...
I'm having trouble picturing what's going on here. I'm not sure what the apparatus is. The best I can figure, it's two containers of water with the reference gold in one and the crown in the other. However, this wouldn't be any different than just weighing the two pieces of gold (which are already known to be the same mass). I tried searching for "hydrostatic balance," but nothing relevant to this came up. Since you seem to understand this, would you mind explaining (or pointing to an explanation of) Archimedes's probable solution?
This can be quite a useful phenomenon practically. Anyone who has learned to scuba dive will know that if you take a deep breath in from your air tank you increase your volume without changing your weight and will be able to slightly change your bouyancy and float upwards or downwards without moving your limbs. Submarines also use the same phenomenon.
For clarity, the submarines fix their voice but adjust their weight by pumping or flooding their ballast tanks
Technically, it doesn't balance an air either, but it's just harder to notice the effect.
For an exaggerated example, imagine a 1-kg cube of styrofoam and another 1-kg cube of steel, each placed on opposite trays of a balance-scale.
The scale will be truly balanced in vacuum, and in air will appear balanced to the unaided human eye.
However when you submerge the entire system underwater, the differences will be shockingly visible... especially when the styrofoam floats up and off the scale entirely! It isn't because of negative mass or negative weight, just buoyancy that can no longer be ignored.
By conducting the "weighing" experiment again in a denser fluid (water) any subtle differences in density/ displacement become easier to measure.
The trick being described has the weigher balance the scale in air, with unknown mass A and some mass of gold B. The two sides are equal in weight in air, different from mass. Then the entire balance system is submerged. The difference in density of A and B, and therefor volume, leads the balance to become unbalanced.
It would be wise to add mass to the lighter side to try and measure how imbalanced. I would bet most adulterants are about half the density of gold or less. In g/cm3: Gold is 19.3, silver 10.5, lead 11.3, copper 9.0, nickel 8.9.
I think you're confusing the tool-calibration step with the actual measuring. As long as a scale is built symmetrically, an empty scale will read as balanced in any environment. Both sides are made from the same materials with the same densities and displacements etc.
Once you apply the dissimilar samples (such as a known 1kg mass of styrofoam versus a known 1kg mass of steel) it will cease to read as perfectly even, because the air-buoyancy of the samples will be different. Perhaps not enough to see easily, but it's there.
____
It may help to consider that for this experiment we do not actually need to see an "equal" weight-measurement from any kind of scale. What we're actually trying to check is that the readout doesn't change when swapping the surroundings from air to water, ex:
diff_air = weight(real_gold, air) - weight(suspicious_crown, air)
diff_water = weight(real_gold, water) - weight(suspicious_crown, water)
assert(diff_air == diff_water, "Error, density mismatch detected")
Ah, you seem to be assuming that the mass of the crown is known and an equivalent mass of gold can be produced.
> What we're actually trying to check is that the readout doesn't change ...
I'm not sure what you mean by readout. If one side is A and the other B the balance only has three readings, A>B or A=B or A<B.
Typically I would expect the crown to be put on one side of a balance. Then the weigher would search for the amount of gold that makes the balance, well, balance (A=B). In effect the weigher chooses diff_air==0.
> A good counterfeiter will ensure diff_air==0
I don't see how the counterfeiter has any influence on diff_air, since the mass is not known beforehand.
Your equations seem correct.
The first is effectively true because you can weigh the crown in air, which for goldish-density crownlike objects is so relatively thin that you'll get similar results to doing the comparisons in vacuum.
The second assumption of a reference-sample was explicitly stated earlier in the thread, inside the Wikipedia quote.
> I don't see how the counterfeiter has any influence on diff_air, since the mass is not known beforehand.
The crooked crown-maker already knows (A) how much true-gold mass their customer is expecting them to deliver and (B) they have many opportunities to mass-measure and adjust the profitably-adulterated not-quite-pure-gold object they are creating.
The idea is to balance a scale with the crown on one side and an equal mass of gold on the other side (no water yet), and then submerge the entire scale in water. Now there will still be the same mass on each side, but there will additionally be a buoyancy force on each side proportional to its volume. So if the volume of the crown is different from the volume of the reference gold, the buoyancy forces will be different and the scale will tip.
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isa...
But it just kept growing and growing. He eventually bought back in, and that was right at the peak before the crash, so he lost a lot.
Truly a great quote and still so valid today.
CASSANDRA. I see nothing. I prophesy nothing. All I ever do is to take account of two great stupidities: the stupidities of men, and the wild stupidity of the elements.
— Jean Giraudoux, French (1882-1944)
(attributed to him, anyway)
“When I meet God, I’m going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he’ll have an answer for the first.”
I'd say, "disparaging against the Germans" or "repulsed by confederations" ('Alemanni' ∩ 'emetic').
If somebody is proficient in Arabic, maybe 'emetic' (after article "Al-") makes sense also outside IE...
Newton was dutiful, honest and smart.
As an American English-speaker I think my ostensible tribal obligation is to call it a tie at worst and take Sir Isaac’s part by default, but Wikipedia seems to be going out of its way to avoid concluding that Leibniz got there first: I’m curious if Germans have a different view than us in the Empire or it’s former colonies.
It seems a tough case to make that Newton wasn’t the more influential thinker overall, but on Calc I-IV? Lot of claims about stuff that he “decided not to publish”.
In the realm of calculus Leibniz is far more influential - his notation, for instance, is so superior that English mathematicians rejecting it arguably led to the stagnation of the field in England. And of course it is far more prevalent today.
Not quite the same thing, but has quite a few references to Newton contained within the pages. Perhaps enough to mix it up in your memory.
Or more charitably, Neale didn't fight too hard for his prerogatives when he saw that one of the most competent men in the history of western civilization was trying to solve his biggest problem.
"You will be taken from this place to another place, and thence to a place of execution, where you will be hanged by the neck until dead."
The penalty for common traitors was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The hanging was not until death; after dangling for a while, you were cut down and your limbs were attached to horses, which were then driven apart, causing all of your joints to be dislocated. You were then cut into four pieces, which were carried to the corners of the realm, and displayed as a warning to others not to engage in treason.
High-born traitors had it easy; they had the privilege of being beheaded instead. If they were lucky, they got a skilled executioner, who could strike off their head with a single blow. Lady Jane Grey was not lucky.
So sometimes hangees would pay people to swing from their ankles after the drop, until they were really dead.
For hanging, drawing and quartering, you weren't supposed to die from the hanging bit.
[Edit] The quartering part wasn't some kind of superfluous state expense; it was the whole point of the exercise. HDQ was only performed rarely - it was reserved for the (commoner) leaders of rebellions against the monarch. Common criminals were just hanged.
The thing, this is only decidable in hindsight. Many a confident person has declared themselves to be "the most competent" and proven to be... not that.
(competence & confidence are perhaps entirely uncorrelated)
“There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar [author of "Tulipmania" and a professor of early modern history at King’s College London] says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”[1]
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
I'm surprised he didn't get more negative attention from counterfeiters. But then once you get one hanged, and drawn and quartered, maybe they realize this cat has claws and they should leave it alone.
It is historical fiction, but I very much like the narrative style.
Well put!
If he had no been that easily distracted by weird things I expect he would have pushed the envelope of knowledge significantly less.
I think Newton was curious about everything around him, and a lot of it paid off.
Does anyone know where I can find this?
In that he states
"Newton was an MP for almost exactly one year, but he seems to have contributed nothing personally to the proceedings of the new parliament. He reported back to the Vice-Chancellor faithfully and in minute detail, but according to one anecdote, which may or may not be true, he said only one thing during the year-long proceedings. Feeling a draught down his back, he asked a nearby usher to close an open window."
But there is no other reference in that book to where that came from.
Official records of what was and what as not said in Parliament didn't really come into the public until Hansard (circa 1800) there is 'WIlliam COBBETT's parliamentary history of England : from the Norman conquest, in 1066, to the year, 1803' which has been a reference before the 1800's and you can find a copy of that on the Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/pp809777_0001/mode/2up
There is one reference to the string 'Newton' in that search but it is just a name of a borough.
• Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), p. 483
• A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (1992), p. 231
I looked up both those books and both of them call it an anecdote.
Westfall:
> There is no way to pretend that Newton played a leading role in its deliberations. According to a story that rests solely on anecdotal authority , he spoke only once; feeling a draft, he asked an usher to close a window . It is not merely anecdotal that none of the surviving accounts of the Parliament contain any record of his participation in its debates. Only to a limited extent do we know where he stood on the great issues the Convention Parliament decided.
Hall:
> An anecdote records Newton's only utterance in the House of Commons: feeling a draught, he requested that a window be closed. However, anecdote may be erroneous. Since Newton asked leave to bring in a Bill to confirm the charters and privileges of the University of Cambridge, he must have made some remarks, however terse.
I think you mean (1696)...
Levenson's book publish date.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151012784/exectoda-...
To make it worse, scammers and corporations spend massive amounts of time/money researching how to best exploit those weaknesses and so the moment our guard is down any one of us could fall for one of their traps. We're all basically one bad day away from being suckered into losing money on something. Nobody can be hypervigilant all the time and a person like Newton probably had a lot on his mind.
> So, if someone with Newton’s caliber can't get laid, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Which is obviously false.
He was good at things he dealt with personally.
Nullius in verba and all that.
If you find yourself in a lot of money, your best bet is a diversified portfolio of stable, slow-earning assets. Newton was brilliant, but not immune to the tantalizing excitement of "striking it rich" with a big investment. You might say... he pressed his luck.
I like the quote from the "Margin Call" movie. It's about hearing the music stop. That is, mostly just blind luck.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37493372
https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalon...
I found this interesting:
> Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty.
The facts are the same (researched by Levenson), but the words and presentation/storytelling are different, surely? You can see that Levenson and I chose somewhat different parts of his book to emphasize. I wouldn't have been surprised even if we had chosen the same parts, because obviously I think the ones I chose were the good parts :-)
It is a stunning coincidence that it was posted just yesterday though; as far as I can tell there's no connection between that article being posted (given that it got hardly any attention) and “The Greatest Counterfeiter” being posted (which led to my comment).
The juxtaposition of Sanskrit amongst Python and maths makes for a very pleasant reading experience.
I spent a few minutes comparing the two articles because I'm a doofus and hadn't noticed the author of the post (you) had replied. But now that I've done this pointless bit of work, can confirm - the topics are similar but they focus on different facts and even time periods. One is very much not a copy of the other.
$91,000 a year
Many will find this relatable.
> I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Is interpreted by some as a snide dig at his shorter rival, Hooke.
Now, I have less respect for Newton than ever before. That essay repeats the details of the smear job against Newton's rival in earnest, and parrots his praises, with zero sense of irony or context with respect to how history is formed. Reminds me strongly of Thomas Edison, prominent scientist with suspiciously high political standing and personal fortune.
No one can contest this now, the histories are 300 years old. What no one can contest in good faith is that, "The winners write the history books".
His "political standing" was a result purely of his scientific achievements and a general consensus of his high ability within scientific circles. He took great pains to reduce the number of acquaintances he had rather than increase them.
I think Newton was more right than wrong in the beliefs he took seriously (even outside the narrow confines of "science"). He was anything but naive. This doesn't mean he never lied; it just means that he lied way less compared to average standards for humanity.
Regarding “context with respect to how history is formed”, I think this is best done by reading more primary sources, and not forming a quick opinion (as you seem to be doing, from a blog post). This is what the author of the book has done. From his article at http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalone... —
> Some historians, notably Frank Manuel, have speculated that Newton pursued this work with implausible eagerness, out of a kind of frustrated blood lust born of his abandoned and unhappy childhood. This seems to me to be nonsense. The specific historical context matters here: Newton did not author the bloody code, nor did he send everyone he could to the gallows. Rather, the record of his depositions shows him to be simply a relentless practical man doing his job. He used little fish to catch big fish, and at least some of those low on the ladder received their escape from the gibbet. What you can see here, surprisingly, is the birth of a modern idea of a civil service. The Warden -– even Isaac Newton — was simply a man in a job doing the functions of that job, which included organizing the investigation and prosecution of counterfeiters.
> […] Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty. When he found he could not, he responded as he always had to the job at hand.
then I'm sorry but I'm not sure your respect means a ton.
Newton was 55 already at this point, and it is but a tiny excerpt from his life.
Newton could be an unmitigated shit. He has feuds with lots of people, including Hooke, Leibniz & Flamsteed. Not to mention that he rounded up the poor and convicted them of counterfeiting for possession of coins, rather than making them.
he also had a heretical secret life, properly into alchemy and other (for the time) wildly fantastical beliefs. Ones I suspect, but cant prove, he would have exploited should they have belonged to his rivals.
Mark Steele covers him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQenuI_zsw (its the radio version)
That's not to say i disagree about history being written by the winners and all the potential pitfalls that entails. This story just isn't relavent to what newton is known for.
Besides, the historical record when it comes to Newton is pretty clear. His personal abilities could hardly have been faked, and he had a personality pretty much opposite to a con man.