Comment by stiff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stiff | Hacker News Reader

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This is simply completely untrue. Newton synthesized a lot of earlier results in physics and mathematics into a unified framework, and he deserves a lot of credit for that obviously, but nevertheless it was a synthesis and not something done "single-handedly and all by himself", in fact you are contradicting Newtons famous own words that he was "standing at the shoulders of giants".

Isaac Barrow, Newtons teacher, had already discovered the rudiments of calculus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow

Hooke played a significant role in establishing the law of universal gravitation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gra...

Newtons first law comes from Galileo's principle of inertia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion#Newto...

And so on and so forth, lookup Kepler, Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, Barrow, Descartes, Fermat and so on in the Wikipedia, or better read any serious scholarly history of physics about this period, this is only scratching the surface of people whose work Newton very directly built upon. There is no synthesis to be done without a period of establishing a great many of particular results.

Easy to dismiss genius as 'obvious', don't err too far on that side! Newton was certainly the greatest Scientist in a couple of centuries, instrumental in advancing three areas of Science. Not single-handedly certainly but nothing we ever do works that way.

Hooke, btw, was an enemy of Newton. Hooke would publish books of drivel about 'what if' physics worked by a certain equation; Newton derived why physics Must work a certain way. 'Hookes Law' of springs should be another of Newton's laws, but Hooke had actually written down that spring law with no proof and no motivation, but nevertheless published first. Newton argued (correctly) why springs worked that way. So a basic rule of physics has the name of someone who did no physics.

Or so the story goes.

I do not deny his genius, but popular accounts of scientific work certainly tend to overemphasize individual contributions and downplay the overall incremental progress a generation of scientists of various statue can make. It has the practical effect of discouraging young people from doing actual scientific work on small, particular results, instead they feel they should immediately have an idea for a grand theory of everything.

Practical consequences are irrelevant to questions of historical veracity.

Of course, there is no denying that Newton built upon much of the work of his predecessors - notably Galileo's early experiments in motion, as well Kepler, Huygens, Barrow and others.

But there were a significant number of original ideas, research, analysis, and experiments that added to, refined and extended their work, and most importantly formalized it all into a coherent, unified corpus in the form of the Principia. And that work was done single-handedly, all by himself, working alone, and is considered seminal in laying the foundations of science for the next three hundred years. To call it just a grand synthesis, severely discounts the magnitude and impact of that achievement.

I've always found it strange that Newton is known for saying something so humble, yet when it came to calculus, he acted like a raging socio-path, abusing all of his political might in a successful effort to discredit Leibniz.

I recall reading a paper once that made the case that Newton was speaking sarcastically, mocking Hook, if I remember correctly. Certainly that interpretation seems a better fit for his character.

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