and attended the "liturgies".
TRUE? FALSE?
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1- loner, few close friends,
spent much time alone, unmarried, no children, no known romance. 2- powers of concentration legendary for days at at time, often refusing food. 3- low self esteem depressed as if indulging in a private vice, nervous breakdown is consistent. |
4 / A true scientist restarts, produces more, and not in the same domain:
4.1 philosophy
Rule V (found in his papers), would be sufficient to show the philosophical level and the advance of Newton:
4.2 Optic:
Galilee didn't invent the telescope. He pretended it and was believed,
but the telescope of Galilee (concave and convex lentils) comes from Dutchmen
and the telescope (to the own sense,
with convex mirror) comes from Newton. (J.P. Lentin, "Je
pense donc je suis", page 52 (Albin Michel, 1994).
Therefore, temporary theory to manufacture geniuses,
(that gave results already through "prosopamnesia"):
_ 
- 1 / a childhood
assuring the minimum,
_ - 2 / but a drama,
loss, abandonment by a parent,
_ - 3 / with possibility
to fight, to affirm oneself,
_ - 4 / then, a
"locomotive"...
This theory becomes important just at the time when the neo-satammism
pushes the disarray in millions of families...
Do you accept to participate in a research on the future education,
on the manufacture of my small NewSteins?
. I, for one, bring two strong points:
- 
- my incredible
formation in the frame of "Uncle Cardinal's Plan":
- - my discharge
of all paternal loads by the agonising satammism...
Therefore,
. 1 / a childhood assuring the minimum
It seems that Isaac was saved by his mother:
Points remaining to be to developped:
. Peter Gay, "The Enlightment", Norton, 1969
THE ENLIGHTMENT'S ENTANGLEMENT with science is pervaded
with ironies. The philosophes celebrated the scientific revolution, accepted
its findings, and imitated its methods. They pushed its philosophical implications
far beyond what the scientists themselves would have thought warranted.
They tried to apply the scientific style of thinking to the regions of
aesthetic, social, and political theory... In the age of the Enlightenment,
that great time of discovery consolidation, and triumphant popularizing,
it did not take unusual perspicacity to recognize the scientific revolution
as an extraordinary event. It was plain that this revolution was the most
far-reaching upheaval the West had experienced since the Protestant
Reformation, indeed more far-reaching: the discoveries
of Galileo and Boyle and Newton were changing the world more drastically
than it had been changed by the doctrines of Luther and Calvin.
The spectacular intellectual conquests of astronomers
and physicists made science interesting to many, and not to philosophes
alone: the philosophes might think themselves privileged admirers, but
in fact science had many other courtiers in the age of the Enlightenment;
indeed, when Rousseau denigrated the sciences in his first Discours, it
was the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux that defended them against this
eloquent slanderer. The philosophers welcomed the widespread passion for
science, the mass of popular explanations of abstruse theories, the new
scientific journals but, as men of letters, they were also a little uneasy
about it. In 1735 Voltaire, on a short visit to Paris from Cerney, complained
that
We are inclined to think of the scientists among
the philosophes as literary men with a scientific vocation, but, in fact,practically
all the philosophers with serious scientific interests -Maupertuis, Buffon,
d'Alembert, Lichtenberg, Franklin, Kant, Condorcet- began with science
before they turned to philosophy, and the intelligent
amateurs and popularizes among them -Voltaire and Diderot among others-
did not have far to go to consult the experts; some of their best friends
were mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers. But the philosophers'
seizure of science was a far from untroubled affair.
As the sciences grew more technical, more professional,
they developed autonomously, and confronted the philosophes, eager as they
were to turn knowledge into politics, with linguistic, ethical, and metaphysical
difficulties they had not anticipated and for which most of them were ill-prepared.Hume
and d'Alembert, Condillac and Kant thought about the philosophical implications
of the sciences fruitfully and constructively;
they set the terms on which the debate over the nature of science is still
conducted today.
But there were other philosophers who, as the eighteenth
century progressed, found science to be not a servant or an ally but an
embarrassment.
Newton was a congenial kind of hero for the philosophes: when Voltaire set the fashion for the Enlightenment by calling Newton the greatest man who ever lived, he contrasted him, significantly, with the heroes that had served earlier, more bellicose ages: "If true greatness consists of having been endowed by heaven with powerful genius, and of using it to enlighten oneself and others then a man like M. Newton (we scarcely find one like him in ten centuries) is truly the great man, and those politicians and conquerors (whom no century has been without) are generally nothing but celebrated villains."
Everything co-operated to make Newton into a fitting object of a mystique. He was eccentric and fallible enough to provide memorable stories-like the imperishable anecdote about Newton meditating on fruit dropping from his trees which Voltaire brought back with him from England. Equipped with penetrating vision where others had seen nothing, unsurpassed and unsurpassable in his achievement, too preoccupied and too aloof to conduct his own polemics, Newton had unified disparate phenomena, laid bare age-old secrets, and, with one almost incredible intellectual effort, compelled nature to order. He had been a visionary disciplined by the appeal to experience, an empiricist illuminated by profound vision, a pioneer who employed all weapons in the scientific arsenal-mathematics, experiment, observation -with equal ease. Such a giant did more than invite assent to his theories; he commanded submission. By mid-century, d'Alembert noted, Newton's system was "so generally accepted, that people were beginning to dispute their author the honour of having discovered it," and in 1776 Voltaire surprised no one when he announced, quite simply,
Even the Cartesians were irresistibly drawn into the circle of admiration: Fontenelle composed his eulogy for the Académie des sciences on the occasion of Newton's death as though he were in the presence of a towering natural force: what a marvellous mathematician, he exclaimed, to have unravelled the mysterious complexities of the universe!
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