Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with jed
buckwald a professor of history and a
philosopher of science at caltech
interested especially in the development
of scientific concepts and the
instruments used to create and explore
new effects and ideas in science
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this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation with jed
buckwald
the science progress
via paradigm shifts and uh revolutions
as philosopher thomas kuhn said or does
it progress gradually what do you think
well i got into this field because i was
tom coons research assistant 50 years
ago 52 years ago
he pulled me into it out of physics
instead
so i know his work pretty well and in
the years when i was at mit running an
institute
he was then in the philosophy department
used to come over all the time
to the talks we held and so on
so what would i say about that he of
course developed his ideas a lot over
the years yes the thing that he's famous
for the
structure of scientific revolutions came
out in 62
and um
as you just said it offered
an outline for what he called a
paradigmatic structure namely the notion
that
you have to look at what scientists do
is forming a community of investigators
and that they're trying to solve various
puzzles as he would put it that crop up
figuring out how this works how that
works and so on and of course they don't
do it out of the blue they do it within
a certain framework the framework can be
pretty vague
he called it a paradigm
and his notion was that eventually they
run into troubles or what he called
anomalies that kind of cracks things
somebody new comes along with a
different way of doing it etc do i think
things work that way no not really
tom and i used to have lengthy
discussions about that over the years
i do think there is a common structure
that formulates both theoretical and
experimental practices
and historians nowadays of science like
to refer to scientific work as what
scientists practice it's uh almost
craftsmen like
they can usually adapt in various ways
and i can give you all kinds of examples
of that i
once wrote a book on the origins of wave
theory of light and that is one of the
paradigmatic examples that tom used only
it didn't work that way
exactly because he thought that what
happened was
that the
wave theory ran into trouble with a
certain phenomenon which it couldn't
crack
well it turned out that in fact
historically that phenomenon was
actually um
not relevant
later on to the wave theory and when the
wave theory came in
the alternative to it which had
prevailed which was newton's views of
light as particles
that it seemed couldn't explain what the
wave theory could explain again not true
not true and much more complex than that
the wave theory offered the opportunity
to deploy
novel experimental and mathematical
structures which gave younger
scientists mathematicians and others the
opportunity to
effect
manufacture make
new sorts of devices
it's not that the alternative couldn't
sort of explain these things but it
never was able to generate them
de novo as novelties in other words if
you think of it as something scientists
want to
progress in the sense of finding new
stuff to solve
then i think what often happens is is
that it's not so much that the
prevailing view can't crack something as
that it doesn't give you the opportunity
to do new stuff
when you say new stuff are we referring
to experimental science here or new
stuff in the space of uh new theories
could be both it could be both actually
so how does that can maybe elaborate a
little bit on the story of the wave
sure
the prevailing view of light
at least in france where the wave theory
really first took off although it had
been introduced in england by thomas
young the prevailing theory dates back
to newton that light is a stream of
particles and that refraction and
reflection involve sort of repulsive and
attractive forces
that deflect and bend the paths of these
particles
newton was not able successfully to deal
with the phenomenon of
what happens when light goes past a
knife's edge or a sharp edge what we now
call diffraction
he had
cooked up something about it that no
mathematical structure could be applied
thomas young first but really this guy
named augustan fernell in france
deployed
in fresnel's case rather advanced
calculus forms
of mathematics which enabled
computations to be done
and observations to be melded with these
computations
in a way that you could not do or see
how to do with newton did that mean that
the newtonian explanation of what goes
on and diffraction fails
not really you can you can actually
make it work but you can't generate
anything new out of it whereas
using the mathematics of wave optics in
respect to a particular phenomenon
called polarization
which ironically was discovered by
partisans of newton's way of doing
things
you were able to generate devices
which reflect light in crystals do
various things
that the newtonian way
could accommodate only after the fact
they couldn't generate it from the
beginning and so if you want to be
somebody who is working a novel vein
which increasingly becomes the case with
uh
people who become what we now call
physicists in the 1820s 30s and 40s
in particular then that's the direction
you're going to go but there were
holdouts until the 1850s
i want to try to elaborate on the nature
of the disagreement you have with thomas
kuhn so do you still believe in paradigm
shifts do you still see that there is
ideas that really have a
transformational effect on science
you just the nature of the disagreement
has to do with how those
paradigm shifts come to be
how they come to be and how they change
i certainly think they exist
how strong they may be at any given time
is maybe not quite as powerful as tom
thought in general
although towards the end of his life he
was beginning to develop uh different uh
modifications
of his original way of thinking
but i don't think that the changes
happen quite so
neatly if you will in reaction to um
novel experimental observations making
much more complex than that
in terms of neatness
how much of science progresses by
individual lone geniuses
and how much by the messy collaboration
of competing and
cooperating humans
i don't think you can cut
that
with a knife to say it's this percent
and that percent
it's
almost always the case that there are
one or two or maybe three
individuals
who
are sort of central
to what goes on when things begin to
shift
are they inevitably and solely
responsible for what then
begins to happen
um in a major way i think not
it depends you can go
very far back with this
even into antiquity to see what goes on
um
the locus the major locus we always talk
about from the beginning is if you're
talking about galileo's work on motion
for example
uh were there ways of accommodating it
that others could adapt to without
buying into the whole scheme yes
did it eventually evolve and start
convincing people because you could also
do other things with it that you
couldn't otherwise do
also yes let me give you an example the
great french mathematician philosopher
descartes
who uh was a mechanical philosopher he
believed the world was
matter in motion he never thought much
of what galileo had done in respect to
motion
because he thought well at best it's
some sort of approximative scheme or
something like that
but one of his
initial
i wouldn't call him a disciple but
follower who then broke with him in a
number of ways was a man named christian
huygens who was along with newton one of
the two greatest
scientists of the 17th century
huygens is older than newton and huygens
nicely deployed galilean relationships
in respect to motion to develop all
sorts of things including the first
pendulum governed
clock
and even figured out how to build one
which is keeps perfect time except it
didn't work but he had the mathematical
structure for it how well known as
huygens oh very well known should i be
should i know him well yes you should
interesting you should definitely know
him no no no no no can we can we define
should here okay because i don't
right
um so uh so this should like uh
uh
yeah can you define should
should means this
um
if you had taken up to a second year of
physics courses you should you would
have heard his name because one of the
fundamental principles and optics is
called huygens principle
okay okay yeah so i have and i have i
heard his name there you go no but i
don't remember but you don't remember so
i mean there's there's a very different
thing
between names attached to principles and
laws and so on that you sometimes let go
of you just remember the equations of
the principles themselves and the
personalities of science and there's
certain personalities certain human
beings that stand out
and that's why there is a sense to which
the lone inventor the lone scientist is
the way
i personally mean i think a lot of
people think about the history of
science is these lone geniuses without
them the senses if you remove newton
from the picture if you remove galileo
from the picture
then science would
there's almost a feeling like it would
just have stopped there
or at the very least
there's a feeling like it would take
much longer to develop the things that
were developed is that a silly way to
look at the history that's not entirely
incorrect i suppose um
i
find it difficult to believe that had
galileo not existed that eventually
someone like huygens for instance given
the context of the times
what was floating around
in the belief structure concerning the
nature of the world and so on the
developments in mathematics and whatnot
that sooner or later
whether it would have been exactly the
same or not i cannot say but would
things have evolved yes
if we look at the long arc of history of
science
from from uh back when we were in the
caves
trying to knock two rocks together
or maybe make a basic tool
to
a long time from now many centuries from
now when human civilization finally
destroys itself if you look at that
history
and imagine you're a historian
at the end
like with the fire of the apocalypse
coming upon us
and you look back at this time in the
21st century how far along are we on
that arc
do you do you sense
have we invented and discovered
everything that's to be discovered or
are we at like below one percent
well
you're going to get a lot of absurd
questions today i apologize it's a
lugubrious picture you're
painting there i don't even know what
the word
is but i love it
well um
let me try and separate the question of
whether we're all going to die in an
apocalypse in several hundred years or
not
um
from the question of where science may
be sitting take this consumption
okay
um
i find that hard to say
and i find it hard to say
because
in the deepest sense of the term
as it's usually deployed by philosophers
of science today i'm not fundamentally a
realist that is to say i think our
access
to
the
inner workings
of nature is inevitably mediated
by what we can do
with
the materials
and factors around us we can probe
things in various ways does that mean
that i don't think that the
you know the standard model in quantum
electrodynamics is in of course not
uh i wouldn't even dream of saying such
a thing it can do a lot
especially when it comes to figuring out
what's happening in very large expensive
particle accelerators
and applying results in cosmology and so
on as well
do i think that we have inevitably
probed the depths of reality through
this i do not agree with stephen
weinberg who thinks we have
about such things
do i on the other hand think that
the way in which science has been moving
for the last 100 years physics in
particular is what i have in mind
uh will continue on the same course
in that sense i don't because we're not
going to be building bigger and bigger
and more and more expensive
machines to rip apart particles in
various ways
in which case what are physicists going
to do they'll turn their attention to
other aspects there are all sorts of
things we've never explained
about the material world we don't have
theories that
go beyond a certain point for all sorts
of things
we can can we for example start with the
standard model and work our way up all
the way to chemical
transformations you can make an argument
about it
and you can justify things but that's in
chemistry that's not the way people work
they work with much higher level quantum
mechanical relationships and so on
so this notion of the deep theory to
explain everything
is
a
long-standing belief
which goes back pretty far although i
think it only takes its fullest form
sometime in towards the end of the 19th
century so maybe we just speak to that
you're referring to
a hope a dream a reality of coming up
with a theory of everything that
explains everything
so there's a very specific thing that
that currently means in physics
as the unification of the laws of
physics
but
i'm sure in antiquity or before it meant
maybe something else or is it always
about physics because i mean i think as
you've kind of implied
in physics there's a sense once you get
to the theory of everything you've
understood everything but there's a very
deep sense in which you've actually
understood not very much at all
you've understood at that particular
level how things work but you don't
understand how the abstractions on top
of abstractions form all the way to the
chemistry to the human mind and the
human societies and all those kinds of
things
so uh maybe you can speak to the theory
of everything in its history and and
comment on what the heck does that even
mean the theory of everything
well i don't think you can go back that
far with something like that maybe to
the at best to the 17th century if you
go back all the way in antiquity there
are of course discussions about
the nature of the world
but first of all
you have to
have to recognize
that the manipulative character of
physics and chemistry
the probing of
let me put it this way
we assume
and have assumed for a long time
i'll come back to when in a moment
that if i take
a little device which is really
complicatedly made out of all kinds of
things
and i put a piece of some material in it
and i monkey around with it and do all
kinds of unnatural things to it things
that wouldn't happen
and i find out how it behaves and what
not and then i try and make an argument
about how that really applies even in
the natural world without any artificial
structures and so on that's not a belief
that was widely held
by pretty much anyone until sometime
maybe in the 1500s and when it was first
held it was held by people we now call
alchemists
so alchemy was the first the early days
of the theory of everything of a dream
of a theory of everything i would put it
a little differently i think it's more
along the way a dream
that by probing nature in
artificially constructed ways we can
find out what's going on deep down there
so that was that's distinct from science
being an observing thing where you
observe nature and you study nature
you're talking about probing like
messing with nature to understand it
indeed i am and but that of course is
the very essence of experimental science
you have to
you have to manipulate nature
to find out things about it and then you
have to convince
others
that you haven't so manipulated it that
what you've done is to produce what
amounts to
fake artifactual behavior that doesn't
really hold
purely naturally
so where are we today in your sense
to jump around a little bit with the
theory of everything okay maybe a a
quick kind of uh
sense you have about the journey
in the world of physics that we're
taking towards the theory of everything
well
i'm of course not a practicing physicist
i mean i was trained in physics at
princeton a long time ago until thomas
coons stole you away
more or less i was taking graduate
courses in those days in general
relativity i was an undergraduate but i
moved up and then i took a course with
him and
well you made the mistake of uh being
compelled by charismatic philosophers
and never looked back
i suppose so in a way
and um
from what i understand talking
especially to my friends at caltech
uh
like kip thorne
and others the um
the fundamental notion is that actually
the laws that even at the deepest level
we can
sort of divine
and work with in the universe that we
inhabit
are perhaps quite unique
to this particular universe as it formed
at the big bang
the question is
how deep does it go
if you are very mathematically inclined
the prevailing notion for
several decades now has been what's
called string theory
but
that has not
been able to
figure a way to generate
probative experimental evidence although
it's pretty good apparently at
accommodating things
and
then the question is you know what's
before the big bang or actually the word
before doesn't mean anything given the
nature of time but
but um
why the why do we have the laws that
prevail in our universe
well there is a notion that those laws
prevail in our universe
because if they didn't we wouldn't be
here
that's a bit of a cyclical but uh
nevertheless a compelling definition and
there's all kinds of things like
the
it seems like the unification of those
laws could be discovered by looking
inside of a black hole because you get
both the general relativity and the
quantum mechanics quantum field theory
in there
uh experimentally of course there's a
lot of interesting ideas we can't really
look close to the big bang can look that
far back
this caltech and mit will lie go look
into gravitational waves perhaps allows
us to march backwards and so on yeah
it's really exciting space and there's
of course
the theory of everything like with a lot
of things in science captivates the
dreams of those who are perhaps
completely outside of science it's the
dream of discovering the key to how the
you know the nature of
how everything works
and that feels uh
that feels deeply human
that's perhaps the thing the
the basic
elements of what makes up a scientist in
the end is that curiosity that longing
to understand
let me ask you mentioned a disagreement
with weinberg on
reality
could you elaborate a little bit
well i
obviously i don't disagree with steve
weinberg on physics itself i wouldn't
know enough to even begin to do that
and clearly you know he's one of the
founders of the standard model and so on
and it works
to a level of accuracy that no physical
theory has ever worked at before
i suppose the question in my mind is
something that
in one way could go back to the
philosopher immanuel kunt in the 18th
century namely can we really ever
convince ourselves
that we have
come to grips
with something that is
not in itself
knowable
to us
by our senses
or even except in the most remote way
through the complex instruments that we
make
as to what it is that underlies
everything can we corral it
with mathematics and experimental
structures yes
uh do i think that a particular way of
corralling nature
will inevitably play itself out
i don't know
it always has
i'll put it to you that way
um
so the basic question is
can we
no
reality
is that the the con question is that the
weinberg
question
we humans okay with our brains right can
we
comprehend reality
sounds like a very trippy question
because a lot of it rests on definitions
of uh no and comprehend and reality but
get to the bottom of it
like it's it's turtles on top of turtles
can we get to the bottom turtle
well i say hello uh maybe i could um
put it to you this way
in uh
a way that i we often i often begin
discussions in a class on
uh the history of
science and so on
and say i'm looking at you
yes
um you are in fact a figment of my
imagination
you have a messed up imagination yes
well what do i mean by that
if i were a dragonfly
looking at you
whatever my nervous system would form
by way of
a perceptual structure
would is clearly be utterly different
from what
my brain
and perceptual system altogether is
forming
when i look at you
who's right
is it me or the dragonfly
well the dragonfly is certainly very
impressive so i don't know but yes it's
uh the observer matters
well how does what is that supposed to
tell us about objective reality well i
think it means that
it's very difficult to get beyond
the constructs
that our perceptual system is leading us
to when we make apparatus and devices
and so on we're still making things
the results of which are the outputs of
which we process perceptually in various
ways
and an analogy i like to use with the
students sometimes is this all right
they all have their laptops open in
front of them of course okay
and um i've sent them
something to read
and i say okay click on it and open it
up so pdf opens up i said what are you
looking at
i said well i'm looking at you know the
paper that you sent me
i said no you're not
what you're looking at is a stream of
light coming off leds or lcds coming off
a screen
and and i said what happens when you use
your mouse and move that
fake piece of paper on the screen around
what are you doing you're not moving a
piece of paper around are you you're
moving a construct around
a construct that's being processed so
that our perceptual system can interact
with it in the way we interact with
pieces of paper yes but it's not
real
so
are there things outside the reach of
science
can you maybe
as an example
talk about consciousness i'm asking for
a friend trying to figure this thing out
well boy i mean i i
i read a fair bit about that but i
certainly don't
can't really say much about it
i'm a materialist
in the deepest sense of the term i don't
think there is anything out there
except material structures which
interact
in various ways do i think for example
that this bottle of water is conscious
no i do not
although how would i know i can't talk
to it
yeah but so what do it's a hypothesis
you have it's an opinion an educated
opinion that may be very wrong well i
know that you're conscious because i can
interact directly with you but am i
well unless you're a figment of my
imagination of course nor or i'm a robot
that's able to generate the illusion uh
yes the illusion of consciousness
effectively enough to facilitate a good
conversation because we humans do want
to pretend that we're talking to other
conscious beings that's how we respect
them if it's not conscious we don't
respect them we're not good at talking
to robots that's true of course we
generalize from our own inner sense
which is the kind of thing descartes
said uh from the beginning and we
generalize from that but i do think that
consciousness must be
something whatever it is that occurs as
a result of some particular
organizational structure of
material
elements does materialism mean that it's
all within
within the reach of science
my sense would be that
especially as
neuroscience
progresses more and more and at caltech
we just built a whole neuroscience
arena and so on and as
more knowledge is gained about the ways
in which
animals
when they behave
what patterns show up at various parts
of the brain and nervous system
and perhaps extending it to humans
eventually as well
we'll get more of a handle
on what brain activity is associated
with
uh experiences
that
we have as humans can we move from the
brain activity to the experiences
in terms of our person no you can't
perception is perception
that's the hypothesis once again
maybe maybe the
maybe consciousness is just one of the
laws of physics that's yet to be
discovered
maybe it permeates all matter
maybe it's
maybe it's as simple as trying to plug
it in and um
plug into
the ability to generate and control that
kind of law of physics that would crack
open
where we would understand that the wa
that the bottled water is in fact
conscious just much less conscious than
us humans and then we would be able to
then generate uh beings that are more
conscious
well that'll be unfortunate i'd have to
stop drinking the water after that
every time you take it take a sip
there's a little bit of a
suffering going on right
what to use the most
interesting beautiful moments in the
history of science what stands out right
and then we can pull at that thread
right
well i like to think of
events that have
a major impact and involve both
beautiful
conceptual
mathematical
if we're talking physical structures
work and are associated as well with
probing
experimental
situations
so um among my favorites is one of the
most famous
which was the young isaac newton's
with the colors produced when you pass
sunlight through a prism
and why do i like that
it's not profoundly mathematical in one
sense it doesn't need it initially it
needs the following though which begins
to show you i think a little bit about
what gets involved when you've got a
smart individual who's trying to monkey
around with stuff and finds new things
about it
first let me say that the the notion the
prevailing notion going back to
antiquity was that um
colors are produced in a sense by
modifying or tinting
white light that they're modifications
of white light in other words the colors
are not in the sunlight in any way
okay
now
what newton did following experiments
done by descartes before him who came to
very different conclusions
he took a prism
you might ask where do you get prisms in
the you know 1660s
county fairs they were very popular they
were pretty crude with bubbles in them
and everything but they produced colors
so you could buy them at county fairs
and things very popular oh so they were
modifying the white light
well to create colors they were
creating colors from it well known
um
and what he did was the following he was
by this time even though he's very young
a very good mathematician
and he could use the
then known laws for how light behaves
when it goes through glass
to calculate what should happen
if you took light from the sun passed it
from a hole through a little hole
then hit the prism
goes out of the prism goes strikes a
wall a long distance away and makes a
splash of light never mind the colors
for a moment makes a splash of light
there he was very smart
first of all
he abstracts from the colors themselves
even though that's what everybody's
paying attention to initially
and because what he knows is this he
knows that if you take this prism
and you turn it to a certain particular
angle that he knew
what it should be because he could
calculate things and
very few other people in europe at the
time could calculate things like he
could
that if you turn the prism to that
particular angle
then the sun which is of course a circle
when its light passes through this
little hole and then into the prism on
the far distant wall
should still make a circle
but it doesn't
it makes a very long image okay
and this
led him to a very different conception
of light indicating that there are
different types of light in the sunlight
now
to go beyond that what's particularly
interesting i think is the following
when he published uh this paper which
got him into a controversy
he really didn't describe it all what he
did he just gave you some numbers
now i just told you that you had to set
this prism at a certain angle right
you would think because we do have his
notes and so on
um you would think that he took some
kind of complicated measuring device to
set the prism he didn't
he held it in his hand
that's all and he twiddled it around
and what was he doing it turns out
that when you twiddle the prism around
at the point where you should get a
circle from a circle
it also is the place where the image
does not move very fast so if you want
to get close to there you just twiddle
it this is manipulative experimentation
taking advantage through his
mathematical knowledge
of the inherent inaccuracies that label
let you come to exact conclusions
regardless of the built-in problematics
of measurement he's the only one i know
of doing anything like that at the time
yeah
well even still there's very few people
that are able to have to calculate as
well as he did to be a theoretician
and an experimentalist
like in the same moment
right um it's it's true although until
uh the um
really the
well into the 20th century
maybe the beginning of the 20th century
really
most of the most significant
experimental results
produced in the 1800s
which laid the foundations for light
electricity electrodynamics and so on
even
hydrodynamics and whatnot were also
produced by people who are both
excellent
calculators uh
very talented mathematicians and good
with their hands experimentally
and then that led to the 21st century
with enrico from me that uh
one of the one of the last people that
was able to do that
both of those things very well and that
uh
he built a little device called an
atomic bomb
that has some positives and negatives
right of course that actually did
involve some pretty large-scale
elaborate equipment too yeah while
holding a
prism in your hands
right no what uh what's the controversy
that you got into with that paper when
you published it
well i th
in a number of ways it's a complicated
story there was a
very talented character
known as a mechanic mechanic means
somebody who was a craftsman who could
build and make really good stuff and he
was very talented his name was robert
hook
and he was the guy who
at the weekly meetings of the royal
society in london and newton's not in
london you know he's at cambridge a
young guy he would demonstrate new
things and he was very clever
and he had written a book in fact called
the micrographia which by the way he
used a
microscope
to make the first depictions of things
like a fly's eye the structure of you
know it had a big influence and in there
he also talked about light and so he had
a different view of light when he read
what newton was
wrote he had a double reaction on the
one hand he said anything in there that
is correct i already knew
and anything
that i didn't already know is probably
not right anyway
i gotta love egos okay can you uh can we
just step back can you say
who was isaac newton
what are the things he contributed to
this world in the space of ideas
wow uh
who was he
he was born
in
and near the small town of grantham in
england
in fact the house he was born in
and that his mother died in is still
there and can be visited
his father died
before he was born
and his mother eventually remarried
uh a man named reverend smith whom
newton did not like
at all
uh
because reverend smith took his mother
away to live with him a few miles away
leaving newton to be brought up more or
less by his grandmother
over there and he had huge resentment
about that his
whole life
i think that gives you a little inkling
that a little bit of trauma in childhood
maybe a complicated father-son
relationship can be useful uh to create
a good scientist
could be although this case it would be
right the you know
absent father non-father relationship
he was known as a kid little that we do
know for uh being very clever about uh
flying kites and
uh there are stories about him putting
candles and putting
flying kites and scaring the living
devil out of people at night by doing
that and things like that making things
most of the uh
physicists and
natural philosophers i've dealt with
actually
as children were very fond of making and
playing with things
i can't think of one i know of who
wasn't
actually they're very good with their
hands and whatnot
he uh
was
his mother wanted him to take over the
manor it was a kind of farming manner
they were the class of what are known as
yeomans
there are stories that he wasn't very
good at that
one day one of the stories is he's
sitting out in the field and the cows
come home without him and he doesn't
know what's going anyway
i
had relatives and
he manages to get to cambridge sent to
cambridge because he's known to be smart
he's read books that he got from local
dignitaries and some relatives
uh and he goes there as what's known as
a sub-sizer what does that mean well
it's not too pleasant basically a
sub-sizer was a student who had to clean
the bedpans of the richer kids
okay right
that didn't last too long
he makes his way
and he becomes absorbed
in some of the new ways of thinking that
are being talked about
on the parts of descartes and others as
well there's also the traditional
curriculum which he follows and we have
his notes
we have his student notebooks and so on
we can see gradually this young man's
mind
focusing and coming to grips with
deeper questions of the nature of the
world and perception even and how we
know things and also probing and
learning uh
mathematical structures to such an
extent that he builds on
some of the investigations that had been
done in this
period before him to create the
foundations of a way of investigating
processes that happen and change
continuously instead of by leaps and
bounds and so on forming the foundation
of what we now call the calculus yeah
so
can you maybe just paint a little bit of
a picture you've already started
of
what were the things that bothered him
the most
that stood out to him
the most about the traditional
curriculum
about the way people saw the world you
mentioned discrete versus continuous is
there something where he began thinking
in a revolutionary way it's because it's
fascinating most of us go to college uh
cambridge or otherwise
and we just kind of take what we hear
as gospel
right like not gospel but um
as like facts you don't begin to sort of
see how can i expand on this
aggressively your heart how can i
challenge everything
that i hear
like rigorously mathematically
through the i mean i don't even know how
how rigorous the mathematics was at that
point i'm sure it was
geometry and so on no calculus huh
there are elements of what turned into
the calculus that predate newton but how
much how much rigor was there how much
uh well rigor no
and then of course no scientific method
not really i mean somewhat like
i mean appreciation of data
ah that is a separate question from a
question of method appreciation of data
is a significant question
as to what you do with data there's lots
of things you're asking i apologize so
maybe let's backtrack and the first
question is was there something that was
bothering him that he especially
thought he could contribute or work on
well of course we can't go back and talk
to him but we do have these student
notebooks there's two of them
one's called the philosophical questions
and the other is called the waste book
the philosophical questions has
discussions of the nature of reality and
various issues concerning it and the
wastebook has things that have to do
with motion in various ways what happens
in
collisions and things of that sort and
it's a complicated story but what's
among the things that i think are
interesting is he took notes in the
philosophical questions on stuff that
was traditionally
given to you in the curriculums going
back several hundred years namely on
what uh scholars refer to as scholastic
or neo-scholastic
ways of thinking about the world
dating back to the reformulation of
aristotle in the middle ages by thomas
aquinas in the church this is a totally
different way of thinking about things
which actually connects to something we
were saying a moment ago for instance um
so i'm wearing a blue shirt
and
i will sometimes ask students where is
the blue
and they'll usually so it's in your
shirt
and then some they'll get clear and they
say well no you know light is striking
it photons are re-emitted they strike
the back of your retina and etc etc and
i said yes
you what that means is that the blue
is actually
an artifact of our perceptual system
considered as
the percept of blue
it's not out there it's in here yeah
right that's not how things were thought
about
well into the 16th century the general
notion
dating back even to aristotelian
antiquity and formalized by the 12th
century
at the paris
oxford and elsewhere is that qualities
are there in the world
they're not in us
we have senses and our senses can be
wrong
you know you could go blind things like
that
but if they're working properly
you get the actual qualities of the
world now that break
which is
occurring
towards the end of the 16th century and
is most visible in descartes
is the break between conceiving
that the qualities of the world are very
different
from the qualities that we perceive
that in fact the qualities of the world
consist almost entirely in shapes
of various kinds and
maybe hard particles or whatever
but
not colors not sounds
not smells
not softness and hardness they're not in
the world they're in us
that break newton is picking up
as he reads descartes he's going to
disagree with a lot in descartes but
that break
he is
among other things picking up very
strongly and that underlies a lot
of the way he works later on when he
becomes skeptical of the evidence
provided by the senses
yeah that's that's actually i don't know
the way you're describing is so powerful
this makes makes me realize how
liberating that is as a
as a scientist as somebody who's trying
to understand reality
that our senses is just
our senses are not to be trusted
that reality is to be investigated
through
tools that are beyond our senses yes
or that improve our sense improve our
senses
in some ways
um that's pretty powerful for i mean
that is uh
for a human being
that's like einstein level
for be for a human being to realize you
can't tr i can't trust my own senses at
that time
that's pretty trippy
it's coming in it's coming in and i
think it
it arises probably you know
a fair number of decades before that
perhaps in part with all chemical
experimentation and manipulations that
you have to go through elaborate
structures to produce things
and ways you think about it
but let me give you an example that you
know i think you might find interesting
because it's from
it involves that guy named hook that
newton had an argument with
and um he had lots of arguments with
hook although hook was a very clever guy
and gave him some things that stimulated
him later anyway
hook who was argumentative
and he really was convinced that the
only way to gain real knowledge
of nature is through carefully
constructed
devices and he was an expert
mechanic if you will at building such
things now there was a
there was a rather wealthy man
in
danzig
by the name of hevelius latinized name
he was a brewer in town
and he had become fascinated with the
telescope
this is
30 years or so 20 or 30 years after the
telescope had moved out and become more
common and he built a large observatory
on the top of his uh brewery actually
and working with his wife
they they
used these very uh elaborate
reconstructed brass and metal
instruments to make observations of
positions of the stars and he published
a whole new catalog of where the stars
are
and he claimed it was incredibly
accurate
he claimed it was so accurate that
nothing had ever come close to it hook
reads this and he says wait a minute
you
didn't use a telescope here of any kind
because what's the point
unless you do something to the telescope
all you see are dots with stars you just
use your eye your eyes can't be that
good it's impossible
so what did hook do to prove this he
said what you should have done is you
should have put a little device in the
telescope that lets you measure
distances between these dots you didn't
do that and because you didn't there's
no way you could have been that good
at two successive meetings of the royal
society
he hauls
the members out into the courtyard
and he takes a card
and he makes successive black and white
stripes on the card and he pastes the
card up on a wall and he takes them one
by one he says now
move back looking at it
presumably with one eye until you can't
tell the the black ones from the white
stripes he says
that i can then measure the distance i
can see the angles i can give a number
then for what is the best possible
what we would uh call perceptual acuity
of human vision
and it turned out he thought to be
something like 10 or more times worse
than this guy hevelius had claimed so
obviously says hook of alias
right well
years ago
i calculated um hevelius's numbers and
so on using modern uh
tables from nasa and so on and they are
even more accurate than hevelius claimed
and worse than that
the royal society sent a young
astronomer named hallie
over to dunsig to work with him and
halley writes back and he says i
couldn't believe it
but i could he taught me how to do it
and i could get just as good as he how
is it possible
well here this shows you something very
interesting about experiments perception
and everything else hook was right but
he was also wrong
he was wrong for the right reasons
and he was right for the wrong reasons
and what do i mean by that
what he actually found
was the number for what we now call 2020
vision he was right
you can't tell except a few people much
better than that
yeah
but he was observing the wrong thing yes
what hevelius was observing was a bright
dot
a star
moving past a pointer
our eyes are rather similar to frog's
eyes
you know i'm sure you've heard the story
if i hold a dead fly on a string in
front of a frog and don't move it the
frog pays no attention as soon as i
move the fly the frog immediately tongue
laptop because the visual system of the
frog responds to motion yes so does ours
and our
acuity for distinguishing motion from
statics
five or more times better yeah that's
fascinating
damn uh and of course
i mean i maybe you can comment on
their understanding
of the human perceptual system at the
time was probably really terrible
like yeah like i've recently been
working with just almost as a fun side
thing with vision scientists and
peripheral vision
it's a it's a beautiful complex mess
that whole thing we still don't
understand all the weird ways that human
perception works and they were probably
terrible at it
they probably didn't have any conception
of peripheral vision or or the fovea or
or i mean basically anything
they had some i mean because actually
was newton himself who probed a lot of
this for instance
uh newton the young newton
trying to work his way around what's
going on with colors
wanted to try and distinguish
colors that occur through natural
processes out there
and colors that are a result of our eyes
not operating right so you know what he
did it's a famous thing he took a stick
and he stuck that stick under his lower
eyelid and pushed up on his eyeball
and what that did
what produced colored circles
at diametrically opposite positions of
the stick in the eyeball and he moved it
around to see how they moved
trying to distinguish legit
right i always have to tell my students
don't do this but
or do it if you want to be great
and remembered by uh human history
that's that there's a lot of equivalent
to sticking a stick into your eye in
modern day that
may pay off in the end
okay
uh
as a small aside is the newton and the
apple story true no
was it a different fruit
as a colleague of mine named simon
shaffer in england
once said on a nova program that we were
both on
the role of fruit in the history of
science has been vastly exaggerated
okay
so was there any immune to to zoom out
moments of epiphany
is is there something to moments of
epiphany or again this is the paradigm
shift versus the gradualism there is a
shift um it's a much more complex one
than that and we
i'm
as it happens a colleague of mine and i
are writing a paper right now on one of
the aspects of these things
based on the work that many of our
colleagues have done over the last
30 and 40 years
um
let me try and see if i could put it to
you this way
newton
until the
early 1670s
and probably really until a fair time
after that
first of all was not very interested in
questions of motion
he was working actually
in all chemical relationships or what is
called by historians chymistry a kind of
early modern chemical structure
colleagues of ours at indiana have even
reproduced the amalgams that
anyway
his way of thinking about motion
involved a certain
set of relationships
which
was not conducive
to
any application that would yield
computationally direct results
uh for things like planetary motions
which he wasn't terribly interested in
anyway
he enters the correspondence with his
original nemesis robert hook and hook
says well have you ever thought about
and then hook tells him a certain way
you might think about it and when newton
hears that
he recognizes that there is a way to
inject time that would enable him to
solve certain problems
it's not that he
that there was anything he thought
before
that was contrary to that way of
thinking it's just that that particular
technical insight
was not something that
for a lot of reasons that are complex
had never occurred to him
at all and that sent him a different way
of thinking
but to answer your question about the
apple business which is always about you
know gravity and the moon and all of
that being no um the the re the reason
there is that the idea
that um
what goes on
here in the neighborhood of the earth
and what goes on at the moon
let us say remind the sun and the planet
can be due to a direct relationship
between the earth let's say
and the moon
is contrary
to fundamental
beliefs held by many of the mechanical
philosophers as they're called at the
time in which everything has to involve
at least a sequence of direct contacts
has to be something between here and
there yes that's involved
and uh hook
probably not thinking terribly deeply
about it based on what he said along
with others like the architect and
mathematician christopher wren
hearken back to the notion that well
maybe there is a kind of magnetic
relationship
between the moon and maybe the planets
and the earth and gravity and so on
vague but establishing a direct
connection somehow however it's
happening forget about it
newton wouldn't have cared about that if
that's all they said but it was when
hook mentioned this different way of
thinking about the motion
a way he could certainly have thought of
because it does not contradict anything
newton is a brilliant mathematician and
he could see
that you could suddenly start to do
things with that
that you otherwise wouldn't and this led
eventually to another controversy with
hook in which hook said well after
newton published his great principia i
gave him how to do this and then newton
of course got ticked off about that and
said well listen to this i did
everything and because he had a picayune
little idea he thinks he can take credit
for it
okay
uh
so his ability to play with his ideas
mathematically is what solidified the
initial intuition that you could have
was that the first time he was born the
idea that you have action at a distance
that you can have
forces without contact which is another
revolutionary idea
i would say that in the sense of dealing
with
the mechanics of force-like
effects
considered to act at some distance
it is novel
uh with both hook and newton
at the time the notion that two things
might interact at a distance with one
another without direct contact that goes
back to antiquity
uh only there it would thought of more
as a sympathetic reaction
you know to a magnet and and a piece of
iron they have a kind of mutual sympathy
for one another
and like uh like what love what are we
talking about well actually they do
sometimes talk like that
but that is love that i meant
i see now i talk like that all the time
i think love is somehow
in consciousness or forces of physics
that yet to be discovered okay
now there's the
the other side of things which is
calculus that you begin
to talk about so newton brought a lot of
things to this world one of them is
calculus
what is calculus
and uh what was role what was newton's
role in bringing it
to life what was it like what was the
story of bringing calculus to this world
well
since the publication starting
many decades ago by
tom whiteside who's now deceased of
newton's mathematical papers
we know a lot about
how he was pushing things and how he was
developing things it's a complex
question to
to say what calculus is calculus is the
set of mathematical techniques that
enable you to investigate
what we now call functions mathematical
functions which are continuous that is
that are not formed out of
discrete
sets like the counting numbers for
instance
um
uh newton uh there were already
procedures
for
solving problems involving such things
is finding areas
to under curves and tangents to two
curves by using geometrical structures
but only for certain limited
types
of curves if you will
um newton as a young man the
we know this is what happened
is looking at
a formula which involves an
expansion in separate terms polynomial
terms as we say for certain functions
i know i don't want to get complicated
here about this but and he realizes it
could be generalized
and he tries the generalization and that
leads him to a an expansion formula
called the binomial theorem
that
enables him to move ahead with the
notion that if i take something
that has a certain value
and i add a little bit to it and i use
this binomial theorem and expand things
out i can begin to do new things
and the new things that he begins to do
leads him to a recognition that the
calculations of areas and the
calculations of tangents to curves
are reciprocal
to one another
and the
procedures that he develops is a
particular form of the calculus
in which uh he considers small
increments and then continuous flows
uh and changes of curves uh and so on
and we have relics of it in physics
today the notation in which you put a
dot over a uh variable indicating the
rate of change of the variable that's
newton's original type of notation the
dot yeah
the the the dot notation
possibly independently of newton
because he didn't publish this thing
although uh he became quite well known
as quite a brilliant young man in part
because um
people heard about his work and so on
uh when another young
man by the name of gottfried leibniz
visited london
and he heard about these things
it is said that he independently
develops
his form of the calculus which is
actually the form we use today both in
notation and perhaps in certain
fundamental ways of thinking
it has remained
a controversial point as to
where exactly
and how much independently leibniz did
it leibniz aficionados think
and continue to maintain he did it
completely independently newton when he
became president of the royal society
put together a group to go on the attack
saying no he must have taken everything
we don't know
but i will tell you this
about uh 25 or so years ago
a scholar uh who's a professor at
indiana now
uh named domenico melli
got his hands on a leibnitz manuscript
called the ten tammon which was
leibniz's attempt
to produce an alternative to newton's
mechanics
and it comes to some conclusions that
you have in the newton's mechanics well
he published that but mellie got the
manuscript and what mellie found out was
that leibniz reverse engineered the
principia and cooked it backwards
so that he could get the results he
wanted
that was for the mechanics so that means
his mind allows for that kind of thing
some people
you're breaking some news today you're
starting some people
some people think so i think most
historians of mathematics do not agree
with that
a
friend of mine rather well-known
physicist unfortunately died a couple
years ago named mike nauenberg at uc
santa cruz
had some evidence along those lines
didn't pass mustard
with many of my friends who are
historians of math in fact i edit with a
historian of math a technical journal
and
we were unable to publish it in there
because we couldn't get it through
any of our colleagues
but i am i remain suspicious
what is it about those tense
relationships and that kind of drama
einstein doesn't appear to have much of
that drama
nobody claims i haven't heard claims
that they
perhaps because it's
such crazy ideas of any of his major uh
inventions major ideas
being those that are
basically i came up with it first or
independently there's not
as far as i'm aware not many people talk
about general relativity especially
in those terms but with newton that was
the case
i mean
is that just a natural outgrowth of how
science works is there's going to be
personalities that i'm not saying this
about lands but maybe i am that there's
people who uh steal ideas for the
you know
because of ego because of all those
kinds of things i don't think it's all
that common frankly
um the the newton hook leibniz contra
tomps and so on
well you know you're at the beginnings
of a lot of things there and so on these
are difficult and complex times as well
these are times in which
science as an activity
pursued by other than let us say
interested aristocrats is becoming
something somewhat different it's not a
professional community of investigators
in the same way
it's also a period in which
procedures and rules
of practice are being developed to avoid
um attacking one another directly and
pulling out a sword to cut off the other
guy's head if he disagrees with you
and so on
so it's a very different period
controversies happen people get angry i
can think of a number of others
including in the development of optics
in the 19th century and so on
and it can get hot under the collar
sometimes
one character who's worked an area
extensively whether they've come up with
something terribly novel or not and
somebody else kind of moves in
and
does completely different novel things
the first guy gets upset about it
because he's sort of muscled into what i
thought was my area yeah and you find
that sort of stuff but uh do you have
examples of cases where it worked out
well like uh that competition is good
for the progress of science yeah it
almost always is good in that sense so
it's just painful for the individuals
and b yeah it doesn't have to be you
know nasty
although sometimes it is so on the space
like for the example of the optics could
you comment on that one well yeah sure
let me there are several but
i could give you um
all right so i'll give you this example
that probably is
the most pertinent um
the first
polytechnic school like mit or caltech
was actually founded in france during
the french revolution it exists today
it's the egg called pulley technique
right
and two people who were there
uh were two young men in the 90s 1790s
uh named on the one hand francois arago
and the other jean-baptiste bio they
both lived a long time well into the
1850s arago became a major administrator
of science
and b.o
his career started to peter out after
about the late teens
now
they are
sent on an expedition
which was one of the expeditions
involving measuring things to start the
metric system
there's a lot more to that story anyway
they come back arago gets separated
he's captured
uh
by uh pirates actually
wounds up in
uh tangier escapes is captured again
everybody thinks he's dead he gets back
to paris and so on he's greeted as a
hero and what not in the meantime b.o
has pretty much published some of the
stuff that he's done and arago doesn't
get much credit for it and aragog starts
to get very angry and bo is known for
this kind of thing so hour ago anyway
b.o
starts investigating a new phenomenon in
optics involving something called
polarization
and he writes all kinds of stuff on it
arago
looks into this
and decides to write some things as well
and actually
b.o gets mostly interested in it when he
finds out that arago is doing stuff yeah
now bo is actually the better scientist
in a lot of ways but arago is furious
about this
so furious that he actually demands and
forces the leader of french science
laplace the marquis de la place
and
cohorts to write a note in the published
journal saying oh excuse us
um
actually arago et cetera et cetera
blah blah so
arago continues to just hold this
antipathy and
fear of beo so what happens
uh
napoleon is finished at waterloo
right a young frenchman by the name of
august stanford now
was in the army
is going back to his home on the north
coast of france in normandy passes
through paris
arago is friends with
fresnel's uncle
uh
who's the head of the ecole de bozar at
the time
anyway
fresnel is already interested in certain
things in light and he talks to arago
arago tells him a few things fresnel
goes home and fernell is a brilliant
experimenter
he observes things
and he's a very good mathematician
calculates things he writes something up
he sends it to arago arago looks at it
and arago says to himself
i can use this to get back at b.o.
he brings fresnel to paris sets him up
in
a room at the observatory where arago is
for fresnel to continue his work
paper after paper comes out
undercutting everything b.o had done
what is it about jealousy and
just envy that could be an engine of
creativity and and productivity
versus like an einstein where it seems
like not
i don't know which one is better i guess
it depends on the personality both are
useful engines and science
well in this particular story it's um
maybe even more interesting because
fresnel himself the young guy
he knew what arigo was doing with him
and he didn't like it yeah he didn't
want to get with he wrote his brother
said i you know i don't want to get an
argument with b i just want to do my
stuff
arago is using him
but it's because arago kept pushing him
to go into certain areas that stuff kept
coming out yeah
ego is beautiful okay but back to uh
newton
there's a bunch of things i want to ask
but sort of
let's say
since we're on the leibniz and the topic
of drama let me ask another drama
question
why was newton a complicated man
we're breaking news today this is like
uh
right
complicated it's like
his brain structure was different i
don't know why he had a complicated
young life as we've said
he
had always been
very
self-contained and solitary he had
acquaintances in france
and when he moved to london eventually
he had quite a career
a career for instance that led him when
he was famous by then the 1690s he moves
to london he becomes first
warden of the mint the mint is what
produces coins and coinage was a
complicated thing because there was
counterfeiting going on
and he becomes master of the mint to the
extent
and a guy at mit
wrote a book about this a little bit we
wrote something on it too i forget his
name was levin
newton sent
investigators out to catch these guys
and sent at least one of them a famous
one named challenger to the gallows
so he was
he and and one of the reasons he
probably was so particularly angry at
challenger was challenger had apparently
said some nasty things about newton in
front of parliament at some point
fair enough yeah that was apparently not
a good idea well he had a bit of a ten
percent had a bit of a clearly okay
clearly um
but he um
he even as a young man at uh cambridge
though he doesn't come from wealth he
attracts um people who recognize his
smarts uh he there's a young fellow
named humphrey newton uh shared his
rooms you know these students always
shared rooms with one another uh became
his kind of amanuensis to uh write down
what newton was doing
and so on
and uh there were others over time
uh who he befriended in various ways and
so on he was solitary
uh he had as far as we know no
relationships with either women or men
in uh anything other than a
formal way
uh the only those get in the way
relationships right well i mean he was
he he was
i don't know if he was close to his
mother i mean she passed away everything
left him he went to be with her after
she died he was close to his niece
catherine barton who basically came to
run his household
when he moved to london and so on and
she married
a man named conduit who became one of
the
people who controlled newton's legacy
later on and so on so he and and and you
can even see the house that the
townhouse that newton lived in in those
days still there
so there's the the story of uh newton
coming up with quite a few ideas uh
during a pandemic
we're on the outskirts of a pandemic
ourselves right and a lot of people use
that example as motivation for everybody
while they're in lockdown to get stuff
done
uh so
what's that about can you tell the story
of that
well i can let me first say that uh of
course we've been teaching over zoom
lately and there's no zoom back then
yeah there was no zoom back then
although it wouldn't have made much
difference because the story was newton
was so complicated in his lectures that
at one point the humphrey newton
actually said that he might as well have
just been lecturing to the walls because
nobody was there yeah to listen to it so
what difference but uh also not a great
teacher huh i if you look at his optical
notes
if that's what he's reading from oh boy
okay
no
so what uh what can you say about that
whole journey through the pandemic
that uh that resulted in so much
innovation right of amount of time well
i mean there's two times that he goes
home
would he have been able to do it and do
do it if you'd stayed at cambridge i
think you would have
i don't think it really uh although i do
like to tell my advanced students when i
lecture on the history of physics to the
physics and chemistry students
especially we've been doing it over zoom
last year when we get to newton and so
on because these kids are you know 21 22
i like to say well you know when newton
was your age
and he had to go home
during an epidemic do you know what he
produced
so can you actually summarize this for
people who don't know how old was newton
and what did he produce
well newton goes up to cambridge as it
said when he's 18 years old in 1660
and the so-called miraculous year
the anus mirabilis where you get the
development in the calculus and in
optical discoveries especially is 1666
right so he's what 24 years old at the
time but judging from his
the notebooks that i mentioned he's
already before that come to an awful lot
of uh developments uh over the previous
couple of years
does it have much to do with the fact
that he twice went home
it is true
that the optical experiments that we
talked of a while ago with the light on
the wall moving up and down were done at
home in fact you can visit the very room
he did it in to this day
yeah it's very cool and if you look
through the window in that room there is
an apple tree
out there in the garden so you might be
wrong about this
i thought you were lying to me what
maybe there's an apple involved after
all well it's it's not the same apple
tree but it's cuttings how do you know
they don't last that long but okay it's
400 years ago oh
wow i continue with the dumbest
questions okay so
you're saying that perhaps going home
was not
it may have given him an opportunity to
work things through and after all he did
make use of that room and he could do
things like put you know a shade over
the window move things around cut holes
in it and
do stuff probably in his rooms at
cambridge he maybe not although
when he stayed at cambridge
subsequently became a fellow and then
the first uh actually the second
lucasian professor there he was actually
really the first one because
isaac barrow who was the mathematician
professor of optics who recognized
newton's genius
gave up what would have been his
position
because he recognized um
not newton may not have learned too much
from him although they did interact
and and so newton was the first lucasian
professor really the one that stephen
hawking held
until he died
and we know
that the rooms that he had there at
cambridge uh subsequently because rooms
are still there
he built an all chemical furnace outside
did all sorts of stuff in those rooms
uh and
don't forget you didn't have to do too
much
as a lucasian professor every so often
you had to go give these lectures
whether anybody was there or not and
deposit the notes
uh you know for the future which is how
we have all those things
oh they were stored in and now we have
them and now we know just how terrible
the teacher newton was yeah but we know
how brilliant these notes are in fact
the second volume of newton's
of the notes really on the great book
that he published the optics which he
published in 1704 that has just been
uh finished with full annotations and
analysis by the greatest analyst of
newton's optics alan shapiro who uh
retired a few years ago at the
university of minnesota and been working
on newton's optics
ever since i knew him and before and
i've known him since 1976.
is there
something you could say broadly about
what either that work on optics or
principia itself as a
something that i've never actually
looked at
as a piece of work
is it
powerful in itself or is it just an
important
moment in history in terms of the amount
of inventions that are within
the
amount of ideas that are within or is it
a really powerful work in itself well it
is a powerful work in itself you can see
this uh this guy
coming to grips with and pushing through
and working his way around complicated
and difficult issues melding
experimental situations which nobody had
worked with before even discovering new
things trying to figure out ways of
putting this together with mathematical
structures succeeding and failing at the
same time
and we can see him doing that
i mean what is uh what is uh contained
within principia i don't even know in
terms of the scope
of the work all right is it the entirety
of the body of work of uh
of newton no no no no the principia
mathematic as is the calculus
well he all right so
the principia is divided into three
books excellent
book one contains his version of the
laws of motion
and the application of those laws to
figure out when a body moves in certain
curves and is forced to move in those
curves by forces directed to certain
fixed points
what is the nature of the mathematical
formula for those forces that's all that
book one is about and it contains not
the kind of version of the calculus that
uses algebra of the sort that i was
trying to explain before
but is done in terms of
ratios between
geometric line segments when one of the
line segments goes very very small
it's called the kind of limiting
procedure which is calculus but it's a
geometrically structured although it's
clearly got algebraic elements in it as
well
and that makes the principia's
mathematical structure rather hard for
people who aren't studying it today to
go back to
book two contains his
work on what we now call hydrostatics
and a little bit about hydrodynamic
hydrodynamics a fuller development of
the concept of pressure
which is a complicated concept and book
three
applies what he did in book one to the
solar system
and it is successful
partially
because
the only way that you can exactly solve
the only types of problems you can
exactly solve in terms of the
interactions of
two particles governed by gravitational
force between them is for only two
bodies
if there's more than two
let's say it's a b and c a x on b b x on
c c axon a
you can cannot solve it exactly you have
to develop techniques the fullest sets
of techniques are really only developed
about 30 or 40 years after newton's
death by french
mathematicians like laplace
newton
tried to apply his structure to the
sun earth moon because the moon's motion
is very complicated
the moon for instance
exactly repeats its observable position
among the stars only every 19 years
that is if you
look up where the moon is among the
stars at certain times and it changes
it's it's complicated that's by the way
that was discovered
that was discovered by the babylonians
that fact in 19 years thousands of years
ago yeah and then you have to look that
little piece of data and how do you make
sense of it well i mean that that is
data and you have to and it's
complicated so newton actually kind of
reverse engineered a technique that had
been developed by a man named horox
using certain laws of kepler's to try
and get around this thing in newton then
sort of
my understanding i've never studied this
has reversed
sort of reversed it and fit it together
with his force calculations by way of an
approximation
and
was able to construct a model to make
some predictions
fit
things backwards pretty well
okay
where does data fit into this we kind of
earlier in the discussion
uh mention data as part of the
scientific method
how important was
data to newton okay so like you
mentioned uh prism and playing with it
and looking at stuff and then coming up
with calculations and so on where does
data fit into any of his ideas
all right well let me say two things
first one we rarely use the phrase
scientific method anymore because there
is no one
easily
describable such method in a certain i
mean humans have been playing around
with the world and learning how to
repetitively do things and make things
happen ever since you know humans became
humans
um
do you have a preferred definition of
the scientific method what are the
various uh no i don't
i prefer to talk about
um
the
considered
manipulation of artificial structures to
produce results
that can be worked together with schemes
to construct other devices and make
uh
predictions if you will about the way
such things will work
so ultimately it's about producing other
devices it's like leads you down uh i
think so principally
uh i mean you may have data if you will
like astronomical data
obtained otherwise and so on but yes
and but but but number two here is this
question of data what is data
in that sense see when we talk about
data today
um we have
a kind of complex notion which
reverts to even issues of statistics
and measurement procedures and so on so
let me put it to you this way so
let's say i had a ruler in front of me
go on and it's marked off in little
black marks separated by let's say
distances
called a millimeter
okay now i make a mark on this piece of
paper here so i made a nice black mark
right
nice black mark
and i ask you i want you to measure that
and tell me how long it is
you're going to take the ruler
you're going to put it next to it
and you're going to look
and it's not going to sit even if you
put one end as close as you can on one
black mark the other end probably isn't
going to be exactly on a black mark well
you'll say it's closer to this or that
you write down a number and i say okay
take the ruler away a minute i take this
away come back in five minutes put the
piece of paper down do it again
you're going to probably come up with a
different number
and you're going to do that a lot of
times
and then if i tell you i want you to
give me your best estimate of what the
actual length of that thing is what are
you going to do
you're going to
average all of these numbers
why
statistics
well yes
statistics
there's lots of ways of going around it
but the average is the best estimate on
the basis of what's called the central
limit theorem
a statistical thing we were talking
about things
that were not really developed until the
1750s 60s and 70s newton died in 1727.
the intuition perhaps was there not
really i'll tell you what people did
including newton although newton is
partially the one exception
we talked a while ago about this guy
christian huygens
he measured lots of things and he was a
good
mechanic himself
he and his brother ground lenses huygens
i told you developed the first pendulum
mechanism pendulum driven clock with a
mechanism and so on also
a spring watch where he got into a
controversy with hook over that by the
way
um well these mechanics and the
controversy yeah
well we also have
huygens's notes
um they're preserved at the at leiden
university in holland he's dutch
for his work in optics which was
extensive we don't have time to go into
that except the following
a number of years ago i went through
those things because in this optical
theory that he had
there are four numbers that you've got
to be able to get good numbers on to be
able to predict other things
so what would we do today what in fact
was done at the end of the 18th century
when somebody went back to this you do
what you just i told you to do with the
ruler you make a lot of measurements and
average results
we have huygens notes he did make a lot
of measurements
one after the other after the other
but when he
came to use the numbers for calculations
and indeed when he published things
at the end of his life
he gives you one number and it's not the
average of any of them it's just one of
them
which one was it the one that he thought
he got
so good at
working by practice that he put down the
one he was most confident in
that was the general procedure
at the time you wouldn't publish a paper
in which you wrote down six numbers and
said well i measured this six times let
me put them together none of them is
really
they would have said the right number
but i'll put them together and give you
a good number no you would have been
thought of that you know you don't know
what you're doing yeah
by the way there's just an inkling of
value to that approach
just an inkling
we sometimes use statistics as like a
thing that like oh that solves all the
problems
we'll just do a lot of it and we'll take
the average or whatever it is as many
excellent books and mathematics have
highlighted the flaws
in our uh approach to certain sciences
that rely heavily on statistics okay let
me ask you again for a friend
about uh this alchemy thing
you know it'd be nice to create gold but
also seems to uh come into play quite a
bit throughout the history of science
perhaps in positive ways in terms of its
impact can you say something to the
history of alchemy
a little bit
sure
um it used to be thought
two things one that alchemy
which dates certainly back to the
islamic period in islam
you're talking you know
11th 12th 13th centuries
among islamic natural philosophers and
experimenters
but it used to be thought that
alchemy which picked up strikingly in
the 15th 16th century 1500s and
thereabouts
was a sort of mystical procedure
involving all sorts of strange notions
and so on and
that's not entirely untrue
but it is substantially untrue in that
alchemists were engaged in what uh
was known as chrysopoeia that is
looking for ways to transform
invaluable materials into valuable ones
but in the process of doing so or
attempting to do so
they
learned how to
uh create complex amalgams of various
kinds they used very elaborate apparatus
glass olympics in which they would use
heat to produce chemical decompositions
they would
write down and observe these
compositions and many of the so-called
really strange-looking alchemical
formulas and statements where they'll
say something like i i can't produce it
but it'll be
the soul of mars will
combine with the
this etc etc these
it has been shown are almost all actual
formulas for how to engage in the
production of complex amalgams
and what to do
and by the time of newton
newton was reading the works of a
uh fellow by the name of starkey who was
actually came from harvard
uh
shortly before
in which um
things had progressed if you will to the
point where the procedure turns into
what historians call chrysopoeia
which basically runs into the notion of
thinking that may these things are made
out of particles
this is the mechanical philosophy can we
engage in processes chemical processes
to rearrange these things
which is not so stupid after all
i mean we do it except we happen to do
it in reactors not in chemical processes
unless of course it had happened that
cold fusion had worked which it didn't
um i uh
well right but um so that's the way
they're thinking about these things
there's a kind of mix and newton engages
extensively
in those sorts of manipulations in fact
more in that than almost anything else
except for his optical investigations if
you look through the latter parts of the
1670s the last five six seven years or
so of that there's more on that than
there is on anything else he's not
working on mechanics he's pretty much
gone pretty far in optics he'll turn
back to optics later on
so optics and alchemy
so what you're saying is isaac newton
liked shiny things
well actually if you go online and look
at what bill newman the professor at
indiana
at bloomington indiana has produced
you'll find the very shiny thing called
the star regulus which newton describes
as having produced according to a
particular way which newman figured out
and was able to do it and it's very
shiny
there you go proves the theorem
i
can ask you about god religion and its
role in newton's life
was there
helpful
constructive
or destructive influences of religion
in his work and and in his life
well there you begin to touch on a
complex question um
the role that god played would be an
interesting question to answer should
one go and be able to speak with this
invisible character who doesn't exist
but putting that aside for the moment
yeah we don't like to talk about others
while they're not here so right
um newton is
a deeply religious man not unusually so
of course for the assignment
and um
clearly his upbringing
and perhaps his early experiences
have
exacerbated that in a number of ways
that he takes a lot of things personally
and and he finds perhaps solace
in thinking about a sort of governing
abstract
rule-making
exacting
deity
i think there is little question
that his
conviction
that you can figure things out
has a fair bit to do
with his profound belief that this rule
maker
doesn't do things arbitrarily
newton does not think that miracles have
happened
since maybe the time of christ if then
and not in the same way he was for
instance an anti-trinitarian
he did not hold that christ had a divine
being
but was rather endowed with certain
powers by the rule maker and whatnot and
um
he uh did not think that some of the
uh
tales of the old testament with various
miracles and so on occurred in anything
like that way some may have some may not
have
um like everybody else of course he did
think that creation had happened about
six thousand years ago
wait really oh yeah sure
well biblical chronology can give you a
little bit about that's a little
controversial but sure
interesting
wow the deity created
the universe
six thousand years ago and that didn't
interfere with his
uh playing around with the sun and the
moon and the oh no because he's figuring
out he's he's watching the brilliant
construction that this
perfect entity did six thousand years
ago
yeah has produced plus or minus a few
years well if you go with bishop buster
it's 4004 bce
i want to be precise about it
we always on this this is a serious
program we always want to be
precise uh okay let me ask another
ridiculous question if uh
if newton were to travel forward in time
and visit with einstein
and have a discussion about
space time and general relativity that
conception of time that conception of
gravity what do you think that
discussion will go
like
uh put that way i think newton would sit
there and shock and say i have no idea
what you're talking about
if on the other hand
there's a time machine you go back and
bring a somewhat younger newton
not a man
my age say i mean he lived a long time
you know into his mid 80s
but take him when he's in his 40s let's
say
bring him forward and don't immediately
introduce him to einstein let's take him
for a ride on a railroad
let him experience the railroad oh
that's right
take him
around and
um
show him
uh
a sparking machine
he knows about sparks sending off sparks
show him wires have him touch the wires
and get a little shock
show him a clicking telegraph
machine of the kind then let him hear
the clicks in a telephone receiver and
so on do that
for a couple of months
let him get accustomed to things
then take him into not einstein yet
let's say we're taking him into the
1890s
einstein is young man then we take him
into some of the laboratories
we show him some of the equipment the
devices not the most elaborate ones we
show him certain things we educate him
bit by bit well the optics maybe focus
on that certainly
you begin to show him things he's a
brilliant human being
i think bit by bit
he would begin to see what's going on
but if you just dumped him in front of
einstein he'd sit there his eyes would
glaze over
i mean this uh i guess it's it's almost
a question
of how big of a leap
how many leaps have been taken in
science that go from newton to einstein
we sometimes in a compressed version of
history think that
not much
oh that's totally wrong
a lot
huge amounts
in multifarious ways
involving fundamental conceptions
mathematical structures the evolution of
novel experimentation and devices the
organization
everything everything i mean to a point
where i wonder even if newton was
uh
like you said 40 but even like 30. so
he's very like if he would be able to
catch up with the conception of
everything i i wonder as a scientist
how much
you load in from age five
about this world in order to be able to
conceive of the world
of ideas that uh that push that science
forward
i mean you mentioned the railroad and
all those kinds of things that that we
might that might be fundamental to our
ability to invent even when it doesn't
directly obviously seem relevant
well
yes
um i mean the railroad the steam engine
the watt engine etc i mean that was
really the one engine you know was
developed pretty although what knew
joseph black a chemist scientist so on
did stuff on heat was developed pretty
much independently of
the developing thoughts about heat
at the time but what it's not
independent of
is the evolution of practice in the
manufacture and construction of devices
which can do things in extraordinarily
novel ways and the premium being
gradually placed on calculating how you
can make them more efficient
that is of a piece
with
a way of thinking about the world in
which you're controlling things
and working it's something that you know
humans have been doing for a long time
but
in this more concerted
and
uh structured way
i think you really don't find it in the
fullest sense until
uh
well into the 1500s and really not fully
until the 17th century later on
so newton had this uh year of miracles
i wonder if i could ask you briefly
about einstein in his year miracles i've
been reading
i'm re-reading revisiting
the brilliance of
the papers that einstein published in
the year 1905
one of which one of the nobel prize the
photoelectric effect but also brian
motion special
theory of relativity
and of course the uh
the old e equals mc squared
is there um
does that make sense to you that uh
these two figures had such productive
years
that there's this moment of genius maybe
maybe if we zoom out
i mean i
my work is very much in artificial
intelligence so
wondering about the nature of
intelligence
like how did we
how did evolution on earth produce
genius
that could come up with so much in so
little time to me that gives me hope
that one person
can change the world
in such a small amount of time well of
course there are
precedents for
in both newtons and einstein's cases for
elements of what we're finding there
it's you know and so on
well i have no idea you know i'm sure
you must have read it was kind of a
famous story that um
after einstein died he donated his brain
and they sliced it up to see if they
could find something unusual there and
nothing unusual visibly
in there
so i have i
clearly
there are people who for various reasons
maybe both intrinsic and
extrinsic in the sense of experience and
so on are capable of coming up with
these extraordinary
uh results
many years ago when i was a student
a friend of mine came in and said did
you read about did you read this i
forget what anyway there was a story in
the paper
it was about i think it was a young
woman
who um
was
she couldn't speak
and she she was somewhere on the autism
spectrum she could not
um read
other people's affect
in any ways
but she could sit down at a piano
and
having heard it once and then run
variations on the most complex
uh
pianistic
works of chopin and others
right now how
some aspect of our mind is able to tune
in in some aspect of reality and become
a master of it and every once in a while
that means
coming up with breakthrough ideas in
physics
yeah
how the heck does that happen
who knows
jed i'd like to say thank you so much
for spending your valuable time with me
today it was a really fascinating
conversation i've learned so much about
isaac newton who's one of the most
fascinating figures in human history so
thank you so much for talking pleasure
enjoyed it very much
thanks for listening to this
conversation with jed buckwald
to support this podcast please check out
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and now let me leave you some words from
thomas kuhn
a philosopher of science
the answers you get depend on the
questions you ask
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you