Jed Buchwald: Isaac Newton and the Philosophy of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #214
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 to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description 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 1642 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 1815 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 our sponsors in the description 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