Principia

I have actually read Principia, and it motivated me to read Newton's Bible
commentary, by the way, he wrote more Bible commentary then science or math.

Daniel

robbie:

I think all of this might even be tied to the earlier talk of the modern
divide between the sciences and humanities. While I do still disagree, I
think that I might be able to see how one might see things as you suggest
they are if nurtured with and nurturing the divide, but I'm really not sure
I can imagine at all a person on your side of things who has intensively
studied math and science, treating them AS humanities (and as the obnoxious
web article that started this mess made clear, some of the people most
critical of what you've been talking about are math/science people, even
those who DON'T treat them as humanities). I have countless examples
jumping out in my head, but the biggest one -- perhaps because it so
profound and perhaps because I am even now immersed in it -- is Isaac
Newton's Principia Mathematica. It is certainly one of the most influential
books ever written (I don't doubt on par with the Bible, I shit you not) and
at the same time one of the most unread. It is very difficult -- John Locke
reportedly went to Newton for help at understanding the central argument --
and most people who learn about it do so through many degrees of separation.
Regardless, in it Newton essentially invents modern physics, and much of
modern science, as he develops a quite new and extraordinary and beautiful
and fascinating way of looking at the world. There is a moment -- a
staggering, breath-taking, for some almost tear-inducing moment -- when
Newton demonstrates that the force that impels an apple off a tree and down
to the ground is the very same that is required to keep the moon in orbit
around the earth. Contrary to what most people believe or would expect,
contrary to what you would think by opening most translations, Newton didn't
really write this book in the symbols of mathematics. It is largely a
mathematical work, surely, and there's lots of math in it (he might have
largely invented the calculus for it), but it's written quite simply in the
symbols of Latin, in an ordinary (well, dead, but otherwise ordinary)
language. The book is not like the cold and sterile books that came after
it and that interpret it and that expand upon it. It contains and
encourages philosophy, perhaps to some extent even theology. It is a work
that, however mathematical, is created firmly to sit amongst the humanities.

I read this book very similarly in many important respects to how I read
Homer. But in this book, the hand and mind of the author are not easily
doubted. Otherwise, it seems, we wouldn't be able to make it work, we
wouldn't have been able to use it to put men on the moon.

It might not apply well or at all, perhaps it applies only by analogy, but
studying a book like Newton's makes it very hard for me to doubt that the
meaning of the author can be accessible to me.
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Received on Mon Dec 2 12:15:07 2002