Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Jed Buchwald, a professor of history and a philosopher of
00:00:05 science at Caltech, interested especially in the development of scientific concepts
00:00:12 and the instruments used to create and explore new effects and ideas in science.
00:00:19 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
00:00:23 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jed Buchwald.
00:00:31 Does science progress via paradigm shifts and revolutions as philosopher Thomas Kuhn said,
00:00:38 or does it progress gradually? What do you think?
00:00:41 Well, I got into this field because I was Tom Kuhn’s research assistant 50 years ago, 52 years
00:00:48 ago. He pulled me into it out of physics instead. So I know his work pretty well. And in the years
00:00:55 when I was at MIT running an institute, he was then in the philosophy department, used to come
00:01:01 over all the time to the talks we held and so on. So what would I say about that? He, of course,
00:01:08 developed his ideas a lot over the years. The thing that he’s famous for, the structure of
00:01:14 scientific revolutions came out in 62. And as you just said, it offered an outline for what he
00:01:24 called a paradigmatic structure, namely the notion that you have to look at what scientists do as
00:01:31 forming a community of investigators, and that they’re trying to solve various puzzles, as he
00:01:38 would put it, that crop up, figuring out how this works, how that works and so on. And of course,
00:01:44 they don’t do it out of the blue. They do it within a certain framework. The framework can
00:01:49 be pretty vague. He called it a paradigm. And his notion was that eventually they run into troubles
00:01:57 or what he called anomalies. That kind of cracks things. Somebody new comes along with a different
00:02:03 way of doing it, etc. Do I think things work that way? No, not really. Tom and I used to have
00:02:11 lengthy discussions about that over the years. I do think there is a common structure that
00:02:20 formulates both theoretical and experimental practices. And historians nowadays of science
00:02:26 like to refer to scientific work as what scientists practice. It’s almost craftsman like.
00:02:34 They can usually adapt in various ways. And I can give you all kinds of examples of that.
00:02:41 I once wrote a book on the origins of wave theory of light. And that is one of the paradigmatic
00:02:49 examples that Tom used. Only it didn’t work that way exactly because he thought that what happened
00:02:56 was that the wave theory ran into trouble with a certain phenomenon, which it couldn’t crack.
00:03:05 Well, it turned out that in fact, historically that phenomenon was actually not relevant
00:03:13 later on to the wave theory. And when the wave theory came in, the alternative to it,
00:03:19 which had prevailed, which was Newton’s views light as particles that it seemed couldn’t
00:03:25 explain what the wave theory could explain. Again, not true. Not true. Much more complex
00:03:33 than that. The wave theory offered the opportunity to deploy novel experimental and mathematical
00:03:40 structures, which gave younger scientists, mathematicians and others, the opportunity
00:03:47 to effect, manufacture, make new sorts of devices. It’s not that the alternative couldn’t sort of
00:03:56 explain these things, but it never was able to generate them de novo as novelties. In other
00:04:04 words, if you think of it as something scientists want to progress in the sense of finding new stuff
00:04:10 to solve, then I think what often happens is that it’s not so much that the prevailing view
00:04:17 can’t crack something as that it doesn’t give you the opportunity to do new stuff.
00:04:23 When you say new stuff, are we referring to experimental science here or
00:04:27 new stuff in the space of new theories?
00:04:29 Could be both. Could be both actually.
00:04:32 So how does that… Can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the story of the wave view?
00:04:36 Sure. The prevailing view of light, at least in France where the wave theory really first took
00:04:43 off, although it had been introduced in England by Thomas Young, the prevailing theory dates back
00:04:49 to Newton that light is a stream of particles and that refraction and reflection involve sort
00:04:55 of repulsive and attractive forces that deflect and bend the paths of these particles. Newton was
00:05:03 not able successfully to deal with the phenomenon of what happens when light goes past a knife’s
00:05:10 edge or a sharp edge, what we now call diffraction. He had cooked up something about it that no
00:05:19 mathematical structure could be applied. Thomas Young first, but really this guy named Augustin
00:05:26 Fresnel in France deployed, in Fresnel’s case, rather advanced calculus forms of mathematics,
00:05:35 which enabled computations to be done and observations to be melded with these
00:05:41 computations in a way that you could not do or see how to do with Newton. Did that mean that the
00:05:49 Newtonian explanation of what goes on in diffraction fails? Not really. You can actually
00:05:58 make it work, but you can’t generate anything new out of it. Whereas using the mathematics
00:06:05 of wave optics in respect to a particular phenomenon called polarization, which ironically
00:06:12 was discovered by partisans of Newton’s way of doing things, you were able to generate devices
00:06:20 which reflect light in crystals, do various things that the Newtonian way could accommodate only
00:06:29 after the fact. They couldn’t generate it from the beginning. And so if you want to be somebody who
00:06:36 is working a novel vein, which increasingly becomes the case with people who become what we
00:06:44 now call physicists in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s in particular, then that’s the direction you’re going
00:06:51 to go. But there were holdouts until the 1850s. I want to try to elaborate on the nature of the
00:06:57 disagreement you have with Thomas Kuhn. So do you still believe in paradigm shifts? Do you still see
00:07:02 that there’s ideas that really have a transformational effect on science? The nature of
00:07:09 the disagreement has to do with how those paradigm shifts come to be? How they come to be and how
00:07:16 they change. I certainly think they exist. How strong they may be at any given time is maybe not
00:07:25 quite as powerful as Tom thought in general. Although towards the end of his life, he was
00:07:31 beginning to develop different modifications of his original way of thinking. But I don’t think
00:07:38 that the changes happened quite so neatly, if you will, in reaction to novel experimental
00:07:47 observations. They get much more complex than that. In terms of neatness, how much of science
00:07:56 progresses by individual lone geniuses and how much by the messy collaboration of competing and
00:08:05 cooperating humans? I don’t think you can cut that with a knife to say it’s this percent and
00:08:18 that percent. It’s almost always the case that there are one or two or maybe three individuals
00:08:27 who are sort of central to what goes on when things begin to shift. Are they inevitably and
00:08:37 solely responsible for what then begins to happen in a major way? I think not. It depends. You can
00:08:48 go very far back with this, even into antiquity to see what goes on. The major locus we always
00:08:59 talk about from the beginning is if you’re talking about Galileo’s work on motion, for example,
00:09:05 were there ways of accommodating it that others could adapt to without buying into the whole
00:09:11 scheme? Yes. Did it eventually evolve and start convincing people because you could also do
00:09:19 other things with it that you couldn’t otherwise do? Also, yes. Let me give you an example.
00:09:26 The great French mathematician philosopher Descartes, who was a mechanical philosopher,
00:09:32 he believed the world was matter in motion. He never thought much of what Galileo had done
00:09:38 in respect to motion because he thought, well, at best, it’s some sort of approximative scheme
00:09:44 or something like that. But one of his initial, I wouldn’t call him a disciple, but follower,
00:09:51 who then broke with him in a number of ways, was a man named Christian Huygens, who was,
00:09:56 along with Newton, one of the two greatest scientists of the 17th century. Huygens is
00:10:02 older than Newton, and Huygens nicely deployed Galilean relationships in respect to motion
00:10:11 to develop all sorts of things, including the first pendulum governed clock,
00:10:19 and even figured out how to build one, which keeps perfect time, except it didn’t work. But
00:10:24 he had the mathematical structure for it. How well known is Huygens?
00:10:28 Oh, very well known. Should I know him well?
00:10:31 Yes, you should. Interesting.
00:10:33 You should definitely know him.
00:10:34 No, no, no, no, no. Can we define should here?
00:10:37 Okay.
00:10:38 Because I don’t.
00:10:39 Right.
00:10:40 So is this should like, yeah, can you define should?
00:10:48 Should means this. If you had taken up to a second year physics courses, you should,
00:10:55 you would have heard his name because one of the fundamental principles in optics is called
00:11:00 Huygens principle.
00:11:03 Okay.
00:11:03 Okay.
00:11:04 Yeah, so I have and I have heard his name.
00:11:07 There you go.
00:11:07 No, but I don’t remember.
00:11:08 But you don’t remember.
00:11:09 So I mean, there’s a very different thing between names attached to principles and laws and so on
00:11:16 that you sometimes let go of, you just remember the equations of the principles themselves,
00:11:21 and the personalities of science. And there’s certain personalities,
00:11:25 certain human beings that stand out. And that’s why there’s a sense to which the lone inventor,
00:11:32 the lone scientist is the way I personally mean, I think a lot of people think about the history
00:11:38 of science is these lone geniuses. Without them, the senses, if you remove Newton from the picture,
00:11:45 if you remove Galileo from the picture, then science would, there’s almost a feeling like
00:11:51 it would just have stopped there. Or at the very least, there’s a feeling like it would take much
00:11:57 longer to develop the things that were developed. Is that a silly way to look at the history?
00:12:01 That’s not entirely incorrect, I suppose. I find it difficult to believe that had Galileo not
00:12:12 existed, that eventually someone like Huygens, for instance, given the context of the time,
00:12:19 what was floating around in the belief structure concerning the nature of the world and so on,
00:12:27 the developments in mathematics and whatnot, that sooner or later, whether it would have been
00:12:34 exactly the same or not, I cannot say. But would things have evolved? Yes.
00:12:41 If we look at the long arc of history of science, from back when we were in the caves trying to knock
00:12:54 two rocks together, or maybe make a basic tool to a long time from now, many centuries from now,
00:13:03 when human civilization finally destroys itself. If we look at that history, and imagine you’re
00:13:09 a historian at the end, like with the fire of the apocalypse coming upon us, and you look back at
00:13:16 this time in the 21st century, how far along are we on that arc? Do you sense? Have we invented
00:13:26 and discovered everything that’s to be discovered, or are we at like below 1%? You’re going to get a
00:13:33 lot of absurd questions today. I apologize. It’s a lugubrious picture you’re painting there.
00:13:39 I don’t even know what the word lugubrious means, but I love it. Lugubrious.
00:13:44 Well, let me try and separate the question of whether we’re all going to die in an apocalypse
00:13:51 in several hundred years or not from the question of where science may be sitting.
00:13:57 Take that as an assumption. Okay. I find that hard to say. And I find it hard to say
00:14:07 because in the deepest sense of the term, as it’s usually deployed by philosophers of science today,
00:14:17 I’m not fundamentally a realist. That is to say, I think our access to the inner workings of nature
00:14:30 is inevitably mediated by what we can do with the materials and factors around us. We can probe
00:14:40 things in various ways. Does that mean that I don’t think that the standard model in quantum
00:14:47 electrodynamics is incorrect? Of course not. I wouldn’t even dream of saying such a thing.
00:14:52 It can do a lot, especially when it comes to figuring out what’s happening in very large,
00:14:59 expensive particle accelerators and applying results in cosmology and so on as well.
00:15:09 Do I think that we have inevitably probed the depths of reality through this? I do not agree
00:15:16 with Steven Weinberg who thinks we have about such things. Do I, on the other hand, think that
00:15:24 the way in which science has been moving for the last hundred years, physics in particular is what
00:15:30 I have in mind, will continue on the same course? In that sense, I don’t because we’re not going to
00:15:38 be building bigger and bigger and more and more expensive machines to rip apart particles in
00:15:44 various ways. In which case, what are physicists going to do? They’ll turn their attention to other
00:15:50 aspects. There are all sorts of things we’ve never explained about the material world.
00:15:57 We don’t have theories that go beyond a certain point for all sorts of things.
00:16:04 Can we, for example, start with the standard model and work our way up all the way to chemical
00:16:09 transformations? You can make an argument about it and you can justify things, but in chemistry,
00:16:17 that’s not the way people work. They work with much higher level quantum mechanical relationships
00:16:22 and so on. This notion of the deep theory to explain everything is a longstanding belief
00:16:33 which goes back pretty far, although I think it only takes its fullest form
00:16:41 sometime towards the end of the 19th century. Maybe we just speak to that. You’re referring to
00:16:48 a hope, a dream, a reality of coming up with a theory of everything that explains everything.
00:16:55 There’s a very specific thing that that currently means in physics,
00:16:58 is the unification of the laws of physics. But I’m sure in antiquity or before it meant maybe
00:17:06 something else, or is it always about physics? Because I mean, I think as you’ve kind of implied
00:17:13 in physics, there’s a sense once you get to the theory of everything, you’ve understood everything,
00:17:17 but there’s a very deep sense in which you’ve actually understood not very much at all.
00:17:21 You’ve understood at that particular level how things work, but you don’t understand how the
00:17:26 abstractions on top of abstractions form, all the way to the chemistry, to the human mind,
00:17:31 and the human societies, and all those kinds of things. So maybe you can speak to the theory of
00:17:37 everything and its history and comment on what the heck does that even mean, the theory of everything.
00:17:43 Well, I don’t think you can go back that far with something like that. Maybe to the, at best,
00:17:48 to the 17th century. If you go back all the way in antiquity, there are, of course,
00:17:53 discussions about the nature of the world. But first of all, you have to recognize that the
00:18:07 manipulative character of physics and chemistry, the probing of… Let me put it this way. We assume
00:18:17 and have assumed for a long time, I’ll come back to when in a moment, that if I take a little device,
00:18:26 which is really complicatedly made out of all kinds of things, and I put a piece of some material in
00:18:33 it, and I monkey around with it and do all kinds of unnatural things to it, things that wouldn’t
00:18:39 happen naturally, and I find out how it behaves and whatnot, and then I try and make an argument
00:18:46 about how that really applies even in the natural world without any artificial structures and so on.
00:18:54 That’s not a belief that was widely held by pretty much anyone until sometime maybe
00:19:01 in the 1500s. And when it was first held, it was held by people we now call alchemists.
00:19:08 So alchemy was the first, the early days of the theory of everything, of a dream of a theory of
00:19:13 everything. I would put it a little differently. I think it’s more along the way, a dream that
00:19:20 by probing nature in artificially constructed ways, we can find out what’s going on deep down there.
00:19:32 So that’s distinct from science being an observing thing, where you observe nature
00:19:39 and you study nature. You’re talking about probing, like messing with nature to understand it.
00:19:45 Indeed I am. But that, of course, is the very essence of experimental science. You have to
00:19:54 manipulate nature to find out things about it, and then you have to convince others that you haven’t
00:20:03 so manipulated it that what you’ve done is to produce what amounts to fake artifactual behavior
00:20:10 that doesn’t really hold purely naturally. So where are we today in your sense to jump
00:20:18 around a little bit with the theory of everything? Maybe a quick kind of sense you have about the
00:20:26 journey in the world of physics that we’re taking towards the theory of everything.
00:20:30 Well, I’m, of course, not a practicing physicist. I mean, I was trained in physics at Princeton
00:20:36 a long time ago. Until Thomas Kuhn stole you away.
00:20:40 More or less. I was taking graduate courses in those days in general relativity. I was an
00:20:45 undergraduate, but I moved up and then I took a course with him and…
00:20:49 Well, you made the mistake of being compelled by charismatic philosophers and never looked back.
00:20:56 I suppose so in a way. From what I understand, talking especially to my friends at Caltech,
00:21:08 like Kip Thorne and others, the fundamental notion is that actually the laws that even
00:21:17 at the deepest level we can sort of divine and work with in the universe that we inhabit are
00:21:26 perhaps quite unique to this particular universe as it formed at the Big Bang.
00:21:34 The question is, how deep does it go? If you are very mathematically inclined, the prevailing notion
00:21:43 for several decades now has been what’s called string theory, but that has not been able to
00:21:53 figure a way to generate probative experimental evidence, although it’s pretty good apparently
00:22:00 at accommodating things. Then the question is, what’s before the Big Bang? Actually,
00:22:08 the word before doesn’t mean anything given the nature of time, but why do we have the
00:22:17 laws that prevail in our universe? Well, there is a notion that those laws prevail in our universe
00:22:26 because if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.
00:22:30 That’s a bit of a cyclical, but nevertheless, a compelling definition. And there’s all kinds
00:22:35 of things like it seems like the unification of those laws could be discovered by looking
00:22:42 inside of a black hole because you get both the general relativity and the quantum mechanics,
00:22:45 quantum field theory in there. Experimentally, of course, there’s a lot of interesting ideas.
00:22:51 We can’t really look close to the Big Bang. We can’t look that far back. Caltech and MIT will
00:22:57 LIGO looking at gravitational waves, perhaps allows us to march backwards and so on. Yeah,
00:23:03 it’s really exciting space. And there’s, of course, the theory of everything,
00:23:07 like with a lot of things in science, captivates the dreams of those who are perhaps completely
00:23:13 outside of science. It’s the dream of discovering the key to the nature of how everything works.
00:23:21 And that feels deeply human. That’s perhaps the basic elements of what makes up a scientist in
00:23:31 the end is that curiosity, that longing to understand. Let me ask, you mentioned a disagreement
00:23:39 with Weinberg on reality. Could you elaborate a little bit? Well, obviously, I don’t disagree
00:23:48 with Steve Weinberg on physics itself. I wouldn’t know enough to even begin to do that. And clearly,
00:23:55 you know, he’s one of the founders of the standard model and so on. And it works to a level of
00:24:02 accuracy that no physical theory has ever worked at before. I suppose the question in my mind is
00:24:10 something that in one way could go back to the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century,
00:24:18 namely, can we really ever convince ourselves that we have come to grips with something that is
00:24:30 not in itself knowable to us by our senses, or even except in the most remote way through the
00:24:41 complex instruments that we make as to what it is that underlies everything? Can we corral it
00:24:48 with mathematics and experimental structures? Yes. Do I think that a particular way of corraling
00:24:57 nature will inevitably play itself out? I don’t know. It always has. I’ll put it to you that way.
00:25:06 So the basic question is, can we know reality? Is that the Kant question? Is that the Weinberg
00:25:18 question? We humans, with our brains, can we comprehend reality? Sounds like a very trippy
00:25:28 question because a lot of it rests on definitions of know and comprehend and reality. But
00:25:34 get to the bottom of it. It’s turtles on top of turtles. Can we get to the bottom turtle and say
00:25:44 hello? Well, maybe I can put it to you this way in a way that I often begin discussions in a class
00:25:56 on the history of science and so on, and say, I’m looking at you. Yes. You are in fact a figment of
00:26:07 my imagination. You have a messed up imagination, yes. Well, what do I mean by that? If I were a
00:26:15 dragonfly looking at you, whatever my nervous system would form by way of a perceptual structure
00:26:29 would clearly be utterly different from what my brain and perceptual system altogether is forming
00:26:39 when I look at you. Who’s right? Is it me or the dragonfly?
00:26:51 Well, the dragonfly is certainly very impressive, so I don’t know. But yes, the observer matters.
00:27:02 What is that supposed to tell us about objective reality?
00:27:06 Well, I think it means that it’s very difficult to get beyond the constructs that our perceptual
00:27:16 system is leading us to. When we make apparatus and devices and so on, we’re still making things,
00:27:25 the results of which or the outputs of which we process perceptually in various ways.
00:27:30 An analogy I like to use with students sometimes is this. All right, they all have their laptops
00:27:36 open in front of them, of course. I’ve sent them something to read, and I say, okay, click on it
00:27:45 and open it up. PDF opens up. I said, what are you looking at? They said, well, I’m looking at the
00:27:51 paper that you sent me. I said, no, you’re not. What you’re looking at is what you’re looking at
00:27:57 is a stream of light coming off LEDs or LCDs coming off a screen. And I said, what happens when you
00:28:06 use your mouse and move that fake piece of paper on the screen around? What are you doing? You’re
00:28:12 not moving a piece of paper around, are you? You’re moving a construct around, a construct
00:28:18 that’s being processed so that our perceptual system can interact with it in the way we
00:28:24 interact with pieces of paper. Yes. But it’s not real. So, are there things outside of the reach
00:28:34 of science? Can you maybe, as an example, talk about consciousness? I’m asking for a friend
00:28:43 trying to figure this thing out. Well, boy, I mean, I read a fair bit of science, but I don’t
00:28:52 know. I read a fair bit about that, but I certainly can’t really say much about it.
00:29:02 I’m a materialist in the deepest sense of the term. I don’t think there is anything out there
00:29:09 except material structures which interact in various ways. Do I think, for example,
00:29:16 that this bottle of water is conscious? No, I do not. Although, how would I know? I can’t talk to
00:29:23 it. Yeah. But, so what do… It’s a hypothesis you have. It’s an opinion, an educated opinion
00:29:29 that may be very wrong. Well, I know that you’re conscious because I can interact directly with you.
00:29:35 But am I? Well, unless you’re a figment of my imagination, of course. Or I’m a robot that’s
00:29:41 able to generate the illusion of consciousness effectively enough to facilitate a good
00:29:48 conversation. Because we humans do want to pretend that we’re talking to other conscious beings.
00:29:52 That’s how we respect them. If it’s not conscious, we don’t respect them. We’re not good at talking
00:29:56 to robots. That’s true. Of course, we generalize from our own inner sense, which is the kind of
00:30:01 thing Descartes said from the beginning. We generalize from that. But I do think that
00:30:07 consciousness must be something, whatever it is, that occurs as a result of some particular
00:30:14 organizational structure of material elements. Does materialism mean that it’s all within the
00:30:24 reach of science? My sense would be that, especially as neuroscience progresses more and more and
00:30:35 at Caltech, we just built a whole neuroscience arena and so on. And as more knowledge is gained
00:30:44 about the ways in which animals, when they behave, what patterns show up at various parts of the
00:30:52 brain and nervous system, and perhaps extending it to humans eventually as well, we’ll get more of a
00:31:00 we’ll get more of a handle on what brain activity is associated with experiences that we have as
00:31:12 humans. Can we move from the brain activity to the experiences in terms of our perception? No,
00:31:20 you can’t. Perception is perception. That’s the hypothesis, once again.
00:31:26 Maybe consciousness is just one of the laws of physics that’s yet to be discovered. Maybe it
00:31:35 permeates all matter. Maybe it’s as simple as trying to plug it in and plug into the ability
00:31:44 to generate and control that kind of law of physics that would crack open. Or we would understand
00:31:52 that the bottle of water is in fact conscious, just much less conscious than us humans,
00:31:56 and then we would be able to generate beings that are more conscious.
00:32:02 Well, that’ll be unfortunate. I’d have to stop drinking the water after that.
00:32:06 Every time you take a sip, there’s a little bit of suffering going on.
00:32:11 Right.
00:32:12 What do you use the most interesting, beautiful moments in the history of science? What stands
00:32:18 out? And then we can pull at that thread.
00:32:22 Right. Well, I like to think of events that have a major impact and involve both beautiful,
00:32:34 conceptual, mathematical, if we’re talking physical structures work, and are associated as
00:32:41 well with probing experimental situations. So among my favorites is one of the most famous,
00:32:51 which was the young Isaac Newton’s work with the colors produced when you pass sunlight through a
00:32:59 prism. And why do I like that? It’s not profoundly mathematical in one sense. It doesn’t need it
00:33:08 initially. It needs the following though, which begins to show you I think a little bit about what
00:33:14 gets involved when you’ve got a smart individual who’s trying to monkey around with stuff and
00:33:19 finds new things about it. First, let me say that the prevailing notion going back to antiquity
00:33:26 was that colors are produced in a sense by modifying or tinting white light, that they’re
00:33:34 modifications of white light. In other words, the colors are not in the sunlight in any way.
00:33:43 Now, what Newton did following experiments done by Descartes before him who came to very different
00:33:49 conclusions, he took a prism. You might ask, where do you get prisms in the 1660s? County fairs,
00:33:59 they were very popular. They were pretty crude with bubbles in them and everything,
00:34:03 but they produced colors. So you could buy them at county fairs and things very popular.
00:34:08 Oh, so they were modifying the white light to create colors.
00:34:11 Well, they were creating colors from it, well known. And what he did was the following. He
00:34:18 was by this time, even though he’s very young, a very good mathematician. And he could use the
00:34:26 then known laws for how light behaves when it goes through glass to calculate what should happen
00:34:32 if you took light from the sun, passed it from a hole, through a little hole, then hit the prism,
00:34:39 goes out of the prism, strikes a wall a long distance away and makes a splash of light,
00:34:45 never mind the colors for a moment, makes a splash of light there. He was very smart.
00:34:50 First of all, he abstracts from the colors themselves, even though that’s what everybody’s
00:34:56 paying attention to initially. Because what he knows is this, he knows that if you take
00:35:01 this prism and you turn it to a certain particular angle, that he knew what it should be because he
00:35:09 could calculate things. Very few other people in Europe at the time could calculate things like he
00:35:16 could. That if you turn the prism to that particular angle, then the sun, which is, of course, a
00:35:23 circle, when its light passes through this little hole and then into the prism on the far distant
00:35:30 wall, should still make a circle. But it doesn’t. It makes a very long image. And this led him to a
00:35:43 very different conception of light, indicating that there are different types of light in the
00:35:48 sunlight. Now, to go beyond that, what’s particularly interesting, I think, is the following.
00:35:54 When he published this paper, which got him into a controversy, he really didn’t describe
00:36:02 at all what he did. He just gave you some numbers. Now, I just told you that you had to set this
00:36:08 prism at a certain angle, right? You would think, because we do have his notes and so on,
00:36:16 you would think that he took some kind of complicated measuring device to set the prism.
00:36:22 He didn’t. He held it in his hand. That’s all. And he twiddled it around. And what was he doing?
00:36:30 It turns out that when you twiddle the prism around at the point where you should get a circle
00:36:36 from a circle, it also is the place where the image does not move very fast. So if you want
00:36:43 to get close to there, you just twiddle it. This is manipulative experimentation taking advantage
00:36:52 through his mathematical knowledge of the inherent inaccuracies that let you come to
00:37:00 exact conclusions, regardless of the built in problematics of measurement. He’s the only one
00:37:09 I know of doing anything like that at the time. Yeah. Well, even still, there’s very few people
00:37:15 that are able to have to calculate as well as he did to be a theoretician and an experimentalist,
00:37:23 like in the same moment. It’s true, although until really well into the 20th century,
00:37:35 maybe the beginning of the 20th century, really, most of the most significant experimental results
00:37:45 produced in the 1800s, which laid the foundations for light, electricity, electrodynamics, and so on,
00:37:53 even hydrodynamics and whatnot, were also produced by people who are both excellent calculators,
00:38:02 very talented mathematicians, and good with their hands experimentally.
00:38:11 And then that led to the 21st century with Enrico Fermi that one of the last people that
00:38:18 was able to do that, both of those things very well, and that he built a little device
00:38:25 called an atomic bomb that has some positives and negatives.
00:38:28 Well, right. Of course, that actually did involve some pretty large scale elaborate
00:38:34 equipment too. Well, holding a prism in your hands.
00:38:38 Right. No. What’s the controversy that Newton got into with that paper when he published it?
00:38:45 Well, in a number of ways, it’s a complicated story. There was a very talented character
00:38:54 known as a mechanic. Mechanic means somebody who was a craftsman who could build and make
00:39:00 really good stuff. And he was very talented. His name was Robert Hooke. And he was the guy who
00:39:06 at the weekly meetings of the Royal Society in London, and Newton’s not in London, he’s at
00:39:11 Cambridge, he’s a young guy, he would demonstrate new things. And he was very clever. And he had
00:39:18 written a book, in fact, called the Micrographia, which by the way, he used a microscope to make
00:39:26 the first depictions of things like a fly’s eye, the structure of, you know, it had a big influence.
00:39:31 And in there, he also talked about light. And so he had a different view of light. And when he read
00:39:36 what Newton wrote, he had a double reaction. On the one hand, he said, anything in there that is
00:39:44 correct, I already knew. And anything that I didn’t already know, is probably not right anyway.
00:39:51 Trey Lockerbie I gotta love egos. Okay. Can we just step
00:39:58 back? Can you say who was Isaac Newton? What are the things he contributed to this world
00:40:05 in the space of ideas? Wow. Who was he? He was born in 1642,
00:40:20 and near the small town of Grantham in England. In fact, the house he was born in,
00:40:26 and that his mother died in is still there and can be visited.
00:40:29 His father died before he was born. And his mother eventually remarried a man named
00:40:41 Reverend Smith, whom Newton did not like at all. Because Reverend Smith took his mother away to
00:40:52 live with him a few miles away, leaving Newton to be brought up more or less by his grandmother
00:40:57 over there. And he had huge resentment about that his whole life.
00:41:02 I think that gives you a little inkling that a little bit of trauma in childhood,
00:41:08 maybe a complicated father son relationship can be useful to create a good scientist.
00:41:13 Could be, although this case, it would be right, the absent father, non father relationship,
00:41:19 so to speak. He was known as a kid, little that we do know for being very clever about
00:41:26 flying kites. And there are stories about him putting candles and putting flying kites and
00:41:34 scaring the living devil out of people at night by doing that and things like that,
00:41:39 making things. Most of the physicists and natural philosophers I’ve dealt with actually,
00:41:48 as children, were very fond of making and playing with things. I can’t think of one I know of who
00:41:54 wasn’t actually, very good with their hands and whatnot. His mother wanted him to take over the
00:42:06 manor. It was a kind of farming manor. They were the class of what are known as yeomans.
00:42:12 There are stories that he wasn’t very good at that. One day, one of the stories is he’s sitting
00:42:17 out in the field and the cows come home without him and he doesn’t know what’s going on. Anyway,
00:42:24 had relatives and he manages to get to Cambridge, sent to Cambridge because he’s known to be smart.
00:42:30 He’s read books that he got from local dignitaries and some relatives. And he goes there as what’s
00:42:37 known as a sub sizer. What does that mean? Well, it’s not too pleasant. Basically, a sub sizer
00:42:43 was a student who had to clean the bed pans of the richer kids. That didn’t last too long.
00:42:50 He makes his way and he becomes absorbed in some of the new ways of thinking that are being talked
00:43:00 about on the parts of Descartes and others as well. There’s also the traditional curriculum,
00:43:06 which he follows. And we have his notes. We have his student notebooks and so on. We can see
00:43:12 gradually this young man’s mind focusing and coming to grips with deeper questions of the
00:43:20 nature of the world and perception even, and how we know things and also probing and learning
00:43:28 mathematical structures to such an extent that he builds on some of the investigations that had been
00:43:35 done in the period before him to create the foundations of a way of investigating processes
00:43:43 that happen and change continuously instead of by leaps and bounds and so on, forming the
00:43:50 foundation of what we now call the calculus. Yeah. So can you maybe just paint a little bit
00:43:56 of a picture you’ve already started of what were the things that bothered him the most
00:44:04 that stood out to him the most about the traditional curriculum, about the way people
00:44:11 saw the world? You mentioned discrete versus continuous. Is there something where he began
00:44:16 thinking in a revolutionary way? Because it’s fascinating. Most of us go to college,
00:44:22 Cambridge or otherwise, and we just kind of take what we hear as gospel, right? Like not gospel,
00:44:30 but as like facts. You don’t begin to sort of see how can I expand on this aggressively or how can
00:44:39 I challenge everything that I hear rigorously, mathematically through the… I mean, I don’t even
00:44:46 know how rigorous the mathematics was at that point. I’m sure it was geometry and so on,
00:44:52 no calculus, huh? There are elements of what turned into the calculus that predate Newton,
00:45:00 but… How much rigor was there? How much… Well, rigor, no. And then, of course, no scientific
00:45:06 method. Not really. I mean, somewhat. I mean, appreciation of data. That is a separate question
00:45:15 from a question of method. Appreciation of data is a significant question as to what you do with
00:45:20 data. There’s lots of things you’re asking. I apologize. So maybe let’s backtrack in the first
00:45:26 question. Was there something that was bothering him that he especially thought he could contribute
00:45:32 or work on? Well, of course, we can’t go back and talk to him, but we do have these student
00:45:38 notebooks. There’s two of them. One’s called The Philosophical Questions and the other is called
00:45:43 The Waste Book. The Philosophical Questions has discussions of the nature of reality and
00:45:49 various issues concerning it. And The Waste Book has things that have to do with motion in various
00:45:55 ways, what happens in collisions and things of that sort. And it’s a complicated story,
00:46:01 but what’s among the things that I think are interesting is he took notes in The Philosophical
00:46:07 Questions on stuff that was traditionally given to you in the curriculums going back several hundred
00:46:17 years, namely on what scholars refer to as scholastic or neo scholastic ways of thinking
00:46:25 about the world dating back to the reformulation of Aristotle in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas
00:46:32 in the church. This is a totally different way of thinking about things, which actually connects to
00:46:37 something we were saying a moment ago. For instance, so I’m wearing a blue shirt and I will
00:46:45 sometimes ask students, where is the blue? And they’ll usually say, well, it’s in your shirt.
00:46:52 And then some of them get clear and they say, well, no, you know, light is striking it,
00:46:56 photons are reemitted, they strike the back of your retina and et cetera, et cetera. And I said,
00:47:01 yes. What that means is that the blue is actually an artifact of our perceptual system considered as
00:47:10 the percept of blue. It’s not out there, it’s in here. That’s not how things were thought about
00:47:21 well into the 16th century. The general notion dating back even to Aristotelian antiquity
00:47:28 and formalized by the 12th century at Paris, Oxford and elsewhere is that qualities are there
00:47:39 in the world. They’re not in us. We have senses and our senses can be wrong. You could go blind,
00:47:48 things like that. But if they’re working properly, you get the actual qualities of the world.
00:47:55 Now, that break, which is occurring towards the end of the 16th century and is most visible in
00:48:02 Descartes, is the break between conceiving that the qualities of the world are very different
00:48:12 from the qualities that we perceive. That in fact, the qualities of the world consist almost
00:48:17 entirely in shapes of various kinds and maybe hard particles or whatever, but not colors,
00:48:28 not sounds, not smells, not softness and hardness. They’re not in the world, they’re in us.
00:48:37 That break Newton is picking up as he reads Descartes. He’s going to disagree with a lot in
00:48:43 Descartes, but that break he is, among other things, picking up very strongly. And that
00:48:50 underlies a lot of the way he works later on when he becomes skeptical of the evidence provided
00:48:58 by the senses. Yeah, that’s actually, I don’t know, the way you’re describing is so powerful.
00:49:05 It just makes me realize how liberating that is as a scientist, as somebody who’s trying
00:49:11 to understand reality, that our senses are not to be trusted, that reality is to be investigated
00:49:24 through tools that are beyond our senses. Yes, or that improve our senses in some ways.
00:49:34 That’s pretty powerful. For a human being to realize I can’t trust my own senses at that time,
00:49:49 that’s pretty trippy. It’s coming in, it’s coming in. And I think it arises probably a fair number
00:49:59 of decades before that, perhaps in part with all chemical experimentation and manipulations,
00:50:05 that you have to go through elaborate structures to produce things and ways you think about it.
00:50:13 But let me give you an example that I think you might find interesting because it’s from
00:50:17 it involves that guy named Hooke that Newton had an argument with. And he had lots of arguments
00:50:24 with Hooke, although Hooke was a very clever guy and gave him some things that stimulated him later.
00:50:30 Anyway, Hooke, who was argumentative, and he really was convinced that the only way to gain
00:50:38 real knowledge of nature is through carefully constructed devices. And he was an expert
00:50:48 mechanic, if you will, at building such things. Now, there was a rather wealthy man in Danzig
00:51:00 by the name of Hevelius, Latinized name. He was a brewer in town. And he had become very
00:51:06 fascinated with the telescope. This is 30 years or so, 20 or 30 years after the telescope had
00:51:14 moved out and become more common. And he built a large observatory on the top of his brewery,
00:51:21 actually. And working with his wife, they used these very elaborately constructed
00:51:32 grass and metal instruments to make observations of positions of the stars. And he published a whole
00:51:37 new catalog of where the stars are. And he claimed it was incredibly accurate. He claimed it was so
00:51:45 accurate that nothing had ever come close to it. Hooke reads this, and he says, wait a minute,
00:51:51 you didn’t use a telescope here of any kind, because what’s the point? Unless you do something
00:51:56 to the telescope, all you see are dots with stars. You just use your eyes. Your eyes can’t be that
00:52:02 good. It’s impossible. So what did Hooke do to prove this? He said, what you should have done
00:52:08 is you should have put a little device in the telescope that lets you measure distances between
00:52:12 these dots. You didn’t do that. And because you didn’t, there’s no way you could have been that
00:52:17 good. At two successive meetings of the Royal Society, he hauls the members out into the courtyard
00:52:28 and he takes a card and he makes successive black and white stripes on the card. And he pastes the
00:52:34 card up on a wall and he takes them one by one. He says, now move back looking at it, presumably
00:52:42 with one eye, until you can’t tell the black ones from the white stripes. He says, that I can then
00:52:48 measure the distance. I can see the angles. I can give a number then for what is the best possible,
00:52:57 what we would call perceptual acuity of human vision. And it turned out, he thought, to be
00:53:05 something like 10 or more times worse than this guy Hevelius had claimed. So obviously he says,
00:53:12 Hooke, Hevelius. Well, years ago, I calculated Hevelius’s numbers and so on using modern
00:53:22 tables from NASA and so on. And they are even more accurate than Hevelius claimed. And worse than
00:53:28 that, the Royal Society sent a young astronomer named Halley over to Dantzig to work with him.
00:53:35 And Halley writes back and he says, I couldn’t believe it, but he taught me how to do it.
00:53:41 And I could get just as good as he. How is it possible? Well, here, this shows you something
00:53:46 very interesting about experiments, perception and everything else. Hooke was right, but he was also
00:53:52 wrong. He was wrong for the right reasons and he was right for the wrong reasons. And what do I
00:53:59 mean by that? What he actually found was the number for what we now call 2020 vision. He was
00:54:09 right. You can’t tell, except a few people, much better than that. But he was observing the wrong
00:54:16 thing. What Hevelius was observing was a bright dot, a star, moving past a pointer.
00:54:28 Our eyes are rather similar to frogs eyes. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard the story. If I hold
00:54:34 a dead fly on a string in front of a frog and don’t move it, the frog pays no attention. As soon
00:54:41 as I move the fly, the frog immediately tongue lats out because the visual system of the frog
00:54:48 responds to motion. So does ours and our acuity for distinguishing motion from statics, five or
00:54:58 more times better. Yeah, that’s fascinating. Damn. And of course, I mean, maybe you can comment on
00:55:06 their understanding of the human perceptual system at the time. It’s probably really terrible.
00:55:12 Like, yeah, like I’ve recently been working with just almost as a fun side thing with vision
00:55:16 scientists and peripheral vision. It’s a, it’s a beautiful, complex mess. That whole thing,
00:55:23 we still don’t understand all the weird ways that human perception works. And they were probably
00:55:29 terrible at it. They probably didn’t even have any conceptual peripheral vision or anything like
00:55:34 any conceptual peripheral vision or, or the fovea or, or, I mean, basically anything.
00:55:41 They had some, I mean, because actually it was Newton himself who probed a lot of this. For
00:55:46 instance, Newton, the young Newton trying to work his way around what’s going on with colors,
00:55:53 wanted to try and distinguish colors that occur through natural processes out there and colors
00:56:01 that are a result of our eyes not operating whites. You know what he did? It’s a famous thing.
00:56:06 He took a stick and he stuck that stick under his lower eyelid and pushed up on his eyeball.
00:56:14 And what that did, what produced colored circles at diametrically opposite positions of the stick
00:56:22 in the eyeball. And he moved it around to see how they moved, trying to distinguish.
00:56:27 Legit. Right? I always have to tell my students don’t do this, but.
00:56:34 Or do it if you want to be great and remembered by human history. That’s, there’s a lot of
00:56:40 equivalent to sticking a stick into your eye in modern day that may pay off in the end. Okay.
00:56:51 As a small aside, is the Newton and the Apple story true?
00:56:55 No. Was it a different fruit?
00:57:00 As a colleague of mine named Simon Schaffer in England once said on a Nova program that we were
00:57:06 both on, the role of fruit in the history of science has been vastly exaggerated.
00:57:13 Okay. So was there any, I mean, to, to the zoom out moments of epiphany,
00:57:19 is, is there something to moments of epiphany? Oh, again, this is the paradigm shift versus the
00:57:24 gradualism. There is a shift. It’s a much more complex one than that. And we,
00:57:33 as it happens, a colleague of mine and I are writing a paper right now on one of the aspects
00:57:39 of these things based on the work that many of our colleagues have done over the last 30 and 40 years.
00:57:44 Let me try and see if I could put it to you this way. Newton, until the early 1670s and probably
00:57:56 really until a fair time after that, first of all, was not very interested in questions of motion.
00:58:03 He was working actually in all chemical relationships or what is called by historians
00:58:09 chymistry, a kind of early modern chemical structure. Colleagues of ours at Indiana have
00:58:15 even reproduced the amalgams that, you know, anyway, his way of thinking about motion involved
00:58:23 a certain set of relationships, which was not conducive to any application of motion.
00:58:35 Not conducive to any application that would yield computationally direct results for things like
00:58:46 planetary motions, which he wasn’t terribly interested in anyway. He enters a correspondence
00:58:54 with his original nemesis, Robert Hooke. And Hooke says, well, have you ever thought about,
00:59:00 and then Hooke tells him a certain way you might think about it. And when Newton hears that,
00:59:06 he recognizes that there is a way to inject time that would enable him to solve certain problems.
00:59:14 It’s not that there was anything he thought before that was contrary to that way of thinking,
00:59:21 it’s just that that particular technical insight was not something that,
00:59:28 for a lot of reasons that are complex, had never occurred to him at all. And that sent him a
00:59:34 different way of thinking. But to answer your question about the Apple business, which is always
00:59:39 about, you know, gravity and the moon and all of that being, no. The reason there is that the idea
00:59:48 that what goes on here in the neighborhood of the earth and what goes on at the moon,
00:59:55 at the moon, let us say, remind the sun and the planets, can be due to a direct relationship
01:00:03 between the earth, let’s say, and the moon, is contrary to fundamental beliefs held by many of
01:00:13 the mechanical philosophers, as they’re called at the time, in which everything has to involve
01:00:18 at least a sequence of direct contacts, has to be something between here and there that’s involved.
01:00:26 And Hooke, probably not thinking terribly deeply about it, based on what he said,
01:00:33 along with others, like the architect and mathematician Christopher Wren,
01:00:37 harken back to the notion that, well, maybe there is a kind of magnetic relationship between the
01:00:44 moon and maybe the planets and the earth and gravity and so on, vague, but establishing a
01:00:49 direct connection somehow, however it’s happening, forget about it. Newton wouldn’t have cared about
01:00:56 that, if that’s all they said, but it was when Hooke mentioned this different way of thinking
01:01:01 about the motion, a way he could certainly have thought of, because it does not contradict
01:01:05 anything. Newton is a brilliant mathematician, and he could see that you could suddenly start
01:01:13 to do things with that, that you otherwise wouldn’t, and this led eventually to another
01:01:19 controversy with Hooke, in which Hooke said, well, after Newton published his Great Principia,
01:01:25 I gave him how to do this. And then Newton, of course, got ticked off about that and said, well,
01:01:30 listen to this, I did everything, and because he had a picayune little idea,
01:01:34 he thinks he can take credit for it. Okay. So his ability to play with his ideas mathematically is
01:01:43 what solidified the initial intuition that you could have. Was that the first time he was born,
01:01:48 the idea that you have action at a distance, that you can have forces without contact,
01:01:54 which is another revolutionary idea? I would say that in the sense of dealing with
01:02:02 the mechanics of force like effects considered to act at some distance, it is novel with both
01:02:14 Hooke and Newton at the time. The notion that two things might interact at a distance with one
01:02:21 another without direct contact, that goes back to antiquity. Only there it would be thought of
01:02:26 more as a sympathetic reaction to a magnet and a piece of iron. They have a kind of mutual sympathy
01:02:35 for one another. Like what? Love? What are we talking about? Actually, they do sometimes talk
01:02:41 like that. That is love. See, now I talk like that all the time. I think love is somehow
01:02:49 in consciousness or forces of physics that yet to be discovered. Okay. Now there’s the other side
01:02:58 of things, which is calculus that you began to talk about. So Newton brought a lot of things
01:03:03 to this world. One of them is calculus. What is calculus? And what was Newton’s role in bringing
01:03:13 it to life? What was it like? What was the story of bringing calculus to this world? Well, since
01:03:21 the publication starting many decades ago by Tom Whiteside, who’s now deceased, of Newton’s
01:03:28 mathematical papers, we know a lot about how he was pushing things and how he was developing things.
01:03:34 It’s a complex question to say what calculus is. Calculus is the set of mathematical techniques
01:03:42 that enable you to investigate what we now call functions, mathematical functions,
01:03:49 which are continuous. That is, that are not formed out of discrete sets like the counting numbers,
01:03:58 for instance. Newton, there were already procedures for solving problems involving
01:04:11 such things as finding areas to under curves and tangents to curves by using geometrical structures,
01:04:20 but only for certain limited types of curves, if you will. Newton as a young man, we know this is
01:04:31 what happened, is looking at a formula which involves an expansion in separate terms, polynomial
01:04:42 terms, as we say, for certain functions. I know I don’t want to get complicated here about this,
01:04:48 and he realizes it could be generalized. And he tries the generalization and that leads him to
01:04:55 an expansion formula called the binomial theorem. That enables him to move ahead with the notion
01:05:03 that if I take something that has a certain value, and I add a little bit to it, and I use
01:05:10 this binomial theorem and expand things out, I can begin to do new things. And the new things that
01:05:17 he begins to do leads him to a recognition that the calculations of areas and the calculations
01:05:24 of tangents to curves are reciprocal to one another. And the procedures that he develops
01:05:33 is a particular form of the calculus in which he considers small increments and then continuous
01:05:43 flows and changes of curves and so on. And we have relics of it in physics today, the notation
01:05:52 in which you put a dot over a variable indicating the rate of change of the variable. That’s
01:05:59 Newton’s original type of notation. The dot. Yeah, the dot notation.
01:06:09 Possibly independently of Newton, because he didn’t publish this thing, although he became
01:06:16 quite well known as quite a brilliant young man, in part because people heard about his work and
01:06:24 so on. When another young man by the name of Gottfried Leibniz visited London and he heard
01:06:34 about these things, it is said that he independently develops his form of the calculus,
01:06:42 which is actually the form we use today, both in notation and perhaps in certain
01:06:47 fundamental ways of thinking. It has remained a controversial point as to where exactly and how
01:06:56 much independently Leibniz did it. Leibniz aficionados think and continue to maintain he
01:07:02 did it completely independently. Newton, when he became president of the Royal Society, put together
01:07:08 a group to go on the attack saying, no, he must have taken everything. We don’t know.
01:07:14 But I will tell you this. About 25 or so years ago, a scholar who’s a professor at Indiana now
01:07:23 named Domenico Melli got his hands on a Leibniz manuscript called the Tentamen,
01:07:31 which was Leibniz’s attempt to produce an alternative to Newton’s mechanics.
01:07:36 Mm hmm.
01:07:37 And it comes to some conclusions that you have in Newton’s mechanics. Well, he published that,
01:07:43 but Melli got the manuscript. And what Melli found out was that Leibniz reverse engineered
01:07:49 the Principia and cooked it backwards so that he could get the results he wanted.
01:07:55 That was for the mechanics. So that means his mind allows for that kind of thing.
01:07:59 Some people.
01:08:00 You’re breaking some news today. You’re starting some whole drama.
01:08:04 Some people think so. I think most historians of mathematics do not agree with that.
01:08:09 A friend of mine, rather well known physicist, unfortunately, died a couple of years ago named
01:08:15 Mike Nowenberg at UC Santa Cruz, had some evidence along those lines. Didn’t pass mustard
01:08:23 with many of my friends who are historians of math. In fact, I edit with a historian of math,
01:08:28 a technical journal, and we were unable to publish it in there because we couldn’t get
01:08:33 it through any of our colleagues. But I am, I remain suspicious.
01:08:41 What is it about those tense relationships and that kind of drama? Einstein doesn’t
01:08:47 appear to have much of that drama. Nobody claimed, I haven’t heard claims that they’ve,
01:08:53 perhaps because it’s such crazy ideas, of any of his major inventions, major ideas,
01:09:00 being those that are basically, I came up with it first or independently. There’s not,
01:09:07 as far as I’m aware, not many people talk about general relativity, especially in those terms.
01:09:12 But with Newton, that was the case. I mean, is that just a natural outgrowth of how science works?
01:09:20 Is there going to be personalities that, I’m not saying this about Linus, but maybe I am,
01:09:25 but there’s people who steal ideas for the, because of ego, because of all those kinds of things.
01:09:35 I don’t think it’s all that common, frankly. The Newton book, Leibniz, Contratemps and so on.
01:09:43 Well, you’re at the beginnings of a lot of things there and so on. These are difficult
01:09:48 and complex times as well. These are times in which science as an activity pursued by other than,
01:09:57 let us say, interested aristocrats is becoming something somewhat different. It’s not
01:10:05 a professional community of investigators in the same way. It’s also a period in which
01:10:12 procedures and rules or practice are being developed to avoid attacking one another directly
01:10:23 and pulling out a sword to cut off the other guy’s head if he disagrees with you and so on.
01:10:28 So it’s a very different period. Controversies happen. People get angry. I can think of a number
01:10:35 of others, including in the development of optics in the 19th century and so on, and it can get hot
01:10:42 under the collar. Sometimes one character who’s worked an area extensively, whether they’ve come
01:10:50 up with something terribly novel or not, and somebody else kind of moves in and does completely
01:10:57 different and novel things, the first guy gets upset about it because he’s sort of muscled into
01:11:03 what I thought was my area. You find that sort of stuff. But do you have examples of cases where it
01:11:10 worked out well, like that competition is good for the progress of science? Yeah, it almost always is
01:11:16 good in that sense. It’s just painful for the individuals involved. It can be. It doesn’t have
01:11:21 to be nasty, although sometimes it is. So for the example with optics, could you comment on that one?
01:11:28 Well, yeah, sure. There are several, but I could give you… All right, so I’ll give you this
01:11:36 example that probably is the most pertinent. The first polytechnic school like MIT or Caltech was
01:11:49 actually founded in France during the French Revolution. It exists today. It’s the Ecole
01:11:53 Polytechnique. Two people who were there were two young men in the 90s, 1790s named on the one hand
01:12:06 Francois Arago and the other Jean Baptiste Biot. They both lived a long time, well into the 1850s.
01:12:13 Arago became a major administrator of science and Biot’s career started to peter out after about the
01:12:22 late teens. Now, they are sent on an expedition, which was one of the expeditions involving
01:12:30 measuring things to start the metric system. There’s a lot more to that story. Anyway,
01:12:36 they come back. Arago gets separated. He’s captured by pirates actually. Wounds up in
01:12:46 Tangier, escapes, is captured again. Everybody thinks he’s dead. He gets back to Paris and so on.
01:12:55 He’s greeted as a hero and whatnot. In the meantime, Biot has pretty much published some
01:13:00 of the stuff that he’s done and Arago doesn’t get much credit for it and Arago starts to get very
01:13:05 angry and Biot is known for this kind of thing. Biot starts investigating a new phenomenon in
01:13:17 optics involving something called polarization and he writes all kinds of stuff on it. Arago
01:13:25 looks into this and decides to write some things as well and actually Biot gets mostly interested
01:13:33 in it when he finds out that Arago is doing stuff. Now, Biot is actually the better scientist
01:13:38 in a lot of ways, but Arago is furious about this. So furious that he actually demands and
01:13:46 forces the leader of French science, Laplace, the Marquis de Laplace and cohorts to write a note in
01:13:57 the published journal saying, oh, excuse us, actually Arago, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah.
01:14:05 So Arago continues to just hold this antipathy and fear of Biot. So what happens? 1815,
01:14:17 Napoleon is finished at Waterloo. A young Frenchman by the name of Augustin Fresnel
01:14:24 who was in the army is going back to his home on the north coast of France in Normandy,
01:14:31 passes through Paris. Arago is friends with Fresnel’s uncle who’s the head of the École des
01:14:39 Beaux Arts at the time. Anyway, Fresnel is already interested in certain things in light
01:14:45 and he talks to Arago. Arago tells him a few things. Fresnel goes home and Fresnel is a
01:14:51 brilliant experimenter. He observes things and he’s a very good mathematician, calculates things,
01:15:00 he writes something up, he sends it to Arago. Arago looks at it and Arago says to himself,
01:15:06 I can use this to get back at Biot. He brings Fresnel to Paris, sets him up in
01:15:13 a room at the observatory where Arago is for Fresnel to continue his work. Paper after paper
01:15:19 comes out undercutting everything Biot had done. What is it about jealousy and just envy that
01:15:31 could be an engine of creativity and productivity versus like an Einstein where it seems like not?
01:15:40 I don’t know which one is better. I guess it depends on the personality. Both are useful
01:15:44 engines in science. Well, in this particular story, it’s maybe even more interesting because
01:15:51 Fresnel himself, the young guy, he knew what Arago was doing with him and he didn’t like it.
01:15:58 He didn’t want to get with, he wrote his brother said, I don’t want to get in an argument with Biot,
01:16:03 I just want to do my stuff. Arago is using him, but it’s because Arago kept pushing him to go
01:16:10 into certain areas that stuff kept coming out. Yeah. Ego is beautiful. Okay. But back to Newton,
01:16:21 there’s a bunch of things I want to ask, but sort of, let’s say since we’re on the Leibniz
01:16:26 and the topic of drama, let me ask another drama question. Why was Newton a complicated man?
01:16:31 We’re breaking news today. This is like. Right. Why was he complicated? His
01:16:41 brain structure was different. I don’t know why. He had a complicated young life, as we’ve said.
01:16:48 He had always been very self contained and solitary. He had acquaintances and friends.
01:16:56 And when he moved to London eventually, he had quite a career. A career, for instance, that led
01:17:02 him when he was famous by then, the 1690s, he moves to London. He becomes first warden of the
01:17:10 mint. The mint is what produces coins and coinage was a complicated thing because there was
01:17:15 counterfeiting going on. And he becomes master of the mint to the extent. And a guy at MIT wrote a
01:17:23 book about this a little bit. We wrote something on it too. I forget his name was Levin. That Newton
01:17:30 sent investigators out to catch these guys and sent at least one of them, a famous one named
01:17:36 Challener to the gallows. And one of the reasons he probably was so particularly angry at Challener
01:17:47 was Challener had apparently said some nasty things about Newton in front of parliament at
01:17:52 some point. Fair enough. That was apparently not a good idea. Well, he had a bit of a temper. So
01:17:58 you had a bit of a temper. Clearly. But he even as a young man at Cambridge, though he doesn’t come
01:18:08 from wealth, he attracts people who recognize his smarts. There’s a young fellow named Humphrey
01:18:16 Newton shared his rooms. These students always shared rooms with one another, became his kind
01:18:23 of amanuensis to write down what Newton was doing and so on. And there were others over time who he
01:18:34 befriended in various ways and so on. He was solitary. He had, as far as we know, no relationships
01:18:42 with either women or men in anything other than a formal way. The only…
01:18:49 Those get in the way relationships.
01:18:51 Right. Well, I mean, I don’t know if he was close to his mother. I mean, she passed away,
01:18:58 everything left him. He went to be with her after she died. He was close to his niece,
01:19:04 Catherine Barton, who basically came to run his household when he moved to London and so on. And
01:19:13 she married a man named Conduit, who became one of the people who controlled Newton’s legacy
01:19:21 later on and so on. And you can even see the townhouse that Newton lived in, in those days,
01:19:29 still there.
01:19:30 All right. So there’s the story of Newton coming up with quite a few ideas during a pandemic.
01:19:38 We’re on the outskirts of a pandemic ourselves.
01:19:42 Right.
01:19:43 And a lot of people use that example as motivation for everybody while they’re
01:19:47 in lockdown to get stuff done. So what’s that about? Can you tell the story of that?
01:19:53 Well, I can. Let me first say that, of course, we’ve been teaching over Zoom lately.
01:19:58 There was no Zoom back then?
01:20:00 There was no Zoom back then. Although it wouldn’t have made much difference because the story was
01:20:04 Newton was so complicated in his lectures that at one point, Humphrey Newton actually said that
01:20:09 he might as well have just been lecturing to the walls because nobody was there
01:20:13 to listen to it. So what difference?
01:20:15 Also not a great teacher, huh?
01:20:18 If you look at his optical notes, if that’s what he’s reading from…
01:20:22 Oh, boy. Okay.
01:20:23 No.
01:20:27 So what can you say about that whole journey through the pandemic that resulted in so much
01:20:35 innovation in such a short amount of time?
01:20:37 Well, I mean, there’s two times that he goes home. Would he have been able to do it and do do it if
01:20:45 he’d stayed at Cambridge? I think he would have. I don’t think it really… Although I do like to
01:20:50 tell my advanced students when I lecture on the history of physics to the physics and chemistry
01:20:55 students, especially we’ve been doing it over Zoom last year, when we get to Newton and so on,
01:21:00 because these kids are, you know, 21, 22, I like to say, well, you know, when Newton was your age
01:21:06 and he had to go home during an epidemic, do you know what he produced?
01:21:12 So can you actually summarize this for people who don’t know how old was Newton and what did
01:21:16 he produce? Well, Newton goes up to Cambridge, as it said, when he’s 18 years old in 1660.
01:21:24 And the so called miraculous year, the annus mirabilis, where you get the development
01:21:32 in the calculus and in optical discoveries, especially, is 1666, right? So he’s, what,
01:21:40 24 years old at the time. But judging from the notebooks that I mentioned, he’s already,
01:21:48 before that, come to an awful lot of developments over the previous couple of years.
01:21:56 Does it have much to do with the fact that he twice went home? It is true that the optical
01:22:03 experiments that we talked of a while ago with the light on the wall moving up and down were done at
01:22:08 home. In fact, you can visit the very room he did it in to this day. Yeah, it’s very cool.
01:22:15 And if you look through the window in that room, there is an apple tree out there in the garden.
01:22:21 So you might be wrong about this. You’re lying to me. Maybe there’s an apple
01:22:25 involved after all. Well, it’s not the same apple tree, but it’s cuttings.
01:22:29 How do you know?
01:22:31 They don’t last that long, but it’s 400 years ago.
01:22:34 Oh, wow. I continue with the dumbest questions. Okay. So you’re saying that perhaps going home
01:22:43 was not… It may have given him an opportunity to work things through. And after all, he did make
01:22:50 use of that room and he could do things like put a shade over the window, move things around,
01:22:55 cut holes in it and do stuff. Probably in his rooms at Cambridge, maybe not. Although when he
01:23:03 stayed at Cambridge subsequently and became a fellow, and then the second Lucasian professor
01:23:10 there, he was actually really the first one because Isaac Barrow, who was the mathematician,
01:23:18 professor of optics who recognized Newton’s genius, gave up what would have been his position
01:23:24 because he recognized… Newton may not have learned too much from him, although they did
01:23:30 interact. And so Newton was the first Lucasian professor really, the one that Stephen Hawking
01:23:35 held till he died. And we know that the rooms that he had there at Cambridge subsequently,
01:23:44 those rooms are still there, he built an all chemical furnace outside, did all sorts of stuff
01:23:49 in those rooms. And don’t forget, you didn’t have to do too much as a Lucasian professor.
01:23:57 Every so often you had to go give these lectures, whether anybody was there or not,
01:24:01 and deposit the notes for the future, which is how we have all those things.
01:24:09 Oh, they were stored and now we have them. And now we know just how terrible of a teacher Newton
01:24:15 was. Yeah, but we know how brilliant these notes are. In fact, the second volume of Newton’s,
01:24:20 of the notes really on the great book that he published, The Optics, which he published in 1704,
01:24:27 that has just been finished with full annotations and analysis by the greatest analyst of Newton’s
01:24:35 optics, Alan Shapiro, who retired a few years ago at the University of Minnesota and been working
01:24:42 on Newton’s optics ever since I knew him and before, and I’ve known him since 1976.
01:24:48 Is there something you could say broadly about either that work on optics or Principia itself
01:24:57 as something that I’ve never actually looked at as a piece of work?
01:25:04 Is it powerful in itself or is it just an important moment in history in terms of the
01:25:12 amount of inventions that are within, the amount of ideas that are within, or is it a really powerful
01:25:19 work in itself? Well, it is a powerful work in itself. You can see this guy coming to grips with
01:25:27 and pushing through and working his way around complicated and difficult issues, melding
01:25:34 experimental situations which nobody had worked with before, even discovering new things,
01:25:42 trying to figure out ways of putting this together with mathematical structures,
01:25:46 succeeding and failing at the same time. And we can see him doing that.
01:25:52 I mean, what is, what is contained within Principia? I don’t even know in terms of the
01:25:58 scope of the work. Is it the entirety of the body of work of Newton?
01:26:04 No, no, no, no. The Principia Mathematica…
01:26:06 Is it calculus?
01:26:08 Well, all right. So the Principia is divided into three books.
01:26:14 Excellent.
01:26:16 Book one contains his version of the laws of motion and the application of those laws
01:26:23 to figure out when a body moves in certain curves and is forced to move in those curves
01:26:30 by forces directed to certain fixed points, what is the nature of the mathematical formula
01:26:37 for those forces? That’s all that book one is about. And it contains not the kind of version
01:26:44 of the calculus that uses algebra of the sort that I was trying to explain before,
01:26:50 but is done in terms of ratios between geometric line segments when one of the line segments goes
01:27:00 very, very small. It’s called the kind of limiting procedure, which is calculus, but it’s a geometrically
01:27:08 structured, although it’s clearly got algebraic elements in it as well. And that makes the
01:27:14 Principia’s mathematical structure rather hard for people who aren’t studying it today to
01:27:22 go back to. Book two contains his work on what we now call hydrostatics and a little bit about
01:27:34 hydrodynamics, a fuller development of the concept of pressure, which is a complicated concept.
01:27:42 And book three applies what he did in book one to the solar system. And it is successful
01:27:51 partially because the only way that you can exactly solve, the only types of problems you
01:27:59 can exactly solve in terms of the interactions of two particles governed by gravitational force
01:28:08 between them is for only two bodies. If there’s more than two, let’s say it’s A, B, and C,
01:28:15 A acts on B, B acts on C, C acts on A, you cannot solve it exactly. You have to develop techniques.
01:28:24 The fullest sets of techniques are really only developed about 30 or 40 years after Newton’s
01:28:29 death by French mathematicians like Laplace. Newton tried to apply his structure to the
01:28:40 sun, earth, moon, because the moon’s motion is very complicated. The moon, for instance,
01:28:47 exactly repeats its observable position among the stars only every 19 years.
01:28:53 That is, if you look up where the moon is among the stars at certain times and it changes,
01:28:59 it’s complicated. That’s, by the way, that was discovered by the Babylonians.
01:29:06 That fact, the 19 years.
01:29:08 Thousands of years ago, yes.
01:29:09 And then you have to load that little piece of data and how do you make sense of it? I mean,
01:29:13 that is data and you have to fit it.
01:29:15 And it’s complicated. So Newton actually kind of reverse engineered a technique that had been
01:29:21 developed by a man named Horrocks, using certain laws of Kepler’s to try and get around this thing.
01:29:28 And Newton then sort of, my understanding, I’ve never studied this, has reversed,
01:29:33 sort of reversed it and fit it together with his force calculations by way of an approximation.
01:29:40 And was able to construct a model to make some predictions?
01:29:46 It fit things backwards pretty well.
01:29:49 Okay. Where does data fit into this? We kind of earlier in the discussion
01:29:57 mentioned data as part of the scientific method. How important was data to Newton?
01:30:04 Okay.
01:30:05 So like you mentioned Prism and playing with it and looking at stuff and then coming up with
01:30:11 calculations and so on. Where does data fit into any of his ideas?
01:30:14 All right. Well, let me say two things first. One, we rarely use the phrase scientific method
01:30:20 anymore because there is no one easily describable such method. I mean, humans have been
01:30:28 playing around with the world and learning how to repetitively do things and make things happen
01:30:34 ever since, you know, humans became humans.
01:30:37 Do you have a preferred definition of the scientific method?
01:30:41 Do you have a preferred definition of the scientific method? What are the various?
01:30:46 No, I don’t. I prefer to talk about
01:30:52 the considered manipulation of artificial structures to produce results that can be
01:31:02 worked together with schemes to construct other devices and make
01:31:08 predictions, if you will, about the way such things will work.
01:31:11 So ultimately, it’s about producing other devices. It’s like leads you down a…
01:31:16 I think so, principally. I mean, you may have data, if you will, like astronomical data
01:31:23 obtained otherwise and so on, but yes. But number two here is this question of data. What is data
01:31:30 in that sense? See, when we talk about data today, we have a kind of complex notion, which
01:31:38 reverts to even issues of statistics and measurement procedures and so on. So let me put it to you this
01:31:47 way. So let’s say I had a ruler in front of me and it’s marked off in little black marks separated
01:31:55 by, let’s say, distances called a millimeter. Okay. Now I make a mark on this piece of paper here.
01:32:03 So I made a nice black mark, right? Nice black mark. And I ask you, I want you to measure that
01:32:09 and tell me how long it is. You’re going to take the ruler, you’re going to put it next to it,
01:32:17 and you’re going to look, and it’s not going to sit, even if you put one end in the middle,
01:32:24 even if you put one end as close as you can on one black mark, the other end probably isn’t going to
01:32:29 be exactly on a black mark. Well, you’ll say it’s closer to this or that. You’ll write down a number
01:32:35 and I say, okay, take the ruler away a minute. I take this away, come back in five minutes,
01:32:40 put the piece of paper down, do it again. You’re going to probably come up with a different number
01:32:45 and you’re going to do that a lot of times. And then if I tell you, I want you to give me your
01:32:50 best estimate of what the actual length of that thing is, what are you going to do?
01:32:55 You’re going to average all of these numbers. Why?
01:33:04 Statistics.
01:33:06 Well, yes, statistics. There’s lots of ways of going around it,
01:33:10 but the average is the best estimate on the basis of what’s called the central limit theorem,
01:33:16 a statistical theorem. We’re talking about things that were not really developed until the 1750s,
01:33:23 60s and 70s. Newton died in 1727.
01:33:26 The intuition perhaps was there.
01:33:28 Not really. I’ll tell you what people did, including Newton, although Newton is
01:33:33 partially the one exception. We talked a while ago about this guy, Christian Huygens.
01:33:39 He measured lots of things and he was a good mechanic himself. He and his brother ground
01:33:45 lenses. Huygens, I told you, developed the first pendulum mechanism, pendulum driven clock with a
01:33:51 mechanism and so on. Also a spring watch where he got into a controversy with Hooke over that,
01:33:58 by the way.
01:34:00 What’s with these mechanics and the controversy?
01:34:04 Well, we also have Huygens’s notes. They’re preserved at Leiden University in Holland,
01:34:12 he’s Dutch, for his work in optics, which was extensive. We don’t have time to go into that,
01:34:18 except the following. A number of years ago, I went through those things because
01:34:23 in this optical theory that he had, there are four numbers that you’ve got to be able to get
01:34:30 good numbers on to be able to predict other things. What would we do today? What in fact
01:34:37 was done at the end of the 18th century when somebody went back to this? I told you to do
01:34:42 with the ruler. You make a lot of measurements and average results. We have Huygens’s notes.
01:34:48 He did make a lot of measurements, one after the other, after the other. But when he came to use
01:34:56 the numbers for calculations, and indeed when he published things at the end of his life,
01:35:03 he gives you one number and it’s not the average of any of them. It’s just one of them. Which one
01:35:09 was it? The one that he thought he got so good at working by practice that he put down the one he
01:35:20 was most confident in. That was the general procedure at the time. You wouldn’t publish
01:35:26 a paper in which you wrote down six numbers and said, well, I measured this six times.
01:35:32 Let me put them together. None of them is really, they would have said, the right number,
01:35:37 but I’ll put them together and give you a good number. No, you would have been thought of that,
01:35:42 you know, you don’t know what you’re doing. Yeah. By the way, there’s just an inkling of value to
01:35:49 that approach. Just an inkling. We sometimes use statistics as like a thing that like, oh,
01:35:56 that solves all the problems. We’ll just do a lot of it and we’ll take the average or whatever it
01:36:01 is. As many excellent books on mathematics have highlighted the flaws in our approach to certain
01:36:08 sciences that rely heavily on statistics. Okay. Let me ask you again for a friend about this
01:36:16 alchemy thing. You know, it’d be nice to create gold, but it also seems to come into play quite
01:36:24 a bit throughout the history of science, perhaps in positive ways in terms of its impact. Can you
01:36:30 say something to the history of alchemy? A little bit. Sure. It used to be thought two things. One,
01:36:40 that alchemy, which dates certainly back to the Islamic period in Islam, you’re talking, you know,
01:36:49 11th, 12th, 13th centuries among Islamic natural philosophers and experimenters.
01:36:54 But it used to be thought that alchemy, which picked up strikingly in the 16th century, 1500s
01:37:03 and thereabouts, was a sort of mystical procedure involving all sorts of strange notions and so on.
01:37:12 And that’s not entirely untrue, but it is substantially untrue in that alchemists were
01:37:20 engaged in what was known as chrysopoeia, that is looking for ways to transform invaluable materials
01:37:32 into valuable ones. But in the process of doing so or attempting to do so, they learned how to
01:37:42 create complex amalgams of various kinds. They used very elaborate apparatus, glass
01:37:49 alembics in which they would use heat to produce chemical decompositions. They would write down and
01:37:57 observe these compositions. And many of the so called really strange looking alchemical formulas
01:38:03 and statements where they’ll say something like, I can’t produce it, but it’ll be the soul of
01:38:09 Mars will combine with this, et cetera, et cetera. These, it has been shown, are almost all actual
01:38:18 formulas for how to engage in the production of complex amalgams and what to do. And by the time
01:38:26 of Newton, Newton was reading the works of a fellow by the name of Starkey, who actually came
01:38:34 from Harvard shortly before, in which things had progressed, if you will, to the point where
01:38:45 the procedure turns into what historians call chrysopoeia, which basically runs into the notion
01:38:52 of thinking that these things are made out of particles. This is the mechanical philosophy.
01:39:00 This is the mechanical philosophy. Can we engage in processes, chemical processes to rearrange these
01:39:06 things, which is not so stupid after all. I mean, we do it, except we happen to do it in reactors,
01:39:12 not in chemical processes, unless of course it had happened that cold fusion had worked,
01:39:18 which it didn’t. Not yet. Well, right. So that’s the way they’re thinking about these things.
01:39:26 There’s a kind of mix. And Newton engages extensively in those sorts of manipulations.
01:39:32 In fact, more in that than almost anything else, except for his optical investigations. If you look
01:39:41 through the latter parts of the 1670s, the last five, six, seven years or so of that,
01:39:47 there’s more on that than there is on anything else. He’s not working on mechanics. He’s pretty
01:39:53 much gone pretty far in optics. He’ll turn back to optics later on. So optics and alchemy.
01:40:00 So what you’re saying is Isaac Newton liked shiny things. Well, actually, if you go online and look
01:40:07 at what Bill Newman, the professor at Indiana, at Bloomington, Indiana has produced, you’ll find
01:40:13 the very shiny thing called the star regulus, which Newton describes as having produced according to
01:40:19 a particular way, which Newman figured out and was able to do it. And it’s very shiny.
01:40:25 There you go. Proves the theorem. Can I ask you about God, religion and its role in Newton’s life?
01:40:34 Was there helpful, constructive or destructive influences of religion in his work and in his life?
01:40:47 Well, there you begin to touch on a complex question. The role that God played would be an
01:40:55 interesting question to answer should one go and be able to speak with this invisible character
01:41:00 who doesn’t exist. But putting that aside for the moment. Yeah, we don’t like to talk about others
01:41:05 while they’re not here. So, right. Newton is a deeply religious man, not unusually so,
01:41:12 of course, for the time. And clearly, his upbringing and perhaps his early experiences
01:41:24 have exacerbated that in a number of ways that he takes a lot of things personally. And he finds
01:41:32 perhaps solace in thinking about a sort of governing, abstract, rulemaking, exacting deity.
01:41:45 I think there is little question that his conviction that you can figure things out has
01:41:56 a fair bit to do with his profound belief that this rulemaker doesn’t do things arbitrarily.
01:42:06 Newton does not think that miracles have happened since maybe the time of Christ, if then,
01:42:14 and not in the same way. He was, for instance, an anti Trinitarian. He did not hold that Christ
01:42:20 had a divine being, but was rather endowed with certain powers by the rulemaker and whatnot.
01:42:28 And he did not think that some of the tales of the Old Testament with various miracles and so on
01:42:38 occurred in anything like that way. Some may have, some may not have. Like everybody else,
01:42:44 of course, he did think that creation had happened about 6,000 years ago. Wait, really? Oh, yeah,
01:42:51 sure. Well, biblical chronology can give you a little bit about that. It’s a little controversial,
01:42:56 but sure. Interesting. Wow. The deity created the universe 6,000 years ago. And that didn’t
01:43:06 interfere with his playing around with the sun and the moon? No, because he’s figuring out,
01:43:12 he’s watching the brilliant construction that this perfect entity did 6,000 years ago.
01:43:21 Yeah, has produced. Plus or minus a few years. Well, if you go with Bishop Boster, it’s 4004 BCE.
01:43:30 Want to be precise about it. We always, and this is a serious program, we always want to be precise.
01:43:36 Okay. Let me ask another ridiculous question. If Newton were to travel forward in time
01:43:45 and visit with Einstein and have a discussion about space time and general relativity,
01:43:54 that conception of time and that conception of gravity, what do you think that discussion will go
01:43:59 like? Put that way, I think Newton would sit there in shock and say, I have no idea what you’re
01:44:07 talking about. If on the other hand, there’s a time machine, you go back and bring a somewhat
01:44:13 younger Newton, not a man my age, say. I mean, he lived a long time into his mid eighties,
01:44:22 but take him when he’s in his forties, let’s say, bring him forward and don’t immediately
01:44:27 introduce him to Einstein. Let’s take him for a ride on a railroad. Let him experience the
01:44:33 railroad. Oh, that’s right. Take him around and show him a sparking machine. He knows about sparks,
01:44:45 sending off sparks. Show him wires, have him touch the wires and get a little shock.
01:44:52 Show him a clicking telegraph machine of the kind. Then let him hear the clicks in a telephone
01:45:01 receiver and so on. Do that for a couple of months. Let him get accustomed to things.
01:45:08 Then take him into, not Einstein yet, let’s say we’re taking him into the 1890s. Einstein is
01:45:14 young man then. We take him into some of the laboratories. We show him some of the equipment,
01:45:21 the devices, not the most elaborate ones. We show him certain things. We educate him
01:45:26 bit by bit. On optics, maybe focus on that. Certainly on optics. You begin to show him
01:45:32 things. He’s a brilliant human being. I think bit by bit, he would begin to see what’s going on.
01:45:42 But if you just dumped him in front of Einstein, he’d sit there, his eyes would glaze over.
01:45:46 I mean, I guess it’s almost a question of how big of a leap, how many leaps have been taken
01:45:57 in science that go from Newton to Einstein. We sometimes in a compressed version of history
01:46:02 think that not much. Oh, that’s totally wrong. A lot. Huge amounts in multifarious ways
01:46:13 involving fundamental conceptions, mathematical structures, the evolution of novel experimentation
01:46:19 and devices, the organization. It’s not everything. Everything. I mean, to a point where I wonder
01:46:25 even if Newton was like, you said 40, but even like 30. So he’s very, like if you would be able
01:46:35 to catch up with the conception of everything. I wonder as a scientist, how much you load in from
01:46:42 age five about this world in order to be able to conceive of the world of ideas that push that
01:46:50 science forward. I mean, you mentioned the railroad and all those kinds of things. That might be
01:46:56 fundamental to our ability to invent even when it doesn’t directly obviously seem relevant.
01:47:02 Well, yes. I mean, the railroad, the steam engine, the Watt engine, et cetera. I mean,
01:47:13 that was really the Watt engine was developed pretty… Although Watt knew Joseph Black,
01:47:19 a chemist scientist and so on, did stuff on heat, was developed pretty much independently of
01:47:25 the developing thoughts about heat at the time. But what it’s not independent of is the evolution
01:47:36 of practice in the manufacture and construction of devices which can do things in extraordinarily
01:47:45 novel ways and the premium being gradually placed on calculating how you can make them more
01:47:51 efficient. That is of a piece with a way of thinking about the world in which you’re controlling
01:48:00 things and working it. It’s something that humans have been doing for a long time, but in this more
01:48:07 concerted and structured way, I think you really don’t find it in the fullest sense until well into
01:48:18 the 1500s and really not fully until the 17th century later on. So Newton had this year of
01:48:28 miracles. I wonder if I could ask you briefly about Einstein and his year of miracles. I’ve
01:48:34 been reading, re reading, revisiting the brilliance of the papers that Einstein published in the year
01:48:42 1905, one of which won him the Nobel prize, the photoelectric effect, but also Brownian motion,
01:48:49 special theory of relativity, and of course the old E equals MC squared.
01:49:00 Does that make sense to you that these two figures had such productive years
01:49:05 that there’s this moment of genius? Maybe, maybe if we zoom out, I mean, I, my work is very much
01:49:12 in artificial intelligence, sort of wondering about the nature of intelligence. Like how did we,
01:49:20 how did evolution on earth produce genius that could come up with so much in so little time?
01:49:28 To me, that gives me hope that one person can change the world in such a small amount of time.
01:49:35 Well, of course there are precedents for, in both Newton’s and Einstein’s cases for elements of
01:49:44 what we’re finding there. It’s, you know, and so on. Well, I have no idea. You know,
01:49:50 I’m sure you must’ve read, it was a kind of a famous story that after Einstein died,
01:49:54 he donated his brain and they sliced it up to see if they could find something unusual there,
01:50:00 nothing unusual visibly in there. So I have, clearly there are people who for various reasons,
01:50:11 maybe both intrinsic and extrinsic in the sense of experience and so on, are capable of coming
01:50:19 up with these extraordinary results. Many years ago, when I was a student, a friend of mine came
01:50:27 in and said, did you read about, did you read this? I forget what, anyway, there was a story
01:50:31 in the paper. It was about, I think it was a young woman who was, she couldn’t speak and she was
01:50:43 somewhere on the autism spectrum. She could not read other people’s affect in any ways, but she
01:50:53 could sit down at a piano and having heard it once and then run variations on the most complex
01:51:05 pianistic works of Chopin and others, right? Now how?
01:51:14 Some aspect of our mind is able to tune in in some aspect of reality and become a master of it.
01:51:21 And every once in a while, that means coming up with breakthrough ideas in physics.
01:51:26 Yep. How the heck does that happen? Who knows? Jed, I’d like to say thank you so much for spending
01:51:33 your valuable time with me today. It was a really fascinating conversation. I’ve learned so much
01:51:37 about Isaac Newton, who’s one of the most fascinating figures in human history. So
01:51:41 thank you so much for talking to me. My pleasure. I enjoyed it very much.
01:51:44 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jed Buchwald. To support this podcast,
01:51:51 please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
01:51:56 Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science. The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.
01:52:03 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.