January 19, 2016 • 52 mins
There have been a lot of great scientist throughout history, but Sir Isaac Newton might just take the cake. But while he was a certified genius, he was also a little screwy. Dive into the life of this fascinating chap in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(01:03):
That is right. So we'll see you guys in Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hi,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is the Stuff you should know.
(01:26):
H that was my Isaac Newton press. Really yeah, you
didn't have an accent, that was That's what he sounded like. Oh,
it's very it's a very common misconception that British people
in the seventeenth century sound like British people today. They
actually sounded exactly like how I existed. All right, well
you did extra research, then it's pretty good. Let's travel
(01:49):
back in time. We we just had a nice ten
minute discussion Jerry and you and I about or me? Alright, uh,
who cares? Yeah, about pop culture things that we've ingested
since our break six weeks ago. Yep, And that could
be a show. Everyone wants to know what we watched
(02:12):
and absorbed and how we feel about it, but they
never will. We talked about making of a Murderer or
making a Murderer. We talked about Hateful Eight and Star
Wars and The Revenant. People want to know, but they
never will. You gotta keep him mysterious, right, guys, that's right.
(02:33):
And all this leads to Isaac Newton, who it was.
So you know, um Wolf from Science World. Who Wolf
from Science World. It's a very very bona fide science website.
No dumbing down there it so Wolf from put it
like this, He's the bomb dignity. It is no, it
(02:59):
is no exaggeration to say that Isaac Newton is the
single most important contributor to the development of modern science.
And Wolf from Science World knows what they're talking about
when it comes to contributors to science. Yeah, you know what,
I will agree with that, even though we will see
he was many things, including a little screwy, super screwy.
(03:20):
But um, what I gathered after researching this dude, is
that science this is seventeenth century stuff going on. Science
was the wild West. And he came in like a
sheriff and basically brought order and discipline and said, this
is the way we should do things if we want
to be taken seriously, guys, varmints. Um, you can't just
(03:42):
say things like the world's flat. You gotta prove it
or or this is kind of the thinking. And he
really kind of rose to prominence while the scientific revolution
was already going, but he very much contributed to it
because still at the time you could be like, well,
the uh, the Earth spins because God spun it and
(04:03):
it is God's will, and like people would be like,
absolutely scientist. Not the case after Newton came along. Now
it's like, you gotta prove the stuff. There's gotta be
a method in place, you gotta test things again. And
again he was I didn't know this. He was one
of the or if not the first person to average data. Yeah,
what did they do before that? Just cherry pick something?
(04:25):
Probably they're like, oh, that looks like the nice round number.
I'll go, I'll use this one. So like, if he measured,
say the how long a top spun because that's what
scientists measure a lot of top spinning. Um, if he
measured it four or five times, then he got different
measurements every time. Yeah, I guess before they would just
pick whatever when they like the most. It just seems
so he was the first one to average. Yeah. It
(04:46):
just seems so second nature to think while averaging something
is what you should do, But back then it wasn't. No,
and that's that's so that came up a lot while
I was reading this article. It's a very good article
by Jacob Silverman one on Jeopardy. Pretty yeah, um he
uh he he. The way that he portrayed Newton. I
(05:08):
think it gets across that we take Newton's work so
for granted these days as just that's the way the
universe works. That to think otherwise, it's just totally alien
to us. And it's that's just such evidence of how
much that man single handedly changed the world. But you
(05:29):
also can't say single handedly he's His genius is unequivocal, right,
But he also did definitely stand on the backs of giants,
on the shoulders of giants, people who came before him,
a sis, and the work of his peers. But he
also like to take a lot of the credit for himself,
sometimes unnecessarily. He was a very complex man. He was
(05:54):
a scientist who deeply believed in God. He believed that
you that there was law in order that could be deduced,
that could be investigated, but it was orderly and rational,
because God was an orderly, rational creator. Yeah, he saw
logic and he thought God was that logic. He also
(06:15):
thought that the stuff that he was uncovering was actually
ancient wisdom that was being recovered from pre Christian civilizations.
That's it gets a little screwy. Yeah, that had um
kind of da Vinci coded, uh, this knowledge in things
like pyramids and stuff like that, and that he was
hand selected as a select view to uncover this knowledge. Yeah,
(06:36):
so much so that he made he made a name
for himself, Chuck. And once you start to really investigate Newton,
you can just kind of see him like tittering to
himself as he's talking to himself in his chambers at Cambridge,
calling himself this out loud to an empty room. Yeah,
he was. He changed his name or didn't change it.
(06:59):
I'm sorry. He had a special name for himself, Jehovah
Sanctus Unice, which means Jehovah the Holy One. And he
he got that name by rolling a twenty sided die
several times. So that was his special uh. I guess
Council of of Unique Scientists, like a league of extraordinary gentleman.
(07:19):
That was a super hero name. Yeah, and he was.
He was an alchemist as well. He very seriously pursued
the study of turning plain old metal into gold of um,
finding long life Elixer's. He was a very complex man,
and a lot of people like to put him in
in this this um rational scientists compartment as like how
(07:42):
we view scientists today typically, And he wasn't that. You
just can't look at science the same in the seventeenth
century as you do today, No, because different. It wasn't
like this guy was helping form science today, and at
the time it was he was seeking answers to the
universe where ever there it was. There weren't many boundaries
to him, Like if he could come to conclusions about
(08:06):
the universe through weird mysticism, then whatever. He still came
to the same conclusions that he did through mathematics, which
by the way, a major part of of which he
helped develop single handedly. Almost. Yeah, it's kind of a
weird time because you could on one hand, be a
very rational thinker and say you have to prove this,
but you can also say that lady didn't float, so
(08:28):
she's a witch and that's why she drowned, and and
be completely like normal, say it with a straight face. Yeah.
That was like like Newton, like I can turn this
mercury into gold, right, there's an elixir that will let
you live forever. And I can also say you should
average data and write the principia. Right, I can also
(08:48):
literally discover gravity, like there was no such thing as
gravity as far as humans were concerned before Isaac Newton
came along. All right, that's a great setup. That was
even better than our field. So January four, which is
yesterday in real time, was his actual birthday? Did not
know that? Weird timing? Um, it depends on the calendar.
(09:12):
Depends on the calendar Christmas Day or January four, right, yes,
but like a year apart rather than like a week
or so apart. Right, Because one of the great myths
is that he was born on Galileo's the day he
Galileo died, which means that he's not true, right. Galileo
reincarnated is what people say. It's some people catch you,
(09:32):
some people like Isaac Newton. Probably I don't think he
said that, but yeah, that was using the old Julian calendar.
When you use the Gregorian calendar, his birthday was actually
Jane uh, January four of the following year, or no
of the year before. I think, oh wow, he got younger.
No of the same year. So like if he was
(09:53):
born in December twenty on one calendar. For the other calendar,
he would go back in time to the beginning ing
of that same year, so almost a year apart. And
the reason that there is a weird discrepancy is um
in fifteen eighty two the Catholic nations converted from the
Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, full hundred or so
years before Newton, or a little less than hundred years,
(10:17):
But it wasn't until the seventeen fifties that the British
Isles Protestants converted to that Gregorian or Catholic calendar. We
should do one of calendars. Oh, we definitely should. More
complex than you think. But in the in in the
in the continent, and in Great Britain or in the UK,
um they I don't know still after all these years.
(10:41):
So it's Great Britain in Northern Ireland, right, the United
Kingdom and Northern Ireland. I'm just gonna let you go
down this road anyway. Uh. They used to notate dates
with um old style and new style, depending on what calendar.
So anyway, that's the whole discrepancy between his birthday. No,
(11:02):
that makes sense, Oh it sure it does. Uh, all right,
so let's go back in time. Let's get in the
way back machine and go back to one of those
two days depending on our calendar that we have in
the way back machine. How it's programmed, well, the way
back machines programmed to um Gregorian. So it's fine. Great. Uh,
(11:27):
So we are back when he was born as a
little baby. He was a premature and very sickly. And
here's how things can go in the world. He wasn't
supposed to live. And like, what would the world have
been like without Isaac Newton? Pretty dark? Yeah, or at
least it would have taken them longer. Maybe, yeah, maybe
it just would have been someone else, like the clapper
would have been invented, but we would just assume it
(11:47):
worked because God willed it too. That's right. Born uh
in eighteen I'm sorry, sixteen forty three, not eight um.
He was from a family of farmers that did pretty
well for themselves, although his dad, Isaac died before a
few months before he was born, and was an illiterate
farmer who was successful at his work, but very big
(12:10):
that his father died before he was born. Because he
never quite got over that. He ended up um living
for a short time with his mother and new stepdad,
Reverend Barnabas Smith. But he sounded like a jerk who
did not like Isaac said, I cast the out, And
he was cast out and lived with his maternal grandmother
for nine years from age three to twelve. Yeah, I
(12:31):
mean it was pretty much raised by his maternal grandmother. Yeah,
and he was apparently old enough to realize what was
going on, because the any psychoanalyst would have a field
day with Newton, because he grew up to be a
very insecure man who had a tremendous amount of difficulty
trusting people because he's rejected, yes by his mother. Um
(12:53):
and who who who suffered from what you would probably
call these days hostile attribution bias, where the any any
slight or something was clearly intended by the other party.
Everybody else was hostile and out. Again, I'm not necessarily
making a paranoid but just any slight was intentional, even
when it was unintentional. It's a way to live. Yeah,
(13:15):
it took everything personally interesting. So this led over his
life to a couple of nervous breakdowns. Um, and you
know that also had to do with the fact that
he worked tirelessly and didn't sleep well and was in
a lot of ways a prototypical scientists like he never
got married, was just consumed with his work and didn't
(13:36):
take care of himself and uh, sort of obsessed with
his with his life's work. Yeah, and some people have
posthumously diagnosed him, including Simon Baron Cohen who's a um
an expert on autism and uh uh Asperger's borat his relative. Interesting.
I don't think it's his brother, but there are related Yeah,
(14:00):
I was totally kidding. Well, you're totally right. So what
are he diagnosed with Asperger's? But that's definitely come under
fire lately. They think that So there's something UM called
I don't remember what it's called. But in sixteen his
second his second nervous breakdown in the sixteen nineties, he
um they he stopped doing any kind of scientific research
(14:24):
I for that, and he apparently declined mentally compared to
his previous state, which means that he came down to
about normal levels I would guess. But they think that
it was actually mercury poisoning. Yeah, and that he wasn't
necessarily autistic. It's an easy catch all to put him
in that in that again in that compartment these days,
(14:47):
but we don't know enough about him to say that
whether he was autistic, like like one of the um
one of the evidences was that he didn't play with
the other kids, Um, he just kept two himself. So
they're like, well, that that shows a lack of social
communication skills or or um, you know, being able to
(15:08):
connect with others. But then if you look back at
historical data, he he he tried to hang out with
his peers at school, but they didn't like hanging out
with them because he was too smart for them, so
they shunned him. So, you know, does that make him
autistic or does does that mean he had autism spectral
disorder spectrum disorder or aspergers. You can't say he may have,
(15:31):
but easy to go back now and put people on
the on the spectrum. But they do think because he
was exhumed a few hundred years after his death and
they found a lot of mercury still like in his
um system or in his bones, I would guess, um,
and they think that he inadvertently poisoned himself and that
(15:52):
that led to his second nervous breakdown and mental decline. Interesting, Yeah,
all right, Well, let's take a break here and uh
we'll talk about his schooling years right after this. All right,
(16:18):
so Newton in school, Uh wasn't a great student in
high school? Um? He who was the mascot? Was there
was there one? I don't think so, okay, because I
thought they were God that would be like really great
trivia Newton's high school mascot? What was yours in Silanto's mind?
(16:39):
What you remember Silanto? The kid who's like watching me,
watching me night. You guys went to the same high school.
Remember I told you we were the Red and Raiders Raiders? Okay? Yeah,
and my elementary school was the Red and Little Raiders. Ah.
That is cute, isn't it? H l I l Um.
So he wasn't a great student. He was also a
(17:01):
terrible farmer because of course, being uh the son of
a farmer. They were like, you need to work on
the farm. And there are some people that think he'd
purposefully like he was clearly smart enough to do this,
but purposely failed at it. So he didn't have to
do it because he was really into book learning. Uh
so that makes sense to me. Um, he did continue
his education because he wasn't farming I went on to Cambridge,
(17:23):
but UM had to act as a valot to wealthy
students for a little while. Yeah, way through basically what
we would consider undergraduate school. Yeah, and then he got
a scholarship which allowed him to continue UM through his
uh graduate studies. But all that didn't happen in like
some smooth things. So he went to school first. His
(17:45):
mom came back for him, took him out of school,
tried to set him up as a farmer. He failed
at that, ended up going to Cambridge, working his way,
working to pay his own way to Why though, if
they had money, did they not want to pay for school?
I wonder. I think maybe his mom wasn't happy about
it or something. I'm not sure because that's the only
thing I couldn't figure out, because she didn't have money
for sure. Um, but he had to pay his own
(18:07):
way through Cambridge, at least undergrad. And while he was
there as an undergrad, chuck, he he pursued his own studies. Yeah.
He basically got a syllabus each quarter, tore it up
and said, you guys don't know this yet, but I'm
Isaac Newton and I'm gonna invent a great figgy cookie
and a lot of other great stuff. That is a
(18:27):
great figgy cookie. Um So, so he almost he basically
failed out or almost self educating himself. But there is
a man named Isaac Barrow who was the Lucazian chair professor,
and he took a notice of Newton and said, I
think there's a little more to this kid than appears
to meet the eye. He was the Robin Williams to
(18:49):
Newton's Matt Damon precisely, you know, precisely, except Damon was
a custodian and Newton was an actual student. But he
did clean rooms too. Yeah, so there is a pretty
deep parallel there. But um so, Newton got his hands
on something by the guy who came up with the
Mercader projection I can't remember his first name, and basically
(19:11):
took this book and expounded on it um and it
was just mind blowing stuff that he did. And he
did it as like a year old. And Barrow got
his hands on it and said, you need to stick around.
So he ended up getting him basically a four year
scholarship for postgraduate studies. Yeah, and not only that, but
he uh for various reasons which we'll get into here,
(19:33):
and there. Newton was reluctant to publish a lot of times,
and Barrow was the one that really helped him say, like,
you know, you need to get this out there. This
is great stuff you've got, ye, Matt Damon. Yes, Like
you know what kind of movies you're going to be
in after this? Yeah, you're going to be Private Ryan. Yeah.
You give me Jason Bourne and The Martian. You can't
(19:57):
think of any other Matt Damon movies. Sure, uh uh
of course. Oh you're gonna be The Scoundrel and The Departed. Yeah,
great movie it is. I thought Jack really overdid it
in that one. Oh. I loved it. Although, dude, I'll
tell you something. Another movie I saw recently was The Shining. Yeah,
(20:18):
I did say I saw it recently because I see
The Shining probably every three months. Yeah, I saw it
again recently. I think that that might be the best
movie ever made. It's pretty great, and no joke, I
really think The Shining might be at least my favorite
movie of all time. Boy he uh, he can set
a mood. It is so good and you can watch it.
(20:42):
I can watch it anytime, any time of year, any
time of day, any day of the week. Christmas morning exactly. Yeah,
and I'll enjoy it just as much as I would
on like Halloween or something. You know, it's my honeymoon night.
Let's watch the shining right all the normal times. So um,
Newton eventually, uh, well, actually not eventually. He was forced
(21:04):
to leave Cambridge for um a little while because the
bubonic plague swathed through London to the tune of about
a hundred thousand people dead in six months. That's qui.
So they closed Cambridge and said everyone go home. He
went home, and everyone go home to London. He went
(21:26):
home and h had a what they called later a
year of miracles. He and us mirabilis uh. And it
was a little bit mythical, and that supposedly he came
up with all the great stuff of his career in
this one year, probably played up for the newspapers or
you know, for his own reputation of of the age,
(21:48):
because in reality he did come up with a lot
of great stuff, but he clearly didn't come up with
everything in that year. He might have started a lot
of good uh conversations in his head about things, but um,
it was a little trumped up that that was the
year of miracles. So it probably, like you said, there
were some things I'm sure that he thought of during
(22:08):
this year. But again, he placed his entire career in
this one year, including the apple falling from the tree.
Should we go and cover that? Sure? Did it happen? Uh?
Probably not, And even if it did, it didn't. Historians
are like, that is a fairy tale. On its face,
(22:30):
you can tell it's a fairy tale. But Newton himself
is like, oh no, this happened. That, this is really true.
This is where the theory of gravitational um force sure
came from. Yeah, Like he was laying on the ground,
supposedly looking up at the moon, wondering, how's that thing
just sitting up there? Spin off into space? Yeah, apple
(22:52):
falls and he puts it all together. Sounds kind of unbelievable.
Sounds like folklore to me, it does. But again he
promoted this story. He was definitely for somebody who was
just a hair's breath away from being uh shut in.
And there was a d in there. It was breadth
not breath, I know the difference. Um And and he
(23:16):
didn't have virtually any friends. He had not one, but
two nervous breakdowns in his lifetimes. Very insecure. He was
also like an astute self promoter. Yeah, he he had
a lot of contradictory sort of traits I think so. Um.
Like we said earlier, he was very much noted for
(23:39):
his precision with notes and experimentation. Um, with the averaging
of data and uh what else the scientific method of course,
putting these things into place. Yeah, the scientific method was
already around. He didn't come up with a scientific method,
but he definitely refined it and created the scientific method
as we recognize as it today under ideal scientific inquiry,
(24:03):
when when a scientist today follows that scientific procedure, what
he's doing basically or she is following in Newton's footsteps.
Like Newton took this thing and said, here's the best
way to do this. Like you, you make some observations.
From these observations, you come up with a theory, and
then you figure out an experiment to test that theory,
(24:27):
and then you either discard the theory or you um
you yeah, you test it again until the theory becomes
basically for all intents of purposes proven, And like you said,
as a result, after after this coming up with it,
when he laid this stuff down in his Principia mathematica UM,
which is his big his not his life's work, but
(24:48):
his his biggest published work as far as being widely
accepted and remarkable and game changing. Yes, universe changing quite literally,
or at least it changed our understanding of the universe. Um.
When he when he laid all this stuff down, it's it's.
It wasn't like you could just say it is because
(25:11):
God wills it anymore. It was like, here is the
framework for science from here on out. Follow this, this
is the best practice, and there's math behind all of it.
And that was another thing too, Like, so let's talk
about you want to talk about his Principia mathematica. Well, yeah,
I mean there was just a little thing in there
called the three laws of motion. No biggie physics at all. Right,
(25:34):
So there's inertia um, a body that is at rest
tends to say at rest, acceleration which means things go
super fast sometimes when they're falling, and action and reaction,
which is uh, the cub ball theory. Yeah, and those
are while he didn't completely invent those he he you know,
(25:56):
Galleo started a lot of that talk, a lot that
jibber jabber, but Newton really solidified at all, and it's
remarkable to think that all these years later that's still
the thing. Well, he solidified it. And so what Galileo
did was he said, I've observed this, and it seems
to be universally applicable that if if a ball is
(26:17):
sitting there on a table and nothing's moving it, no
wind is blowing, there's no force acting upon it, it's
not going to spontaneously move. And people went, Galileo, that
was that's amazing. Can you explain why? And Galileo was like, no.
Newton came along and he said, I can explain why.
(26:37):
And he added a third law of motion to that.
And the whole point was he figured out that everything
has mass. Everything that has mass has some sort of
force acting upon it, and as a result, also can
exert force on other bodies that have mass. And what
he figured out that force was, or that magical thing,
(26:58):
was gravity universal gravitation, right, which his law of universal gravitation,
which is also in the principia Um. And again, I
don't think you can overstate this, Chuck. People knew that
like the moon went around the Earth and that it
was somehow adhered to the Earth, but they didn't really
(27:22):
know why. And out of nowhere, like no one before
him had ever suggested, maybe it's this thing called gravity. Newton,
his perspective of the universe, gave us the idea of gravity.
It wasn't there before Newton. It's amazing it was there
because of Newton. It's here now. Like that's a huge contribution,
(27:44):
just that alone. And he's not one of these scientists.
It's like a seven century scientist said this, and he
was close. But it turns out he was wrong in
every way. But it was a good start, like Einstein,
although Einstein did go on to change and uh uh
not adapt well, I guess he adapted. But Newton was
(28:04):
wrong in some cases. But some of these laws are
still spot on right. And this is like the mid
to late six yea. Our understanding of gravity has been
refined tremendously by by Um Einstein and the idea of
relativity and quantum mechanics and all that. But for what
Newton was doing, yes, he explained the universe. He was uh.
(28:27):
He was the first person to say, you know what, uh,
this white light you see isn't actually white. It's actually
a spectrum of colors and everyone's like, what he did
this as a student, and he said watch this and
he got out of prism and bam and everyone went, whoa,
he got out of prison prism. He oh, I got it. Yeah,
(28:48):
And then we had the Dark Side of the Moon
album cover, so you can thank Newton for that as well.
That's right. And he published that in seventeen o four,
and which is way after he experimented with prisms because
he was reluctant to publish things a lot. So let's
talk about that. Was published an optics. Yeah, like magic.
I guess they dropped magic. Yeah, sometimes magic spelled with
(29:11):
a K, which you know, it's like the real thing.
So let's talk about that, chuck. He published um Optics
in seventeen o four, but he was doing these experiments
in like the sixteen sixties um, and he didn't publish
this stuff in part because he could not handle being
(29:32):
challenged criticized. He did not like it, and he got
into it a lot. Like part of the scientific revolution
that was going on was that scientists around the world,
well at least in the West, we're arguing with one another,
we're picking apart one another's theories were um corresponding with
one another about ideas and sharing all these thoughts, but
(29:53):
a lot of it was contentious and um his first
Newton's first nervous breakdown came because Robert Hook said that
he stole some of his ideas, and then they had
it out in the journals through letters back and forth
through the life. Yeah, and then he also the Jesuits
(30:14):
didn't accuse him of stealing any of their ideas, but um,
he was. He was corresponding with the monastery and they
were like, we like your your thoughts, but we think
your experiment might be slightly flawed. And he went for zerk.
He's like what And then he had a nervous breakdown,
which was finally completed in sixteen sixty nine. I believe
(30:35):
with the our sixteen seventy nine, I'm sorry, with the
death of his mother, so he was doing experiments. He
started to kind of come out with him publicly. They
they were challenged in question, he lost his his he
went berserk. It's probably stems from his rejection from childhood.
Of course, he withdrew and then throughout the sixteen seventies
(30:57):
didn't do any kind of um publishing or research. Yeah,
it kind of went dark. Yeah, then his mom dies
and then um, he finally comes back out of it
thanks to the help of like Isaac Barrow, and then
later on other colleagues like Edmund Haley of Haley's comment,
and then finally publishes. But if you notice the date
of the publication of Optics, that comes after Robert Hook,
(31:19):
who is his lifelong arch nemesis, has died, and they
never worked it out. There wasn't some like, uh, leave
on Helm, Robbie robertson deathbed, Hey, I still love you, man,
Like they died, now, come on, they died bitter rivals. Yeah,
Newton and uh Hook. I know a band reference is
(31:43):
probably lost on most people. Just google it. Google the band. Yeah.
And there's also like a hundred dudes that are like, yes,
what a reference? What else did he do? How about
a little something called the reflecting telescope. Yeah, that's a
big one. Back in the day, refracting tell us hopes
were all the rage. But you couldn't really focus that
well on him, which is sort of key with a telescope,
(32:05):
would be like, is that a stock? Sure, let's call
it a stock. Uh, and let's name it after me. Um.
But these mirrors that he said, you know what, dudes,
let's use lenses. It can be about one twelfth size
and in focus. Boom, and all of a sudden, like
if you dropped the average size of a telescope down,
(32:25):
that would be good enough. Yeah, even if it's still Yeah,
but he actually improved it as well. That's right, and
that got him into the Royal Academy when he presented
it at the urging a Barrow again, I think that
was Barrow that actually did the presenting, but he said
it's this guy and just stood off to the side
with his security blanket around his shoulders. He had his woobie. Uh.
(32:49):
And he also created a little something that I hate
called calculus. I and you don't even hate calculus because
I am that unfamiliar with it. Yeah, had to take
a calculus class and I wasn't good at it. The
remarkable thing is he created calculus because the limits of geometry.
He was like, we need more higher level of math
(33:12):
to figure this out, and I'm gonna invent it, not
to figure it out, to explain it makes sense of
it what he figured out. Yeah, so he's like calculus,
it's great with things in motion and geometry. Isn't. And
he was all about, well not all about. He was
keen on things in motion. Yeah, well you kind of
needed him, Like you could say, well this, you know,
an ellipse is is Um. You can describe it geometrically,
(33:35):
but you can't really describe an orbit of something. It's
motion in the in an ellipse, just through normal geometry.
So I'll just invent a supersized version of geometry to
help explain my discoveries. Yeah, and um, it wasn't nuts. Yeah,
it wasn't called calculus though. It was called the fluxions,
(33:57):
which I think, Uh, we should bring back, totally bring
it back. We should call it. Everyone should call it
the fluxions. You might as well. I refer to calculus
so infrequently that I can just call it the flex
and people be like, what does that mean? I'll say,
look it up. All right, let's take a break here
and we will get into the later years of Newton's
(34:19):
life when things got a little weird. All right, So
we mentioned his lifelong rivalry with Robert Hook. Um, not
(34:43):
the pirate, not the pirate? Uh? Was there a pirate
named Robert Hook? Captain Hook from Peter Pan? Was it Robert.
I don't know, he didn't have any on it. Know,
I think I want to say that's James Hook. I
think James Hook. I think you're right. Um so not
the pirate U. He also had a rivalry with um. Well,
he had a rivalry with many scientists. But another dude
(35:06):
who claimed he invented calculus, Oh Liban's. So that's a
weird story, the story of calculus. Who invented calculus? Because
think about it, people don't invent new, more refined forms
of math every day, do they. Well, they don't. They
think they might not even the state. Well, when they
(35:26):
come down off the acid, they realized that it's all
just chicken scraps and get this tinfoil hat off my head.
So when when not only Newton said that he created calculus,
Liban said that he did as well. Within a decade
or some of each other, there was quite a bit
of hubbub over who actually created calculus. And to make
the whole thing even more murky, they had corresponded with
(35:49):
one another about the ideas of calculus. And scientists aren't
not all scientists, but polease, don't write in and say
I'm not like that, but scientists a lot of times
in history, some of the more notable scientists aren't big
on being like, yeah, we we totally like help each other.
It's usually like, no, I invented that, because that's their legacy.
(36:09):
I think that they're fighting for sure, and sometimes it's
definitely pride themselves on their legacy. And Newton was probably
one of them, and big money so he um he
and Leban's had this ongoing dispute and they had their
supporters as well. Who who disputed? And it wasn't just
a Leban's versus Newton in who created calculus. It was
(36:30):
also the Aisles versus the continent, the Catholics versus the Protestants.
There were a lot more divisions to it than just
these two men. But from what I can gather, historians
now believe that um Liban's and Newton independently developed calculus
on their own. Really is that the modern way of thinking? Yeah,
(36:53):
Newton probably beat his notes suggests that he came up
with calculus before Liban's, but that Leban's came up with
it on his own as well. Wow, that's pretty remarkable.
It is. It's almost like a soccer score. Everybody wins,
you know, Uh. He also in the dark years we
talked about when he sort of fell off the radar
(37:13):
and wasn't publishing much. That's when he was getting into
the alchemy um, which we said, um range is what
really was was sort of a precursor to chemistry in
some ways, UM And now we look back on it
with a little more understanding. At the time though it
was illegal up until like I think of right before
his birth, was actually illegal because it was I guess
(37:36):
like one of the dark arts or something, and they
were burning people at the stake for practicing alchemy, right,
which again at the time it was a little fruity,
you know, but it wasn't so much so that uh,
it wasn't science wasn't necessarily so close to the concept
of mystical truths as it is today. Um, So you
(38:00):
could conceivably be involved in scientific inquiry and find yourself
going down this alley of alchemy. Even still, Newton was like,
this would be bad for my name, and I might
be fired if they found out that I was into alchemy,
and so he kept it a closely guarded secret. Yeah.
Not only did he, but his family after his death
kind of kept that stuff quiet for a while, and
(38:20):
I think it was the early ninety nineties when all
of his works were finally published and they were like whoa, Yeah,
it was really all over the place, well out there. Uh.
We also mentioned earlier briefly that he thought that um,
he thought that alchemy was like any ancient riddle, um,
and it was up to him and other uh, up
(38:42):
to him, Jehovah sank this unus Yeah, to figure it out,
and the answer is out there. And he's one in
a line of great men chosen to do so little
screwy Yeah at this point, right, m I being cold,
He believed in the Philosopher's Stone. I have a tremendous
amount of respect for him, having a scientific mind that
(39:03):
was open to all sorts of stuff. And again, this
was the seventeenth century, so let's cut him some slack.
But he did believe in the Philosopher's Stone, which was
thought to aid in alchemy cure disease, and um, somethink
or thought that like the key to eternal life was
in the Saucerer's stone, Philosopher's Stone. Sorry, that's a whole
(39:25):
different things, a little different, and chuck um. Not only
was he into alchemy and mysticism as well. Um, he
also was very much into uh like obscure Christian stuff too. Yeah. So,
like one of his pursuits that he amused himself with
(39:45):
on the side was chronology. He wanted to he believed
the Bible was a literal history of um the world,
and that the prophecies in the Bible were directly from
God who could who who could see to the end
of time and knew everything that was gonna happen already.
(40:06):
So everything in the Bible he called a history of
future events basically. And so his whole thing was, if
you can go back, now that we understand time keeping
better and astronomy, you could go back and sink, um,
things that happened in the Bible to current astronomical dates.
(40:26):
You can put a current date on them, so you
could say when, um, you know this happened, when the
walls of Jericho actually fell, because he believed all this
stuff happened, or when something might happen in the future exactly.
And apparently he did just that. He interpreted this one
section of the Bible about the end of the world coming,
and he dated it to coming up. We'll see, So uh,
(40:51):
I read a little blurb from a scholar of on
Newton who said, like he, this is something he did
to amuse himself in private. It was never meant for
perfect consumption. But he probably would have believed that he
got that date right. Oh really, Yeah, he he worried
about getting dates wrong and didn't think that people should
(41:11):
mess around with stuff like that because you are fallible
and in setting dates like that. Um, which is probably
why he never meant it for publication. But he probably
thought he was right. Yeah, and that had he lived
in twenty six he would have seen the end of
the world. He also dabbled in something called arianism, which uh,
(41:32):
has nothing to do with white people. Um, it was,
it was. It was actually a priest named Arius from
Libya is the Olivian priest who came up with this.
And the idea is that um the Holy Trinity, Father, Son,
holy Spirit. And in Christian theology it disrupted that and
said that Jesus may have been created by God, but
he is not divine. If you believe in arianism, that's
(41:56):
what you believe. And Newton was an adherent of arianism,
which super popular at the time or ever. Probably it
was basically stamped out by the seventh century, and here's
Newton in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century. Yeah, he's like,
oh this, this makes a lot of sense to me.
What an obscure, arcane thing to think of. And he
(42:17):
got into a religion in college. Actually another weird thing
to do, even at that time. Yeah, that's when you
get out of religion. Sure, that's when you started to
question things, right, that's when he got into it. Apparently
one of the first things that he did he was
a bit of a prude. One of the first things
he did was um, right down a list of every
sin he ever committed. And they weren't exactly groundbreaking, like
(42:40):
um Silverman points out that one of them was he
broke the Sabbath by baking pies one Sunday. How dare
he like? This is the kind of sins that he's like.
He also said he wanted to burn his mother and
stepfather alive in their home, which was one of the
sins he recorded. So he did have a darker side,
did he really? Oh yeah, oh we really did. That
(43:02):
wasn't a joke. I thought. I was like, that was
a weird joke. No, he had quite arranged from baking
pies to burning his parents alive, like just wanting to though, right, yeah, Okay,
he didn't make an attempt to r no, no, no, no,
that was yeah, the sin was threatening to her, wanting
to I'm not sure if he got verbalized it or
if he just thought it in his head. Yeah, but
(43:22):
like he was a rejected little kid, and yeah, yeah,
who wouldn't want So we're talking about arianism though there's
um it's a very heretical thought that Jesus isn't divine,
but that you should still worship him, right, Yeah, it
was a very unusual line of thinking, right, and and
(43:45):
like critics of that kind of thinking say, well that
that worships um poly or that creates poly theism because
you're worshiping God, but you're also worshiping Jesus, who's not divine.
You're a wrong wrong wrong, wrong wrong. And the Council
of New See you UM, which was a learned council
that basically decided what went into the Bible UH in
(44:05):
the fourth century, said uh, no, the Trinity is absolutely
correct and anything against that is heresy and you should
be burned at the state. So even that, UM, I
get the impression that his fellow dons at Cambridge I
knew that he was into Arianism, or if they didn't,
they may have suspected that he had unorthodox beliefs about Christianity,
(44:27):
and so that just created an even wider gulf between
him and and the people who he saw on a
daily basis. Well, he definitely thought that Catholicism and uh
some other like branches of major religions were very corrupt
and not to be trusted. Uh, yeah, he was. He
was an odd guy. Uh, we can't get that across enough. Um.
(44:50):
Later in life, but he did not sit on his laurels.
Later in life, he was made uh he accepted a
position at the mint um and apparently that that sort
of sounds like the old I'm going to retire as
the CEO and work as a consultant, Like I'll make
more money than I did ever before for not doing
(45:10):
much work. Um. Apparently that was the deal with the mint.
He got appointed later on in your life to the
mint and he kind of just made a lot of
dough and didn't do much. He was like, no, no,
no, no no, no, I'm gonna actually do something. He like
three years later became master of the Mint and he
is the one responsible for changing the English pound standard
from sterling to gold. Is that right? Yes, he was
actually trying to get things done and he went after counterfeiters,
(45:33):
went after counterfeiters. Pretty interesting. Yeah, not bad. He was
also later in life elected the president of the Royal
Society of London, which is the Academy of Sciences in
in the UK. Yeah, he was a member of parliament.
He's elected to parliament, but he yes, he was twice.
And actually he was knighted in seventeen o five and
the Queen apparently knighted him for political reasons. She wanted
(45:57):
to help He was standing for parliament again and she
wanted to help his chances of being elected, so she
united him, not for his scientific achievements because of the
election of se five. It didn't help. He still didn't
unseat the guy that she wanted out of office, but
he got knighted anyway. Good for him. Yeah, what a
(46:17):
complex dude. Yeah, there's a T shirt just a picture
of him complex dude underneath, and we should We didn't
really talk quite enough about it, but he definitely stole
people's ideas in certain ways. There's a guy named um
John Flamsteed, and he, like Newton, used a lot of
(46:40):
his work to help form the basis of his theory
of universal gravitation, and Um Flamsteed, I guess, rubbed Newton
the wrong way, and Newton just removed any reference to
Flamsteed in his second edition of the Principia. I think
all scientists build on the backs of those who came
before them. But it's been it'd be cool to say, like,
(47:02):
and this would not have been possible without the work
of Flamsteed, not like, oh you know what, let's redact
that and took his name out of there because I
think it's a jerk. I don't like how it's spelled. Yeah.
We'll end with his epitaph, though, because it definitely gets
the point across I think correctly. His epithap says, mortals rejoice.
That's so great an ornament to the human race. Wow.
(47:22):
I thought it was business in front, party in the rear. No,
he invented the mullet. You know. Oh, I know, you're ready.
I'm ready. If you want to know more about Isaac Newton,
type those words into the search part how stuff works
dot Com. Since I said search parts time for listener mail.
(47:45):
I'm gonna call this don't yuck someone's yum. Hey, guys,
after listening, after listening for years, love you guys. Your
Christmas episode had me yelling at my iPhone and I
decided I need to send a note. You were both
adamant about ever even trying fruitcake and then went on
to insult it with open barrels. I probably would have
agreed with you three weeks ago, because I also never
(48:07):
touched a fruitcake or eating one. However, last week I
finally looked at the ingredients was amazed. Sugar, molasses, ginger,
fruit loaded with rum. Uh, there is rum in the batter,
and when done baking, you actually drizzle with more rum,
wrap it and cheeseball to soak it in even more
with rum. The only bad thing I can figure out
about fruitcake is that this particular recipe needs to sit
(48:28):
and rum for ten weeks before eating. So just because
you have not tried fruitcake, you shouldn't be such naysayers.
Give fruitcake a break. My nephew has several rules, and
rule number four is don't yuck someone's yum. You know
that that's absolutely true. We were total youm yunkers. Uh.
And as soon as I read this, I was like, man,
(48:49):
I was a young yunker. I need to try fruitcake.
Apparently there's this thing going on where Slate was like
beer is too much hops in it? What's the deal?
I've seen a lot of some somebody like that. It's
hate down of it. That went viral. That was like,
what what is it to you? If you don't like
hops and your beer drinking different kinds of beer, why
do you have to publish an article about how you
don't like hops. At the same time, it's like, really,
(49:13):
is that taking away from your enjoyment of your happy
beer to know that somebody at Slate doesn't like it.
I think what I've heard the complaint of, and this
is on the Stuff you Should Know message board and otherwise,
is that non hops enthusiasts are aggravated that the craft
beer movement these days is way too hoppy and it's
hard to find things other than pale ales and I
(49:34):
p a s. But that's not true. There's plenty of
craft beers out there that aren't p seems to be
that there's a lot of i pas, but it seems
like a lot of people love them. That's probably what
they're making them, right, Like I can't stand barley wines.
But you don't hear me saying I can't stand barley wines.
They're discussed much. Let's take the time to write an
article about it. Yeah, who cares? Yeah, I guess I'm
(49:55):
conflicted about all this. They're both sides are wrong. Big
shout out to our friend at Creature Comforts and Athens
and they're delicious Tropicalia, which made I think their brewery
was one of the top five best new breweries according
to uh maybe Forbes some big magazine and a huge
shout out checked the Bowler Beer Company, who sent us
(50:16):
a bunch of huge bombers that were awesome. And um,
I gave the barley wine one to know by the way,
I really he like just soaked his beard in it
and let it seep in. Yeah. And while we're talking
about free booze, I was lucky enough to take home
the shaker and spoonbox that got sent to us. What
it's like Blue Apron, but for cocktails. They send you
(50:38):
everything but the booze, including like a zester. I needed
a zester, like all the different kinds of like, um,
Demoera syrup and everything you need plus cocktail recipes. You've
been enjoying it. Oh, I, it's already long gone enjoyed.
They were great. It's just like ad bourbon and follow
the recipes, but they're like really sophisticated smart recipes that
(50:58):
you may never try that are like all the ingredients
you need an easy instructions. So it was good. And
the guy said, I think his name is Mike. He said,
if you and Jerry wanted to box, he was totally
hooked up. I strongly recommend. Yes, there were more than
one tincture in the box. Uh and um to follow up,
there's the longest list you mail ever on the Brooklyn
(51:19):
or I'm sorry the Boulder h Beer Company. Uh, You're
hoodie T shirt that you sent me is one of
my favorite new shirts. Yes and where all the time. Yes,
he does alright, so that wait, hold on, it might
as well. Thank Little Bit Sweets for the nice and
thank you very much to Mona Collin Tinne and her
family for sending the box. The annual box of Christmas
(51:43):
goodies that's always the precursor to our administring industry. Oh
and thank you to the hex they sent us like
a bunch of Corrabas gift certificates that we're gonna use
for lunch. Oh really Yeah, and a bunch of other
stuff too. But I mean like they sent us a
significant amount of Rob's gift. Ki, you got this in
your wallet? Yeah, I got them tucked in my cheek. Uh.
(52:05):
So that is from Caroline from New York and her nephew.
We didn't mean to yuck the yum. Yeah, you're right, nephew. Yep.
Sometimes kids can set adult straight. Yeah, just don't do
it much or you'll get the old belt. Just kidding. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us to
(52:26):
send us stuff, to send us an email to take
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Hey, everybody out there in the United States, we are
coming on tour in January to select cities. Yea, so
probably the city where you are is really really cold.
Come down below the frost line and see us. Yeah,
and you know, iup, you're in a cold place. We
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(01:03):
That is right. So we'll see you guys in Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hi,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is the Stuff you should know.
(01:26):
H that was my Isaac Newton press. Really yeah, you
didn't have an accent, that was That's what he sounded like. Oh,
it's very it's a very common misconception that British people
in the seventeenth century sound like British people today. They
actually sounded exactly like how I existed. All right, well
you did extra research, then it's pretty good. Let's travel
(01:49):
back in time. We we just had a nice ten
minute discussion Jerry and you and I about or me? Alright, uh,
who cares? Yeah, about pop culture things that we've ingested
since our break six weeks ago. Yep, And that could
be a show. Everyone wants to know what we watched
(02:12):
and absorbed and how we feel about it, but they
never will. We talked about making of a Murderer or
making a Murderer. We talked about Hateful Eight and Star
Wars and The Revenant. People want to know, but they
never will. You gotta keep him mysterious, right, guys, that's right.
(02:33):
And all this leads to Isaac Newton, who it was.
So you know, um Wolf from Science World. Who Wolf
from Science World. It's a very very bona fide science website.
No dumbing down there it so Wolf from put it
like this, He's the bomb dignity. It is no, it
(02:59):
is no exaggeration to say that Isaac Newton is the
single most important contributor to the development of modern science.
And Wolf from Science World knows what they're talking about
when it comes to contributors to science. Yeah, you know what,
I will agree with that, even though we will see
he was many things, including a little screwy, super screwy.
(03:20):
But um, what I gathered after researching this dude, is
that science this is seventeenth century stuff going on. Science
was the wild West. And he came in like a
sheriff and basically brought order and discipline and said, this
is the way we should do things if we want
to be taken seriously, guys, varmints. Um, you can't just
(03:42):
say things like the world's flat. You gotta prove it
or or this is kind of the thinking. And he
really kind of rose to prominence while the scientific revolution
was already going, but he very much contributed to it
because still at the time you could be like, well,
the uh, the Earth spins because God spun it and
(04:03):
it is God's will, and like people would be like,
absolutely scientist. Not the case after Newton came along. Now
it's like, you gotta prove the stuff. There's gotta be
a method in place, you gotta test things again. And
again he was I didn't know this. He was one
of the or if not the first person to average data. Yeah,
what did they do before that? Just cherry pick something?
(04:25):
Probably they're like, oh, that looks like the nice round number.
I'll go, I'll use this one. So like, if he measured,
say the how long a top spun because that's what
scientists measure a lot of top spinning. Um, if he
measured it four or five times, then he got different
measurements every time. Yeah, I guess before they would just
pick whatever when they like the most. It just seems
so he was the first one to average. Yeah. It
(04:46):
just seems so second nature to think while averaging something
is what you should do, But back then it wasn't. No,
and that's that's so that came up a lot while
I was reading this article. It's a very good article
by Jacob Silverman one on Jeopardy. Pretty yeah, um he
uh he he. The way that he portrayed Newton. I
(05:08):
think it gets across that we take Newton's work so
for granted these days as just that's the way the
universe works. That to think otherwise, it's just totally alien
to us. And it's that's just such evidence of how
much that man single handedly changed the world. But you
(05:29):
also can't say single handedly he's His genius is unequivocal, right,
But he also did definitely stand on the backs of giants,
on the shoulders of giants, people who came before him,
a sis, and the work of his peers. But he
also like to take a lot of the credit for himself,
sometimes unnecessarily. He was a very complex man. He was
(05:54):
a scientist who deeply believed in God. He believed that
you that there was law in order that could be deduced,
that could be investigated, but it was orderly and rational,
because God was an orderly, rational creator. Yeah, he saw
logic and he thought God was that logic. He also
(06:15):
thought that the stuff that he was uncovering was actually
ancient wisdom that was being recovered from pre Christian civilizations.
That's it gets a little screwy. Yeah, that had um
kind of da Vinci coded, uh, this knowledge in things
like pyramids and stuff like that, and that he was
hand selected as a select view to uncover this knowledge. Yeah,
(06:36):
so much so that he made he made a name
for himself, Chuck. And once you start to really investigate Newton,
you can just kind of see him like tittering to
himself as he's talking to himself in his chambers at Cambridge,
calling himself this out loud to an empty room. Yeah,
he was. He changed his name or didn't change it.
(06:59):
I'm sorry. He had a special name for himself, Jehovah
Sanctus Unice, which means Jehovah the Holy One. And he
he got that name by rolling a twenty sided die
several times. So that was his special uh. I guess
Council of of Unique Scientists, like a league of extraordinary gentleman.
(07:19):
That was a super hero name. Yeah, and he was.
He was an alchemist as well. He very seriously pursued
the study of turning plain old metal into gold of um,
finding long life Elixer's. He was a very complex man,
and a lot of people like to put him in
in this this um rational scientists compartment as like how
(07:42):
we view scientists today typically, And he wasn't that. You
just can't look at science the same in the seventeenth
century as you do today, No, because different. It wasn't
like this guy was helping form science today, and at
the time it was he was seeking answers to the
universe where ever there it was. There weren't many boundaries
to him, Like if he could come to conclusions about
(08:06):
the universe through weird mysticism, then whatever. He still came
to the same conclusions that he did through mathematics, which
by the way, a major part of of which he
helped develop single handedly. Almost. Yeah, it's kind of a
weird time because you could on one hand, be a
very rational thinker and say you have to prove this,
but you can also say that lady didn't float, so
(08:28):
she's a witch and that's why she drowned, and and
be completely like normal, say it with a straight face. Yeah.
That was like like Newton, like I can turn this
mercury into gold, right, there's an elixir that will let
you live forever. And I can also say you should
average data and write the principia. Right, I can also
(08:48):
literally discover gravity, like there was no such thing as
gravity as far as humans were concerned before Isaac Newton
came along. All right, that's a great setup. That was
even better than our field. So January four, which is
yesterday in real time, was his actual birthday? Did not
know that? Weird timing? Um, it depends on the calendar.
(09:12):
Depends on the calendar Christmas Day or January four, right, yes,
but like a year apart rather than like a week
or so apart. Right, Because one of the great myths
is that he was born on Galileo's the day he
Galileo died, which means that he's not true, right. Galileo
reincarnated is what people say. It's some people catch you,
(09:32):
some people like Isaac Newton. Probably I don't think he
said that, but yeah, that was using the old Julian calendar.
When you use the Gregorian calendar, his birthday was actually
Jane uh, January four of the following year, or no
of the year before. I think, oh wow, he got younger.
No of the same year. So like if he was
(09:53):
born in December twenty on one calendar. For the other calendar,
he would go back in time to the beginning ing
of that same year, so almost a year apart. And
the reason that there is a weird discrepancy is um
in fifteen eighty two the Catholic nations converted from the
Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, full hundred or so
years before Newton, or a little less than hundred years,
(10:17):
But it wasn't until the seventeen fifties that the British
Isles Protestants converted to that Gregorian or Catholic calendar. We
should do one of calendars. Oh, we definitely should. More
complex than you think. But in the in in the
in the continent, and in Great Britain or in the UK,
um they I don't know still after all these years.
(10:41):
So it's Great Britain in Northern Ireland, right, the United
Kingdom and Northern Ireland. I'm just gonna let you go
down this road anyway. Uh. They used to notate dates
with um old style and new style, depending on what calendar.
So anyway, that's the whole discrepancy between his birthday. No,
(11:02):
that makes sense, Oh it sure it does. Uh, all right,
so let's go back in time. Let's get in the
way back machine and go back to one of those
two days depending on our calendar that we have in
the way back machine. How it's programmed, well, the way
back machines programmed to um Gregorian. So it's fine. Great. Uh,
(11:27):
So we are back when he was born as a
little baby. He was a premature and very sickly. And
here's how things can go in the world. He wasn't
supposed to live. And like, what would the world have
been like without Isaac Newton? Pretty dark? Yeah, or at
least it would have taken them longer. Maybe, yeah, maybe
it just would have been someone else, like the clapper
would have been invented, but we would just assume it
(11:47):
worked because God willed it too. That's right. Born uh
in eighteen I'm sorry, sixteen forty three, not eight um.
He was from a family of farmers that did pretty
well for themselves, although his dad, Isaac died before a
few months before he was born, and was an illiterate
farmer who was successful at his work, but very big
(12:10):
that his father died before he was born. Because he
never quite got over that. He ended up um living
for a short time with his mother and new stepdad,
Reverend Barnabas Smith. But he sounded like a jerk who
did not like Isaac said, I cast the out, And
he was cast out and lived with his maternal grandmother
for nine years from age three to twelve. Yeah, I
(12:31):
mean it was pretty much raised by his maternal grandmother. Yeah,
and he was apparently old enough to realize what was
going on, because the any psychoanalyst would have a field
day with Newton, because he grew up to be a
very insecure man who had a tremendous amount of difficulty
trusting people because he's rejected, yes by his mother. Um
(12:53):
and who who who suffered from what you would probably
call these days hostile attribution bias, where the any any
slight or something was clearly intended by the other party.
Everybody else was hostile and out. Again, I'm not necessarily
making a paranoid but just any slight was intentional, even
when it was unintentional. It's a way to live. Yeah,
(13:15):
it took everything personally interesting. So this led over his
life to a couple of nervous breakdowns. Um, and you
know that also had to do with the fact that
he worked tirelessly and didn't sleep well and was in
a lot of ways a prototypical scientists like he never
got married, was just consumed with his work and didn't
(13:36):
take care of himself and uh, sort of obsessed with
his with his life's work. Yeah, and some people have
posthumously diagnosed him, including Simon Baron Cohen who's a um
an expert on autism and uh uh Asperger's borat his relative. Interesting.
I don't think it's his brother, but there are related Yeah,
(14:00):
I was totally kidding. Well, you're totally right. So what
are he diagnosed with Asperger's? But that's definitely come under
fire lately. They think that So there's something UM called
I don't remember what it's called. But in sixteen his
second his second nervous breakdown in the sixteen nineties, he
um they he stopped doing any kind of scientific research
(14:24):
I for that, and he apparently declined mentally compared to
his previous state, which means that he came down to
about normal levels I would guess. But they think that
it was actually mercury poisoning. Yeah, and that he wasn't
necessarily autistic. It's an easy catch all to put him
in that in that again in that compartment these days,
(14:47):
but we don't know enough about him to say that
whether he was autistic, like like one of the um
one of the evidences was that he didn't play with
the other kids, Um, he just kept two himself. So
they're like, well, that that shows a lack of social
communication skills or or um, you know, being able to
(15:08):
connect with others. But then if you look back at
historical data, he he he tried to hang out with
his peers at school, but they didn't like hanging out
with them because he was too smart for them, so
they shunned him. So, you know, does that make him
autistic or does does that mean he had autism spectral
disorder spectrum disorder or aspergers. You can't say he may have,
(15:31):
but easy to go back now and put people on
the on the spectrum. But they do think because he
was exhumed a few hundred years after his death and
they found a lot of mercury still like in his
um system or in his bones, I would guess, um,
and they think that he inadvertently poisoned himself and that
(15:52):
that led to his second nervous breakdown and mental decline. Interesting, Yeah,
all right, Well, let's take a break here and uh
we'll talk about his schooling years right after this. All right,
(16:18):
so Newton in school, Uh wasn't a great student in
high school? Um? He who was the mascot? Was there
was there one? I don't think so, okay, because I
thought they were God that would be like really great
trivia Newton's high school mascot? What was yours in Silanto's mind?
(16:39):
What you remember Silanto? The kid who's like watching me,
watching me night. You guys went to the same high school.
Remember I told you we were the Red and Raiders Raiders? Okay? Yeah,
and my elementary school was the Red and Little Raiders. Ah.
That is cute, isn't it? H l I l Um.
So he wasn't a great student. He was also a
(17:01):
terrible farmer because of course, being uh the son of
a farmer. They were like, you need to work on
the farm. And there are some people that think he'd
purposefully like he was clearly smart enough to do this,
but purposely failed at it. So he didn't have to
do it because he was really into book learning. Uh
so that makes sense to me. Um, he did continue
his education because he wasn't farming I went on to Cambridge,
(17:23):
but UM had to act as a valot to wealthy
students for a little while. Yeah, way through basically what
we would consider undergraduate school. Yeah, and then he got
a scholarship which allowed him to continue UM through his
uh graduate studies. But all that didn't happen in like
some smooth things. So he went to school first. His
(17:45):
mom came back for him, took him out of school,
tried to set him up as a farmer. He failed
at that, ended up going to Cambridge, working his way,
working to pay his own way to Why though, if
they had money, did they not want to pay for school?
I wonder. I think maybe his mom wasn't happy about
it or something. I'm not sure because that's the only
thing I couldn't figure out, because she didn't have money
for sure. Um, but he had to pay his own
(18:07):
way through Cambridge, at least undergrad. And while he was
there as an undergrad, chuck, he he pursued his own studies. Yeah.
He basically got a syllabus each quarter, tore it up
and said, you guys don't know this yet, but I'm
Isaac Newton and I'm gonna invent a great figgy cookie
and a lot of other great stuff. That is a
(18:27):
great figgy cookie. Um So, so he almost he basically
failed out or almost self educating himself. But there is
a man named Isaac Barrow who was the Lucazian chair professor,
and he took a notice of Newton and said, I
think there's a little more to this kid than appears
to meet the eye. He was the Robin Williams to
(18:49):
Newton's Matt Damon precisely, you know, precisely, except Damon was
a custodian and Newton was an actual student. But he
did clean rooms too. Yeah, so there is a pretty
deep parallel there. But um so, Newton got his hands
on something by the guy who came up with the
Mercader projection I can't remember his first name, and basically
(19:11):
took this book and expounded on it um and it
was just mind blowing stuff that he did. And he
did it as like a year old. And Barrow got
his hands on it and said, you need to stick around.
So he ended up getting him basically a four year
scholarship for postgraduate studies. Yeah, and not only that, but
he uh for various reasons which we'll get into here,
(19:33):
and there. Newton was reluctant to publish a lot of times,
and Barrow was the one that really helped him say, like,
you know, you need to get this out there. This
is great stuff you've got, ye, Matt Damon. Yes, Like
you know what kind of movies you're going to be
in after this? Yeah, you're going to be Private Ryan. Yeah.
You give me Jason Bourne and The Martian. You can't
(19:57):
think of any other Matt Damon movies. Sure, uh uh
of course. Oh you're gonna be The Scoundrel and The Departed. Yeah,
great movie it is. I thought Jack really overdid it
in that one. Oh. I loved it. Although, dude, I'll
tell you something. Another movie I saw recently was The Shining. Yeah,
(20:18):
I did say I saw it recently because I see
The Shining probably every three months. Yeah, I saw it
again recently. I think that that might be the best
movie ever made. It's pretty great, and no joke, I
really think The Shining might be at least my favorite
movie of all time. Boy he uh, he can set
a mood. It is so good and you can watch it.
(20:42):
I can watch it anytime, any time of year, any
time of day, any day of the week. Christmas morning exactly. Yeah,
and I'll enjoy it just as much as I would
on like Halloween or something. You know, it's my honeymoon night.
Let's watch the shining right all the normal times. So um,
Newton eventually, uh, well, actually not eventually. He was forced
(21:04):
to leave Cambridge for um a little while because the
bubonic plague swathed through London to the tune of about
a hundred thousand people dead in six months. That's qui.
So they closed Cambridge and said everyone go home. He
went home, and everyone go home to London. He went
(21:26):
home and h had a what they called later a
year of miracles. He and us mirabilis uh. And it
was a little bit mythical, and that supposedly he came
up with all the great stuff of his career in
this one year, probably played up for the newspapers or
you know, for his own reputation of of the age,
(21:48):
because in reality he did come up with a lot
of great stuff, but he clearly didn't come up with
everything in that year. He might have started a lot
of good uh conversations in his head about things, but um,
it was a little trumped up that that was the
year of miracles. So it probably, like you said, there
were some things I'm sure that he thought of during
(22:08):
this year. But again, he placed his entire career in
this one year, including the apple falling from the tree.
Should we go and cover that? Sure? Did it happen? Uh?
Probably not, And even if it did, it didn't. Historians
are like, that is a fairy tale. On its face,
(22:30):
you can tell it's a fairy tale. But Newton himself
is like, oh no, this happened. That, this is really true.
This is where the theory of gravitational um force sure
came from. Yeah, Like he was laying on the ground,
supposedly looking up at the moon, wondering, how's that thing
just sitting up there? Spin off into space? Yeah, apple
(22:52):
falls and he puts it all together. Sounds kind of unbelievable.
Sounds like folklore to me, it does. But again he
promoted this story. He was definitely for somebody who was
just a hair's breath away from being uh shut in.
And there was a d in there. It was breadth
not breath, I know the difference. Um And and he
(23:16):
didn't have virtually any friends. He had not one, but
two nervous breakdowns in his lifetimes. Very insecure. He was
also like an astute self promoter. Yeah, he he had
a lot of contradictory sort of traits I think so. Um.
Like we said earlier, he was very much noted for
(23:39):
his precision with notes and experimentation. Um, with the averaging
of data and uh what else the scientific method of course,
putting these things into place. Yeah, the scientific method was
already around. He didn't come up with a scientific method,
but he definitely refined it and created the scientific method
as we recognize as it today under ideal scientific inquiry,
(24:03):
when when a scientist today follows that scientific procedure, what
he's doing basically or she is following in Newton's footsteps.
Like Newton took this thing and said, here's the best
way to do this. Like you, you make some observations.
From these observations, you come up with a theory, and
then you figure out an experiment to test that theory,
(24:27):
and then you either discard the theory or you um
you yeah, you test it again until the theory becomes
basically for all intents of purposes proven, And like you said,
as a result, after after this coming up with it,
when he laid this stuff down in his Principia mathematica UM,
which is his big his not his life's work, but
(24:48):
his his biggest published work as far as being widely
accepted and remarkable and game changing. Yes, universe changing quite literally,
or at least it changed our understanding of the universe. Um.
When he when he laid all this stuff down, it's it's.
It wasn't like you could just say it is because
(25:11):
God wills it anymore. It was like, here is the
framework for science from here on out. Follow this, this
is the best practice, and there's math behind all of it.
And that was another thing too, Like, so let's talk
about you want to talk about his Principia mathematica. Well, yeah,
I mean there was just a little thing in there
called the three laws of motion. No biggie physics at all. Right,
(25:34):
So there's inertia um, a body that is at rest
tends to say at rest, acceleration which means things go
super fast sometimes when they're falling, and action and reaction,
which is uh, the cub ball theory. Yeah, and those
are while he didn't completely invent those he he you know,
(25:56):
Galleo started a lot of that talk, a lot that
jibber jabber, but Newton really solidified at all, and it's
remarkable to think that all these years later that's still
the thing. Well, he solidified it. And so what Galileo
did was he said, I've observed this, and it seems
to be universally applicable that if if a ball is
(26:17):
sitting there on a table and nothing's moving it, no
wind is blowing, there's no force acting upon it, it's
not going to spontaneously move. And people went, Galileo, that
was that's amazing. Can you explain why? And Galileo was like, no.
Newton came along and he said, I can explain why.
(26:37):
And he added a third law of motion to that.
And the whole point was he figured out that everything
has mass. Everything that has mass has some sort of
force acting upon it, and as a result, also can
exert force on other bodies that have mass. And what
he figured out that force was, or that magical thing,
(26:58):
was gravity universal gravitation, right, which his law of universal gravitation,
which is also in the principia Um. And again, I
don't think you can overstate this, Chuck. People knew that
like the moon went around the Earth and that it
was somehow adhered to the Earth, but they didn't really
(27:22):
know why. And out of nowhere, like no one before
him had ever suggested, maybe it's this thing called gravity. Newton,
his perspective of the universe, gave us the idea of gravity.
It wasn't there before Newton. It's amazing it was there
because of Newton. It's here now. Like that's a huge contribution,
(27:44):
just that alone. And he's not one of these scientists.
It's like a seven century scientist said this, and he
was close. But it turns out he was wrong in
every way. But it was a good start, like Einstein,
although Einstein did go on to change and uh uh
not adapt well, I guess he adapted. But Newton was
(28:04):
wrong in some cases. But some of these laws are
still spot on right. And this is like the mid
to late six yea. Our understanding of gravity has been
refined tremendously by by Um Einstein and the idea of
relativity and quantum mechanics and all that. But for what
Newton was doing, yes, he explained the universe. He was uh.
(28:27):
He was the first person to say, you know what, uh,
this white light you see isn't actually white. It's actually
a spectrum of colors and everyone's like, what he did
this as a student, and he said watch this and
he got out of prism and bam and everyone went, whoa,
he got out of prison prism. He oh, I got it. Yeah,
(28:48):
And then we had the Dark Side of the Moon
album cover, so you can thank Newton for that as well.
That's right. And he published that in seventeen o four,
and which is way after he experimented with prisms because
he was reluctant to publish things a lot. So let's
talk about that. Was published an optics. Yeah, like magic.
I guess they dropped magic. Yeah, sometimes magic spelled with
(29:11):
a K, which you know, it's like the real thing.
So let's talk about that, chuck. He published um Optics
in seventeen o four, but he was doing these experiments
in like the sixteen sixties um, and he didn't publish
this stuff in part because he could not handle being
(29:32):
challenged criticized. He did not like it, and he got
into it a lot. Like part of the scientific revolution
that was going on was that scientists around the world,
well at least in the West, we're arguing with one another,
we're picking apart one another's theories were um corresponding with
one another about ideas and sharing all these thoughts, but
(29:53):
a lot of it was contentious and um his first
Newton's first nervous breakdown came because Robert Hook said that
he stole some of his ideas, and then they had
it out in the journals through letters back and forth
through the life. Yeah, and then he also the Jesuits
(30:14):
didn't accuse him of stealing any of their ideas, but um,
he was. He was corresponding with the monastery and they
were like, we like your your thoughts, but we think
your experiment might be slightly flawed. And he went for zerk.
He's like what And then he had a nervous breakdown,
which was finally completed in sixteen sixty nine. I believe
(30:35):
with the our sixteen seventy nine, I'm sorry, with the
death of his mother, so he was doing experiments. He
started to kind of come out with him publicly. They
they were challenged in question, he lost his his he
went berserk. It's probably stems from his rejection from childhood.
Of course, he withdrew and then throughout the sixteen seventies
(30:57):
didn't do any kind of um publishing or research. Yeah,
it kind of went dark. Yeah, then his mom dies
and then um, he finally comes back out of it
thanks to the help of like Isaac Barrow, and then
later on other colleagues like Edmund Haley of Haley's comment,
and then finally publishes. But if you notice the date
of the publication of Optics, that comes after Robert Hook,
(31:19):
who is his lifelong arch nemesis, has died, and they
never worked it out. There wasn't some like, uh, leave
on Helm, Robbie robertson deathbed, Hey, I still love you, man,
Like they died, now, come on, they died bitter rivals. Yeah,
Newton and uh Hook. I know a band reference is
(31:43):
probably lost on most people. Just google it. Google the band. Yeah.
And there's also like a hundred dudes that are like, yes,
what a reference? What else did he do? How about
a little something called the reflecting telescope. Yeah, that's a
big one. Back in the day, refracting tell us hopes
were all the rage. But you couldn't really focus that
well on him, which is sort of key with a telescope,
(32:05):
would be like, is that a stock? Sure, let's call
it a stock. Uh, and let's name it after me. Um.
But these mirrors that he said, you know what, dudes,
let's use lenses. It can be about one twelfth size
and in focus. Boom, and all of a sudden, like
if you dropped the average size of a telescope down,
(32:25):
that would be good enough. Yeah, even if it's still Yeah,
but he actually improved it as well. That's right, and
that got him into the Royal Academy when he presented
it at the urging a Barrow again, I think that
was Barrow that actually did the presenting, but he said
it's this guy and just stood off to the side
with his security blanket around his shoulders. He had his woobie. Uh.
(32:49):
And he also created a little something that I hate
called calculus. I and you don't even hate calculus because
I am that unfamiliar with it. Yeah, had to take
a calculus class and I wasn't good at it. The
remarkable thing is he created calculus because the limits of geometry.
He was like, we need more higher level of math
(33:12):
to figure this out, and I'm gonna invent it, not
to figure it out, to explain it makes sense of
it what he figured out. Yeah, so he's like calculus,
it's great with things in motion and geometry. Isn't. And
he was all about, well not all about. He was
keen on things in motion. Yeah, well you kind of
needed him, Like you could say, well this, you know,
an ellipse is is Um. You can describe it geometrically,
(33:35):
but you can't really describe an orbit of something. It's
motion in the in an ellipse, just through normal geometry.
So I'll just invent a supersized version of geometry to
help explain my discoveries. Yeah, and um, it wasn't nuts. Yeah,
it wasn't called calculus though. It was called the fluxions,
(33:57):
which I think, Uh, we should bring back, totally bring
it back. We should call it. Everyone should call it
the fluxions. You might as well. I refer to calculus
so infrequently that I can just call it the flex
and people be like, what does that mean? I'll say,
look it up. All right, let's take a break here
and we will get into the later years of Newton's
(34:19):
life when things got a little weird. All right, So
we mentioned his lifelong rivalry with Robert Hook. Um, not
(34:43):
the pirate, not the pirate? Uh? Was there a pirate
named Robert Hook? Captain Hook from Peter Pan? Was it Robert.
I don't know, he didn't have any on it. Know,
I think I want to say that's James Hook. I
think James Hook. I think you're right. Um so not
the pirate U. He also had a rivalry with um. Well,
he had a rivalry with many scientists. But another dude
(35:06):
who claimed he invented calculus, Oh Liban's. So that's a
weird story, the story of calculus. Who invented calculus? Because
think about it, people don't invent new, more refined forms
of math every day, do they. Well, they don't. They
think they might not even the state. Well, when they
(35:26):
come down off the acid, they realized that it's all
just chicken scraps and get this tinfoil hat off my head.
So when when not only Newton said that he created calculus,
Liban said that he did as well. Within a decade
or some of each other, there was quite a bit
of hubbub over who actually created calculus. And to make
the whole thing even more murky, they had corresponded with
(35:49):
one another about the ideas of calculus. And scientists aren't
not all scientists, but polease, don't write in and say
I'm not like that, but scientists a lot of times
in history, some of the more notable scientists aren't big
on being like, yeah, we we totally like help each other.
It's usually like, no, I invented that, because that's their legacy.
(36:09):
I think that they're fighting for sure, and sometimes it's
definitely pride themselves on their legacy. And Newton was probably
one of them, and big money so he um he
and Leban's had this ongoing dispute and they had their
supporters as well. Who who disputed? And it wasn't just
a Leban's versus Newton in who created calculus. It was
(36:30):
also the Aisles versus the continent, the Catholics versus the Protestants.
There were a lot more divisions to it than just
these two men. But from what I can gather, historians
now believe that um Liban's and Newton independently developed calculus
on their own. Really is that the modern way of thinking? Yeah,
(36:53):
Newton probably beat his notes suggests that he came up
with calculus before Liban's, but that Leban's came up with
it on his own as well. Wow, that's pretty remarkable.
It is. It's almost like a soccer score. Everybody wins,
you know, Uh. He also in the dark years we
talked about when he sort of fell off the radar
(37:13):
and wasn't publishing much. That's when he was getting into
the alchemy um, which we said, um range is what
really was was sort of a precursor to chemistry in
some ways, UM And now we look back on it
with a little more understanding. At the time though it
was illegal up until like I think of right before
his birth, was actually illegal because it was I guess
(37:36):
like one of the dark arts or something, and they
were burning people at the stake for practicing alchemy, right,
which again at the time it was a little fruity,
you know, but it wasn't so much so that uh,
it wasn't science wasn't necessarily so close to the concept
of mystical truths as it is today. Um, So you
(38:00):
could conceivably be involved in scientific inquiry and find yourself
going down this alley of alchemy. Even still, Newton was like,
this would be bad for my name, and I might
be fired if they found out that I was into alchemy,
and so he kept it a closely guarded secret. Yeah.
Not only did he, but his family after his death
kind of kept that stuff quiet for a while, and
(38:20):
I think it was the early ninety nineties when all
of his works were finally published and they were like whoa, Yeah,
it was really all over the place, well out there. Uh.
We also mentioned earlier briefly that he thought that um,
he thought that alchemy was like any ancient riddle, um,
and it was up to him and other uh, up
(38:42):
to him, Jehovah sank this unus Yeah, to figure it out,
and the answer is out there. And he's one in
a line of great men chosen to do so little
screwy Yeah at this point, right, m I being cold,
He believed in the Philosopher's Stone. I have a tremendous
amount of respect for him, having a scientific mind that
(39:03):
was open to all sorts of stuff. And again, this
was the seventeenth century, so let's cut him some slack.
But he did believe in the Philosopher's Stone, which was
thought to aid in alchemy cure disease, and um, somethink
or thought that like the key to eternal life was
in the Saucerer's stone, Philosopher's Stone. Sorry, that's a whole
(39:25):
different things, a little different, and chuck um. Not only
was he into alchemy and mysticism as well. Um, he
also was very much into uh like obscure Christian stuff too. Yeah. So,
like one of his pursuits that he amused himself with
(39:45):
on the side was chronology. He wanted to he believed
the Bible was a literal history of um the world,
and that the prophecies in the Bible were directly from
God who could who who could see to the end
of time and knew everything that was gonna happen already.
(40:06):
So everything in the Bible he called a history of
future events basically. And so his whole thing was, if
you can go back, now that we understand time keeping
better and astronomy, you could go back and sink, um,
things that happened in the Bible to current astronomical dates.
(40:26):
You can put a current date on them, so you
could say when, um, you know this happened, when the
walls of Jericho actually fell, because he believed all this
stuff happened, or when something might happen in the future exactly.
And apparently he did just that. He interpreted this one
section of the Bible about the end of the world coming,
and he dated it to coming up. We'll see, So uh,
(40:51):
I read a little blurb from a scholar of on
Newton who said, like he, this is something he did
to amuse himself in private. It was never meant for
perfect consumption. But he probably would have believed that he
got that date right. Oh really, Yeah, he he worried
about getting dates wrong and didn't think that people should
(41:11):
mess around with stuff like that because you are fallible
and in setting dates like that. Um, which is probably
why he never meant it for publication. But he probably
thought he was right. Yeah, and that had he lived
in twenty six he would have seen the end of
the world. He also dabbled in something called arianism, which uh,
(41:32):
has nothing to do with white people. Um, it was,
it was. It was actually a priest named Arius from
Libya is the Olivian priest who came up with this.
And the idea is that um the Holy Trinity, Father, Son,
holy Spirit. And in Christian theology it disrupted that and
said that Jesus may have been created by God, but
he is not divine. If you believe in arianism, that's
(41:56):
what you believe. And Newton was an adherent of arianism,
which super popular at the time or ever. Probably it
was basically stamped out by the seventh century, and here's
Newton in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century. Yeah, he's like,
oh this, this makes a lot of sense to me.
What an obscure, arcane thing to think of. And he
(42:17):
got into a religion in college. Actually another weird thing
to do, even at that time. Yeah, that's when you
get out of religion. Sure, that's when you started to
question things, right, that's when he got into it. Apparently
one of the first things that he did he was
a bit of a prude. One of the first things
he did was um, right down a list of every
sin he ever committed. And they weren't exactly groundbreaking, like
(42:40):
um Silverman points out that one of them was he
broke the Sabbath by baking pies one Sunday. How dare
he like? This is the kind of sins that he's like.
He also said he wanted to burn his mother and
stepfather alive in their home, which was one of the
sins he recorded. So he did have a darker side,
did he really? Oh yeah, oh we really did. That
(43:02):
wasn't a joke. I thought. I was like, that was
a weird joke. No, he had quite arranged from baking
pies to burning his parents alive, like just wanting to though, right, yeah, Okay,
he didn't make an attempt to r no, no, no, no,
that was yeah, the sin was threatening to her, wanting
to I'm not sure if he got verbalized it or
if he just thought it in his head. Yeah, but
(43:22):
like he was a rejected little kid, and yeah, yeah,
who wouldn't want So we're talking about arianism though there's
um it's a very heretical thought that Jesus isn't divine,
but that you should still worship him, right, Yeah, it
was a very unusual line of thinking, right, and and
(43:45):
like critics of that kind of thinking say, well that
that worships um poly or that creates poly theism because
you're worshiping God, but you're also worshiping Jesus, who's not divine.
You're a wrong wrong wrong, wrong wrong. And the Council
of New See you UM, which was a learned council
that basically decided what went into the Bible UH in
(44:05):
the fourth century, said uh, no, the Trinity is absolutely
correct and anything against that is heresy and you should
be burned at the state. So even that, UM, I
get the impression that his fellow dons at Cambridge I
knew that he was into Arianism, or if they didn't,
they may have suspected that he had unorthodox beliefs about Christianity,
(44:27):
and so that just created an even wider gulf between
him and and the people who he saw on a
daily basis. Well, he definitely thought that Catholicism and uh
some other like branches of major religions were very corrupt
and not to be trusted. Uh, yeah, he was. He
was an odd guy. Uh, we can't get that across enough. Um.
(44:50):
Later in life, but he did not sit on his laurels.
Later in life, he was made uh he accepted a
position at the mint um and apparently that that sort
of sounds like the old I'm going to retire as
the CEO and work as a consultant, Like I'll make
more money than I did ever before for not doing
(45:10):
much work. Um. Apparently that was the deal with the mint.
He got appointed later on in your life to the
mint and he kind of just made a lot of
dough and didn't do much. He was like, no, no,
no, no no, no, I'm gonna actually do something. He like
three years later became master of the Mint and he
is the one responsible for changing the English pound standard
from sterling to gold. Is that right? Yes, he was
actually trying to get things done and he went after counterfeiters,
(45:33):
went after counterfeiters. Pretty interesting. Yeah, not bad. He was
also later in life elected the president of the Royal
Society of London, which is the Academy of Sciences in
in the UK. Yeah, he was a member of parliament.
He's elected to parliament, but he yes, he was twice.
And actually he was knighted in seventeen o five and
the Queen apparently knighted him for political reasons. She wanted
(45:57):
to help He was standing for parliament again and she
wanted to help his chances of being elected, so she
united him, not for his scientific achievements because of the
election of se five. It didn't help. He still didn't
unseat the guy that she wanted out of office, but
he got knighted anyway. Good for him. Yeah, what a
(46:17):
complex dude. Yeah, there's a T shirt just a picture
of him complex dude underneath, and we should We didn't
really talk quite enough about it, but he definitely stole
people's ideas in certain ways. There's a guy named um
John Flamsteed, and he, like Newton, used a lot of
(46:40):
his work to help form the basis of his theory
of universal gravitation, and Um Flamsteed, I guess, rubbed Newton
the wrong way, and Newton just removed any reference to
Flamsteed in his second edition of the Principia. I think
all scientists build on the backs of those who came
before them. But it's been it'd be cool to say, like,
(47:02):
and this would not have been possible without the work
of Flamsteed, not like, oh you know what, let's redact
that and took his name out of there because I
think it's a jerk. I don't like how it's spelled. Yeah.
We'll end with his epitaph, though, because it definitely gets
the point across I think correctly. His epithap says, mortals rejoice.
That's so great an ornament to the human race. Wow.
(47:22):
I thought it was business in front, party in the rear. No,
he invented the mullet. You know. Oh, I know, you're ready.
I'm ready. If you want to know more about Isaac Newton,
type those words into the search part how stuff works
dot Com. Since I said search parts time for listener mail.
(47:45):
I'm gonna call this don't yuck someone's yum. Hey, guys,
after listening, after listening for years, love you guys. Your
Christmas episode had me yelling at my iPhone and I
decided I need to send a note. You were both
adamant about ever even trying fruitcake and then went on
to insult it with open barrels. I probably would have
agreed with you three weeks ago, because I also never
(48:07):
touched a fruitcake or eating one. However, last week I
finally looked at the ingredients was amazed. Sugar, molasses, ginger,
fruit loaded with rum. Uh, there is rum in the batter,
and when done baking, you actually drizzle with more rum,
wrap it and cheeseball to soak it in even more
with rum. The only bad thing I can figure out
about fruitcake is that this particular recipe needs to sit
(48:28):
and rum for ten weeks before eating. So just because
you have not tried fruitcake, you shouldn't be such naysayers.
Give fruitcake a break. My nephew has several rules, and
rule number four is don't yuck someone's yum. You know
that that's absolutely true. We were total youm yunkers. Uh.
And as soon as I read this, I was like, man,
(48:49):
I was a young yunker. I need to try fruitcake.
Apparently there's this thing going on where Slate was like
beer is too much hops in it? What's the deal?
I've seen a lot of some somebody like that. It's
hate down of it. That went viral. That was like,
what what is it to you? If you don't like
hops and your beer drinking different kinds of beer, why
do you have to publish an article about how you
don't like hops. At the same time, it's like, really,
(49:13):
is that taking away from your enjoyment of your happy
beer to know that somebody at Slate doesn't like it.
I think what I've heard the complaint of, and this
is on the Stuff you Should Know message board and otherwise,
is that non hops enthusiasts are aggravated that the craft
beer movement these days is way too hoppy and it's
hard to find things other than pale ales and I
(49:34):
p a s. But that's not true. There's plenty of
craft beers out there that aren't p seems to be
that there's a lot of i pas, but it seems
like a lot of people love them. That's probably what
they're making them, right, Like I can't stand barley wines.
But you don't hear me saying I can't stand barley wines.
They're discussed much. Let's take the time to write an
article about it. Yeah, who cares? Yeah, I guess I'm
(49:55):
conflicted about all this. They're both sides are wrong. Big
shout out to our friend at Creature Comforts and Athens
and they're delicious Tropicalia, which made I think their brewery
was one of the top five best new breweries according
to uh maybe Forbes some big magazine and a huge
shout out checked the Bowler Beer Company, who sent us
(50:16):
a bunch of huge bombers that were awesome. And um,
I gave the barley wine one to know by the way,
I really he like just soaked his beard in it
and let it seep in. Yeah. And while we're talking
about free booze, I was lucky enough to take home
the shaker and spoonbox that got sent to us. What
it's like Blue Apron, but for cocktails. They send you
(50:38):
everything but the booze, including like a zester. I needed
a zester, like all the different kinds of like, um,
Demoera syrup and everything you need plus cocktail recipes. You've
been enjoying it. Oh, I, it's already long gone enjoyed.
They were great. It's just like ad bourbon and follow
the recipes, but they're like really sophisticated smart recipes that
(50:58):
you may never try that are like all the ingredients
you need an easy instructions. So it was good. And
the guy said, I think his name is Mike. He said,
if you and Jerry wanted to box, he was totally
hooked up. I strongly recommend. Yes, there were more than
one tincture in the box. Uh and um to follow up,
there's the longest list you mail ever on the Brooklyn
(51:19):
or I'm sorry the Boulder h Beer Company. Uh, You're
hoodie T shirt that you sent me is one of
my favorite new shirts. Yes and where all the time. Yes,
he does alright, so that wait, hold on, it might
as well. Thank Little Bit Sweets for the nice and
thank you very much to Mona Collin Tinne and her
family for sending the box. The annual box of Christmas
(51:43):
goodies that's always the precursor to our administring industry. Oh
and thank you to the hex they sent us like
a bunch of Corrabas gift certificates that we're gonna use
for lunch. Oh really Yeah, and a bunch of other
stuff too. But I mean like they sent us a
significant amount of Rob's gift. Ki, you got this in
your wallet? Yeah, I got them tucked in my cheek. Uh.
(52:05):
So that is from Caroline from New York and her nephew.
We didn't mean to yuck the yum. Yeah, you're right, nephew. Yep.
Sometimes kids can set adult straight. Yeah, just don't do
it much or you'll get the old belt. Just kidding. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us to
(52:26):
send us stuff, to send us an email to take
us task coop cares. You can send us an email
to Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. You
can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you
Should Know. You can tweet to us at s y
s K podcast, and you can hang out with us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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