And, in the last paragraph of the general scholium, the appendix of the Principia, Newton describes electromagnetism and the role of electrical oscillation in the nervous system. It’s actually the root of the the history of “vibes”
“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...
This is some remarkable intuition. Electromagnetism wasn't even developed as a theory. To observe such varied phenomena like how nerves communicate or what comprises matter or the behaviour of light and postulate they might all have something in common and something to do with the attraction/repulsion seen when objects are rubbed together, is incredible. Was the idea very unique for its time or did scientists at the time hold similar ideas? Do you think it was just a lucky guess in the end that the world didn't turn out to be more complex or was there some reason behind this craziness?
It's tricky in hindsight. He also guessed stuff wrong, and how the biology eventually turned out is not exactly how he imagied. You project a modern understanding on that text but you don't really understand the significance of the phrasing he uses, such as spirit etc. It's a loose match, perhaps better than Democritus and the atom, but still needs hindsight bias.
People had similar theories, like Descartes imagined nerve tubes carrying fluid to act and kind of hydraulic actuation, as well as ancient Greek pneuma theory of vital spirit. Gilbert's work on magnetism and electricity was known, Hooke's work on vibrations.
It's impressive of course but not out of this world unimaginable magic. He plugged his favorite modern theory to biology, replacing the fluid stuff with electric stuff. Tons of people did that kind of thing before and after, sometimes it works, sometimes it leads to nowhere.
The classic “genius effect” where someone is a genius or very good at something and goes do something else and is off base but people will still thing there’s value there.
People just didn’t have the tools to understand this subject at that time.
Nikola Tesla fits this all to well. He was a genius in an very narrow subject and rejected the ideas of his peers in his field. He didn't believe electricity was made of subatomic electrons and it all came from an either. He was even trying to use the Earth as a wireless energy transmitter when it is a grounding source.
Too many people believe that a person really good in context A will be good in context B to Z. Or the Shaolin Monk Fallacy, just because you can do push ups with two fingers and swing a staff does not mean you are instantly good with a pool cue or tennis racket.
Perhaps not instantly good, but there's obviously major skill transfer between domains. In physical domains this is easy to see and understand with countless demonstrations of professional athletes who decide to swap sports and reach a professional level in the new sport with relative ease. And I think the exact same is true in mental domains.
World class expertise in some mental field is not achieved solely by knowledge within that field, but by a distinct ability to process and apply information in a novel way. And that skill is highly transferrable to other fields. Of course you still need to then accumulate information in said other field, which is why it's not instantaneous, but if a world class individual in one field puts their energy towards mastery of another field, I certainly would not bet against their success!
I’m not sure it’s really about skill transfer outside of very related areas. You need to be genetically lucky to hit the very top of a physical or mental field and the odds you have similar gifts in a field with slightly different demands is far higher than average.
Similarly having the drive to actually dedicate yourself to some narrow area could be considered a skill but I think it’s more a personality trait.
By "skill" I'm referring to something far more fundamental, perhaps trait would have been a better word. For instance sports are largely about athleticism, hand eye coordination, strength, and so on. And these all are largely transferrable. Similarly in mental domains I'm referring more about the ability to accumulate and process information while also using it as a tool think more outside the box, than as an ends in and of itself.
Are you saying that a rifle shooter could easily pivot to darts or pool, and a swimmer could just as easily move to baseball? Or a body builder could take on a rock climber because they are in the domain of "Sports"?
All sports have different muscle memory training and thought processes.
"Or the Shaolin Monk Fallacy, just because you can do push ups with two fingers and swing a staff does not mean you are instantly good with a pool cue or tennis racket."
Agreed, it’s astonishing intuition. It’s hard to call it a lucky guess when it is the last paragraph of Newton’s magnum opus. But very hard to explain.
Choosing my words carefully, I think it was a kind of deep and deliberate magic. Of the sort Newton ascribed to Pythagoras as the esoteric discoverer of the inverse square law of gravitation. (see “Newton and the pipes of pan”). Hooke also had a sort of musical, oscillatory, spiraling conception of mental phenomena. So it was in the Zeitgeist.
In any case, it is striking and amazing— and resonant in this age of vibes.
People like Newton, in earlier eras, would be called prophets. And Newton wasn't do far from the religious aspect himself. He was considered crazy in his time, disliked by most. He was an adherent of the occult, in fact he discovered gravity while specifically looking for ways to move objects from afar. Oh, he found it. Today he is revered, and rightly so, but at the time he was hated though he was respected.
> He was considered crazy in his time, disliked by most.
Where did you get that from? As far as I know he was widely respected as a genius in his time and had great professional and social success (including receiving a knighthood of course).
Where is it written that he was considered crazy and disliked?
I don't think prophet is the right word. Prophets didn't develop physics or engineering but warned the tribe of God's impending punishment unless they obey better or similar historic predictions of how God will use floods or draughts or enemy tribes to challenge you etc.
I'm quibbling with the term "prophet", I'm not disparaging the amount or beyondness of Newton's insight. Prophets are generally not known for the "beyond"-ness of their "insights".
There are some insights, but I think you only feel they are remarkable because you have a much more concrete understanding of how things work and you filled the holes in these vague words with your knowledge.
An ancient Greek philosopher said the matter is made of smallest particles. It doesn't mean he found the concept of atoms as we know.
"Did we know the mechanical affections of the particles of rhubarb, hemlock, opium, and a man, as a watchmaker does those of a watch ... we should be able to tell beforehand that rhubarb will purge, hemlock kill, and Opium make a man sleep; as well as a watchmaker can" -- John Locke
The world was very pious then. To have written that paragraph a century earlier may have resulted in ostracizm. To have written it like that was enough given the limited backing that ould be given. It was enough to influence those around and after Newton, it was, in that sense, remarkable.
People today are confused by the word spirit because the word fields quietly replaced it, and they are just as mysterious because we don’t know if they are real.
At the time, 'spirit' was used to mean 'low-viscosity fluid' and 'vapor'. Alcohol and various distilled fluids were called spirits. He didn't necessarily mean 'intangible'.
"Field" is a less mysterious term because it's not polysemous with a supernatural being (ghost) or a distilled alcoholic beverage (soluble liquid).
Sure, it's polysemous with "a cultivated expanse of land", but AFAIK there is no popular, problematic pseudoscientific quackery about suggesting our bodies possess rows of oats.
> Wenn wir das Wesen des Baumes suchen, müssen wir gewahr
werden, daß jenes, was jeden Baum als Baum durch waltet, nicht
selber ein Baum ist, der sich zwischen den übrigen Bäumen antreffen läßt.
Newton leaving it to “future work” is iconic, like casually predicting neuroscience. Meanwhile, French mathematician Lagrange solved orbital parking mechanic over a century before we sent rockets into space
In some sense, yes. I've seen portions of works by people like Newton etc. You had to be a philosopher to read them, much less understand them. In a lot of cases, the same "material" that we learn today required someone to come along later and work out a notation that we can read and teach. My favorite example is the Algebra of Al-Khwarizmi, which contained no numbers, much less equations, but was just a wall of text. In fact, equations were invented later. Also, I think the electromagnetism of Maxwell was reformulated into the equations that we love and cherish by Heaviside.
It's how a lot of science was written, and knowing that makes strong Sapir-Whorf a really funny joke. We didn't derive our ideas about science from our language. Developing our ideas of science shaped our language so it could communicate them efficiently.
(Weak Sapir-Whorf is still a perfectly fine observation, but it's a lot less predictive as a hypothesis.)
The principa and the scholium were written in NeoLatin, the version of Latin adopted from the Renaissance through the 1900s to write scientific, philosophical and other treatises
Yeah, so I’m working on a piece about this. Of course, “cosmic sympathy” and “harmony of the cosmos” goes back to the stoics and Pythagoreans. The direct use of the term vibration in the context of mental activity (“thought vibrations”) is from the American New Thought Movement and Theosophy — that’s where The Beach Boys got it from. But it extends back over the centuries to Newton and then Willis (who used sympathetic vibrations as the basis of his introduction of associationism in psychology).
“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.” https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...