Why Newton was an avid Alchemist...

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If you get freakishly into chemistry - obsessively for years - lots of chemical reactions - 24 hours plus sessions of doing reactions - following the subtle threads - you start seeing everything through it.

The chemistry starts to answer questions about life and the Universe with deep physical metaphors.

The body language of God.

It stops being logic and turns into understanding.

An understanding of the physical realm that holds the spirit to the body. The nature of reality.

Real scientific progress is made through understanding, logic is hindsight.

Why no more Isaac Newtons? Is it because we have found all the big stuff?

Or have we forgotten how it's done?

I love Newton, especially his work with figs.

Really? How about Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman and Witten. There are of the same caliber as Isaac Newton. David Hilbert was a much more talented mathematician than Newton.

reuveyn

You are right reuveyn. There are no doubt more. I got a bit too much velocity on the topic of Newton. I guess it would have been preferable to say why so few Newtons, and why could we not learn more from how they did it.

The point I was trying to make is people think science is generated purely by logical means, yet tend to neglect that science would be bugger all were it not for leaps in logic. Main-stream beliefs do not enrich the main-stream, they merely preserve or stagnate it.

Don't get me wrong, I am an advocate of logic, and science cannot be anything without it. Niels Bohr once summed it up well with "no, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical" in an expression of what else may be needed.

So on the topic of Newton having some "weird" pursuits or perspectives such as alchemy, I think they were required for him to generate the absurd force needed to achieve what he did.

At the end of the day science does not really tell us how it is, it gives us abstractions that predict behaviors. If it's weird but it works, that is all ok.

I don't want to sound pedantic, but I'm a bit confused by your second sentence.
I think there needs to be a distinction between abstract statements in propositional logic and pieces of knowledge we humans may possess about the physical world.

In math, people will often prove the truth of a statement by proving that the negation is false, but they do not always have to use this method. Q is true if and only if (not Q) is false - and it doesn't matter if you start by showing that Q is true or if you start by showing that (not Q) is false. Isn't this correct? (Perhaps someone with knowledge of Godel is going to come and complicate things now?)

When it comes to the physical sciences, perhaps the best we can say is that a scientific theory is an as yet unfalsified hypothesis, and a good theory should (i) explain observed phenomena in a simple non-convoluted way and (ii) make testable predictions

I'm not sure I understand your example either.
Is (Q and ¬R) in the first line a statement?

I don't really understand the point you're trying to make. However, I will say that the only reason why propositional logic is so *useful* in arguments, is because it in indeed applicable to the physical world. Why do you think there needs to be a distinction between propositional logic and knowledge of the physical world?

The answer to your second paragraph: Yes, you are correct. I don't see why you had to reiterate my point. Is there something I misinterpreted, or an obscure point you're trying to make? And Godel is a totally different story, which has a very remote relevance (if any relevance) to this discussion.

As for your third paragraph: I believe anyone not ignorant of science knows this and, therefore, I don't believe it was necessary for you to explain it.

Final paragraph: It means to assume Q and also assume not R, and conclude not Q. Sorry that I didn't make that clear enough. Thank you for pointing that out to me.

When you said "every practical piece of knowledge is only true if it is proven that it is not false", to me you made it sound (whether you meant to or not) as if proving that (not Q) is false is a prerequisite for concluding that Q is true. I was just pointing out that in math, this is not so, and in the physical sciences we never truly prove anything.

I think you raise some interesting questions and make some interesting observations about Newton. At the same time it seems to me that in the middle of your OP you've used a lot of words to say that "Q is true if and only if (not Q) is false", and I am trying to work out if I'd missed something.

And, don't bite my head off, but I still don't understand your example.
If you assume (Q and ¬R) is true, and then later conclude (by experimentation?) that ¬Q is true, then you know your original assumption was false. In other words you now know that (Q and ¬R) is false. But this doesn't tell you anything about whether R is true or not.

Since you now know that ¬Q is true, then you know the original assumptions (Q and ¬R) are false, therefore you can conclude that R is true. If (not R) is false, then R must be true. R = not (not R), and because the double negation of R makes it true in the same way that two negatives make a positive, but only in this case, two negations make a truth.

I hope this helped some. Take care.

don't they speculate newton had asperger?

at any rate, IMO, newton gets a bit too much credit. it's not as though he randomly discovered laws of motion that weren't previously known (in fact, his laws of optics weren't entirely right). And whereas he developed differentiation rules and the very primitive notion of a limit (independently of Liebniz) he didn't really invent calculus. stokes' theorem had, in one budding form or another, existed for a while.

and fyi, alchemy has nothing to do with the history of modern chemistry, which was developed primarily from quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. ><.

Newton did invent an effective version of calculus. He formulated and solved some of the second order differential equations of motion. He also (among others) solved the brachistochrone problem, so he had the beginnings of the calculus of variations. Newton's symbolism was inferior to that of Leibniz which is why we mostly use the dy/dx formalism of Leibniz. The dot over the variable for the time derivative is still used in physics a lot.

Calculus was brewing in other places as well. An interesting historical note: Archimedes formulated a version of integral calculus 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz. If Archimedes had the zero and algebra we would have gotten a 2000 year head start in mathematics.

ruveyn

I think it's pretty much accepted he was.



It depends what you mean by "modern chemistry". There are loads of specializations throughout modern chemistry, that sure, quantum mechanics has contributed to. I have been a chemist for quite some time and I rarely have to think about or apply quantum methods to do what is considered modern chemistry. I use chemicals, thinking about them in terms of small interacting transformable components and make new and modern materials that way, as has been done for a very long time.

I would say quantum mechanics has contributed to the diversity and understanding of modern chemistry, though modern chemistry still heavily relies on many core principles, methods and apparatus developed in the days of alchemy.

There is no chemistry without the Pauli Exclusion Principle. This is the only explanation for the structure described by the Periodic Table of Elements. Modern Chemistry is a branch of quantum physics.

Pre-quantum chemistry is like geology was before the theory of tectonic plates or biology was before the merger of evolution theory and genetics. The older sciences were primarily descriptive and did not have explanatory hypotheses for the underlying processes.

ruveyn

Hermetic alchemy is pretty cool. I would look into it before dismissing it so readily. Same goes for religion. How can anyone scoff at religon without actually studying it? I see this too often with atheists. If you look at relgious fundamentalism, it seems pretty absurd but if you dig into the ancient texts and analyze the words and metaphors it gets pretty deep. Some say that the Torah is all written in numbers.

That is because the Hebrews, like the Greeks had the unfortunate habit of representing numbers by the same letters used to write words.

The Torah is the book of tales and tall stories cherished by the Jewish people.

ruveyn

xD, don't worry ruveyn. i'm not trying to discredit newton. just give a picture of how much life has advanced since his time. and yes, i'd heard that about archimedes.

and metaphors=>numbers? what is this, cryptography? for mathematics to rigidly correspond to the dynamics of physical systems, even some of the most basic Lagrangians have to be represented with Minkowski-space Grassman spinors. These sorts of mathematical complexities were invented in the 1800s (and other such things came even later, well into the 1920s and 30s) and applied to physics in the 1960s, (when quantum relativity grew out of the budding new field of Dirac's early years and into its own very complicated set of axioms).

I remember my brief conversation with David Finkelstein back in...March or so, it was. A veteran physicist over at GA tech, he's actually still there at like, 84 years old or something. i also talked to a much younger guy who's chairman of the department at Wake Forest; he's more of an applied optics/biophysics type researcher. And it's funny, remembering that these people put their life into studying the mathematical complexity of such things (and how Finkelstein warned me that I would be "humbled" by quantum field theory) and then seeing people cast aside all form of complexity (because it's too big for them) and come up with their own grand nonsensical ideas.

Overall though, I agree. There isn't enough respect for religious texts, and most people who bash it miss the point altogether. I respect atheism and agnosticism as a very rational viewpoint, having once been more or less an atheist for skeptical reasons. But for me there should also be an intense reverence in all of us for those academically conscious of a higher reason than is based on purely /physical/ observation. I was ultimately, I think, converted through the ideas of john archibald wheeler (though i doubt the man himself was very religious)--"It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer.", etc. (following, of course from Jaynes' view of physics as analogous to information entropy/statistics in its reasoning. If we cannot classify physical existance above other forms of abstract existence, then what makes that sort of observation so exclusive in scope?