Thinking About Newton's Thinking

Newton's tomb and monument
in Westminster Abbey

I watched a good documentary last night about Isaac Newton. As my son pointed out, it is impossible to fully describe the 84 year long life of one of the great thinkers of human history in an hour's television program for a general audience. Still, I learned something and the program was an occasion for thought. One of the difficulties faced by the creators of the program was to convey to the modern audience the ways in which Newton thought as we do versus the ways in which he thought differently than we do.

When one has the concept of the social construction of knowledge, it seems clear that Newton understood the world in ways that were the product of the society in which he lived, as we understand the world in ways that are the product of our society. Indeed, he thought about the world in the language of his time. That meant that he thought about the nature of matter in the language of the alchemists (while many of us think about it in the language of physicists and chemists).

Newton's society did construe science to be different than religion or philosophy, and Newton appears to have been quite comfortable lumping his search for understanding of the nature of light and of mechanics as part and parcel with his philosophical search for an understanding of God's actions. Denied our historical perspective, he would not have seen his explorations into alchemy as different in nature than his explorations into the physics of light or celestial orbits. In our socially constructed system of scientific knowledge these seem very different, one from another.

We must presume that Newton, as a human being, thought as we think think today. His brain was anatomically and physiologically similar to ours. He was not an alien. It should be immediately obvious that modern people with similar minds think differently according to the culture to which they belong. Secularists think differently about the world than do the religious, albeit with the same human thinking equipment, as those from one religious culture think differently about the world than those from another (different) religious culture. We should then find it self evident that a man living in 17th century England would think differently within his culture than we do in ours, albeit with the same human brain.'

On the other hand, Newton clearly was smarter than almost everyone. Think about high school, and the person in your class who most understood science. Now think of that person in a group formed of individuals from all over the state, each of whom best understood science in his high school class in your year. Half of those people would lag the median in the statewide group, even though they had led their high school classes. Now consider a group made up with the best high school scientist from each state. Again, half of those would fall below the median level of the group, although each was the best of his age for an entire state. Consider finally that there are perhaps 20 times as many people living in the world as live in the United States. Look at the group formed by the best 20 high school scientists worldwide for each of ten classes. Again, half of them would lag the medium in this elite group.

We can conceive of Newton as comparable to those in the most elite of that elite final group. We can conceive of him as having a mind like ours, comparable to the minds of people we know, but one that worked faster and more clearly not only than most, but than all but the very very few. We can think of his mind as falling with the bell shaped curve of human intellectual ability, but at the very upper limit of the distribution.

But, as the program made clear, Newton was also at the upper end of the distribution of people in his dedication to his work. Indeed, he appears to have worked so long and so hard as to drive himself into a nervous breakdown in middle age.

Newton also appears to have been at the extreme of the distribution of human experience in terms of independence of thought from the existing socially constructed body of knowledge. He essentially worked alone. He did so most famously during the period in which he lived at home away from Cambridge during the plague years -- a period of exceptional intellectual creativity. But he did not publish much during his years of most productive thinking. His laboratory assistants appeared not to have understood his thought, not to have been intellectual collaborators.

On the one hand, it seems clear that if Newton's work was derivative from that of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. On the other hand, it also seems clear that his recognition of the importance of experiments was unusual for his time and was important in his intellectual achievements.

How many Newtons?

One of the scientists interviewed in the program commented that Newton's was a talent that comes along perhaps once in 500 years. I suppose he was commenting on the combination of intelligence, energy, and intellectual independence. I would prefer to think that the genetic makeup might occur once per so many million births -- that is, there are more potential geniuses born each year to our huge global population that were born each year from the smaller population of Newton's world.

But we would not remember Newton today had he died in childhood, nor had he suffered from severe mental and physical disabilities as a result of years of malnutrition and disease as a child. Indeed, had he not been able to be educated and to work at Cambridge University and had the funds to purchase his 1600 book personal library, nor the economic freedom to pursue his studies, we would not have his scientific production.

How many Newton's has mankind wasted? How many are we now wasting each year in which a billion people try to live on a dollar a day or less? How many potential intellectual giants remain unrealized in the world, never receiving the education to develop their talents nor the intellectual and economic freedom to exploit them?