JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 912
I
was tooling looking for vision quotes and came upon this by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (an unusual stomping ground for me) from The Friend (published in 1828):
"The dwarf sees farther
than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on."
This
made me think of the over-quoted sentiment quoted again by Isaac Newton
"What Descartes did was a good step. You have added
much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into
philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing
on the shoulders of Giants."
Newton wrote this in a
letter (5 February 1676) to the immensely creative workhorse Robert Hooke1. He was a tireless, relentless observer and
experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting
and problematic questions relentlessly. More than others too he chased
his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many
people in the scientific community. But there were many characteristics
of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was
any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary
to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other
man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long
pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles
with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton
went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond).
Newton and Hooke had many disputes—most notably
in optics—basically because Hooke pursed Newton
(among many others) for expropriating his ideas. Hooke was over the line on this and probably
pushed the point too far—Newton
was enormously annoyed by this and other Hooke contacts and wasted no effort in
trying to pay Hooke back the favor over the years. Newton
was famously sharp and could fashion that intelligence and wit into a terrifically
nasty tool against those who bothered him.
And
so back to the “shoulders” letter. This always struck me as a bit too
melodramatic for a Newton,
and also a little too congratulatory for a field that he basically owned,
especially since he was a towering egoist (and not without cause). But he did pay Descatres (“des Cartes” in the
original) a compliment; though I could not at all think of Newton referring to the dreaded Hooke as one
of the giants’ shoulders he was standing upon.
Newton’s
reference to “giants” might also have been a swipe at Hooke’s physical stature,
which was terribly slight, small and crooked.
SO I think that Newton
was referring to Descartes, and decidedly not Hooke.
So
this semi-ubiquitous scientific laudatory quote is perhaps not quite so. Kinda like the very well known painting by
William Blake featuring Newton
as a naked geometer, figuring out the world, a color-tone praise of the great
physicist. Or perhaps not. Blake I think simply didn’t like Newton, didn’t
care for the scientist taking away the mystery of the world that Blake loved so
much—especially in regards to color, which Blake needed to stay interpretative
and mysterious. Newton took part of that away, and I think
Blake exercised a little payback in his artwork.
It
seems to me that if one looked at the “shoulder” quote and the Blake artwork as
works that were insults and not praises, they can be easily seen that way. Its all a matter of perspective.
Notes
1.
The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary
book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here)
in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued.
(Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a
royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever
read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17th
century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little
semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives. The only
thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble
were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been
unknown. Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea
were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such
intricate detail and design was a complete revelation. The drawings of
the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider
as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have
unimaginable design and elegance.
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