I got side-tracked and curious about the story of Isaac Newton's life. I bought a book but also I looked on-line to see what I could find. Somehow, I already knew that he had virtually no friends and never married. And it was largely speculated that he suffered from mercury poisoning (causing madness) from all of his alchemy, a definite down side to being an alchemist:) What I discovered that I thought was sort of fascinating and unexpected was how The Great Plague of 1665 sent him home from the university and it was during this quarantine period that he developed most all of his greatest theories. That is what I love about history, how some chance encounter or turn of history allows for something so unexpected. For example, Franklin Roosevelt's polio gave him the great lens of compassion through which he led the country through the Depression and the better part of WWII. The welfare system is in place because FDR had polio and understood what it meant to suffer and be helpless. Newton developed calculus; he set foundations for his theory of light and color, and gained significant insight into the laws of planetary motion. His famous apple falling on his head gravity revelation was also supposedly during this time.
He wasn't traditionally successful in school and needed to do it in his own way. Once he got that space, he was able to flourish. I know so many people like him with brilliant minds who never excelled in school. For Newton, the plague set him free from the constraints of school to begin what is known as the Scientific Revolution. He found his path and went for it. It sounds like he was a very difficult person too, so maybe he needed to be alone. I am curious to read his biography.
It wasn't a total diversion for me though because I added something to the book today because of what I read. I added a part where one of the main characters loses his mind because of mercury poisoning. It's in the alchemy section. I hadn't quite figured out what happened to him and that is it. In the pursuit of mixing sulphur and mercury to make gold, he actually poisoned himself, that happened to a lot of people in the 17th and 18th century. In pursuit of eternal life (the making of the legendary philosopher's stone) and gold, they poisoned themselves and lost their mind. It's sort of a parable I guess.
I really believe that we have such a limited scope of visions as humans. We follow our hearts to try to find truth; to me it seems to be pretty much the best resource as far as the blindness/limited vision we have as humans. And we do the best we can.
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Isaac Newton
He wasn't traditionally successful in school and needed to do it in his own way. Once he got that space, he was able to flourish. I know so many people like him with brilliant minds who never excelled in school. For Newton, the plague set him free from the constraints of school to begin what is known as the Scientific Revolution. He found his path and went for it. It sounds like he was a very difficult person too, so maybe he needed to be alone. I am curious to read his biography.
It wasn't a total diversion for me though because I added something to the book today because of what I read. I added a part where one of the main characters loses his mind because of mercury poisoning. It's in the alchemy section. I hadn't quite figured out what happened to him and that is it. In the pursuit of mixing sulphur and mercury to make gold, he actually poisoned himself, that happened to a lot of people in the 17th and 18th century. In pursuit of eternal life (the making of the legendary philosopher's stone) and gold, they poisoned themselves and lost their mind. It's sort of a parable I guess.
I really believe that we have such a limited scope of visions as humans. We follow our hearts to try to find truth; to me it seems to be pretty much the best resource as far as the blindness/limited vision we have as humans. And we do the best we can.
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Isaac Newton
RSS Feed