Newton: The Chuck Norris of Science

do podcast about it? Right exactly, all right? So here's the thing people have always been doing this is we've discussed We did a whole episode on on why we're in love with the idea of the end of the world and how how we just can't get enough of it.

We love an apocalypse so so for ages we've had quacks stepping out and saying I looked at a text, or I I stared at the sun, or I or I I ate some sort of plant I shouldn't have, and now I have inside information on what is going to happen to our planet in the next year, And would you consider buying this pamphlet right exactly, or in the case that we have coming up with a mind calendar running out, do you want to book a package

to say bellies for the end of the world. I'm not getting there are end of the world packages U in Central America. There are. But but here's the thing. This is nothing new. It's been going on for ages, and it was definitely going on during the lifetime of one Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, the Englishman who lived from sixteen forty three to seventy seven, whose tomb actually makes a statement in Latin, of course, about how he was basically the best man that ever lived. Yeah,

please read that statement because I love it. Yeah, Yeah, here's the here's the right up translated mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race, which which that you gotta admit, even for someone like Sir Isaac Newton, who is pretty big medicine when it comes to science, that's kind of absurd, like like who who is who is deserving of that?

Maybe Sir Isaac Newton. That's the thing, because because it's easy to dismiss him as the gravity and apples guy, but when you really start looking at his life, a he he accomplished so much, and he was so focused and in a little crazy one more than a little crazy. I mean, just the mind of this guy is pretty amazing. And so so he's living, you know, he's doing his thing.

He's uh, he's just throwing his his considerable intellected at various problems that come along as well as the end of the world, right right, right, yeah, because he's he's going out in the street and this is a dude that is uh, you know, he's laying out the laws of motion, he's figuring out universal gravity. He's he's laying down some of the physical laws that that in our understanding, of these physical laws that will allow us to go

to the moon. Uh, I mean, we're He spoke of standing on the shoulders of giants, but he's one of the giants that the modern stock could stand upon. And so he hears these these louts talking about the end of the world and they're talking about how they read it in the Bible, and he's like, WHOA hold on a second, I know a thing or two about theology. I've read the Bible. I've I've i've looked through and glimpse the the hidden truths in it. Let me take a look at this and I'll get back to you.

So he goes home, he analyzes the Book of Daniel. Daniel Old Testament had these visions of four beasts and all and it's and it's great, uh, you know, apocalyptic gravy for for people who are into into that sort of thing. Yeahah. And so so he looks at it and he's like, all right, Uh, I looked at it. I looked at the data. I I sort of weaved around in the Bible codes. And you don't have anything

to worry about. The end of the world is not happening until at least twenty six maybe after, but not until. So everyone shut up, right, just keep keep walking. Nothing nothing to see here. And that is something we thought so amazing. Think about this guy is not just the common things that we know about him, that he has um contributed to society and to mathematics and physics and so I want and so forth, but um that this guy was obsessive on on all points and he could

sort of bend the time space continuum seemingly to his will. Uh. You know whether or not he was, you know, meditating on gravity or perhaps even creating cat flap doors. Yeah, that one's we're not sure on that one, but there's there is there. There is the theory that he invented the cat flap because he didn't want his cats constantly asking to be let into because you know how it is, you're in your lab figuring out how the universe works,

and the cat wants the scratching on the door. You let the cat in, and you're like all right, yeah, and you're like, all right, you're in. Let me get back to work. Then the cat wants out. This is important when you're thinking about gravity, right, can not be interrupted? Um? And so yeah, he's he's he's working on that, and he is making the public feel safer and and re forecasting the apocalypse for right. So yeah, here here we

have the Chuck Norris of science. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the Chuck Norris thing because it's like when I was reading about it and I was researching it for work, you know, his various accomplishments. I kept finding these amazing things because I mean, my understanding Newton was a little deeper than than the gravity and Apple's guy. But but I didn't know about some of these details of the man's life, or just or I didn't have a good

grasp for how his brain worked. But when you when you really look at what he did, he does come off like this Chuck Norris character, you know, and you're reminded of these lists the you know, the the Internet lists of the things Chuck Norris has done, like the idea that Chuck Norris has counted to infinity twice, or that the Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer, but since he's never cried, um that you know, we're not able to

cure cancer, that kind of thing. Um. And you look at Newton's life and some of this stuff is is that outlandish? It is, in fact, before we get to some of the other um, maybe not as widely known information and more Chuck Norris information lists talk really quickly about what we what we think of when we think of Newton. Okay, um, Well, for starters, there is the law of universal gravitation. This like basically strikes at the heart of how gravity works and how the universe is

held together by gravity. Now, one thing we we often don't remember is that one of the ways that Newton expressed this uh in his in his writings, was to create a thought experiment in which you had a mountain that was higher than the clouds, higher than the atmosphere, and had a giant cannon on top of an orbital cannon. They could fire a cannonball at just the right velocity that it would go into orbit around the planet. Like that's the way that the man thought. That's what he

was daydreaming about, right right. Most famously, he he laid down the three laws of motion, and these were this was six seven and uh and and these will sound familiar to everybody. And object will remain at rest or or moving in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. When forces applied to an object, it will accelerate. So we get force equals mass times acceleration. And here's a big one. For every action there is

an equal and opposite reaction and uh. Which seems all very obvious now, but obviously back in the day this was scholars used to wrestle with this um. For instance, the Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that smoke moved upwards because the smoke was mostly air, and therefore was consciously deciding to go into the sky to hang out with the rest of its air bodies. Um, you know which I kind of love. Yeah. Yeah. And then he had other people in reneed de carts who still identified God as

the prime mover behind everything. Newton came down and you know, he laid he laid down the loss and these are these are the fundamental laws that we we we based on modern understanding on. Uh. In addition to that, he looked at rainbows and figured out how rainbows worked. Um that that the prism or the rain drop was not changing or color. It wasn't coloring, but at the time they thought that it was like the sun's rays were dying the light, right. And from there actually leads to

his development of the reflecting telescope. Before that, everyone used the refracting telescope, which wasn't as powerful it it could. It could add various tints of color that weren't weren't disruptive to when you're trying to look at um and uh, and they were, they were larger. So he comes along, he in it. He invents the reflecting telescope because his mirrors and uh, and this becomes the standard. Yeah, this is really cool. This was in your article. Um, your

article's name again. Uh ten Top ten Isaac Newton inventions. A large mirror would capture the image than a small mirror, a smaller mirror would bounce it into the viewer's eyes, which I think it's really cool. Uh. Not only does this method produce a clear image, it also allows for a much smaller telescope. So I just think it's cool that he had that perspective back then to say, how can I improve upon this? You know, let's not refract,

let's reflect. And he actually grinded the mirrors himself and assembled a prototype and then presented it to the Royal Society in sixteen seventy. So let's talk about some of the the other stuff that is just so amazing that this guy is sitting around and accomplishing so much um in such a small amount time. Really, all right, well here's one, all right. So, and again you've got to think about Newton's mind. Is it just this obsessive thing, this engine that in any kind of data comes its

way and he has to solve it. He's going to figure it out. And he's a bit of a madman too. And we'll talk a little bit about this how how it might have affected his perspective. Yeah, he never married. He he didn't have much in the way of friends. Like this was a man who would have lat himself onto a riddle or a puzzle. Like I keep coming back that I've mentioned this before, the old idea that the vampire you leave a knot out for a really complex knot, and it would set there trying to untie

it until the sun came up. Like that's that's Newton's brain, um, and and so like for instance, sixteen sixty five, plague has has hit Debonnet plague has hit England, and it's a it's a huge problem. And so Newton uh sees it.

He's o Rick Cambridge and he decides to figure this out because it's actually shut down the university, right, and that's where he needs to be to think such shut down the university for eighteen months, so he's he's got some time on his hands, right right, right, So he's like, all right, I'm gonna I'm gonna fix this. Here's the thing. Math wasn't sufficient at that time for him to study this.

He needed a school of of mathematics that would allow him to calculate problems that involve changing variables, so he invented one. He invented calculus. Like, okay, he needed calculus. It didn't exist. He made it. Math was insufficient for his needs, so he just created his own, his new school of it. So normous, right, Um, again, we're talking about calculations concerning the angle of cannonballs and a ship's

rate of acceleration. And that's just so that it could fuel his daydreaming, right right, right, yeah, and and and allow him to understand what was happening in the world. He was like, like, I'm having trouble understanding how this is spreading, how this is working. Um, Math, you're not helping me. I'm going to have to do all the work for you. And so he created calculus. It's the father of calculus. It should also be noted that German

mathematician got Free Leadness independently developed calculus around the same time. Yeah. Actually sort of. What has compounded this this question about question mark about who created calculus is the fact that Newton was really private, um, and some would even say secret, and he didn't publish a lot. He might have written down quite a few things and presented them in various academic institutions, but he wasn't someone who was sort of, you know, gunning to get published and get and become

known for something. And in fact, some of the things that he obsessed about and wrote about certainly didn't really enter the public eye. Told quite a while later and we're kind of a dirty secret for for a bit, Are you talking about alchemy? I am talking about alchemy. Yes, yes, alchemy, as we've discussed I think we discussed this in the

Frankenstein podcast a bit. This is, of course the the old typically thought of as medieval bastardization of chemistry and occultism and philosophy and trickery, and just you know that there is there's chemistry bound up in it, but there's just a lot of mess I mean kind of like, just to to be uh, not very kind about it, it's basically taking a pile of dog crap and spinning into gold, right, or turning one's urine into gold and

accidentally discovering phosphorus, that kind of thing. Right. The thing is, though there was a lot of real chemistry there, there was some there was some real science going on in the world of alchemy. And if you were interested in in the chemistry of the world, this was for the most part the only game in town. Um and as far as the west goes. So, so of course he studied it. And uh. And the thing is that alchemy only became this sort of dirty word later in his

life and after his death. And and also he was not afraid of looking into something that was kind of crazy. And he I mean, he really believed that there was there was hidden truth to be found in alchemy. Well and during his time to wasn't an alchemy punishable by law? Yeah, it became so, right, So it's something that he kind of squirreled away because obviously he didn't want to um

to have any sort of negative repercussions from it. But it wasn't until the nineteen thirties when I believe that was a auction house that's someone found a huge bomb volume of his writings and it was discovered to the extent to which he had dedicated really his life to alchemy. Yeah, and that he was serious, like it wasn't just a this is all nonsense, but I'm kind of interested in the chemistry. No, he was trying to create the Philosopher's Stone.

Yet the Philosopher's Stone, Uh, it's exact description varies from texts at texts, but it's clearly like a man made stone or a man made a lixir. Uh, And it has this power of universal transmutation, so it can turn lead into stone, it can cure illnesses that can transform a headless cow into a swarm of bees, or allow you to throw some wizard semen um, you know, in a jar and add a few other ingredients and make a homunculous Yeah. So it's uh, it's like the the

ultimate power. And that's that's why he was interested in it, because ideally this would give him power over life and death. Well, and you know, it turns out that he is really interested in this mystical realm, and so the idea something

people have said. Some historians have looked back at the way his mind works and said, you know, he may not have been able to discuss um the laws of motion or discover them, name them um if he didn't have this particular mystical bent, because he's thinking about the forces of the universe, right and trying to harness them.

So I think that's really interesting and thinking about that when you think about Newton, he wrote more than one million words on the subject of alchemy, which is amazing much more than he ever dedicated to um, you know, his stalwart uh science. Of course, you could look at it in this sense that science for Newton was a problem that he was not that he was eventually able to untie in many cases. Alchemy ultimately proves that not

that never completely untied for him. So it was probably the kind of thing where you just keep writing and writing about it because you're never going to reach that point with alchemy that you're like, all right, philosopher's stone case closed, now, let me move on to something else, right, Yeah, Yeah, And the same thing as we discussed in this doom Stay stuff. He was interested in theology. He was interested in discovering the coded secrets of the Bible, the wisdom

of the ancients. And you can set there all day looking for these secret codes, and you're just gonna end up writing more and more words about it because you're not gonna find you're not gonna uncover this this hidden equation in the in biblical text, and you're not going to find it in alchemy either. But don't tell that to Dan Brown. Well, no, he did find the hidden the hidden equations. But that's right. It had to do with the publishing dollars. Um. Yeah, that's his own kind

of alchemy. But you know, and we will talk a bit more about his sort of obsessive quest for religion, thinking about religion and uh in the Bible. But before we do that, I really want to talk about how he was fighting crime in Melton money, all right, sir Isaac Newton crime finder. And this was an area that I before I was researching in this for work, I I really didn't know anything about this this corner of his life. Well, he was a bit of a politician,

although kind of a backseat politician. I guess you could say, yeah, so you have to you have to go back to England's financial system is in full blown crisis mode. Okay Um, the currencyat consisting entirely of silver coins, and the silver was often worth more than the value stamped on it due to the economic situation. So people start We're often melting the chok coins down or chipping the silver from the edges and selling them to France. So pretty soon

the coinage just looks like crap. It's mangled. People have been melting this stuff down, They've been chipping off the corners. So you can imagine at the counter someone goes into a store to buy something around this time and they're just dumping just a handful of mangled bits of silver and counterfeit mangled bits of silver, because how difficult is it to counterfeit a mangled lump of of shiny metal?

Right when I was just thinking, like, think of the US dollar and just maybe the only thing that's left is the eye and the pyramid and presenting that. I mean, obviously it's going to be a lot easier to to say, you know, to sort of put together something that looks like money. Right, So the powers that be they know Newton is a is a smart cookie. Uh. They have an idea that he's the kind of guy that likes to throw himself at a at a problem. Probably looks

good to throw Newton at a at a problem. I'd like to think of them all sitting around a table, all all wearing black and and saying we need to bring Newton in, yeah, or or they have the Newton

signal on the on the roof, um and uh. And it's also worth noting that, you know, we're talking about counterfeiting a little here, and alchemy has in uh in many places been tied to to counterfeiting because alchemy often involved the creation of dies and uh, and since it couldn't actually change something one medal into another, you could, it did involve sometimes the technique of creating like fool's gold or disguising one medal as another. Um. But but

that's that's kind of incidental. They so they bring Newton in and and and it's largely ceremonial. Nobody really expects Newton to solve the problems, and they gave him a real title, right, Like, yeah, and so what does Newton do? He throws on a diskise, Yeah, heads out into the mean streets of London, like down into like just the poverty and crime ridden alleys, and he starts hanging out

with the counterfeiters. And then of course he has them arrested and subsequently executed, because it was a major offense in those days to counterfeit currency. But yeah, like how amazing is that? I mean, he's essentially the Batman of the seventeen hundreds, right in the sixteen seventeen hundreds, He's he's wearing the skies, going out there fighting crime, then coming back to his scientific layer and developing um, uh,

milled edges for coins. And these are if you if you get a quarter out you find or any coin where you look at the edges and if you see little lines, those are milled edges. And the idea here is you're gonna if you're gonna clip the lane and try and sell the silver to France. Um, it's going to be very noticeable and then you'll be arrested and

possibly executed. Of course. The the other part of that is that it took him a year to create that particular currency, right, and um, I mean the conies on this guy he gathered up well not just he but uh you know, I'm sure he advocated this and they adopted it, but they gathered up all of the currency and melted it down. So then he could then spend like eighteen hours a day, you know, working on this

problem and creating a new currency. Yeah, he was like money is canceled for the next year or so and and then we're gonna have new money. I hope everybody's cool with that, which sounds like it probably wasn't as big of a problem as it would seem like today, because um, you know it was the economy was a mess anyway, and there was a lot of rioting before this even happens, So I mean, wow, yeah, he but he he reorganized the the mint, uh, their system of

creating the coins. Like he went in there and he just kicked button the factories and the next thing, you know, you have this new model and standard of what a coin is, you know, all in the day's work, right. Yeah, And I like to I just made this part out, But I like to joke too that he put his own scowling face on each coin to h to convince people that counterfeit. Counterfeiting was a bad idea. He probably did put some sort of code in there, for sure.

And let's talk about that, um, And specifically, let's talk about whether or not he may have been suffering from mercury poisoning. Yes, so, so how would he have been pro poisoned by mercury? Are we suspecting that someone? No? Actually, because he was using mercury quite a bit, um. And we know that he had a couple of very serious mental breakdowns in the sixteen nineties, um, and you know, sort of had fevered writings from him, would send letters

to his friends. Didn't make any sense. We already know that he was an obsessive guy UM and that he was trying to find hidden meeting in the Bible. He learned Hebrews spent half of his life really devoting himself to trying to figure this out. So there's this idea that his sleeplessness, his digestive upset, his loss of memory, his paranoid delusions could have been mercury poisoning. Because we know, and this is from the chemistry chronicles Newton's Hair by

Mark f Lesnie Uh. They know that that from a hair sample that he had a high amount of mercury in his system, and that he attempted to extract mercury from various medals during his alchemy UM. And and again we know that he spent a good deal of time trying to work his magic on this in dealing with

with with mercury. So it's very possible that Um, at least some of his obsessive nature, not so much as obsessive nature, but some of him sort of going off kilter, could have been delusions that were inspired by mercury poisoning. Now here's another possibility. He actually succeeded in creating the Philosopher's Stone became an immortal, used homunculous technology to clone himself, which involved mercury, and that is what is actually buried at Westminster and that is what they got the hair

sample for. And he's been he's been locked up in his lab ever since, his secret lab, of course, working on how to prevent apocalypse. Okay, so if he's a homunculous now no, no, no, he created the homunculous and that's what was buried. Oh right right, I mean undoubtedly he would have Homunculi working for him now as his age, an army of yeah manculi of course. Um, this sounds like a pretty uh pat answer to the mysteries of Newton. Yes, I'm gonna have to see if they'll let me add

that page to the article that they will They probably will. Yeah, I think I make a pretty strong case. Um. You know. It turns out though again his his his devotion to religion in the Bible could have had something to do with his own, um personal biography which he viewed himself. Again, this is from that paper Chemistry chronicles quote a Christian opposit it and adhere to the then prescribed Aryan heresy that Christ was not divine. Newton still took very seriously

his own birth on Christmas Day. He felt that it gave him a level of prophetic reasonable responsibility, that, if not equal to Christ, was certainly cut from the same cloth, and that it was his own particular role from the start to reveal God's universal laws to all humankind or to justify God's waste a man. Right, yeah, yeah, there

you go. Wow. So and and you know, actually that's interesting, Like maybe we should get be more into the idea of celebrating Sir Isaac Newton like Christmas, like you just completely like retool the holiday, you know, where the tree is all Newton based instead of like a major scene. Well, you know, we've talked about this poopoo platter of religions before, in which we I think we were going to call it saganism after Carl second, right, and everybody wears turtlenecks.

Why not, why not to celebrate Sir Isaac Newton on Christmas Day? Yeah, just a celebration of physics, alchemy, crime fighting, um, and possibly cat doors depending on where you fall on that particular controversy. Right, And I can see it now, like the rainbow is a is a sort of logo for this holiday. Uh, everybody constructs these sort of paper mache rainbows in their houses instead of Christmas trees. I'm

up for it. Yeah. Well, hey, if you want to know more about Sir Isasing Newton in his life, you can check out that article that I wrote on the ten inventions of Sir Isaza Newton. Just searched for that on the House Stuff Works homepage. Also how Isaac Newton worked.

We have a great article about that. And uh and if you really want to know more about the the alchemy to uh do uh, just do a quick search for Newton alchemy and Nova because pbs is nova has a rich website with a lot of resources about what we know about his alchemyical side. Indeed, does that mean that we should roll out robot get some mail? Yeah, let's get the robot out here, share some mail with us.

All right, here's one for Crystal. Crystal rites then, and Crystal actually wrote in with with a number of thoughts on some past episodes. I'm going to read what she said, um about our our episode that we did about a world without Men, about the men going extinct, and she says, uh, for the past six years I've been self employed in such ways that I work infinitely with families. I've seen many different kinds of families and lifestyle, and I have

come to the following conclusion about men and women. Okay, she says, this is this is their opinion. Without women, men are somehow quite not quite fully developed adults, although they are perfectly happy in their lives at that point, men need women to take that last step into adulthood. And then she says, without men, women are fully functional adults, but don't pursue happiness, letting responsibilities overshadow it. Women need men to be reminded to value happiness for its own

sake and hence to be happy. Obviously, this only applies to heterosexual relationships. I haven't had a large enough sample size of homosexual marriages to make any hypothesis. Yet I think any humans somehow evolved past men women would keep them around to remind us happiness should be sought after. I love the podcast, Thanks Robert, Julie and everyone else who makes it happen. Well. I think it's that's interesting.

In the podcast, we talked about whether or not men might go extinct and whether the world will be better for a particular reason, you know, not just us making that up, but yeah, yeah, whether and you know what, it would be a unless violent world, more of a light world, a prettier world. Huh. Well, and you know how, you know how I always feel about it, like, I think that's interesting. I think that she talked about it

being a cultural norm. So for me, uh, you know, when when we talk about women and we um we talked about them being the better angels of our nature, always feel like that sort of makes women even more one dimensional. Yeah, I gotta say, I'm not saying that that we're not great. I'm just saying that, you know, taking that other side of it is not giving you know, full complexity to women out there. I think that's fair. I think it's fair. Right. So again it should be

noted Newton didn't have any time for him. Yeah, can't time for cats, So cat flaps, Yeah, possibly possibly cats and dogs. Though Tho's is weird because there people are divided on the whole pet issue. There are some people who say, yeah, he definitely kept a cat, he kept a dog. Some there are some stories that say that he had a dog named diamond In. There were all sorts of lacky adventures, and then other people were like, Newton had no dogs or cats, so I don't know,

you know, we just don't know for sure. Well, also, pet ownership was a very different thing tacum out there, right, so, um, I can't imagine that he was going to target and probably getting them cute little halloween os. Yeah, Diamond wasn't setting in his lap wearing a little sweater mounted things.

So alright, So hey, if you have anything you would like to share about, well, about Sir Rising Newton, about alchemy, about the idea that he's still out there in his layer and Homunculi perform as every bidding as he tries to prevent the end of the world. In um, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can always find us on the social media platforms. We were on Facebook as stuff to Blow Your Mind, and we are on Twitter as blow the Mind, and you can always drop us a line at blow the Mind at

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