Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton is considered the single greatest influence on theoretical physics until Einstein, and yet, among the materials John Conduitt gathered for a biography of Newton that he would never write, are these celebrated and moving words: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
In 1795, William Blake produced a painting of Newton. Newton is working on a problem in trigonometry. He sits on a coral ledge at the bottom of the ocean, naked, surrounded by demersal darkness. A cloth, perhaps a toga (let us remember this) is draped over his shoulder. Blake’s painting of Newton is said to criticize the benightedness of the scientific worldview but maybe this interpretation is incorrect. Here is another possibility. Newton’s analogy and Blake’s painting are not coincidentally similar. Blake had read the soft words Newton spoke to Conduitt and was moved. He produced the painting, not to find fault with the hectoring Latin proofs of the Principia but to celebrate Newton's "wisdom of ignorance." To clarify this apparent oxymoron, I will annex a final quote. “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.” These words, found in The Lives of Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, are attributed to Socrates. |
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