Lovely lecture as always. Not sure why the default position seems to be to assume the apple story untrue - I've had many ideas looking at nature or some object or sight - even though my ideas are minute in consequence I think we all do this. We are all inspired by other things that have gone before.
Thanks for an interesting and thought-provocative talk! It's easy to fall into a shallow psychologism in trying to understand what guides anyone's thought - but it struck me that Newton's 'almost pathological loneliness' might have to do with his seeing the world from within a 'sheath of steel.' Just a thought from one of Bishop Berkeley's 'Infidel Mathematicians' (and proud of it, Sir!) Thanks again, Prof. McGrath. I look forward to your next.
@ 0.36 " Isaac Newton ....one of Britain's scientific heroes ".. ?!? He is widely regarded as one of the WORLD'S greatest scientist / mathematicians !! Perhaps the Greatest. !
I believe the apple story but not as a eureka moment. It seems impossible not to believe it. I grew up with a garden with trees. It is very difficult not to notice that fruit falls directly under the tree, leaves less so. You don't go wandering around the garden looking for fruit (you do that with eggs). And you inevitably get hit by dislodged fruit when picking them. I remember noticing that by the time I was seven. But although I knew it I didn't think of gravity, but when I heard of gravity those observations made sense. This I think is the point of the apple story. It was simply a stored piece of information, less of an eureka moment. Only later when thinking about gravity he would have that lightbulb moment, "that would explain apples, and walnuts, actually everything." And of all the trees around him why not choose to attribute it to an apple, The fruit of the tree of knowledge. This is also an experience I see regularly in visitors to Woolsthorpe.
Law of Gravitation: Any two material bodies, P and P', with masses m and m', attract each ither with a force F, given by the formula F = Gmm'/d2 where d is their distance and G the Constant of Gravitation.
This is enjoyable, but I have to take a bit of an issue with what he is saying at about the 46 minute mark. Flat out, I'm going to call it an incidence of what psychologists call "projection". While discussing a work of William Paley, he takes a moment to point out what HE seems to think is some sort of 'troubling undercurrent' of an idea. Quoting Paley, "...that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose..." Sorry, but in my opinion the guy reads WWAAYY too much into the fact that Paley used the phrase "an artificer or artificers", in effect saying that there is some sense in which Paley MUST have been speaking, somehow, about both good and evil, and do such 'artificers' still exist, and on and on for a full two minutes... In my opinion, this is a classic example of an author, innocently and without intended or unintended subtext, uses a particular 'turn of phrase', and the reader insists on 'reading into it' some concept that has nothing to do with what the author had to say. Like when two theologists argue for fifteen years about why Jesus said "You SHALL be redeemed before the Father" instead of "You WILL be redeemed before the Father", when the only reason is that the poor monk who transcribed that passage didn't wipe off his spectacles before he read the passage from the book he was copying, and so he made a little mistake... Just my opinion on a little bit of trivia here... Have a nice day... But I can't help mentioning, for those of you old enough to have had an actual education, as opposed to what your poor KIDS are getting in place of an actual education, is my favorite mis-translated bible passage, one that got turned into a stage play called "Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". The bible passages refer to Joseph having a "coat of many colors", which his brother coveted, and blahblahblah. If CORRECTLY translated, Joseph didn't have a "coat of many colors". He had a COAT WITH SLEEVES. You gotta' love those wacky King James Version translators...
@@gregoriusffreeman788 And yet I won't describe my phrase as inaccurate unless and until I find the document which made me think I was stating a fact (or 'fact') in the first place. And that won't happen because I can't even remember POSTING that comment. I must have been both loaded on caffeine and sleep deprived to have been that verbose... I cede the floor to my learned co-respondent.
I didn't see this mentioned in discussion of Paley, but there is another obvious objection to the watchmaker argument: if a watch requires a watchmaker, a god requires a godmaker. The idea of a godmaker is totally unacceptable to Christian theologians.
"...a god requires a godmaker...totally unacceptable to Christian theologians." Not necessarily : that would depend upon your definition of (1) 'a god', and (2) 'Christian'.
Mechanical or Occult...such pioneers challenging the dogmas of the times. Then and now. One way or other the Enterprises exposed for what they are. A top hat tilt to Newton! 🎩🎩🎩
