There is nowhere stated: reason for this article is to promote the book sale.
Knowing true reason/motivtion of somebody's actions is important. You can also draw conclusions if somebody is hiding their true motivation under pretext.
The book was published yesterday, and I just got it this morning.
I just got finished with the first 150 pages, and this book is amazingly great at conveying how obsessed with knowledge he had while dissecting all of his works. Highly recommend everyone to read it.
There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as abrasive and severely arrogant.
I think Newton was, especially to women. But Da Vinci strikes me as much more cordial and eager to fit into higher society, at least in his younger years.
I’ve read some of Newton’s letters while doing research at the Royal Society archives. He definitely comes off as severely deficient in social skills just from the random sampling I looked at - I think one was complaining about his land lady offering him food. Granted, it’s impossible to know many things “for sure” in history but “Newton had a difficult personality” is a pretty good bet, based on those letters and the bios I’ve read.
Another fun fact from the letters - Newton invited the con artist George Psalmanazar over for lunch at some point circa 1703. Psalmanazar claimed to be a Taiwanese prince but had long blonde hair and a faint French accent. Unclear if Newton was taken in, but Halley was able to stump him with an astronomy-based question. Sounds like something from the Baroque Cycle but it all really happened.
Yeah, he asked him if there was ever a time of year when the sun shone directly down Taiwanese chimneys. Psalmanazar said no, not realizing that Taiwan was on the tropic of cancer. He attempted to recover from his mistake by saying that chimneys in Taiwan were Z-shaped.
Actions. Newton’s actions depict a miserable prick, Jobs’ an intelligent sociopath, etc. Jobs died because he thought he was smarter than medicine when it came to beating cancer; hardly the first self-destructive and impulsive action in his record. Newton probed his own eyeball, tried to erase Hooke from history, etc.
Unless you're a doctor who treated Jobs, I doubt we can make any claim about whether his choices killed him or not.
Let's not forget that Jobs underwent a surgery to remove the first round of cancer, and then ended up getting a liver transplant (probably because his pancreatic cancer has metastised into this organ as well). Because of the immunosuppressive medication one has to take for the rest of one's life after a transplant, recurring cancer is extremely dangerous because the cancer can grow unbounded.
I don't really see how surgery and a transplant align with "smarter than medicine."
You can never know for sure but with enough data points you can draw some conclusions. For example, it seems Wozniak was/is a very nice guy where Jobs was a more difficult guy to say the least.
I have grown up surrounded by two people with extraordinarily high IQs, and they were normal people. They have more curiosity than normal people, and they have lots of interests that span many, many subjects, but for all intents and purposes they are normal in manner and demeanor.
This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly beyond me.
Agreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.
Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity required to create new stuff.
> most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense
I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a heavy love of language, a decent dollop of it.
Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.
What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then neither do most intelligent people.
Outright dismissing quantum mechanics because of a personal belief in an linearly causal universe is not really what one would call humble. He's full of rather snarky quotes to express such dismissal ranging from "God does not play dice with the universe." to describing quantum entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." Interestingly, the sarcasm of the latter has been lost in modern context and the former mostly used as an false indicator of religion from Einstein.
I think Einstein's perceived humility was mostly a consequence of the fact that he was mostly right on everything he said, and people quickly acknowledged as much. Relativity overtook aether theory shockingly quickly for instance. There's the old quote that science progresses one funeral at a time. The meaning there being that people tend to obstinately hold onto past beliefs, so it is frequent that it takes the passing of one generation for progress to be effectively made by another. One of his only views that was not widely accepted was that of his view of quantum mechanics - and that's where his snidery started to emerge. But in other cases having your revolutionary ideas rapidly and universally adopted is going to make it rather easier to speak softly knowing your big stick is certainly up to task. And that's probably one too many quotes for a single post...
You're being unfair to the poor guy. It's not as if those quotations are without context and basis. It's also not as if he doesn't have a whole raft of other recorded quotations which provide evidence for his humility. Consider, for example,
> A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...
The dice quote makes more sense when you consider Einstein's personal philosophy, which had led him to discover relativity and aspects of QM. He strongly believed that once you uncover nature's secrets, not only do you understand the universe more, but you see why nothing else could possibly have been the case. Quantum mechanics as it was formulated/interpreted in his time violated this principle, thus he was motivated to look for the deeper secret. We're still arguing whether there's something deeper to this day. The particular type of model Einstein was exploring may have been dismissed, but you cannot fault his motivation - all physicists need one.
While I admire him and read his writings with a lot of interest, I have got to admit : it sounds like he was a complete prick to absolutely all the women in his life.
Did anyone else find the ostentacious sentence structuring in the article distracting, and a little infuriating? Sure, writing is an art form; I get it. I sometimes wonder if this very thing is what readers of The New Yorker actually want.
Yeah I also think their obsession with the diaeresis is on the precious side. But that's what I'm looking for in the New Yorker - they use discursive sentences to write discursive articles. If I wanted a neat summary, I'd come to the HN comments section :)
I, personally, believe such writing styles are used to give tone to an article.
For example, for this article I found myself reading it at a slower pace than usual, attempting to piece the facts in with the time period, as it were. As such as I have written this comment, a more formal language used to convey a more inherent life or fact to the writing.
It doesn't mean that it is inherently more truthful, but, in my opinion, that the reader should spend more time thinking of the context of the article, and less about the absolute absorb the information and move on style of reading.
I do appreciate those writing styles occasionally, and frankly often find myself more drawn into the articles subjects (which I'm sure is the primary goal of the author), I do not find myself teaching these styles.
At the risk of digressing, of which I surely am, there are, at the most basic level, two levels of English. The common, more easily read article(such as we commonly see on HAN), or the more prosaic, lofty style.
Just because it's written as a high minded, lofty worded article though, doesn't mean it should be taken as truth(I am not referring this comment to the current article, just in general, I do not have enough knowledge of the subject matter to argue it's merits).
That's my opinion on the matter for what it's worth :-)
That depends on how you were taught, if you were taught using the Oxford style, than it really becomes more natural to write, as if you speak.
An example being, each time you would make a slight pause in your sentence, than a comma is required, otherwise you would keep writing until a sentence has ended with a period, or as I was originally taught, a full colon.
If you're talking about the 'Oxford comma', then that is definitely not a style advocating for gratuitous comma usage in general, only an extra one on the final item of a list.
Outside of lists, commas are used to separate clauses. They are never used so separate subjects and verbs, as that is always awkward and superfluous. It has nothing to do with pauses, and much more to do with coordinating intonation patterns.
Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to read multiple biographies to try to put his books into reasonable context. My comment is an attempt at getting someone who may have to weigh in.
The idea that Europe went from the middle ages into the Reinassance unassisted thanks to a handful of people in Italy is eurocentric revisionism.
What really happened was:
After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford.
...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own.
There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism.
You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.
No one preaches that the Reinassance was unassisted, or that it was the source of all knowledge - but the technological development that allowed this boom came from Europe.
It's not by random chance that this creative boom came after the print press was invented - in Europe.
After it, the knowledge that was limited to a few people, was spread out via a media development: books, the medium that fueled all of this.
Leonardo was just curious, and had fuel to feed the curiosity, with answers.
It's questionable whether the printing press was an entirely novel invention. Movable type printing had been around for centuries in China, it was just less useful there due to the large number of pictographs. In fact one of the major innovations of Gutenberg was the alloy he used for the type that was both easily workable and durable in use.
Additionally, the major change people usually aren't aware of was the spread of papermaking knowledge through Europe around the 12th and 13th century. Before that point, most books were created on Parchment, which was much more expensive. I've read somewhere that a single bible took ~3000 sheep to produce.
But I didn't said it was a novel invention - yet it was indeed the European concept/invention that thrived and allowed for the boom in Europe.
Regarding the papermaking, I believe we can fit it in the same boat as other craftsmanship that evolved previously and allowing for the development for the press itself (but definitely papermaker had a greater role in some dimension - cost/manufacturing/distribution).
Sure. Good luck doing science without the scientific method in ridiculous impractical numerals, and printing books on sheep skin. Also good luck developing a theory of planetary motion without astronomic almanacs.
If you struggle, you can ask your highly educated peers (<1% of literacy at the time) to provide some help, or you ask the scientific elite at the time, a bunch of theocratic fanatics that would prosecute you, torture you and burn you alive along with all your findings as soon as you publish them.
Stop hoarding the credit. The Reinassance wasn't a self-emergent phenomenon. It required external influence to happen and that is factual.
Are there historical records of the Islamic Empire having all of the inventions and scientific knowledge that came to Europe in the Renaissance, or are you talking about specific preliminary discoveries?
The Reinassance started after a massive amount of scientific and philosophic literature was imported into Europe, and the further development of what became known as the scientific method.
Of course, that literature was not originally in Latin, and had to be translated. Where and when was it translated? In great part, in Toledo, Spain after the fall of Al-Andalus.
e.g: Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards. Without that, Copernicus could not have done what he did.
St. Albertus Magnus, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, studied the works of Aristotle, commented by Averroes, translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin. Without that, St. Thomas Aquinas' works on philosophy and everything based on that would not exist.
Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The foundation from that in great part can be credited to the Islamic empire. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.
There is of course much more but I don't really have the time to go through all that, e.g: numerals, medicine, trade, etc.
So, wrapping up, without their influence this is what would have happened: no scientific method, no real philosophy and/or theology, unsafe medicine, no microscope, no telescope, using ridiculous impractical numerals... a scientific setback worth hundreds of years. Today you would be at best in the middle of the first industrial revolution.
The main difference between Europe and other country in that Age was that Europe was divided in relative small nations, not a big Empire. This permitted to have more chance to be supported for a Discovery or an invention.
Right, right. But they had a powerful, oppressive force: the Church. They would also burn you as soon as you affirm planetary motion doesn't come from god, that earth is not the center of the universe, or anything that slightly contradicts their vision of the world. But not before torturing you until you accept everything you said was a lie... As you can see, there was a lot of innovation going on, Europe was totally a fertile ground for scientific discovery :^)
Philosophy changed that, and you might want to take a look at where that philosophy came from, who translated it and when.
Saint Thomas Aquinas is credited as being one of the most influential scholastic philosophers of that time. He studied under Saint Albertus Magnus, that based his work mostly on annotated Latin translations of Aristotle obtained from Toledo.
That was not my point. My point is criticizing the revisionism surrounding the origins of the Renaissance and creating a more realistic measure of merit around the central figures of it.
If you haven't done so yet, read a PHP dissertation or a scientific paper. You'll notice dozens or hundreds or citations--recognizing other people's earlier contributions. The same with Da Vinci etc., they didn't reinvent the wheel but...
uhm, where in those books cars, tanks and bikes with building schematics? or instruction on how correct for perspective paintings? not gonna go and read all of them to check, so interested in pointers.
Understanding perspective requires understanding geometry and optics. Euclid was one of the first in creating a working framework for this in his work Optics. Euclid's work was introduced in Europe during the Latin translations of the 12th century.
Not to deny Leonardo's might, but quite similar to the pattern of (e.g.) more Depeche Mode songs on the radio signals new album/tour.