So don't buy into those stories. I get that folks needed silver linings during the lockdowns, but Newton didn’t do all that stuff in quarantine. And the things he did accomplish, were made possible by the support and invisible labor of those around him.

(Also, "lone genius with a comprehensive support network" is an outdated picture of scientific progress that doesn’t reflect how science gets done nowadays and wasn't a great parallel for what most people were going through with Covid.)

Newton began his optics work in 1666 but it went on for years. He didn't present it to the Royal Society until 1672. He may have had insights about Earth's gravity extending to the moon in 1666, but it took decades to develop his universal law of gravitation. The work on calculus mostly took place after he became a professor at Cambridge in 1669.

Also, he was living with his mother. All his needs were being taken care of. He didn't have kids, cleaning, laundry, or cooking to worry about.

During the Covid lockdowns, a number of popular sci-comm figures claimed that Newton made incredible discoveries and advances while stuck at his mother’s country home during England’s bubonic “Great Plague” that began in 1665.

I mean, if Newton just needed some social distancing and a sweeping plague to understand gravity, surely we could take advantage of the Covid lockdowns to do something magnificent. Right?

No. That’s not how any of that happened!

The Royal Society has a handsome copy of Stukeley’s “Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life” that you can peruse online:

https://ttp.royalsociety.org//ttp/ttp.html?id=1807da00-909a-4abf-b9c1-0279a08e4bf2&type=book

"After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees."

Newton recounted the story of a falling apple to the writer William Stukeley, who included it in "The Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life."

It's not clear whether this was really a moment of insight, or if Newton was just telling fanciful story to add a bit of color to the discovery.

Everyone go ahead and take a few minutes to read the text and fully absorb it.

Newton's "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” was published in 1687. It spells out his three Laws of Motion, which explain the relationship between the forces acting on an object and the changes in its motion, as well as his law of universal gravitation.

You can page through Newton's own annotated copy of his Principia here, courtesy of the Cambridge University Library:

https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-ADV-B-00039-00001/9

You can also download copies of the individual pages.

Physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton was born #OTD in 1643.

Newton revolutionized our understanding of mathematics, mechanics, gravity, and optics. Later in life he served as warden of the Royal Mint, reforming currency and foiling counterfeiters.

Portrait: Barrington Bramley, after Godfrey Kneller

@dx Hmm, I’ll have to look at adding that!

@NilaJones But I’ve also had plenty of blood draws over past four years, and no suggestion of any problems. I think I just didn’t poke my finger hard enough.

@NilaJones Not that I know of! It’s possible, I guess. I’ve had a few colds and lots of negative tests since 2020.

Nothing to see here, just an 11yo studying BLOOD with her microscope.

Sad to hear that Jim York passed away a few weeks ago. His work on variational principles and quasilocal definitions of conserved quantities (like the paper with Brown, linked below) has been a huge influence on my research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9209012

The 11yo is doing more blood smears with the new microscope today, and one of the first things we learned is that I have a wolverine healing factor. I’d poke my finger, squeeze it to get a drop of blood, and only get a half-drop before it sealed back up.

She was not impressed, and told me to stab my finger harder with the pin.

@projektmyra I hope it went well! Thank you for pointing out the tags, I’ll have to think about what I include beyond the OTD hashtag. @pluralistic

@jeanoappleseed Happy new year!

Lynn Conway has a very detailed bio page at the University of Michigan, where she tells her own story in her own words.

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.html

This list of artists that Midjourney stole from to train its AI is something else.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.129.10.pdf

Lynn Conway, electricial engineer and computer scientist, co-architect of the VLSI design revolution, and transgender activist, was born #OTD in 1938.

She invented Dynamic Instruction Scheduling at IBM, but IBM fired her when they learned she was transitioning.

Photo: Lynn Conway

In Manly Wade Wellman’s “Silver John” stories, John mentions a book called Long-Lost Friend as the source of some of his knowledge. I recently learned that it’s a real book, the full text is online, and it has a spell to make a dog like you.

https://sacred-texts.com/ame/pow/index.htm