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Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations…may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —ROGER COTES, PREFACE TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S Principia Mathematica, SECOND EDITION, 1713
Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.
Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging—a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose.
“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,”
there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish.
“Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible. The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear—the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram. The gnomon—look at our shadows on the Green! We are the gnomon. We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it. By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it. We cast a
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they’d prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way.
Isaac hadn’t studied Euclid that much, and hadn’t cared enough to study him well. If he wanted to work with a curve he would instinctively write it down, not as an intersection of planes and cones, but as a series of numbers and letters: an algebraic expression. That only worked if there was a language, or at least an alphabet, that had the power of expressing shapes without literally depicting them, a problem that Monsieur Descartes had lately solved by (first) conceiving of curves, lines, et cetera, as being collections of individual points and (then) devising a way to express a point by
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“Translating a thing into the analytical language is akin to what the alchemist does when he extracts, from some crude ore, a pure spirit, or virtue, or pneuma. The fœces—the gross external forms of things—which only mislead and confuse us—are cast off to reveal the underlying spirit. And when this is done we may learn that some things that are superficially different are, in their real nature, the same.”
Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up—like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata.
It was the sort of thing that Hooke never bothered with—because for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.
he used the only means of self-preservation that God had granted to five-year-olds: the voice.
Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work.
As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”
to express cogitations is not to perform them, or else quills and printing-presses would write poetry by themselves.”
Fabricks
“Silence. Silence! And in silence ponder the similitudes between cannons and mouths. The simpleton beholds a cannon and phant’sies it an infallible destroyer of foes. But the veteran artilleryman knows that sometimes, when a cannon speaks, it bursts. Especially when it has been loaded in haste. When this occurs, Daniel, the foe is untouched. He may sense a distant gaseous exhalation, not puissant enough to ruffle his periwig. The eager gunner, and all his comrades, are blown to bits.
That, lass, is what I mean by the Devil’s Poor—one who keeps at it regardless—who won’t be mastered by any man, nor reformed by any church.
whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
“I’m saying that at Leipzig all goods—silk, coins, shares in mines—lose their hard dull gross forms and liquefy, and give up their true nature, as ores in an alchemist’s furnace sweat mercury—and all mercury is mercury and can be freely swapped for mercury of like weight—indeed cannot be distinguished from it.”
“To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers—and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy—whatever that means.”
Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls.”
St. Germain (a royal suburb of Paris)
Drake would have said that merely to set foot in such people’s houses and show them common courtesy was to be complicit in their whole system of power.
“If Hooke spent any more time lingering at Death’s door, Satan himself would have the man ejected for vagrancy. Yet just as I am wondering whether I can make time for his funeral, I learn from Sources that he is campaigning like a French regiment through every whorehouse in Whitechapel.”
I seek God where Geometry fails.
if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day.
You will be pleased to know that as of last week there are no beggars in France. The King has declared beggary illegal. The nobles who live at Versailles are of two minds concerning this. Of course they all agree that it is magnificent. But many of them are scarcely above beggars themselves, and so they are wondering whether the law applies to them.
Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made.
You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it.
for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns.
“Then I ask you to rebel.” “You first,” said the sergeant.
On my journey I shall have many hours to recast them in phrasings more pious (to placate the Jesuits), pompous (to impress the scholastics), or simple (to flatter the salons), but I trust you will forgive me for writing in a way that is informal and plain-spoken.
every dome, be it never so large, has an inside and an outside,
the Cartesian Quantity of Motion, mass multiplied by velocity (mv), is not conserved by falling bodies. And yet by doing, or even imagining, a very simple experiment, you can demonstrate that mass multiplied by the square of velocity (mv2) is conserved by such bodies. This quantity mv2 has certain properties of interest. For one, it measures the amount of work that a moving body is capable of doing. Work is something that has an absolute meaning, it is free from the problem of relativity that I mentioned a moment ago, a problem unavoidably shared by all theories that are founded upon the use
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Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now.
“I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. Do you deny it?” “Daniel, I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. But I am aware that you do other things.
