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"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians..." – Keynes Keynes on Newton thread, let's go https://t.co/FpvIITAHyW https://t.co/ybxDIut29P
Keynes wrote a ~4,000 word speech about Newton, titled "Newton: The Man" that was meant to commemorate Newton's 300th birthday – but he died 3 months before he could give it. His brother Geoffrey Keynes gave it in his stead. Let's dig in https://t.co/vGNYmRhqqA https://t.co/VKwNT8vjMj
"Newton was profoundly neurotic" "The too well-known conflicts and ignoble quarrels with Hooke, Flamsteed, Leibniz are only too clear an evidence of this" "Like all his type he was wholly aloof from women" 😂🤔 "a wrapt, consecrated solitary" https://t.co/LKn6Y7nuWZ
"the clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection" "Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret" https://t.co/Ow8yKWqZ26
quick aside – one of my fav things about going down these rabbitholes is finding fellow seekers. here are a bunch of nerds in houston who have left a thread for this nerd in singapore to follow, re: these nerds in cambridge england. their fb page has 1k likes and is active. Like! https://t.co/ObaLK8btPt
"he looked on the whole universe [...] as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence" "he believe that these clues were to be found partly [...] in certain papers and traditions handed down by brethren in an unbroken chain back to [...] Babylonia." https://t.co/nqyGpcFwwn
as someone from southeast asia I never really know what to think or say about elaborate details & backstory re: abrahamic religions. I don't have the context to appreciate this stuff about trinitarians and unitarians etc and I haven't been able to make myself interested https://t.co/yOezC8OJwm
that last bit tho – someone was thrown out of his professorship for saying Wrong Things that Newton secretly believed, and Newton stayed quiet, and Keynes considered this a blot on Newton's record I mean... it's always easy to judge other people's inaction. Newton was kinda busy https://t.co/xXyj38hwUS
@visakanv This is a bit of a cached belief so I'd have to refresh my memory as to why I think this, but my general impression is that Newton was kinda a jackass so this was actually pretty consistent with the rest of his record.
have to appreciate that whatever newton's beliefs were, he put in a fuckton of work into investigating his sources. I know that Keynes himself did this too! doesn't seem like a stretch to say that maybe he was inspired by Newton. rigorous thinkers 😍 https://t.co/Cv8YLTiQzG https://t.co/avzlmt0vLA
keynes does seem a little dismissive of newton's interests in alchemy, and I find myself in agreement with a Costa Rican physics professor on Quora (god, I love the Internet)– that Newton wasn't an occultist himself, but rather looking for coded clues https://t.co/DmCAKG8gYm https://t.co/j7tSp95AOB
Keynes talks for a bit about how Newton was highly qualified to do whatever he wanted despite his quiet anxious nerd disposition, and then talks about how he had a severe nervous breakdown around age 50. I personally find this to be very humanizing, even comforting in a way https://t.co/sjA2pTG7wg
