04.16.08
Newton: scientism’s first critic
Even the idlest stroll through Cambridge, England, calls to mind a pantheon of great scientific minds, but none is greater than Isaac Newton, who revolutionized the world of “natural philosophy” while the rest of England was paralyzed by the plague. Reading an enlightening new biography by Peter Ackroyd, Christopher Hitchens learns that Newton probably didn’t get bonked on the head by an apple—but he did have some pretty funny ideas about sex, gold, and religion.
It is significant that the virtual founding father of physics and the Scientific Revolution stood back with great detachment from his own theory. Some of his views were outlandish, in one way, but a close look shows that Newton was well aware of the limits of physics, and anticipated ever so generally the attempted correction of Kant. Newton lived before the cooptation of physics by scientism