George+Week+Four

It is interesting to see this other side of Newton and to read some of his ideas sheds light onto his true nature. I knew that he was a religious fanatic, but some of his ideas were much father from what I had imagined. It is interesting to read his ideas on oxygen, "is a spirit...[and a] principle of combustion and of life itself" (Newman). An idea like this would be seen as the opposite of science, even though it comes from someone whose name is synonymous with scientific inquiry. His explanation for gravity goes even father. He suggests that all matter is constantly emitting spirit particles that come back to it and pulls matter towards it. This combinaiton of explaining scientific occurances with spiritual explanations is extreemly unlikely in modern times and is seen as unscientific, but is much more normal during the birth of the scientific revolution. Science and religion are continuing to spread apart more and more.

Newton ideas and personality remind me a lot of Kepler. Both were gifted mathematicians and physicists that were very religious and kept to themselves. They both also had seemingly strange theories that they kept away from the public as best as they could. In one of the letters that Kepler sent to Galileo he stated that because Jupiter had moons, there must be people living on them. He said that God must have given the inhabitants of Jupiter moons so that they would have something pretty to look at in the sky. He also believed that some of the craters on the moon must have been some type of housing for people, which they had long since abandoned. Kepler and Newton were both geniouses that both contributed a great deal to the scientific community, yet they both had some seemingly insane (at least with respect to modern day knowledge) ideas. Despite what any of their ideas were, people should be only judged by what they accomplished in life and not what they may have thought, their personal ideas, or their personaliities.