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Good points. His position must have been tenuous anyway as it was a requirement of Cambridge that all Fellows become ordained Anglican priests. Newton only avoi

by pdm55 10y ago

Good points. His position must have been tenuous anyway as it was a requirement of Cambridge that all Fellows become ordained Anglican priests. Newton only avoided this by special exemption from Charles II and it is not likely that he could afford to be exposed as breaking other regulations. Maybe this is part of the reason he was so reluctant to publish, he may have wondered if his physical reasoning could be construed as somehow against the prevailing religious beliefs of the time, especially when you see the approbation Newton's intellectual predecessor Galileo suffered for his new physics.

lisper 10y ago
But you are actually making my point for me. Opportunity cost is a vacuous argument. Everything you do has an opportunity cost. That's not a risk, it's just a consequence of the laws of physics. Maybe publishing would have counted as taking a risk for the reasons you cite, but Newton resisted publishing for a very long time, so he was actually avoiding that risk. So once again it really seems to me that Newton is not a good example of the merits of taking risks. (Quite the contrary in fact.)