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That comparison between the readability of Newton and Darwin has got me thinking on what changed between the 17th and 19th centuries to make that possible. Asid
by benbreen 9y ago
That comparison between the readability of Newton and Darwin has got me thinking on what changed between the 17th and 19th centuries to make that possible. Aside from the obvious differences between how Newton and Darwin communicated in writing (Latin vs English) I think it also might have to do with the rise of the novel, and how novels effectively created a "general interest reader." I suspect that Darwin and Huxley were intentionally writing for mass reading public, people who read Dickens and the Illustrated London News. These sorts of people wanted to learn new things about the world but wanted things to be readable and memorably expressed.
Newton was basically just trying to communicate with a handful of experts, many of whom didn't even speak English, so he just didn't see what he did as something that demanded a lot of attention paid to prose style. I actually find the writing style of some of Newton's contemporaries to be really beautiful and readable (Margaret Cavendish's Observations upon Experimental Philosophy is a surprisingly fun read). As is some of Descartes (like his Meditations). But those are definitely outliers.
- 123e1daAdfafsdf 9y agoIn one of the recent books I read, I've heard that Newton didn't want his material accessible, as it would keep out the dilettantes. He wanted only a select few to understand a lot of what he wrote, which is part of the reason they're difficult. (I think it was either Gleick's book on Information Theory, or the Drunkard's Walk, but it could have been any of the half dozen books I've been absorbed into lately)
- jdietrich 9y agoNewton dabbled in alchemy and the occult. He was working at a time when the modern scientific mindset was still in beta. The idea of open publication seems self-evidently sensible today, but in the 17th century it was still waging a battle with obscurantism.
- roceasta 9y agoYeah it's the opposite of the Nigerian prince scam which is designed to filter out respondents with any intelligence or common sense.
- godelmachine 9y agoWell, my information is a bit different. During his time, there were many amateur mathematicians around. And Newton had a long standing beef with Leibnitz (Who was the chair of the Royal Society at the time). Whenever Newton published any paper, these wayward mathematicians used to ridicule his ideas, which infuriated Newton. That's why he decided to write in such sophisticated and grandiloquent language, such that these dabblers won't understand what he has written, to teach them a lesson (Irony, ROFL!! :D)
- lkramer 9y agoSmall corrections: while he did indeed have a rivalry with Leibnitz (over who invented Calculus), Leibnitz was German, and therefor not likely to be chair of the Royal Society. You are probably thinking of Hooke whom he also had a rivalry with.
- animal531 9y agoYeah, he seems to have had a bit of a personality issue and clashed a lot with everyone around him.
- MooMooMilkParty 9y agoI wish I could find the source for this, but I remember reading that Gauss idolized Newton for his style. From what Gauss (and a tiny bit of Newton) I have read, it seems like he didn't like to provide any sorts of motivation or exposition. So, FWIW there's a second anecdote in support of this idea.
- Retra 9y agoThey're difficult because only a select few did understand what he was writing, and he had to hack and mangle his work into the form of the standard mathematics of his day. Modern science and mathematics would be just as unapproachable if everything were required to be expressed in some standard-but-largely-inelegant framework in order to be taken seriously.
- nils-m-holm 9y ago> He wanted only a select few to understand a lot of what he wrote And thus he created a writing style that is predominant to this day! :(
- nicholas73 9y agoI find more probable that Latin was chosen as it was standardized and can be used to communicate internationally. Writing in his own dialect of English may have been less understandable even in England.