10 ms·
Don’t mess with a genius (2010)
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago(2010) -But a great story.
- gumby 3y agoI think you mean (1696)...
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoWell, no, the article was not written in 1969. The year of events described is irrelevant.
- alasdair_ 3y ago>Well, no, the article was not written in 1969. I think you mean (1696)...
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoOops, yes.
- emmelaich 3y ago2009. Levenson's book publish date. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151012784/exectoda-20 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151012784/exectoda-...
- PlunderBunny 3y agoIf this was the pitch for a movie, it would be turned down on account of being too unbelievable.
- svachalek 3y agoI love the last line, “If you doubt that such a man could exist, this monument bears witness”
- koryk 3y agoNeal Stephenson already wrote a few books about it
- hinkley 3y agoWhen I first read Quicksilver I assumed that Newton as Warden of the Coin was one of the speculative fiction parts of the story. Nope, he was indeed involved heavily in improving the state of the art in authentic money. I'm surprised he didn't get more negative attention from counterfeiters. But then once you get one hanged, and drawn and quartered, maybe they realize this cat has claws and they should leave it alone.
- calcsam 3y agoPaging Christopher Nolan.
- calcsam 3y agoAnd John Madden (Shakespeare in Love).
- geophile 3y agoOh hell no, give the story to a director who can actually create a movie with good dialog and character development.
- pmontra 3y agoGenuine question: is that up to the director or to the authors of the script?
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- n4r9 3y agoI've heard it said that Newton was one of very few (maybe the only?) Wardens to not pardon a single counterfeiter and stay their execution.
- mdp2021 3y ago> I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men Many will find this relatable.
- beachy 3y agoI particularly enjoyed his modest self-eulogy: > I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.
- darkerside 3y agoI wonder what Newton would think of what we've built
- owlstuffing 3y agoOr, worse, what we have destroyed
- survirtual 3y ago"You've split atoms, reached the moon, and yet the very force that keeps your feet on the ground remains a riddle? Perhaps society's attention is too often pulled away from the fundamental questions by trivial distractions."
- darkerside 3y agoI actually could see it being the opposite. Perhaps he'd be gratified and exultant to see that we took all his silly theoretical musings about calculus and gravity and created real world impact.
- survirtual 3y ago"My humble scribblings have led to technologies that reach the stars and devices that fit in the palm of your hand? How gratifying to know that you've taken the seeds of my theories and grown a veritable forest of innovation! Well done, future humans, well done indeed!"
- Izkata 3y agoSounds like the persona of Sherlock Holmes from the original stories, just with a (slightly) different focus.
- galaxyLogic 3y agoExactly maybe but I don't know Conan Doyle knew about this
- thisisauserid 3y agoNewton's obsession with counterfeiters never made sense to me until I read Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle. He makes a good case for tying it with Newton's prior alemetical pursuits.
- fuzzybear3965 3y agoWhat does "alemetical" mean?
- jszymborski 3y agoOP possibly meant alchemical? Can't seem to find anything for almetical.
- stronglikedan 3y agoDamn autocorrect! Also, I was amused that the parent's question is Google's current second result.
- mdp2021 3y ago> alemetical I'd say, "disparaging against the Germans" or "repulsed by confederations" ('Alemanni' ∩ 'emetic'). If somebody is proficient in Arabic, maybe 'emetic' (after article "Al-") makes sense also outside IE...
- acumenical 3y agoUnderrated comment
- mdp2021 3y agoName checks, Acumenical ;) :D
- denton-scratch 3y agoAs far as I can see, it's not_a_word.
- Jun8 3y agoSo, if someone with Newton’s caliber gets suckered into losing a lot of money in a market bubble (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company, note that it was a slave trading company), what hope is there for the rest of us?
- callwhendone 3y ago[flagged]
- autoexec 3y agoIt's like those optical illusions that you can't stop seeing even through you know your eyes are lying to you. Our brains are just wired to leave us vulnerable to certain cognitive biases and errors and while we can try to increase our awareness of those vulnerabilities we can't get rid of them. To make it worse, scammers and corporations spend massive amounts of time/money researching how to best exploit those weaknesses and so the moment our guard is down any one of us could fall for one of their traps. We're all basically one bad day away from being suckered into losing money on something. Nobody can be hypervigilant all the time and a person like Newton probably had a lot on his mind.
- psychoslave 3y agoThere is a great solution for this. Just neither become possessor of any large amount of wealth.
- kurthr 3y agoWell, he was also a lifelong celibate.
- dustypotato 3y agoAnd?
- tgv 3y ago
- emmelaich 3y agoThis is mostly a copy of Levenson's 2009 article, submitted a day ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37493372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37493372 https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chaloner-isaac-newton-counterfeiter/ https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalon... I found this interesting: > Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty.
- svat 3y agoThis is not a copy of Levenson's 2009 article. This is a copy of Levenson's 2009 book (the good parts) (as mentioned in the first sentence), that I wrote as a blog post in 2010 before returning the book to the library, and which someone else submitted to HN today probably after I mentioned it in a comment on another post about another counterfeiter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 The facts are the same (researched by Levenson), but the words and presentation/storytelling are different, surely? You can see that Levenson and I chose somewhat different parts of his book to emphasize. I wouldn't have been surprised even if we had chosen the same parts, because obviously I think the ones I chose were the good parts :-)
- emmelaich 3y agoOK, apologies. I guess I was a little peeved that Levenson's own article didn't get many upvotes. (Though I wasn't the submitter)
- svat 3y agoNo problem :) Mysterious are the ways of upvotes. It's not entirely random—I would expect a post from ciechanow.ski to be reliably upvoted—but there's a fair amount of chance (which is why there's a manually curated "second-chance pool"). I don't know how Levenson's article didn't get more attention. It is a stunning coincidence that it was posted just yesterday though; as far as I can tell there's no connection between that article being posted (given that it got hardly any attention) and “The Greatest Counterfeiter” being posted (which led to my comment).
- benreesman 3y agoI have a dim notion that Sir Isaac also had quite the feud with Leibniz, is that also a wildly entertaining story like this one? And if so what’s the best telling?
- vithlani 3y ago[dead]
- psychoslave 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Clarke_correspondence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Clarke_corresp...
- benreesman 3y agoAwesome thank you for the links. As an American English-speaker I think my ostensible tribal obligation is to call it a tie at worst and take Sir Isaac’s part by default, but Wikipedia seems to be going out of its way to avoid concluding that Leibniz got there first: I’m curious if Germans have a different view than us in the Empire or it’s former colonies. It seems a tough case to make that Newton wasn’t the more influential thinker overall, but on Calc I-IV? Lot of claims about stuff that he “decided not to publish”.
- psychoslave 3y agoLeibniz certainly has a profile closer to that of Thomas Young: a polymath with a name far less known to general public.
- bllguo 3y agoIndeed. To add to this - first to develop or not, Leibniz published first, and Newton's shameless unfounded accusations against him cannot be reasonably defended. I don't see any pro-Newton arguments in this situation besides "tribal obligations" that you mention. In the realm of calculus Leibniz is far more influential - his notation, for instance, is so superior that English mathematicians rejecting it arguably led to the stagnation of the field in England. And of course it is far more prevalent today.
- hirundo 3y ago> Newton saw what was happening ... and somehow intimidated and pushed Neale aside in a bloodless coup, and took over the Great Recoinage himself. Or more charitably, Neale didn't fight too hard for his prerogatives when he saw that one of the most competent men in the history of western civilization was trying to solve his biggest problem.
- thsksbd 3y agoGood management gets out of the way of its star worker.
- sirspacey 3y agoAmen
- taberiand 3y agoEspecially when getting in their way gets you hung drawn and quartered
- denton-scratch 3y ago"Hung" is what you do to a side of beef. TFA said it right; criminals were hanged. "You will be taken from this place to another place, and thence to a place of execution, where you will be hanged by the neck until dead." The penalty for common traitors was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The hanging was not until death; after dangling for a while, you were cut down and your limbs were attached to horses, which were then driven apart, causing all of your joints to be dislocated. You were then cut into four pieces, which were carried to the corners of the realm, and displayed as a warning to others not to engage in treason. High-born traitors had it easy; they had the privilege of being beheaded instead. If they were lucky, they got a skilled executioner, who could strike off their head with a single blow. Lady Jane Grey was not lucky.
- taberiand 3y agoPedantry will get you hung
- zem 3y agohe also invented milled edges, which arguably did even more to preserve the coinage: https://www.perthmint.com/news/collector/coin-collecting/how-isaac-newton-helped-shape-our-coins/ https://www.perthmint.com/news/collector/coin-collecting/how...
- hooloovoo_zoo 3y agoIt’s an idea that goes back to at least the Romans, but Newton attracts attribution like Mark Twain. (Referring to Roman serrate-edge coins)
- dang 3y ago> attracts attribution like Mark Twain Well put!
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- hammock 3y ago>The Warden of the Mint, with a salary of 400-odd pounds a year $91,000 a year
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- thedailymail 3y agoAnother fascinating thing about the Newton story is its parallels to Archimedes and the "eureka" moment. Both stories involve the most famous physicist of the day being asked to protect the integrity of royal gold. (Archimedes was asked by the king of Syracuse to detect whether a goldsmith had been adding baser metals to an offertory gold crown.) And both involve famous scientists bending the rules of evidence and procedure to catch a thief – in Archimedes' case, the modern consensus is that simple water displacement would not be sufficient to distinguish pure gold from a gold/silver alloy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 3y agoWait what? Are you saying that the story (Archimedes invents theory of density, proves the crown is fake) is really Archimedes invents density, but then proves the fakery by ... finding the spare gold in the guys kitchen or something? I'm flabbergasted. I can of course believe it's true. I just never thought to question it.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoI figured it was Archimedes invents theory of density, then he or someone else invents anecdote to show its use, anecdote actually wouldn't work though but theory of density still good so people use it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 3y agoI always wondered how he measured the displacement accurately enough.
- roflmaostc 3y agoYou simply should use a vessel which gets narrower to the top. If you put the crown, the water level rises. The smaller the cross section of the vessel the more the height has to increase to amount the volume.
- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing thread: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 - Sept 2023 (26 comments) - (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499206) Normally we downweight follow-ups but this is too good. Even the parentheticals are good ("the only thing ever recorded spoken by him [in Parliament] is a request to close the window)".
- HansardExpert 3y agoI wonder where that comes from (is it apocryphal?) as prior to Hansard - which itself is not always verbatim and is the body that records the daily goings-on in the Houses of Parliament - there was very little documented on what was actually said in Parliament - let alone who said it. It's a nice anecdote if nothing else.
- dang 3y agoAh good point. As someone with a hair trigger for misattributed quotes I should have been more suspicious.
- svat 3y agoI dug deeper in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517597 — it's mentioned in many books, but Newton's very thorough biographer Richard Westfall authoritatively says “According to a story that rests solely on anecdotal authority, he spoke only once”. So in fact we can be fairly confident it's only an anecdote and nothing more.
- acyou 3y agoDoes this cause anyone else to be more suspicious of Newton's achievements and the history books, given that he at one point had accrued enough power to have his rivals drawn and quartered? Now, I have less respect for Newton than ever before. That essay repeats the details of the smear job against Newton's rival in earnest, and parrots his praises, with zero sense of irony or context with respect to how history is formed. Reminds me strongly of Thomas Edison, prominent scientist with suspiciously high political standing and personal fortune. No one can contest this now, the histories are 300 years old. What no one can contest in good faith is that, "The winners write the history books".
- atomicnature 3y agoIf you study the details of his youth, etc, you will learn that he lived in obscurity for many, many years, toiling alone on the most difficult questions of the time. His "political standing" was a result purely of his scientific achievements and a general consensus of his high ability within scientific circles. He took great pains to reduce the number of acquaintances he had rather than increase them. I think Newton was more right than wrong in the beliefs he took seriously (even outside the narrow confines of "science"). He was anything but naive. This doesn't mean he never lied; it just means that he lied way less compared to average standards for humanity.
- svat 3y agoI don't think this is a reasonable understanding of the story. Chaloner cannot be called “Newton's rival” in any usual sense of the word: he was born destitute, turned to various horrifying crimes from a young age, was barely educated, was arrested multiple times even before his story overlapped with Newton's in any way, etc. He died only because his crime was a serious one, falling under the category of “high treason”. And for his part, Newton hardly had accrued enough power despite all his mathematical and scientific achievements — this job was obtained with great effort late in his life, and his (small) fortune came from his job's salary. Regarding “context with respect to how history is formed”, I think this is best done by reading more primary sources, and not forming a quick opinion (as you seem to be doing, from a blog post). This is what the author of the book has done. From his article at http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chaloner-isaac-newton-counterfeiter/ http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalone... — > Some historians, notably Frank Manuel, have speculated that Newton pursued this work with implausible eagerness, out of a kind of frustrated blood lust born of his abandoned and unhappy childhood. This seems to me to be nonsense. The specific historical context matters here: Newton did not author the bloody code, nor did he send everyone he could to the gallows. Rather, the record of his depositions shows him to be simply a relentless practical man doing his job. He used little fish to catch big fish, and at least some of those low on the ladder received their escape from the gibbet. What you can see here, surprisingly, is the birth of a modern idea of a civil service. The Warden -– even Isaac Newton — was simply a man in a job doing the functions of that job, which included organizing the investigation and prosecution of counterfeiters. > […] Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty. When he found he could not, he responded as he always had to the job at hand.
- aifer4 3y ago> I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me. What a great quote
- kromem 3y agoVery sad. There have been a great many minds that have tortured themselves over pondering the things we don't even blink an eye at today. We admire and idolize those who found the pretty pebbles that light up the shore today, and yet I'm sure many of them would have eagerly traded places just to see what continued to take shape. It's sad, though also a reminder of just how much is easily taken for granted.
- smeej 3y agoTo me it sounds more like standing in wonder at how vastly much more he could never have lived long enough to understand. It doesn't strike me as sad, but humble, and appropriately so.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoNewton, humble? That business about pebbles is Newton showing off. Calculus is Latin for small pebble.
- smeej 3y agoEven titans become humble facing death.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoReally? How would you know?
- svat 3y ago
- ackbar03 3y agoThis is almost like a real-life version of Sherlock Holmes and maybe a slightly discount version James Moriarty
- vishnugupta 3y agoWhile appreciating his genius let's also remember that even Newton himself couldn't resist FOMO and lost substantial money when a bubble burst [1]. Goes to show he was a human after all. [1] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isaac-Newton-and-the-perils-of-the-financial-South https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isa...
- withinboredom 3y agoProbably thought he could time the market. Everyone makes that mistake...
- RugnirViking 3y agoits worse than that. He pulled his money out because he (correctly) thought it would end badly, making a large profit. But it just kept growing and growing. He eventually bought back in, and that was right at the peak before the crash, so he lost a lot.
- cornholio 3y agoThis is almost like how it went for me, early Bitcoin "investor". Still managed to make some speculative profit though, take that, Newton!
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThis is mentioned in the linked story.
- langsoul-com 3y agoThere was a linked quote on that. "I can predict the movement of stars, but not the madness of men" Truly a great quote and still so valid today.
- mjklin 3y agoANDROMACHE. Doesn't it ever tire you to see and prophesy only disasters? CASSANDRA. I see nothing. I prophesy nothing. All I ever do is to take account of two great stupidities: the stupidities of men, and the wild stupidity of the elements. — Jean Giraudoux, French (1882-1944)
- zgiber 3y agoThanks for the great write up! I’d watch this as a series or movie
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> To avoid issues of jurisdiction he got himself appointed Justice of the Peace for nineteen counties surrounding London.
- munro 3y ago> the only thing ever recorded spoken by him is a request to close the window Does anyone know where I can find this?
- HansardExpert 3y agoThe Wikipedia entry for Newton mentions this and cites Michael White's book from 1997 - The last sorcerer. In that he states "Newton was an MP for almost exactly one year, but he seems to have contributed nothing personally to the proceedings of the new parliament. He reported back to the Vice-Chancellor faithfully and in minute detail, but according to one anecdote, which may or may not be true, he said only one thing during the year-long proceedings. Feeling a draught down his back, he asked a nearby usher to close an open window." But there is no other reference in that book to where that came from. Official records of what was and what as not said in Parliament didn't really come into the public until Hansard (circa 1800) there is 'WIlliam COBBETT's parliamentary history of England : from the Norman conquest, in 1066, to the year, 1803' which has been a reference before the 1800's and you can find a copy of that on the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/pp809777_0001/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/pp809777_0001/mode/2up There is one reference to the string 'Newton' in that search but it is just a name of a borough.
- svat 3y agoIt's apocryphal, found in Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes etc. Levenson's book (which BTW has a lot more of interest beyond whatever I put in the blog post) cites two sources for this point: • Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), p. 483 • A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (1992), p. 231 I looked up both those books and both of them call it an anecdote. Westfall: > There is no way to pretend that Newton played a leading role in its deliberations. According to a story that rests solely on anecdotal authority , he spoke only once; feeling a draft, he asked an usher to close a window . It is not merely anecdotal that none of the surviving accounts of the Parliament contain any record of his participation in its debates. Only to a limited extent do we know where he stood on the great issues the Convention Parliament decided. Hall: > An anecdote records Newton's only utterance in the House of Commons: feeling a draught, he requested that a window be closed. However, anecdote may be erroneous. Since Newton asked leave to bring in a Bill to confirm the charters and privileges of the University of Cambridge, he must have made some remarks, however terse.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dagaci 3y agoSounds quite bad. Smells of corruption. At some point Chaloner (correctly) accused the persons running the Royal Mint of Counterfeiting, obviously furious the Mint the Newton suddenly finds witnesses (from other convicts) and evidence that Chaloner is a counterfeiter! and Chaloner end up: “Twitching and writhing, on the hangman’s rope while being disembowelled.”
- juanre 3y agoNeal Stephenson's great trilogy The Baroque Cycle does a great job at depicting this facet of Newton.
- b800h 3y agoHonestly, this reads like something by Terry Pratchett, and probably inspired him.
- earthboundkid 3y agoLocke was really involved in the recoinage. It was an important moment in the history of capitalism in terms of the ideology of money. See https://newtonandthemint.history.ox.ac.uk/great-recoinage/recoinage-theories https://newtonandthemint.history.ox.ac.uk/great-recoinage/re...
- sejtnjir 3y agoA small inaccuracy: the South Sea Bubble was not the first speculation bubble. Tulip Mania took place almost a century earlier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
- Cilvic 3y ago>the world’s first stock market crash
- _maelstrom 3y agoIt's buried in the wikipedia article, but these stories of tulips being a giant society collapsing bubble "come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay."[1] “There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar [author of "Tulipmania" and a professor of early modern history at King’s College London] says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”[1] [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
- hermitcrab 3y agoNewton has a fair claim to be the greatest genius that every lived, with his hugely influential work on gravitation, law of motion, optics, calculcus and more. But he also spent a huge amount of time and energy on bible studies and alchemy. I wonder what other areas of science and maths he might have discovered without those distractions?
- nestorD 3y agoSpending time on alchemy is, to me, symptomatic of a curious mind that was open to experimentation where his peers might reject things altogether on presuppositions. If he had no been that easily distracted by weird things I expect he would have pushed the envelope of knowledge significantly less.
- DylanDmitri 3y agoA curious person finds treasures in one of three rooms they searched. Obviously they should have ignored the other two from the get go. I think Newton was curious about everything around him, and a lot of it paid off.
- hyperthesis 3y agoWorld's greatest detective? Independently wealthy?
- roomey 3y agoIf you like this I would recommend Neil Stephenson's Baroque cycle series of books. It is historical fiction, but I very much like the narrative style.
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