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And, in the last paragraph of the general scholium, the appendix of the Principia, Newton describes electromagnetism and the role of electrical oscillation in t
by dr_dshiv 1y ago
And, in the last paragraph of the general scholium, the appendix of the Principia, Newton describes electromagnetism and the role of electrical oscillation in the nervous system. It’s actually the root of the the history of “vibes”
“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacnewton.ca/gen_scholium/scholium.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...
- mensetmanusman 1y agoPeople today are confused by the word spirit because the word fields quietly replaced it, and they are just as mysterious because we don’t know if they are real.
- gavmor 1y ago"Field" is a less mysterious term because it's not polysemous with a supernatural being (ghost) or a distilled alcoholic beverage (soluble liquid). Sure, it's polysemous with "a cultivated expanse of land", but AFAIK there is no popular, problematic pseudoscientific quackery about suggesting our bodies possess rows of oats.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoFields give breath to the math that perfectly describes reality but which isn’t found anywhere in reality. Kind of mysterious:)
- gavmor 1y ago> Wenn wir das Wesen des Baumes suchen, müssen wir gewahr werden, daß jenes, was jeden Baum als Baum durch waltet, nicht selber ein Baum ist, der sich zwischen den übrigen Bäumen antreffen läßt. — Martin Heidegger, Die Frage Nach Der Technik
- ahazred8ta 1y agoAt the time, 'spirit' was used to mean 'low-viscosity fluid' and 'vapor'. Alcohol and various distilled fluids were called spirits. He didn't necessarily mean 'intangible'.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NoToP 1y agoI had no idea Newton also pioneered British understatement.
- potamic 1y agoThis is some remarkable intuition. Electromagnetism wasn't even developed as a theory. To observe such varied phenomena like how nerves communicate or what comprises matter or the behaviour of light and postulate they might all have something in common and something to do with the attraction/repulsion seen when objects are rubbed together, is incredible. Was the idea very unique for its time or did scientists at the time hold similar ideas? Do you think it was just a lucky guess in the end that the world didn't turn out to be more complex or was there some reason behind this craziness?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoAgreed, it’s astonishing intuition. It’s hard to call it a lucky guess when it is the last paragraph of Newton’s magnum opus. But very hard to explain. Choosing my words carefully, I think it was a kind of deep and deliberate magic. Of the sort Newton ascribed to Pythagoras as the esoteric discoverer of the inverse square law of gravitation. (see “Newton and the pipes of pan”). Hooke also had a sort of musical, oscillatory, spiraling conception of mental phenomena. So it was in the Zeitgeist. In any case, it is striking and amazing— and resonant in this age of vibes.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoAnd since I know the word “magic” is triggering, here’s a magical book by one of the founding members of the Royal Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick
- ahazred8ta 1y ago“Newton and the pipes of pan” (1966) McGuire & Rattansi https://www.enotes.com/topics/theology/criticism/criticism/j-e-mcguire-and-p-m-rattansi-essay-date-1966 https://www.enotes.com/topics/theology/criticism/criticism/j...
- throwaway843 1y agoThe world was very pious then. To have written that paragraph a century earlier may have resulted in ostracizm. To have written it like that was enough given the limited backing that ould be given. It was enough to influence those around and after Newton, it was, in that sense, remarkable.
- windowshopping 1y ago> It’s actually the root of the the history of “vibes” ?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoYeah, so I’m working on a piece about this. Of course, “cosmic sympathy” and “harmony of the cosmos” goes back to the stoics and Pythagoreans. The direct use of the term vibration in the context of mental activity (“thought vibrations”) is from the American New Thought Movement and Theosophy — that’s where The Beach Boys got it from. But it extends back over the centuries to Newton and then Willis (who used sympathetic vibrations as the basis of his introduction of associationism in psychology).
- phrotoma 1y agoWhat space should I watch to catch that piece when you're finished?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoAI and experience design
- windowshopping 1y agohow is this an answer to that question
- dr_dshiv 1y agohttps://aixd.substack.com/ https://aixd.substack.com/
- eirikbakke 1y agoThis must be the mother of all "This is left for future work" paragraphs.
- TMEHpodcast 1y agoNewton leaving it to “future work” is iconic, like casually predicting neuroscience. Meanwhile, French mathematician Lagrange solved orbital parking mechanic over a century before we sent rockets into space
- SoftTalker 1y agoLeft as an exercise for the reader.
- nilamo 1y agoIs that how all "science" was written? It's nearly unreadable, the plot (Spirit?) lost in the language.
- analog31 1y agoIn some sense, yes. I've seen portions of works by people like Newton etc. You had to be a philosopher to read them, much less understand them. In a lot of cases, the same "material" that we learn today required someone to come along later and work out a notation that we can read and teach. My favorite example is the Algebra of Al-Khwarizmi, which contained no numbers, much less equations, but was just a wall of text. In fact, equations were invented later. Also, I think the electromagnetism of Maxwell was reformulated into the equations that we love and cherish by Heaviside.
- dr_dshiv 1y agoThe principa and the scholium were written in NeoLatin, the version of Latin adopted from the Renaissance through the 1900s to write scientific, philosophical and other treatises
- chowells 1y agoIt's how a lot of science was written, and knowing that makes strong Sapir-Whorf a really funny joke. We didn't derive our ideas about science from our language. Developing our ideas of science shaped our language so it could communicate them efficiently. (Weak Sapir-Whorf is still a perfectly fine observation, but it's a lot less predictive as a hypothesis.)