English (Masonic) Ideology, Newton & the Exploitation of Science

What, exactly, is "the game"?

In 1687 the Royal Society published Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematic Philosophia Naturae to almost universal acclaim. It went on to be an event that was compared with God creating the world, as when Pope wrote “God said, ‘Let Newton be!—And all was light.” The publication of the Principia has been portrayed as a quasi-divine act ever since. Even as perceptive a biographer as Richard Westfall has recourse to the imagery of the gods when he writes

He has become for me wholly other, one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings . . 

 And what was this divine accomplishment? Newton’s Principia brought heaven and earth together in one unified system. He united celestial and terrestrial mechanics, the systems of Kepler and Galileo respectively, into one unified mathematical construct described by the inverse square law.

Newton was a mathematician of genius, but he put mathematics to more than one use in the Principia. The first use was to describe the attraction which gravity exerted between bodies in general and the planets in particular. The second use was to cover his tracks. Newton deliberately made the Principia as unreadable as possible by adding large sections of mathematical equations of his own invention.

Newton told his friend William Derham

And for this reason, namely to avoid being baited by little Smatterers in Mathematicks, he told me, he designedly made his Principia abstruse. . . 

 Admirers of the Principia have been so in awe of Newton’s mathematical ability that they failed to see that the Principia aspired to be more than mathematics. It was a treatise in physics and mechanics but it was also a cosmology as well. And it was in these areas that the first objections to his system began to intrude upon the otherwise universal applause which greeted its birth.  (more...)

English Ideology, Newton & the Exploitation of Science

Your costly engineering and scientific education a myth?