If his retreat into the realm of the mind was a boon for science, however, it came at a great cost to the man, and seems to have been connected to the loneliness and pain of his childhood.
I wonder if OP is confusing cause and effect. Did his choice of solitude cause him to suffer socially or did his decision to not waste time with others on minutiae enable him to focus on what he thought was more important? I prefer to choose the latter (for Newton and myself).
I had fun and socialized a lot more in a long time ago. Don't have much to show for it now and kinda wish that I spent the time differently now.
People disappoint; my computer rarely does.
Also I would be more willing to socialize more today but finding like-minded people is kind of hard. Finding like-minded people of the opposite gender harder still (at least where I live).
Damn man, not sure how I should respond. Thank you? Don't worry though loneliness isn't so bad once you get used to it.
I'm actually on vacation now and spent most of it in my room. Rented my first VPS, figured my way around Docker, set up nginx as a reverse proxy, kept tabs on my auth logs and noticed a lot of ssh login attempts from Chinese IPs. These are all firsts for me and I'm having fun. I don't think I'd trade those experiences for just to hang out with people who couldn't give two hoots about any of the things I'm interested in.
Ideally I'd love to share those experiences with others but if the choice is pretending to care about whatever topic I don't care about just for the sake of socializing and being alone and doing things that interest me, I'll take the latter every time.
I often find myself genuinely disinterested in other people where I live. I live in Somaliland and people love to talk local politics here. I don't get involved in it anymore because it's not really about politics but tribalism. It's not about right or wrong but just blindly defending whoever you're tangentially related to. I'm actually quite worried how children I have will end up if raised here.
I'm genuinely interested in people here on HN. In people I see presenting conferences I watch. In people who share my interests. I don't believe I can manufacture genuine interest. It's supposed to come naturally. However, if I don't even try to at least pretend to care then I will literally not talk to anyone for large portions of time.
I would say that by and large it's actually the social people who get lonely. They need the acceptance of others in order to feel good about themselves. Newton had his God and his work. Sure, there's 'more to life' but bear in mind that by any reasonable measure his work was full of life and, logically, every choice he made precluded other choices. We're all the beneficiaries of those choices and I expect they were intensely meaningful to him.
That's a matter of personal preference. I have never been in a relationship and don't currently have any friends, and I'm perfectly happy this way. Life is what you make it.
First of all, it's perfectly possible to waste time alone.
A lot of social interaction is, however, a waste of time indeed.
Waste in the sense that if you could take the net sum of the learning and the enjoyment you would get from it, minus the effort (in particular if you lean towards the I end of the spectrum), depending on the kind of people you have the luck or misfortune to surround yourself with, you could easily go into the red.
If I feel lonely and isolated, I am less inclined to be creative. If I am healthy and socially active, I feel more motivated to work harder and create.
I have wasted so much while being alone and while being very social. It's a vicious thing but all I can do is improve my habits and seek out balance.
Being lonely is being alone and being unhappy about it.
If you're alone but you're perfectly happy about it, you're not lonely, you're just alone.
Since the world is dominated by extraverts who feel lonely whenever they are alone, it is not surprising that these two terms are often used interchangeably. But to a raging introvert like Newton, they can have completely different meanings.
You can quantify that. Look at your facebook feed. Divide the time that you spent reading something useful (i.e. something with actual impact in your life) by the total time it you took to browsing useless gossip.
I think, if you disregard the small amounts of self-validation we get, most of the socializing time is not beneficial.
(and no, facebook is not social life, but it's a fingerprint of it)
> like convincing cats to gather for a game of Scrabble
If you get any board game out in a house with cats, it will be minutes until they are all gathered, trying to sit on the board. Perhaps they should have said "like convincing cats to not sit on a game of Scrabble".
Is it just me or is it Newton season? Aeon Magazine recently ran an article on magical thinking that mentioned Newton, and I swear I've seen him mentioned in other articles recently as well.
Actually, it is - literally. As the article mentioned, Newton was born on 25th December, so he often comes up in Christmas-related discussion and so this time of year is a good time to mention him.
"When Sir Isaac Newton died in 1727, he left behind no will and an enormous stack of papers. His surviving correspondences, notes, and manuscripts contain an estimated 10 million words, enough to fill up roughly 150 novel-length books."
Some of the paragraphs, ie. the first and second, are really good. Some others, aren't.
>Physicist Richard Feynman voiced the feelings of many a self-absorbed scientist when he wrote a book titled, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Did he? I finished the book a few days ago, and there aren't really anything self-absorbed about it.
>Newton never wrote a memoir, but if he had, he probably would have called it I Hope I Really Pissed You Off, or maybe, Don’t Bother Me, You Ass.
What does this even mean? From the article itself, it sounds like Newton didn't want to socialize, not that he wanted to piss people off.
>He had come into the world on December 25, 1642, like one of those Christmas gifts you hadn’t put on your list.
I.. what? Surely, for a parent to get his/her child is a present indeed. (I might misread this, but gifts I don't put on my list are gifts I do not want!).
>They certainly weren’t close—in all the writings and scribbles Isaac left behind there is not a single affectionate recollection of her.
The fact that there aren't anything doesn't mean they weren't close (one can be close without expressing it in writing!).
>The lonely but intensely creative life he led as a boy was preparation for the creative but tortured and isolated life he would lead for most—though happily not all—of his adult life.
The author seems to assume that everyone have to be surrounded by people to not have a 'tortured life'. I can't really say I agree.
>But Newton was not cut out to be a farmer, proving that you can be a genius at calculating the orbits of the planets, and a total klutz when it comes to growing alfalfa. What’s more, he didn’t care.
It sounds indeed like he didn't care, not that he simply sucked at it (though he might did suck).
All in all, I'm not sure I liked the article in its entirety. Somehow, the author thinks (or knows, but without backing it up) that Newton was a bitter, arrogant misanthropy, because of a bad childhood.
I think the writer meant that the gift is one that you didn't ask for, but realize that it is a great thing. Nobody asked for Newtonian Physics, but he delivered it and greatly improved our understanding of our world.
This doesnt really matter :) but..
They wrote that he was born early, his early birth coincided with christmas hence unexpected gift
At least thats how i read it
I agree. Reading it, I felt there were quite a few inferences made with just a dash of artistic liberty. There is some value in adding flair to historical accounts, but not when it potentially distorts important details like, for instance, Newton's character and how he related to people around him. I also doubt that our historical record can support conclusions like these, although I would gladly be disproven. All in all, the writing in this article doesn't make me want to trust that the journalist is treating the topic fairly.
Did Newton himself ever complain about loneliness? I 've never heard anything of the sort, yet this writer assumes it.
Try to picture the genius of Newton in the dark ages in which he lived. He found patterns and understood the world in astonishing ways. I think it was genuinely impossible for him to find a soulmate other than himself, even among his educated peers. He found patterns and understood the world in a profoundly different way than others. Should we not assume he was happy with discovering the unimaginable? Is that even comparable to the petty joy of socializing?
It reads like a character assassination. A very negative interpretation for no particular reason, and a highly incredulous and begrudging perspective of the extreme introverted or loner character.
What about Newtons later career where he made the unlikely transformation from scientific genius to stupendous badass?
"Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon's being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult. However, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties"
I feel skeptical to read about history of anything or anyone. People are complex entities. We have rational and emotional/irrational habits/reactions ...etc. Generally, historians look at the documents left or recorded and construct some picture. But I feel, no one or no entity records every emotion, every reaction, every action they do or involve ...etc. So there will always gaps/holes and there will always be unknown unknowns. Sometimes, we feel, we reached conclusions and may be awards are given and after few years, some new leads open up and it may change whatever we know till then making us feel like fools to trust in the beginning. Then there are many, who won't record anything, no trace at all. We are around 7 billion people now approximately and how much we record daily about ourselves for others i.e. future historians? I feel recording for future historians is overhead. Writing diary for yourself is different thing altogether.
So in conclusion, please do not conclude whatever you read as final w.r.t history even though it may be detailed or how well it may be written. There are always unknown unknowns.
Take whatever useful in your life and leave the rest may be the optimal approach towards history, if really required. Otherwise, in general scenario i.e. for daily life, just ignore history.
There are some doubting the veracity of the article, and while it is onesided in how it paints Newton, the main conclusion, how Newton's childhood might have contributed to his penchant for isolation is a solid one.
Newton was in his time known as vindictive, secretive, paranoid, sensitive (especially to criticism, he would have made many enemies here on HN) and fairly querulous. Throughout his life he had few friends, wasted no time on idling and had no time for art or music. He was puritanical and deeply religious. In his early notebooks he recorded sins such as: Squirting water on Thy day' and 'Making pies on Sunday night'
He was also prone to rages, as recorded in that same notebook:
'Striking many'; 'Punching my sister'; 'Wishing death and hoping it to some'.
In [1] it is stated: Given the rage that Newton had shown throughout his life when criticised, it is not surprising that he flew into an irrational temper directed against Leibniz and that Newton's assistant Whiston had seen his rage at first hand. He wrote:- 'Newton was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.'
However, while these aspects of Newton's personality have recently been the topics of focus in various articles and books, what is often omitted is that Newton was only so vindictive if he felt slighted. Granted, this was not hard to do, but there were other aspects to his character[2]:
>He has usually been found to have been an unsmiling and humourless, puritanical man with a countenance that was ‘ordinarily melancholy and thoughtfull’, but which, as Henry More FRS (1614–87) described during a discussion about biblical prophecy, could sometimes become ‘mighty lightsome and chearfull, and in a maner transported.’20
>He always kept Close to his Studyes, very rarely went a visiting, & had as few Visitors, ...excepting 2 or 3 Persons… in whose Company he took much Delight and Pleasure at an Evening...I never knew him take any Recreation or Pastime, either in Riding out to take ye Air, Walking, bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours lost, yt was not spent in his Studyes
Newton grew up with what seems to be have been a rather disturbed childhood. Isolated, with indication of having been distant to his mother (at least early on) and mistreated by his stepfather; when coupled with how far ahead he was when compared to his peers†, seems to have resulted in an emotionally stunted, insecure and sensitive individual. Taken together with his obsession with righteousness, it is not hard to see how he might have been difficult to get along with, in turn feeding back to poor social ability and bolstering his inclinations towards being alone.
Newton seemed to have suffered from depression and poor self image throughout his life, exacerbated no doubt, to paranoid delusions later on by consumption of heavy metals as mercury, arsenic and lead.
Certainly Newton was not an easy person to deal with; his brilliance, lack of interests and religiosity coupled with insecurity and pensive nature made for a difficult combination to not somehow run afoul of. He was likely not one to suffer fools lightly and was probably very good at holding a grudge. There are signs that he would have been pedantic and insufferable, the servants at his home certainly had no kind words to lay on him. Yet in the context of his early abandonment, the antagonism of his household against his bookishness, the hostility of his stepfather and the isolated childhood from having grown up with a mind so blazingly sharp, it is difficult to fault him for ending up as one so prone to churlishness. But despite a tendency towards a dour disposition, Stukeley wrote of him in his Memoir:
"according to my own observation, tho'. Sr. Isaac was of a very serious, & compos'd frame of mind yet I have often seen him laugh, & that upon moderate occasions. he had in his disposition, a natural...
42 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 93.6 ms ] threadI wonder if OP is confusing cause and effect. Did his choice of solitude cause him to suffer socially or did his decision to not waste time with others on minutiae enable him to focus on what he thought was more important? I prefer to choose the latter (for Newton and myself).
No judgement, just curiosity.
I agree these things are wildly important to a happy life. I still think there is more though.
People disappoint; my computer rarely does.
Also I would be more willing to socialize more today but finding like-minded people is kind of hard. Finding like-minded people of the opposite gender harder still (at least where I live).
And it sounds like you're not getting everything you want from life, and if that's the case, you have my sympathies.
I'm actually on vacation now and spent most of it in my room. Rented my first VPS, figured my way around Docker, set up nginx as a reverse proxy, kept tabs on my auth logs and noticed a lot of ssh login attempts from Chinese IPs. These are all firsts for me and I'm having fun. I don't think I'd trade those experiences for just to hang out with people who couldn't give two hoots about any of the things I'm interested in.
Ideally I'd love to share those experiences with others but if the choice is pretending to care about whatever topic I don't care about just for the sake of socializing and being alone and doing things that interest me, I'll take the latter every time.
I'm genuinely interested in people here on HN. In people I see presenting conferences I watch. In people who share my interests. I don't believe I can manufacture genuine interest. It's supposed to come naturally. However, if I don't even try to at least pretend to care then I will literally not talk to anyone for large portions of time.
Thanks for the advice though.
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
A lot of social interaction is, however, a waste of time indeed.
Waste in the sense that if you could take the net sum of the learning and the enjoyment you would get from it, minus the effort (in particular if you lean towards the I end of the spectrum), depending on the kind of people you have the luck or misfortune to surround yourself with, you could easily go into the red.
Being lonely by myself hurts. Being lonely in a group of people hurts more. Learning about algebraic topology doesn't hurt.
I think it's a bad idea for people to be by themselves, but I can more than empathize with the "I would rather not" sentiment in this thread.
I have wasted so much while being alone and while being very social. It's a vicious thing but all I can do is improve my habits and seek out balance.
Being lonely is being alone and being unhappy about it.
If you're alone but you're perfectly happy about it, you're not lonely, you're just alone.
Since the world is dominated by extraverts who feel lonely whenever they are alone, it is not surprising that these two terms are often used interchangeably. But to a raging introvert like Newton, they can have completely different meanings.
I think, if you disregard the small amounts of self-validation we get, most of the socializing time is not beneficial.
(and no, facebook is not social life, but it's a fingerprint of it)
We're all just optimizing our happy chemicals. http://www.amazon.com/Meet-Your-Happy-Chemicals-Endorphin/dp...
> like convincing cats to gather for a game of Scrabble
If you get any board game out in a house with cats, it will be minutes until they are all gathered, trying to sit on the board. Perhaps they should have said "like convincing cats to not sit on a game of Scrabble".
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=newtonmas
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/newton-papers-q-and-a/
Those words are being transcribed and published. You can read what is published so far here:
http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1
>Physicist Richard Feynman voiced the feelings of many a self-absorbed scientist when he wrote a book titled, What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Did he? I finished the book a few days ago, and there aren't really anything self-absorbed about it.
>Newton never wrote a memoir, but if he had, he probably would have called it I Hope I Really Pissed You Off, or maybe, Don’t Bother Me, You Ass.
What does this even mean? From the article itself, it sounds like Newton didn't want to socialize, not that he wanted to piss people off.
>He had come into the world on December 25, 1642, like one of those Christmas gifts you hadn’t put on your list.
I.. what? Surely, for a parent to get his/her child is a present indeed. (I might misread this, but gifts I don't put on my list are gifts I do not want!).
>They certainly weren’t close—in all the writings and scribbles Isaac left behind there is not a single affectionate recollection of her.
The fact that there aren't anything doesn't mean they weren't close (one can be close without expressing it in writing!).
>The lonely but intensely creative life he led as a boy was preparation for the creative but tortured and isolated life he would lead for most—though happily not all—of his adult life.
The author seems to assume that everyone have to be surrounded by people to not have a 'tortured life'. I can't really say I agree.
>But Newton was not cut out to be a farmer, proving that you can be a genius at calculating the orbits of the planets, and a total klutz when it comes to growing alfalfa. What’s more, he didn’t care.
It sounds indeed like he didn't care, not that he simply sucked at it (though he might did suck).
All in all, I'm not sure I liked the article in its entirety. Somehow, the author thinks (or knows, but without backing it up) that Newton was a bitter, arrogant misanthropy, because of a bad childhood.
Do people even make Christmas lists past the age of 12? O.o
Try to picture the genius of Newton in the dark ages in which he lived. He found patterns and understood the world in astonishing ways. I think it was genuinely impossible for him to find a soulmate other than himself, even among his educated peers. He found patterns and understood the world in a profoundly different way than others. Should we not assume he was happy with discovering the unimaginable? Is that even comparable to the petty joy of socializing?
He had nervous breakdowns, one of the causes: chronic psychological depression
A truly awful article.
"Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon's being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult. However, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Later_life
For an heavily fictionalized, but hugely entertaining, account of the times, I can strongly recommend the Baroque Cycle - much stupendous badassery.
So in conclusion, please do not conclude whatever you read as final w.r.t history even though it may be detailed or how well it may be written. There are always unknown unknowns.
Take whatever useful in your life and leave the rest may be the optimal approach towards history, if really required. Otherwise, in general scenario i.e. for daily life, just ignore history.
Newton was in his time known as vindictive, secretive, paranoid, sensitive (especially to criticism, he would have made many enemies here on HN) and fairly querulous. Throughout his life he had few friends, wasted no time on idling and had no time for art or music. He was puritanical and deeply religious. In his early notebooks he recorded sins such as: Squirting water on Thy day' and 'Making pies on Sunday night'
He was also prone to rages, as recorded in that same notebook:
'Striking many'; 'Punching my sister'; 'Wishing death and hoping it to some'.
In [1] it is stated: Given the rage that Newton had shown throughout his life when criticised, it is not surprising that he flew into an irrational temper directed against Leibniz and that Newton's assistant Whiston had seen his rage at first hand. He wrote:- 'Newton was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew.'
However, while these aspects of Newton's personality have recently been the topics of focus in various articles and books, what is often omitted is that Newton was only so vindictive if he felt slighted. Granted, this was not hard to do, but there were other aspects to his character[2]:
>He has usually been found to have been an unsmiling and humourless, puritanical man with a countenance that was ‘ordinarily melancholy and thoughtfull’, but which, as Henry More FRS (1614–87) described during a discussion about biblical prophecy, could sometimes become ‘mighty lightsome and chearfull, and in a maner transported.’20
>He always kept Close to his Studyes, very rarely went a visiting, & had as few Visitors, ...excepting 2 or 3 Persons… in whose Company he took much Delight and Pleasure at an Evening...I never knew him take any Recreation or Pastime, either in Riding out to take ye Air, Walking, bowling, or any other Exercise whatever, Thinking all Hours lost, yt was not spent in his Studyes
Newton grew up with what seems to be have been a rather disturbed childhood. Isolated, with indication of having been distant to his mother (at least early on) and mistreated by his stepfather; when coupled with how far ahead he was when compared to his peers†, seems to have resulted in an emotionally stunted, insecure and sensitive individual. Taken together with his obsession with righteousness, it is not hard to see how he might have been difficult to get along with, in turn feeding back to poor social ability and bolstering his inclinations towards being alone.
Newton seemed to have suffered from depression and poor self image throughout his life, exacerbated no doubt, to paranoid delusions later on by consumption of heavy metals as mercury, arsenic and lead.
Certainly Newton was not an easy person to deal with; his brilliance, lack of interests and religiosity coupled with insecurity and pensive nature made for a difficult combination to not somehow run afoul of. He was likely not one to suffer fools lightly and was probably very good at holding a grudge. There are signs that he would have been pedantic and insufferable, the servants at his home certainly had no kind words to lay on him. Yet in the context of his early abandonment, the antagonism of his household against his bookishness, the hostility of his stepfather and the isolated childhood from having grown up with a mind so blazingly sharp, it is difficult to fault him for ending up as one so prone to churlishness. But despite a tendency towards a dour disposition, Stukeley wrote of him in his Memoir:
"according to my own observation, tho'. Sr. Isaac was of a very serious, & compos'd frame of mind yet I have often seen him laugh, & that upon moderate occasions. he had in his disposition, a natural...