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The dark side of Isaac Newton

#1
Magical Realist Offline
https://prezi.com/gc0tutw5v0ha/the-dark-...ac-newton/

"Newton also served for 2 years in Parliament, but found it painfully boring. Sir Newton never exercised, nor did he have any interest in games, music, or poetry. He often forgot to eat because he was so busy in his work. He had fierce feuds with academic rivals, and even the few friends that he had found themselves buried deep in his quarrelsome behavior. Isaac Newton was a rather difficult man. He never married, he made few friends, and he kept much of his knowledge to himself until he knew that other people were about to discover the same thing (when this occurred, he would suddenly publish his work in a hurry to claim the credit before anyone else could.) He held grudges and he argued nonstop. He was difficult to get along with, and probably slightly paranoid. The Dark Side of Isaac Newton Newton was also neurotic and frequently depressed. In 1963, he became severely and morbidly depressed and gave up his chemical experiments. Some historians believe it is because Newton was having a homosexual relationship with Nicolas Fatio, a Swiss mathematician, and the relationship ended suddenly that year. England was fiercely puritanical in the 1600s, and anyone that was openly homosexual was to be put to death. One writer, Micheal White, author of Newton's biography "The Last Sorcerer", says that Newton was positively addicted to sorcery, grabbing books from any place he could find on alchemy, the dark arts, and demonology. He was also eager to find the potion for eternal life through chemical experiments. Such chemical experiments gave him lead poisoning. The great mathematician did bad things at age 19: threatened to burn down his parents' house with them inside; tried to use counterfeit money; and even beat up a young man named Arthur Storer. (Newton wrote a confessions list in his Fitzwilliam notebook of 1662, which includes the quote : "beating Arthur Storer.) For most of his life, Newton kept a dangerous secret. As a student at Trinity College, he was required to become a minister in the Church of England, but this was something he violently opposed. Newton became convinced that the Central Doctrine of Christianity, The Trinity, or the that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were all equally divine, was not true. The more ancient Christian texts he read, the more he believed that Christ was the son of God and not his equal."
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#2
C C Offline
Eccentric or crank professionals and possibly even rogue autodidacts lacking any credentials... May have occasionally yielded discoveries, breakthroughs, valuable insights; or inspirationally / indirectly had affects on others and their eventually successful contributions. But with scientism and institutional temples enforcing their parameters for orthodoxy / sanity and dispensing knee-jerk skeptical rejections according to sacred protocols and habits -- as well as faltering but still upright peer review gauntlets providing a filtering net... Then hopefully any damaging influence from such unwashed, disfigured creatures straying out from the dark chambers of an epistemologically and psychologically aberrant underworld will be constrained to a minimum in modern times. Wink

~
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#3
Magical Realist Offline
I feel like the real paradigm shifters in science probably skirted the edges of mental illness. Tesla was pretty far out there. Cantor was a frequent visitor of his local sanitorium. John Nash was schizophrenic. And even Darwin had his own issues:

"The man behind “On the Origin of Species” and the tremendous controversy regarding his theories on evolution made contributions to biology and science that would change the way the world looked at all of the millions upon millions of species of life. He became famous for the voyage that he took on the Beagle over a period of five years, which was a time that defined and made his career, but during which he was nearly incapacitated for the full length of the trip. It is not known exactly what was wrong with him but he suffered from visual hallucinations, hysterical crying, constant trembling and nausea.

It has been speculated by many that these were all symptoms of a severe case of agoraphobia, which were exacerbated from having to live in close quarters with the other people on the boat. After turning thirty, he was bedridden nearly all of the time, avoiding speaking with everybody; including his own children. At least one letter from Darwin mentioned that he had feelings of suicide as a result of the controversy associated with his most famous publication. It has also been suggested that he might have been a hypochondriac and that he suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), due to the meticulous records that he kept of each symptom – new or recurring – from which he suffered."---- https://discoveryspot.wordpress.com/2013...illnesses/
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