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Posted by: djellison May 6 2006, 01:33 PM

Not every day you get to do this - I'm posting from an outhouse of Newton's birthplace - Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. Yes - it has an apple orchard, and yes, it has his bedroom where he used a south facing window to split light into its spectrum. Sadly, you can't take pictures in the house, but I've got some nice ones from outside that I'll post when we get home in a few hours!


Doug

Posted by: djellison May 6 2006, 07:46 PM

Here is a little mosaic of three frames from my camera ( Canon S2 IS for those that like such info )

On the right, Woolsthorpe Manor. Take carefull note of the windows on the first floor. The 'top left' window at the front of the house is the bedroom window in which Newton was born Christmas Day 1642. He left to go to Cambridge University but returned when the plague struck Europe and the University closed. When he returned, he did his work on Optics. The top right window on the front of the house is his bedroom from that time - and the small window on the near-side wall ( the middle of the three on that wall ) is the small south facing window thru which he did his spectral work projected, using a prism, onto the far wall of the bedroom (by what I found is the door) - and that front window is the one from which he is said to have considered gravity 'on the occasion of seing a falling apple'. There's 1001 different tales of this if you go online, most not including the myth that it fell on his head, some saying he was sat in the Orchard, but 'on site' they suggest he saw it from his bedroom.

And which tree was he looking at. Well the actual tree is supposed to have been basically killed in an 1820 storm, but the tree they mark down as being either the remnants or decendant of that tree is the tall, distorted tree near the left end of the mosaic ( I took the mosaic so it would show house and tree ). The base does look very warped and broken, so perhaps there are remains of the original tree playing a part in that tree, who knows. There is a snuff box in his bedroom made from a log cut from the fallen tree in 1820 (and somewhere in the US a cutting is rumoured to have grown into a tree), along with a copy of Pricipia Mathematica and a replica of his small newtonian telescope

All in all, a great little trip out today - something of a pilgrimage for a space nut like me, for as Tom Hanks said...once the engines are off "Isaac Newton's in the driving seat"

A few more pics to follow.

Doug

Posted by: djellison May 6 2006, 07:57 PM

A few more images.

First and second, labeled and unlabeled images of the house from a different view;
Me infront of 'the tree' in an attempt to formulate some magnificent leap forward in scientific thinking (I failed)
And finally, the tree again, from the 'reverse angle'
For more info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woolsthorpe_Manor
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-woolsthorpemanor/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Isaac_Newton

Posted by: Nix May 6 2006, 08:02 PM

A nice trip indeed!

Nico

Posted by: Richard Trigaux May 7 2006, 07:05 AM

Interesting images of an historical place, doug, thank you for posting them. It is alway interesting to see places where history was made.

I France I visited Buffon's forges, with Buffon's house and the remnants of the first blast furnace, an interesting place too, even if not so notorious than Newton's. Such places are a moving dive into the world of our ancestors...

Descendants of the Newton's trees, which are being replanted all over the world? That reminds me of the Bouddha's tree, which can still be seen in Bodhgaya (or its descendant) and which was also transplanted all over the world. It is funny to see the Newton's tree treated as a religious relic! But indeed being the descendant of newton's tree gives it a certain sentimental value.

Posted by: djellison May 7 2006, 10:26 AM

A final pic showing the 'far side' of the tree - looking at the state of the base of the trunk, it's not hard to believe that it could be partically the orig. tree in places..who knows. This is a 2 x 2 mosaic

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 7 2006, 04:22 PM

Doug:

I think he was quoting Jim Lovell!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: djellison May 7 2006, 04:35 PM

Well - wasn't sure if it was creative licence on behalf of the script writers, so I wasn't going to say that Lovell said it incase it was just added for effect in the movie

Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 7 2006, 04:59 PM

Doug:

It was one of Jim Lovell's rentaquotes - he regularly used the phrase in interviews, and it was also broadcast from space at the time, though I seem to remember that Mission Control brought the subject up - doubtless it's going to be picked up in the in the Apollo Flight Journal. I suppose it helps if you're old enough to remember, too...

...what's that? Speak up! Bah, young people these days, don't know what they're missing. In my day we had to make our own Moon landings! Luxury, bloody luxury...

(I could go on. And on. And on!)

Bob Shaw

Posted by: dvandorn May 7 2006, 05:16 PM

The exchange in question happened during Apollo 8. Mike Collins was at the CapCom console, and called up to the vehicle with a question that had been put to him by his young son: Who was driving the spacecraft? Was it his friend, Mr. Borman? Lovell shot back, with a laugh, that no, he thought Isaac Newton was doing the driving right about then.

The exchange happened, as I recall, during trans-Earth coast, on the way home.

-the other Doug

Posted by: dvandorn May 7 2006, 05:38 PM

OK -- just for the sake of completeness, the exchange began at four days, six hours, seven minutes and fifty-one seconds into the mission -- mid-day on Christmas Day, 1968. It went like this:

CapCom (Collins): Is this Bill (Anders)?

LMP (Anders): None other.

CapCom (Collins): I got a message for you while you were asleep. Valerie (Anders) said to tell you that she and the kids are leaving for church about 11:30 and eagerly awaiting your return. She said presents are magically starting to appear under the Christmas tree again so it looks like a double barrel Christmas. Over.

LMP (Anders): You can't beat a deal like that. How was Christmas at your house today?

CapCom (Collins): Early and busy as usual. I told Michael (Collins' young son) you guys are up there, and he said who's driving?

CMP (Lovell): (Laughing) That's a good question. I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.

CapCom (Collins): Say again.

CMP (Lovell): I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.

CapCom (Collins): Roger. We copy.

In my original post, the addition of the line "Was it his friend, Mr. Borman?" comes from Collins' account of the episode in his book, Carrying the Fire. My guess is that Collins' son included that in his original query, but that Collins didn't pass on that portion of the question to the crew, as evidenced by the mission transcript.

-the other Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 7 2006, 06:10 PM

Isn't it satisfying when mere facts back up one's memory?

Now, what was I saying?

Bob Shaw

Posted by: tty May 7 2006, 07:57 PM

[quote name='Richard Trigaux' date='May 7 2006, 09:05 AM' post='53120']
I France I visited Buffon's forges, with Buffon's house and the remnants of the first blast furnace, an interesting place too, even if not so notorious than Newton's. Such places are a moving dive into the world of our ancestors...
/quote]

That can't be right, blast furnaces go back at least to the 14th century in Sweden.

tty

Posted by: Richard Trigaux May 8 2006, 06:37 AM

If i remember well, we hear something like that in the movie "Apollo 13". Perhaps they re-served the same allusion, or it was well known enough to be included into the movie.

Posted by: Richard Trigaux May 8 2006, 07:21 AM

That it was the first blast furnace is what was explained by the guides at Buffon's forges, but I shall not deny that it could be somewhere else.

Perhaps there is a confusion on words. In french we have "bas-fourneau" ("low furnace") for a device which don't melt iron (the resulting iron lump needs to be puddled and it can be forged) and "haut-fourneau" ("high furnace") which melts iron, but gives high carbon pig-iron which can only be cast, not forged. It need to be converted into steel, an operation which is known only since the 19th century. The device at Buffon's is clearly of the second kind. In my dictionary "haut fourneau" translated into "blast furnace" But using an air blast into an iron furnace or into a smithy is known since long ago, this is perhaps what was in Sweden in the 14th century. But if there are really "haut fourneaux" in Sweden since th 14th century, so the explanations at Buffon's are false.

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 8 2006, 09:00 PM

Strangely, in the UK Sir Henry Bessemer is credited with the creation of the first 'practical' steel-making process (meaning suited to mass production - steel was made for centuries before that).

http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96jan/bessemer.html

He must have passed by Newton's house and Oxford many a time!

Charles Fort once observed that, when 'steam engine time' came around, *everybody* started inventing the things at the same time. In rocketry terms, there were Goddard, the Peenemunde guys, and the Comrades over at GIRD...

Bob Shaw

Posted by: Richard Trigaux May 9 2006, 07:15 AM

It seems that the guies at Buffon's forges were doing only cast iron, not steel, for lack of a conversion method. But they produced a huge amount of cast iron, to the epoch standards. There was still visible a 900kg pig iron ingot strangely shaped, the shape of a shuttle, but with a triangular section. Perhaps it was used as a ballast for small ships.

As for steel, there was empirical recipes known for centuries, but at the scale of manual smithing. for instance damaskined knives were to be forged and re-forged up to... 80 times. This made the cost of a thing like a sword very hight, like a luxury car, when today it would cost only some euros.

In the 19th century there was already a mass production of iron, but it had to be puddled (hammered lengthily) to expell the excess carbon particules. This process is explained in Jules verne's "The Begum's Millions". Large bridges and buildings like the Eiffel tower are made of puddled iron, not of steel.

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 9 2006, 03:52 PM

I am sure there are those who will respond with "So what, it's the
science and the discoveries he made that matters", but I remember
what a shame it was to find out that Newton may have been a genius
intellectually, but his personality was anything but sterling.

Newton's vindictiveness towards anyone who opposed his ideas was
quite sad. It bothers me far more than the discovery that he was
quite superstitious, but I put that aspect of his life as being a part
of the era he lived in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_newton

What a contrast to the calming images of his home in the English
countryside.

I know, all scientists are human and geniuses seem to have an
especially hard time balancing smarts with emotions and social
manners.

But some day, perhaps there will be an intellectual and emotional
genius, one whose personal behavior will entice others to the fields
rather than turn them off and invite more stereotypes.

Posted by: djellison May 9 2006, 04:17 PM

Superstition and things of that nature were HUGE during Newtons time - for instance people would draw a 5 fingered hand on the wall - because anyone who HAD 5 fingers was declared a witch and a witch could just knock on your door and demand accomodation...just inside the door at Woolesthorpe is scratching on the wall of a 5 fingered hand so if such an event were to transpire they could say "sorry - already got one staying here, look - that's her hand"

To have dismissed superstition and even the belief that God was all powerfull and all controlling in the late 1600's would have been considered very very strange indeed. The plague would have played a major part in life in Britain during the pivotal period of Newtons life and superstition, alchemy, witchcraft etc were rife in that period.

Lest we forget, Galileo (who's life story is of course highly exagerated w.r.t. house arrests and torture and the like) died just lest than a year before the birth of Newton, and I have no doubt that Newton would have felt a need to 'coform' to the 'system' for fear of being silenced, arrested or worse.

It's a common symptom of intellectual brilliance - strangeness.

Just because he wasn't a model citizen, hit achievments are not to be underestimated - and his heavy mercury doses because of his alchemy work could well explain much of his behaviour.

Doug

Posted by: Bob Shaw May 9 2006, 05:48 PM

For a fascinating, but dizzying, take on Newton and his peers read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle of historical novels. As you might expect (if you know his earlier work) it's intellectually brilliant, and far from the usual 'bodice-ripper' standards of such period pieces. Hard work, but worth the effort!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 9 2006, 06:01 PM

Did you really mean 4 or 6 fingers?

I know superstition and religion played no small role in Newton's time
and place. And when I see how many people are still affected by such
things in the early 21st Century, I shiver at the thought as to how rare
Newton and the Royal Academy were.

A good book describing Newton and his era:

The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture by
Mordechai Feingold:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/scibio/newtoni3.htm

http://www.huntington.org/Information/news/NewtonReleaseII.pdf

The recent Nova program on Newton's other work:

http://www.pbs.org/nova/newton/

And to keep this amongst the unmanned space probes, among the 118
images on the Voyager Interstellar Record is the famous drawing of
cannonballs being shot around Earth at different speeds (with the last
ones going into orbit) taken from an 1711 edition of Newton's System of
the World.

The image here:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/images/image111.gif

Posted by: djellison May 9 2006, 06:40 PM

No - I meant 5 fingers....i.e. a hand with 5 fingers and 1 thumb.

Doug

Posted by: ljk4-1 May 9 2006, 06:43 PM

Oh - I just hate seeing the thumb so discriminated against, considering
how similar it looks to the fingers and how important it is for hitch-hiking
and such.

And imagine how much ruder this world would be if we could only give
someone the fingers up?

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 16 2006, 09:29 PM

Next on NOVA: "Newton's Dark Secrets"

http://www.pbs.org/nova/newton

Broadcast: June 20, 2006 (Repeat)

(NOVA airs Tuesdays on PBS at 8 p.m. Check your local listings as
dates and times may vary.)

Posted by: DonPMitchell Jun 16 2006, 09:45 PM

I just saw that, it was very interesting. We do love to drag out people's dirty laundry, but there is no denying that Newton was also an astounding genius. I read the first 50 pages of Principia once, and found his proofs about Kepler's laws and about gravity from spherical bodies to be elegant and clear. Then I skimmed around and could not believe how advanced his thinking was. I was a graduate student in physics at the time, having read Goldstein's book on Classical Mechanics. The last problem in Newton's book is a calculation of the obliqueness of the Earth from perturbations in the orbit of the Moon. That is a very sophisticated problem. And then remember that Newton was not building on a long history of classical mechanics, he was starting from scratch with F=ma on page 1 (er, whatever page)!

It is a very rare thinker who can originate so much, and not just make small improvements on previous ideas. He said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, but most scientists only stand on the toes of giants.

Another show that impressed me was the Cosmos episode about Kepler. Kepler had a very magical theory about the orbits of the planets, and their relationship to platonic solids. He spent years trying to fit Tycho's measurements to this theory, but it wouldn't work. He finally realized that the orbits were elliptical, which seemed very imperfect to him, but he checked it over and over, and finally published that result.

Now there is another rare lesson in human nature, someone who gives up a cherished theory and accepts the facts. Kepler is the very opposite of the scientific Crank, who would invent one fantastic and improbable excuse on top of another to prove that he is right. I have huge respect for Kepler.

Forcing something to be true reminds me of a Soviet joke: an intelligence test was given to army soldiers, involving the fitting of pegs of various shapes into holes of various shapes. The conclusion was that Russian soldiers are either very dumb or very strong.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 17 2006, 03:03 PM

At least Newton's "dirty laundry" is something of signifgance to our
understanding of the man and his work, rather than the usual trash
regarding some transient "celebrity".

BTW, maybe we should start planning to be off Earth and maybe
even out of the solar system before 2060 - just in case.

Right on the money about Kepler, made all the more amazing by the
fact that he was operating in an era where sticking to one's dogma despite
the evidence was the norm. He even once had a correspondence with
Galileo about whether there was life on the Moon or not. Kepler thought
there was, but Galileo didn't. Kepler eventually came around to agree
with Galileo. Oddly enough, Kepler did not think there were planets
around other stars with life.

Regarding the Russian joke, there was something similar on one of the
original Jetsons cartoon episodes. George and his boss were drafted
into the military, where they were examined and tested along a conveyor
belt by a series of robots and computers. One big, dumb guy in the line
with them had to do the round peg in the square hole test. When he got
angry at being unable to put a round peg in a square hole, he smashed
the test with his fists to make it work. The computer immediately
responded with "Officer material! Officer material!" and promotes
the guy on the spot.