Reminders of Newtonmas Past

Newtonmas 2011

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2011/12/merry-newtonmas.html

Today, we ignore his religious writings, the extent of which actually eclipsed his scientific production.  His heretical Arian beliefs foreshadowed modern Unitarianism, but he swore under oath to be a Trinitarian so that he could teach at Cambridge. 

Newton’s colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.  

Newtonmas 2012

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/12/merry-newtonmas-2012.html

The English crown turned to him to save the Royal Mint. Even when they were not corrupt - which they usually were - the Mint officials were unable to solve the basic problem of creating and maintaining a system of money that worked. A stern Protestant, deeply religious, and moralistic in the extreme, Newton cleared out the criminal element and gave England a reliable monetary system.

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) is intended for a general readership, yet rests on an extraordinary foundation of careful scholarship.  Thomas Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT.  He has been granted several awards for his PBS documentaries. Levenson delivers to print the videographer’s impact of sight and sound.  You walk down the alleys and into the pubs where Isaac Newton investigated crimes against the Mint of which he served as warden and later master.

Newtonmas 2013

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/12/merry-newtonmas-2013.html

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said, 'Let Newton be'  and all was light.

Alexander Pope

Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, the year that Galileo died.  For most people, Newton is famous for his Three Laws of Motion.  Beyond that, those with additional education know him for creating the Calculus to prove his theories of celestial and terrestrial mechanics. In addition, Newton invented the reflecting telescope as a result of his experiments with light.  And he also proved the general case for the Binomial Theorem (“Pascal's Triangle”). He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge, where he had been a professor of mathematics.  He served as president of the Royal Society of scientists. Few people except numismatists know him to have been the Warden and Master of the British Royal Mint for thirty years.  He had himself sworn as a justice of the peace so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.  Any one of those achievements would have made important to us today. That he accomplished all of that - and more - set Sir Isaac Newton apart even from the geniuses and polymaths recorded by history.

Newtonmas 2014

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2014/12/merry-newtonmas.html

I offered Newtonmas in a radio script for WKAR-FM East Lansing in the early 1980s (1982-1984).  In that script, I built up the imagery of a little boy born in a small village across the sea who would grow up to bring light to the world.  When I cited the poet, I emphasized the word Pope – and then announced that Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year that Galileo died. 

Over the years, I sometimes sent out "Newtonmas cards" to our friends, most of whom we knew from college classes in computer science and related fields.  Our physics professor, Alan Saaf, occasionally called the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder a “Newton Burger” (1.0 N ~ .224 lb-f). I do not recall Dr. Saaf ever saying “Newtonmas” but he could have.

Newtonmas 2015

https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-first-newtonmas.html

We commonly call the Nativity scene “the first Christmas” though it was not. The first Christ Mass could not have been celebrated before the Church existed. So, too, did the first Newtonmas not come until 248 years after his birth.

 

It seems that three students at Tokyo University started Newtonmas in their dormitory sometime before 1890.  As the undergraduates developed into graduates and assistants, their professors were drawn into the celebration, and a more suitable assembly hall was found in the University Observatory.  By 1890, they called themselves the Newtonkai  (Newton Association; 皆 = kai = “all”) and moved to the Physical Laboratory. There, they played games symbolic of great mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers: Newton’s apple, Franklin’s kite, a naked doll for Archimedes … 

That story comes from “A New Sect of Hero-Worshippers” published in Nature, Vol. 46, No. 1193, p. 459, 8 September 1892. It available from the publisher for $18 if you are not a member, or it can be found online at Google Books.

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BIG BANG THEORY: MORE FRIENDS THAN SEINFELD

Friends and Seinfeld were the most successful comedies on television because they appealed to wide audiences. That may seem tautological: The fact that Big Bang Theory has now surpassed them indicates a cultural shift in America. The widespread acceptance of Big Bang Theory derives not just from the writing and acting, but from a general interest and appreciation for science.

To some extent, this is a measure of pretense. More people claim to watch PBS and listen to NPR than actually do because it is expected as a sign of culture, learning, and social standing—at least among some people. The ratings for BBT are more reliable than that. It remains that very few of the millions who enjoy the humor freeze the frames to read the white boards. True fans know that the erasable boards contain physics equations that underscore passing elements of the dialog. Sometimes they frame the running narrative. The show is funny and the characters are compelling without it.

(For four seasons, the show was supported by a scientific website, Big Blog Theory written by their science advisor, UCLA’s David Saltzberg.  The final post, which footnoted “The Raiders Minimization” (Season Seven, in fact), was November 10, 2013, here. David Salzberg interviewed by NPR here.)

It raises a deeper question about the nature of comedy in particular, and fiction and literature more generally. Friends was inclusive. It had a large cast of ordinary people from several overlapping urban micro-cultures. Seinfeld was point-of-view, observational humor, with Jerry Seinfeld as our lens, even as we glanced aside to share with George, Elaine, and Kramer.

We can identify with the characters because we know them, perhaps all too well. When I first brought BBT home from the library in 2009, Laurel could not watch even the first episode. It was too embarrassing because it was too much like the people she worked with at the University of Michigan. Personally, I just thought that it was because she has so much in common with Sheldon. The fact is that even those millions who do not see themselves in the characters – as with Friends and Seinfeld – know people like them, again, as with Friends and Seinfeld. The difference between then and now can be attributed to a sociological “tech effect.”   

BBT is just one of many high-tech shows, such as the CSI franchise, N3MBERS, and Bones. Even NCIS is as much about Abbey, Duckie, and their labs, as it is about the marriages and marksmanship of Leroy Jethro Gibbs; and McGee graduated from MIT. The “tech effect” was the label given to the so-called “CSI Effect” in complaints from prosecutors that jurors were expecting sometimes ridiculous physical evidence, such as fingerprints lifted from grass. (See “The CSI Effect” earlier on this blog here  and “Junk Criminology as Pseudo-science” here.) Researchers Barak, Kim, and Shelton found that less educated jurors wanted "scientific" evidence. Educated people just trusted the prosecutor, worrisome as that is.

That nonetheless may reflect the wider “Flynn Effect” which posits that the general IQ is rising and that we are measurably smarter than we were 100 years ago. That being as it may, it is apparent to me that too many people still believe a lot of really stupid claims. It may be a slippery slope from speculation to mythology, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from Batman to Thor, from putting climate science and creation science in the same category.

A recent Pew Research poll on basic science may be disappointing because only 78% of 3278 randomly chosen Americans got 9 out of 12 right. You can take their quiz here. And read the analysis here.  However, as Wired writer Rhett Alain pointed out about a different quiz (here), these instant investigations ask not about scientific thinking but about the memorization of isolated facts. Alain was responding to a now-classic pop quiz given by Prof. Jon Miller of Michigan State University back in 2008 (see here and here ). One extension that Miller reported then was the fact that Americans tend to score slightly higher than Japanese or Europeans.

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Newtonmas 2016: Great Man or Social Forces?

December 25 is the traditional birthday of Sir Isaac Newton(1).  So, some fans and followers of physics, and perhaps some professionals, celebrate Newtonmas on December 25.  The TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory brought the holiday to millions who had not heard of it.(2)  The question remains: Why celebrate Newton, rather than Descartes, Einstein, or many other scientists?

• Sir Isaac Newton represented Cambridge at Parliament.
• He offered an original proof of the binomial theorem, what in high school we learn as “Pascal’s Triangle.”
• He developed an algorithm for rapidly approximating square roots.
• He investigated light and demonstrated that “white” light is composed of discrete colors.
• Based on his experiments with light, he invented the reflecting telescope.
• He invented calculus.
• He invented calculus as part of his general proof of the laws of motion, including the motion of bodies under the influence of gravity. He showed that motion on Earth is not different from motion in the heavens. That was a radical departure from 2000 years of philosophy.
• He served as warden and master of the British Royal Mint for 30 years. His tenure began with his rescuing the British economy from near certain collapse. He had himself sworn as a magistrate so that he could investigate counterfeiting, going in disguise to pubs.

If he had done any one of those, he would have earned a place in history.  He did all of them. 

That brings up the problem of “the great man” versus “social forces.”  If Newton had died in infancy, as he was truthfully at risk, would someone else –Robert Hooke, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz – have filled the void?  Would we have waited until 1800 or 1900 for the next Newton to invent calculus and achieve all of those other heights?  Did we wait until 1680 because some previous Newton of 1300 died at birth? 

For all of Newton’s specific achievements, his greatest glory may be in being the exemplar of the Age of Reason and the gateway to the Enlightenment.  The Newtonian Revolution was not just about the orbit of the planets.  The American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution are consequences of the work of Sir Isaac Newton. The founders of our republic sought natural laws to inform their designs for a just and workable republic with a balance of powers.  As late at the 1830s, diametrically opposed philosophers August Comte and Herbert Spencer attempted to devise “social physics” as a science of human action. They each gave up on that label and settled for mere “sociology.”

(1) Note: Newton was born in 1742.  The English Parliament passed the Calendar Act in 1750 to take effect on 2 September 1752, which was followed by 14 September 1752.   Newton’s birthday (New Style) is January 4. Similarly, George Washington was born on February 11, 1732, which became February 22 when the calendar was set forward. The Gregorian reform of the Julian calendar realigned the solar year with the vernal equinox in order to keep Easter in the spring. 

(2) Note: The first Newtonmas was actually celebrated in Japan before 1890.  I recorded a Newtonmas message for the Community Commentator series of WKAR AM/FM, East Lansing, in 1982 or ’83. I sent Newtonmas cards to my friends off and on over several years.  Meanwhile, Kwanza was invented. Then, Seinfeld introduced “Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.”  Organized atheists began offering Newtonmas as an antidote to Christmas.  Whether and to what extent Newton would have felt honored or horrified is open to debate. Counterfactuals can be unresolvable. 

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Newtonmas 2011

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Newtonmas 2015

Green Lantern Outshines Green Hornet

The Green Lantern (2011, Martin Campbell) not only kept to the story line, it took itself seriously.  The Green Hornet (2011, Michel Gondry) failed to make use of a rich story line, and was a joke on itself. 

Movies like these are always made for the fans. Many of those - perhaps most- are established followers to some degree or other.  In addition, the producers always hope to draw upon the millions who do not know the story, and who are looking for something new. They will become the new fans for next release. 

 Of those who enjoyed Lord of the Rings, only a minority slogged through three volumes of elvish poetry and grammar, and only a minority of them read The Silmarillion.  I know for a fact that many of my conservative comrades on GaltsGulchOnline.com did not read Atlas Shrugged either before or after seeing the movies. And few who did have read The Virtue of Selfishness. 

While I knew about Kato, I did not know Lenore Case (a constant as Britt Reid’s secretary), or Michael Axford (a reporter in two movies in 1940 and 1941, now the editor, played by Edward James Olmos.)  However, Wikipedia is our common memory. That said, when I was about three, we had a Hudson Hornet and being green, I called it The Green Hornet, so I must have known the radio show. And, as a young adult, I learned that Britt Reid was a grandnephew of John Reid, the Lone Ranger.  I had some other tangential exposures to the story over the years.

When they first were on the market, I had the presence of mind to buy the Dark Knight series as gifts for my wife. But it was only a couple of years ago that I picked up on the Green Lantern and several other comics, and only because of Big Bang Theory. The library and comic stores were both big helps. So, I am not a trufan, I confess.

Not only did Michel Gondry and Seth Rogen (star and writer with Evan Goldberg) fail to make the best use of a developed narrative, they besmirched it. From radio into movies, television, and several comic publishers, the Green Hornet has had a complex career, and several incarnations. In this version, Britt Reid’s contempt for everyone around him, especially Kato, and Kato’s servility were sickening. Given the recorded history of Lenore Case since 1936, Cameron Diaz’s talent was wasted. In the year 2011, she could have come out early as the brains of the group. And she should not have needed to kick Britt in the nuts. By 2011, he should have been a better person.

The Green Lantern held true to the story, and was written and played as seriously as a comic book can be. Although Hal Jordan is a swaggering jet jockey, he is not an idiot. And he is not mean. And his serious side is evident from the first, so that when he is called upon to be heroic on an inter-galactic scale, it is believable in the context of the story.

"In brightest day, in blackest night,

No evil shall escape my sight.

Let those who worship evil's might,

Beware my power, Green Lantern's light !"

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Merry Newtonmas!

"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said, 'Let Newton be' and all was light."

Alexander Pope

Godfrey Kneller's 1689 Portrait

  Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642. He invented calculus.  He established physics as a unified study of both terrestrial and celestial motion. He also offered a new proof of the Binomial Theorem (also called "Pascal's Triangle").  He presented an algorithm for rapidly finding square roots.  He invented the reflecting telescope.  He demonstrated that "white" light is comprised of colors.  He was President of the Royal Society, the national scientific association of Great Britain.  He was elected a Member of Parliament to represent Cambridge.  As Master and Warden of the British Royal Mint, he rescued Britain's economy from imminent disaster.  Any one of Newton's accomplishments would have left a historical record.  He did them all – and more.

Celebrating December 25 as “Newtonmas” is a complex field with many point sources.

Newtonmas enjoyed air time on The Big Bang Theory episode “The Maternal Congruence” on December 14, 2009. Richard Dawkins suggested it in The New Statesman for December 13, 2007.  That article did not celebrate Newton but only hurled projectiles at the traditional Christmas story.

Half Penny Tokens from Middlesex 1791

On December 16, 2011, USA Today carried a feature by their Religion columnist, Kimberly Winston, “On Dec 25 atheists celebrate a different holiday”. That article identified some of those independent beginnings. 

"I just made it up back in the 1990s as a joke, just to promote items we were selling," said Michael Shermer, executive director of the Skeptics Society… "Everybody was giving me a hard time for calling our party a Christmas party so I said, 'Alright, I am calling it Newtonmas.” … Matt Blum, who wrote about Newtonmas in a 2007 post on Wired magazine's GeekDad blog, says his high school physics teacher marked Newton's birthday with experiments and "physics carols."(USA Today article here). 

 However, Winston erred in claiming that an “1892 issue of Nature magazine bestows the carol credit on some Victorian-era English scientists.”  That article was about Japanese physics students.  “A New Sect of Hero-Worshippers” (Volume 46. No. 1193. Page 459. 8 September 1892) is available from the publisher for $18 if you are not a member, or can be found in Google Books. 

According to the article, three students at Tokyo University started Newtonmas in their dormitory before 1890.  “But as the undergraduates developed into graduates and assistants, the professors themselves were drawn into the field, a more suitable assembly hall was found in the University Observatory.”  By 1890, the Newtonkai (Newton Association; 皆 = kai = “all”) was moved to the Physical Laboratory. There, they played games symbolic of great mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers: Newton’s apple, Franklin’s kite, a naked doll for Archimedes …

Replica of Newton's Reflecting Telescope

Moreover, Nature injected editorial doubt into the report.  Nature maintained that few scientists would know that Newton was born on December 25, 1642, (Old Style), accepting the date as January 5, 1643.   

Celestron 130 EQ Newtonian 

I offered Newtonmas in a radio script for WKAR-FM East Lansing in the early 1980s (1982-1984).  In that script, I built up the imagery of a little boy born in a small village across the sea who would grow up to bring light to the world.  When I cited the poet, I emphasized the word Pope – and then announced that Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year that Galileo died. 

Over the years, I sometimes sent out "Newtonmas cards" to our friends, most of whom we knew from college classes in computer science and related fields.  Our physics professor, Alan Saaf, occasionally called the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder a “Newton Burger” (1.0 N ~ .224 lb-f). I do not recall Dr. Saaf ever saying “Newtonmas” but he could have.

UK 1 Pound Note 1978-1982

When USA Today’s Kimberly Winston asked me about my inspiration, I confessed that it was a lark. She asked me about the present popularity and, frankly, I pointed to Kwanza which is an invented holiday, and also to Festivus from the Seinfeld comedies. We are allowed such bagatelles in our culture now. We could not have done this in 1642.

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India Two Point Oh: Amita and Raj

Both Aristotle and William Graham Sumner pointed out that laws are only expressions of tradition.  To cite the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, only a paradigm shift can change a folkway.  A hundred years ago, Bhagat Singh Thind (a veteran of the U.S. Army in World War I) was denied citizenship on racial grounds: though admittedly a speaker of an “Aryan” language, the U.S. Supreme Court found that he was “Asian” and therefore not qualified to become a citizen, despite his honorable service in the armed forces.  Almost at that very moment, the self-taught Srinivasa Ramanujan was astounding the mathematics faculty at Cambridge.

Therefore, it is fitting beyond coincidence that Navi Rawat portrayed Dr. Amita Ramunjan in the six seasons of Numb3rs (CBS 2005-2010).  Rawat herself is quite interesting, but actresses often are.  More to the point is the character created for her by the writers.

Though nominally an “Indian” it comes out in the show that she was born and raised in California.  She recognizes one word of Tamil but speaks even fewer.  Off-screen Ramanujan goes to her grandmother for insight into their “native” culture.  (Her own native culture is Californian.)  In addition to her helping Charley Epps in his consultations with the FBI, she announced her intention to earn a second doctorate, this one in astrophysics.  (All that and more on Wikipedia about “Amita Ramanujan” here. )

Kumal Nayyar plays  Raj Koothrappali in Big Bang Theory.  Although he is a comic character, they all are.  His quirks and foibles are not qualitatively different or quantitatively less than those of Sheldon Cooper, Leonard Hofstadter, or Howard Wolowitz – or Dr. Amy Farah Fowler, Dr. Bernadette Rostankowski,. Dr. Leslie Winkle, or Penny, the normal foil for all these nerds. Raj earns his achievements. 

Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali is an astrophysicist and faculty member at Caltech's Physics Department. For his discovery of a planetary object beyond the Kuiper belt, 2008 NQ17 (which he calls "Planet Bollywood"), he is included in People magazine's "30 Under 30 to Watch", granting him some form of celebrity status and a larger office for his work. He is also known for a publication on Kuiper belt object size distribution, having run a simulation to correct for the observational efficiency, and was awarded the Newcomb Medal. His expertise even extends to searching for Trojan asteroids at the Earth-Sun L5 Lagrange point. (See the BBT fan wiki here about Raj here.)

 With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, actors are not their roles.  Nonetheless, the biographies of Navi Rawat and Kumal Nayyar do echo their popular characterizations if only because life and art are two sides of a relationship. What constant or factor, if any, makes the relationship an equation may remain debatable.  The cast of NUMB3RS (CBS 2005-2010) may have been the exception, as Dylan Bruno holds a BS from MIT, and Judd Hirsch’s degree is in physics. Hirsch later appeared in Big Bang Theory as Leonard's father. Also among the Big Bang cast, Mayim Bialik (“Amy Farah Fowler”) really has a doctorate in neuroscience. The exception tests the rule.

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