Blog's First Birthday: Notes on Newton

Godfrey Kneller's portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, aged 46 (1689). Image Source: Wiki.

This blog is one year old today.  It started with this post about Sir Isaac Newton - astronomer, mathematician, physicist and natural philosopher - who hid his analyses of the Bible and esoteric speculations on the end of the world for fear that he would lose face as a scientist. Despite his secrecy, he likely took these arcane musings as seriously as his scientific work.  His theories on religious symbols and occult theories, which he called Histories of Things to Come, were hidden away in a time capsule of sorts.  They did not become publicly available until our own time, that is, ironically, until the era which Newton believed would be affected by his predictions. 

What characterizes an era?  This was a great mind which straddled a time of belief, faith, magic and mysticism on the one hand - and a time of rationalism, empiricism and scientific method on the other.  Newton addressed both traditions with equal attention.  That divided condition resembles our own period, when the Information and Tech Revolutions represent the ultimate triumph of the Age of Rationalism.  It is such a momentous triumph that it threatens to tip us again into a period of mystical awareness.  The uncomfortable tension and overlap between sense and sensibility are everywhere.  The turn of the Millennium is a hybrid between Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read posts here on these subjects, whether they deal with one side of this polarity or the other.


NOTES FOR READERS OF MY POSTS.
If you're not reading this post on Histories of Things to Come, the content has been stolen and republished without the original author's permission. Please let me know by following this link and leaving me a comment. Thank you.