From:             Mendham at AOL.COM
Date sent:        Sat, 20 Mar 1999 02:20:16 EST
To:               johnny at charm.net
Copies to:        johnny-digest at charm.net
Subject:          Gossip from the Newton conference, as requested
Send reply to:    johnny at charm.net

The Annapolis Newton conference, titled "Beyond Hypotheses: Newton's
Experimental Philosophy,"  began with a Friday night lecture.

Before the lecture I ran into Stuart Greenfield and his wife, who got the
thing going.  Stuart is an alumnus from the 50s who gave much of the money for
the new library.  He said he saw an exhibit of Newtonia at MIT last fall and
suggested bringing it to St. John's.   This led to the idea of having a
conference, for which Stuart arranged funding from a foundation of which he is
a trustee.   The conference includes exhibits in the library, which I'll see
tomorrow.

Inside I sat between Joe Sachs, who published his own translation of
Aristotle's Physics a few years ago, and Nancy Buchenauer, who knows
everything.  I hoped this would improve my reporting.  But they were
uncommunicative, at least  about Newton.

The Dean led off with the remarkable news that 40 percent of all copies of the
Principia in English sold each year are sold at the St. John's bookstores.
In other words Newton is not widely read, even among grad students in the
history of science.  The Program is about the only shrine left, it seems.

Tutor Adam Schulman introduced the lecturer,  Francois de Gandt, Professor of
Philosophy at the Universite de Lille.  The professor has translated Galileo
and wrote a book called "Force and Geometry in Newton's Principia."

The lecturer acknowledged that the topic of his lecture, "Does Newton's
Science Disclose Actual Knowledge of Nature?", had been proposed for him.  He
professed to find the question intriguing, though he detected in it a hint
that "I might feel some sort of post-modern suspicion about the value of
science."  

What he really wonders about these days, he said, was the place of science in
culture and the place of science in belief.

de Gandt noted Newton's "triumph" in the 18th century and the subsequent
critiques of his mathematical approach to nature in the 19th, especially by
the German Romantics.   They thought nature had to include more than the
measurable.  Folks like Hegel and Goethe dismissed Newton as  "dry mathematics
that dessicates nature."

Meanwhile Newton's ideas had overwhelmed Descartes, whose vortices offered no
explanation for such non-obvious phenomena as the fact that the sun is always
in the same plane as a planetary orbit.  The Dutch physicist Christian Huygens
pronounced himself satisfied with Newton's solutions "except that he found
them absurd."  Because "gravity" acts at a distance.

I think he said it was LaPlace who, around 1800, called Newton
"incomprehensible and indisputable."  

Professor de Gandt called this sort of hand-wringing a "crisis of causality"
among philosophers who were uncertain what a cause really is.

A problem:  Newton's science does not explain itself.  (Unlike, I suppose,
Kant's and Hegel's.)  

De Gandt thinks Newton found his own ideas wanting and was less enthusiastic
about them than his followers.  He noted that Newton added the General
Scholium -- where he announces "I know no causes" -- only in the third
edition.  He had hoped to present nature as "active, living, operative" but
had failed.

But de Gandt suggests that subsequent generations of Newtonians have extended
the laws of motion and universal gravity to "explain" essentially all
phenomena.

De Gandt expressed his fascination with the evolution of the word "mechanics."
It comes from the Greek mechane, originally meaning clever or devious.  (Its
first recorded application is to Odysseus.)   Aristotle named it a science,
one of the four sciences "mixed" with mathematics.  Namely, music astronomy,
optics and mechanics.  Mechanics was the most "down to earth," most often
mentioned in connection with military engines, but now has subsumed all the
others. 

De Gandt suggests that mechane implied the artificial -- in other words, it
was a way for humans to stand outside nature and even hide from it.
Mathematical physics does not offer us direct knowledge of objects, but only
of the relationships among objects.  

"Mechanics is the way you divorce yourself from the world in order to be able
to see it."  

Was Newton a mechanist?  "Newton would have preferred to say 'God operates'
than adopt a mechanical system of causes. (The English believe in ghosts.)"

Newton was not a dualist, but he believed in spirit.  He thought there were
"degrees of void" and that spirit was a quasi-body that can be penetrated
under some conditions.  "We must be very careful in talking about Newton and
the void."  

You got all that?  The foregoing threatens to be fictional and may bear little
resemblance to any ideas living or dead.  Tune in tomorrow for the next
installment of How the World Turns.

tom Geyer