Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In the comments, Greg speculated that the Cartesians rejected Newton because his theory was unfamiliar and, they thought, incorrect. But the actual situation is almost the exact opposite: Newton's theory seemed all too familiar to them: they thought it was a throwback to Scholasticism. Moliere famously lampooned scholastic philosophers in a scene where they "explain" opium's sleep-producing properties as due to its " dormitive principle ." Well, that was the way Newton's theory looked to the Cartesians: he was "explaining" gravity by an "attractive principle" contained in matter. It was not that they thought Newton's theory was wrong : they didn't think it had any explanatory power. There were Cartesian theories that contained inverse square laws, but which, to them, provided explanations of gravity, in line with their mechanical philosophy .

Bob Murphy "refutes" my post noting that the Cosmos writers blundered big-time in saying Newton invented the calculus in the Principia : "So, I will give Tyson (and his writers) the benefit of the doubt on this one. From further investigations, it seems that Newton used the idea of a limit of shrinking geometric shapes, which one could plausibly say is, or is not, calculus." I am flabbergasted. First of all, the claim on the table was, again, that Newton had invented the calculus in the Principia . Of course, he had invented it years earlier, and far from inventing it there, he didn't use it there. We can tell because there is no calculus in the Principia: what there are is the geometric ideas ("limit of shrinking geometric shapes") that were used to solve problems of derivation and integration before Newton and Leibniz invented the calculus. Of course, these ideas are the steps that led up to the calculus, and so they are quite "calcul...

An actual historian looks at a pop "history" of science column and discovers it is about as accurate as an explanation of evolution that says, "And one day a fish grew legs and walked up onto the land." And Christie even missed a problem with the pop history account, in which Potter wrote: "...how the young Newton, sent home from school at Cambridge to avoid the plague of 1665, was sitting under a tree one day, saw an apple fall to the ground, and, in a flash of insight, came to understand the workings of gravity." Christie notes that "the flash of insight" part is absurd, and it took Newton another twenty years to put his thoughts in publishable form. But the problem Christie misses is the idea that Newton ever "came to understand the workings of gravity": he did not. He devised a formula describing how objects under the influence of gravity would behave. But he had no model or theory of how gravity was producing this behavior...

Klein is trying to knock Krugman by rejecting the idea that we can have a science of higher-level phenomena before understanding the lower levels that make the higher level up: "Methodological individualists don’t deny that there are interesting macro-level regularities that should be recorded and studied, only that claims about them don’t reach the status of science until we understand the underlying causal mechanisms." And that denial is nonsense. Kepler certainly was doing science, and good science, when he developed his laws of planetary motion, without having any idea what underlay those laws. And so was Newton, when he developed his law of universal gravitation, without the least notion of what underlying casual mechanisms were behind this regularity -- something he freely admitted himself. And both physics and chemistry would have been stopped in their tracks by trying to be Kleinian "sciences": they progressed for centuries before it was even clear tha...