YouSaid · the spoken record

Patricia Fara

lines on the record: 69
first: 2021-02-24
most recent: 2021-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I personally don't think there was a scientific revolution. I think it's a very inappropriate label. And if you meet historians of science on the European continent, it's something they haven't really heard of. It was a term that was really introduced.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the person who deserves most credit for identifying it was Alessandro Volta, the Italian researcher, because you're right, people had been able to generate static electricity for a long while. There was a big argument is the electricity generated by a machine, by a human beings. Is that the same sort of electricity as exists inside our bodies? And what Walter was able to do, he created a thing called a pile which is a precursor of a modern battery, and he managed to produce a current of electricity, and he showed that it's the same as the electricity that's in our bodies. So I think Alessandro Volta is the most important person in the creation of current electricity, as opposed to static electricity.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can never know whether that happened, but it was a story that he only started telling about five years before he died, and he did tell it to four separate people. So it sounds as though he was creating a mythological version of scientific creativity. And the story was unknown for decades. It was only really in the 19th century that the story of the apple tree came back, and now of course it's as though he were a secular saint. He has an attribute like St. Catherine has a wheel. Well, Isaac Newton has his apples.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So during the pandemic, which we might now call it, except it wasn't caused by a virus, yeah, he retreated to his country cottage, which now is about an hour by car away from Cambridge. And that's when he supposedly sat beneath a tree in the garden and watched an apple fall to the ground and conceived the theory of gravity.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When he died he told his doctor that he was a virgin, but of course that can't be proved. He certainly had a very close emotional relationship with at least one young man, but the concept of homosexuality is a nineteenth century one, so he might well have had a very, very intense emotional relationship with young men without actually having had sexual relationships with them.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And them gravity can travel through that ether just like sand is transmitted through air or through water. And that basic model sounds really weird now, but throughout the nineteenth century, regular scientists, very eminent, prominent scientists all believed in the ether, and they developed models of it, and it only finally disappeared in nineteen hundred five when Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity and one of his aims in doing that is to dispense of the ether, to say it's a hypothetical substance and it's no longer needed.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in the optics, as it suggests the name suggests, it's a book about optics. But at the end, he added thirty one questions or queries as he called them, and that was a really good opportunity for him to float some really outlandish ideas, and because he put a question mark at the end, then nobody could accuse him of actually believing that. He said, oh, I was just speculating. In the queries of the optics, he formulated two different views of gravity. One is the one that there's some sort of invisible power that stretches out through empty space and attracts the sun to the moon or the apple to the ground. The other version is that there's something called an ether and that the ether is made up of tiny tiny, tiny invisible particles that you can't weigh, you can't see them, you can't smell them, but they pervade everywhere.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to provide different mechanisms to justify and to explain his theory of universal gravity. So in many people's view of the world, God created the universe and then God disappeared and left it to run itself like a clock. Newton's idea was that God was constantly present throughout the universe, use the word imminent, he's imminent throughout the universe, and when a comic comes in, comets in his view are sent by God and they've got fiery tales that have got vegetative, alive matter in them that reanimate the universe. So this very sort of vibrant, vital living view of the universe was one that is absent from modern physics and one that he developed from his alchemical research.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, and it was that sort of spiritual alchemy that Newton believed in, but he pursued a huge amount of alchemical research. He was very expert in alchemy, and many of his alchemical beliefs actually got carried over into his natural philosophy. So you can't draw a hard line between alchemy that's rubbish and science that's legitimate and that science is right. It's not like that at all. You have this very difficult problem of explaining how it is that gravity operates because if you think about it, it's something we still really haven't resolved. If you've got two lumps of matter like the earth and the moon is made of inert material, how is it that somehow they can attract each other that they've got an innate power? And that's the sort of question that science has never really been able to answer. And he drew on his alchemical.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he was definitely not out to lunch. Alchemy was a very serious pursuit. It's had a very bad press. It's always associated with people who were cranks or magicians. If you think about the classic example of alchemy is turning lead into gold. That's changing something that is base, that's low, that's valueless, that's dirty, changing it into something very valuable. When alchemists looked out on the world, they could see everything around them changing, so for example acorns were growing into trees or babies were growing into adults or wood was buried forest was turning into coal. So this idea of change seemed to make a lot of sense to them. And the idea was that just as a base metal lead can be transmuted into gold, so if you pray you can cleanse your own soul and get nearer to gold.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you don't because he changed the way that coins were made. He modernized it. He kept the dies, the molds for making the coins were highly secret and that made the coins much more difficult to forge. But also the fact that all the coins have this milled edge, these little ridges around the rim of the coin meant that you couldn't shave a bit off because it would be noticeable. So nobody in a shot, nobody would accept that coin because they'd immediately see that it wasn't worth its full value.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every single coin was meant to go to the mint, then he melted it all down, and he started again with new coins that had milled edges, like modern coins do, so they're much, much more difficult to scrape or to forge, and then he reissued those, but quite a lot of things went wrong, and like all those stories it was a tale of the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He actually didn't want to do that so there was big consultation while he was still in Cambridge and the trouble was that coins in those days were made of valuable metal. So if you've got a silver coin that was worth a pound, the silver in it was itself worth a pound in money. It's not like dollars or cents now where it's a bit of paper, which a bit of paper, a dollar bill is in itself absolutely worthless. And what criminals did was a file bits off the edge of these silver coins so they had lots of little silver shavings which they could melt down and turn into silver and get rich that way but that meant the currency, the coins, were getting lower and lower and lower in value. And Newton's first job when he got to the mint was call in all the currency.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it was the tower, it was a military fortification, there were many soldiers there and they were riding round on horses and doing all their drill and all the stuff that soldiers do. So after a few months he left the tower because he really didn't like living there and he worked there one day a week but he did most of his work at home.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mint was traditionally located right inside the Tower of London, and if you go to London now as a tourist in normal times when you go you can be shown round the mint and it's squashed into the inner and outer walls of the fortifications of the tower right on the edge of the river. So it's in an ideal location for all the gold coming in from Africa and it was close to Westminster and royalties and parliament so that was also a convenient location. Newton didn't like being physically in the mint. He was given a house that had walls all round the garden so you couldn't see anything but the worst thing was that it was very noisy. At that time there was a zoo in the tower and so he was kept awake all night by the roaring of the lions and the other animals in the zoo. There was also the clanking of all the mint machinery and there were also”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he was very frustrated with being at Cambridge, he applied for several positions there which he didn't get. He was in theological terms he was rather odds with everybody else at Cambridge because he was a very, very devout believer in God, but he didn't adhere to the traditional to the Orthodox, Anglican, theological belief in the Trinity. So that was difficult for him. So he'd been trying to leave Cambridge for some time. And he had a very close friend, Charles Montague, the Earl of Halifax, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, very influential man, and he managed to find Newton, his very prestigious job at the mint that paid a good salary. And the minute Newton heard about it, he down tools at Cambridge rushed down to London, and he'd moved and started a new life within a few months.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a lot of it was equipment for catering. I mean, he's got this reputation for being very antisocial, but he had hundreds of plates and sets of cutlery and things like that. He also had that ultimate Georgean luxury. He owned two silver chamber pots. He spent money on having a good number of portraits of himself painted that he would send out to other people as sort of bribes or as rewards for their allegiance to him. He had furniture, he had decorations, he had a carriage, he had a sedan chair tucked in the stables, he had lots of servants.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic beginner's era he invested in again at a higher price and he watched the value crash. So he did lose several million in today's currency on that particular venture, but in general when he died he was an extremely rich man and you can tell that the inventory of his possessions runs to a vellum scroll that's seventeen feet long.”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He earned his money from several different ways when he went down to London he earned far more than he ever did as a Cambridge professor because he was running the London Mint. So he got a fat salary for that. He also got a premium, a reward for every single gold coin that was minted. He invested in global trading companies like the East India Company, for example, that were sending guns and textiles out to Africa and then shipping enslaved peoples over to the Americas, and he also invested in other stock market companies, so there was this famous occasion, it's the anniversary this year of what's called the South Sea Bubble, when he invested a small fortune in a new company, the South Sea Company, and he watched the levels rise, and he stayed in there, and he sold when the stocks had gone up, so he made a small fortune, but then he made the”
2021-02-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source