Stuff You Should Know - Sir Isaac Newton: Greatest Scientist of All Time?

Episode Date: January 19, 2016

There have been a lot of great scientist throughout history, but Sir Isaac Newton might just take the cake. But while he was a certified genius, he was also a little screwy. Dive into the life of this fascinating chap in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody out there in the United States, we are coming on tour in January to select cities. Yes, so probably the city where you are is really, really cold. Come down below the frost line and see us.

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go to sysklive.com, which is our wonderful website powered by Squarespace. That's right. Who are also sponsoring our tour because they're cool. That is right. Yeah. So we'll see you guys then. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know

from HowStuffWorks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know. Uh... That was my Isaac Newton impression.

Oh, really? Yeah. You didn't have an accent. That's what he sounded like. Oh, okay. It's a very common misconception that British people in the 17th century sound like British people today.

Yeah. They actually sounded exactly like how I just did. All right. Boy, you did extra research then. It's pretty good. I'd travel back in time. It's a way back machine. We just had a nice 10-minute discussion,

Jerry and you and I, about, or me, or I. Uh... Who cares? I. Yeah. About pop culture things that we've ingested since our break six weeks ago. Yep.

And that could be a show. Everyone wants to know what we watched and absorbed and how we feel about it. But they never will. We talked about making of a murderer. Yeah. Or making a murderer. Yeah.

We talked about hateful aid and Star Wars. Right. And the Revenant. Yep. People want to know. But they never will. You got to keep it mysterious. Right, guys?

That's right. And all this leads to Isaac Newton. Who it was... So, you know Wolfram Science World? Who? Wolfram Science World. It's a very, very bona fide science website. No dumbing down there.

I've heard of it. So, Wolfram put it like this. He's the bomb diggity. It is no... It is no exaggeration to say that Isaac Newton is the single most important contributor to the development of modern science. And Wolfram Science World knows what they're talking about

when it comes to contributors to science. Yeah, you know what? I will agree with that. Even though we will see he was many things, including a little screwy. Super screwy. But what I gathered after researching this dude is that science...

This was 17th century stuff going on. Science was the Wild West. Yeah. And he came in like a sheriff and basically brought order and discipline and said, this is the way we should do things if we want to be taken seriously, guys. Varmits.

You can't just say things like the world's flat. You gotta prove it. Or, this is kind of the thinking. And he really kind of rose to prominence while the scientific revolution was already going. Sure. But he very much contributed to it because still at the time you could be like,

well, the earth spins because God spun it and it is God's will. Yeah. And people would be like, absolutely, scientist. Not the case after Newton came along. No, he's like, you gotta prove the stuff. There's gotta be a method in place. You gotta test things again and again.

He was, I didn't know this. He was one of the, or if not the first person to average data. Yeah. What did they do before that? Just cherry pick something? Probably. They're like, oh, that looks like a nice round number.

I'll go, I'll use this one. So like if he measured, say, the, how long a top spun. Yeah. Because that's what scientists measure. Sure, a lot of top spinning. If he measured it four or five times and he got different measurements every time,

yeah, I guess before they would just pick whatever one they liked the most. It just seems so. He was the first one to average. Yeah, it just seems so second nature to think, well, averaging something is what you should do. Right. But back then it wasn't.

No, and that's it. So that came up a lot while I was reading this article. This is a very good article by Jacob Silverman. Yeah. The one on Jeopardy. Jeopardy, champion. Yeah. He, the way that he portrayed Newton,

I think it gets across that. We take Newton's work so for granted these days. Oh yeah, absolutely. As just, that's the way the universe works. Right. That to think otherwise is just totally alien to us. Yeah. And it's just such evidence of how much that man

single-handedly changed the world. Absolutely. But you also can't say single-handedly. He's, his genius is unequivocal, right? Yeah. But he also did definitely stand on the backs of giants, on the shoulders of giants, people who came before him. As all scientists do.

And the work of his peers. Yeah. But he also liked to take a lot of the credit for himself. Yeah, sometimes unnecessarily. Yeah. He was a very complex man. He was a scientist. Yeah.

Who deeply believed in God. He believed that you, that there was law and order that could be deduced, that could be investigated. But it was orderly and rational because God was an orderly, rational creator. Yeah, he saw logic and he thought God was that logic. Right. He also thought that the stuff that he was uncovering

was actually ancient wisdom that was being recovered from pre-Christian civilizations. That's where it gets a little screwy. Yeah, that had kind of Da Vinci coded this knowledge in things like pyramids and stuff like that. Yeah, and that he was hand selected as a select few to uncover this knowledge. Yeah, so much so that he made a name for himself, Chuck.

And once you start to really investigate Newton, you can just kind of see him like, tittering to himself as he's talking to himself in his chambers at Cambridge, calling himself this out loud to an empty room. Yeah, he was, he changed his name, or didn't change it, I'm sorry. He had a special name for himself,

Jehovah Sanctus Eunus, which means Jehovah the Holy One. And he got that name by rolling a 20 sided die several times. Yeah, so that was his special, I guess, council of unique scientists, like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That was his superhero name. Yeah, and he was an alchemist as well. He very seriously pursued the study

of turning plain old metal into gold, of finding long life elixirs. He was a very complex man. And a lot of people like to put him in this rational scientist compartment as like how we view scientists today typically. And he wasn't that. You just can't look at science the same

in the 17th century as you do today. No, because it wasn't. Like this guy was helping form science today. And at the time, he was seeking answers to the universe wherever. There weren't many boundaries to him. Like if he could come to conclusions about the universe through weird mysticism,

then whatever, he still came to the same conclusions that he did through mathematics, which by the way, a major part of which he helped develop single-handedly almost. Yeah, it was kind of a weird time because you could on one hand be a very rational thinker and say you have to prove this, but you can also say that lady didn't float

so she's a witch. And that's why she drowned and be completely like normal. Right, say it with a straight face. Yeah, it was like Newton. Like I can turn this mercury into gold, right? There's an elixir that'll let you live forever. And I can also say you should average data and write the principia.

Right, I can also literally discover gravity. Yeah. Like there was no such thing as gravity as far as humans were concerned before Isaac Newton came along. All right, so that's a great setup. Whew, that was even better than our danger field setup. So January 4th, which is yesterday in real time,

was his actual birthday. Did not know that, weird timing. He was, it depends on the calendar, buddy. Depends on the calendar. Christmas day or January 4th, right? Yes, but like a year apart rather than like a week or so apart. Right, because one of the great myths is that he was born on Galileo's,

the day Galileo died. Right, which means that he's not true, right? Galileo reincarnated. Is that what people say? Some people. Gotcha. Some people. Like Isaac Newton?

Probably. I don't think he said that. But yeah, that was using the old Julian calendar. When you use the Gregorian calendar, his birthday was actually January 4th of the following year, or no, of the year before, I think. Oh, wow. So he got younger.

No, of the same year. So like if he was born December 25th on one calendar, for the other calendar, he would go back in time to the beginning of that same year. Right. So almost a year apart. And the reason that there is a weird discrepancy is in 1582, the Catholic nations

converted from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Full 100 or so years before Newton, or a little less than 100 years. But it wasn't until the 1750s that the British Isles, Protestants, converted to that Gregorian or Catholic calendar. We should do one on calendars.

Oh, we definitely should. More complex than you think. But in the continent and in Great Britain or the UK, Which one? I don't know. Still after all these years. So it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland, right? The United Kingdom and Northern Ireland.

I'm just gonna let you go down this road. Anyway, they used to notate dates with old style and new style, depending on what calendar. Gotcha. So anyway, that's the whole discrepancy between his birth date. Well, that makes sense. No, it doesn't.

Sure it does. All right, so let's go back in time. Let's get in the wayback machine. Yes. And go back to one of those two days, depending on our calendar that we have in the wayback machine, how it's programmed. Well, the wayback machine's programmed to.

Gregorian? No, to UNIX. Oh. So it's fine. Great. So we are back when he was born as a little baby. He was premature and very sickly. And here's how things can go in the world.

He wasn't supposed to live. And what would the world have been like without Isaac Newton? Pretty dark. Yeah, or at least it would have taken him longer, maybe. Yeah. Or maybe it just would have been someone else. Like the clapper would have been invented,

but we would just assume it worked because God willed it to. That's right. Born in 18, I'm sorry, 1643, not 1843. No, that's Darwin. He was from a family of farmers that did pretty well for themselves. Although his dad, Isaac, died before, a few months before he was born.

And was an illiterate farmer who was successful at his work. But very big that his father died before he was born because he never quite got over that. He ended up living for a short time with his mother and new stepdad, Reverend Barnabas Smith. But he sounded like a jerk who did not like Isaac. Said, I cast thee out. And he was cast out

and lived with his maternal grandmother, basically. For nine years, from age three to 12. Yeah, I mean, was pretty much raised by his maternal grandmother. Yeah, and he was apparently old enough to realize what was going on because any psychoanalyst would have a field day with Newton because he grew up to be a very insecure man

who had a tremendous amount of difficulty trusting people. Because he was rejected. Yes, by his mother. And who suffered from what you would probably call these days, hostile attribution bias, where any slight or something was clearly intended by the other party. Everybody else was hostile and out to get him.

Not necessarily making him paranoid, but just any slight was intentional, even when it was unintentional. It's a terrible way to live. Yeah, it took everything personally. Interesting. So this led over his life to a couple of nervous breakdowns.

And that also had to do with the fact that he worked tirelessly and didn't sleep well. Right. And was in a lot of ways a prototypical scientist. Like he never got married and was just consumed with his work and didn't take care of himself and sort of obsessed with his life's work. Yeah, and some people have posthumously diagnosed him,

including Simon Baron Cohen, who's an expert on autism and Aspergers. Borat? His relative. Oh, really? Yeah, interesting. I don't think it's his brother, but they are related. Oh, wow.

I was totally kidding. Well, you're totally right. So what did he diagnose him with? Aspergers. Oh, yeah. But that's definitely come under fire lately. They think that, so there's something called, I don't remember what it's called,

but in 16, his second, his second nervous breakdown in the 1690s, he stopped doing any kind of scientific research after that. And he apparently declined mentally compared to his previous state, which means that he came down to about normal levels, I would guess, but they think that it was actually mercury poisoning.

Oh, really? Yeah. From all the alchemy? Yeah, and that he wasn't necessarily autistic. It's an easy catch-all to put him in that, again, in that compartment these days, but we don't know enough about him to say that whether he was autistic,

like one of the evidences was that he didn't play with the other kids, he just had to himself. So they're like, well, that shows a lack of social communication skills or being able to connect with others. But then if you look back at historical data, he tried to hang out with his peers at school,

but they didn't like hanging out with him because he was too smart for them. So they shunned him. So does that make him autistic? Or does that mean he had autism spectral disorder, spectrum disorder, or Asperger's? You can't say. He may have, but-

It's easy to go back now and put people on the spectrum. But they do think, because he was exhumed a few hundred years after his death, and they found a lot of mercury still in his system. Wow. Or in his bones, I would guess. Yeah. And they think that he inadvertently poisoned himself

and that led to his second nervous breakdown and mental decline. Interesting. Yeah. All right, well, let's take a break here and we'll talk about his schooling years right after this. ["Paydude the 90s"]

On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Newton in school, wasn't a great student in high school. He was a mascot of his high school. Was it, was there one? I don't think so.

Oh, OK, because I thought there were those. God, that would be like really great trivia. Yeah, Newton's high school mascot. What was yours in Cilento's? My what? You remember Cilento, the kid who's like, watch me whip, watch me nae nae, you guys went to the same high school. Remember, I told you that.

Oh, we were the Redan Raiders. Raiders, OK. Yeah, and my elementary school was the Redan Lil Raiders. Oh, that is cute. Didn't it? Yeah. L.I.L. So he wasn't a great student. He was also a terrible farmer, because of course,

being the son of a farmer, they were like, you need to work on the farm. And there are some people that think he'd purposefully, like he was clearly smart enough to do this, but purposefully failed at it, so he didn't have to do it, because he was really into book learning. So that makes sense to me. He did continue his education, because he wasn't farming.

Went on to Cambridge, but had to act as a valet to wealthy students for a little while. Yeah, he'd pay this way through basically what we would consider undergraduate school. Yeah, and then he got a scholarship, which allowed him to continue through his graduate studies. But all that didn't happen in some smooth things. So he went to school first.

His mom came back for him, took him out of school, tried to set him up as a farmer. He failed at that, ended up going to Cambridge, working his way, working to pay his own way through Cambridge. Why, though, if they had money, did they not want to pay for school, I wonder? I think maybe his mom wasn't happy about it or something. I'm not sure.

Because that's the only thing I couldn't figure out. Because she did have money, for sure. But he had to pay his own way through Cambridge, at least undergrad. And while he was there as an undergrad, Chuck, he pursued his own studies. Yeah, he basically got a syllabus each quarter, tore it up, and said, you guys don't know this yet, but I'm Isaac Newton.

And I'm going to invent a great figgy cookie and a lot of other great stuff. That is a great figgy cookie. So he basically failed out, or almost did. He was self-educating himself. But there is a man named Isaac Barrow, who was the Lucasian chair professor. And he took a notice of Newton and said,

I think there's a little more to this kid than appears to meet the eye. He was the Robin Williams to Newton's Matt Damon. Precisely. Precisely. Except Damon was a custodian, and Newton was an actual student. But he did clean rooms, too. Yeah.

So there is a pretty deep parallel there. How about that? So Newton got his hands on something by the guy who came up with the Mercator projection. I can't remember his first name. And basically took this book and expounded on it. And it was just mind-blowing stuff that he did. And he did it as like a 21, 22-year-old.

Crazy. And Barrow got his hands on it and said, you need to stick around. So he ended up getting him basically a four-year scholarship for postgraduate studies. Yeah, and not only that, but he, for various reasons, which we'll get into here and there, Newton was reluctant to publish a lot of times.

And Barrow was the one that really helped him say, you need to get this out there. This is great stuff you've got, Matt Damon. Yes. Like, you know what kind of movies you're going to be in after this? Yeah. You're going to be Private Ryan.

Yeah, you're going to be Jason Bourne in The Martian. Sure. You can't think of any other Matt Damon movies. Sure, sure. Of course. Oh, you're going to be The Scoundrel in the Departed. Yeah. Great movie.

It is. I thought Jack really overdid it in that one. Oh, I loved it. Although, dude, I'll tell you something. Another movie I saw recently was The Shining. Yeah, I should say I saw it recently, because I see The Shining probably every three months. Yeah, I saw it again recently.

I think that that might be the best movie ever made. It's pretty great. No joke, I really think The Shining might be at least my favorite movie of all time. Boy, Kubrick, he can set a mood. It is so good. And you can watch it. I can watch it any time.

Yeah, me too. Any time of year, any time of day, any day of the week. It's Christmas morning. Let's watch The Shining. Exactly. And I'll enjoy it just as much as I would on Halloween or something. It's my honeymoon night.

Let's watch The Shining. Right. All the normal times, sure. So Newton eventually, well, actually, not eventually, he was forced to leave Cambridge for a little while, because the bubonic plague swathed through London to the tune of about 100,000 people dead in six months. That's quick.

So they closed Cambridge and said, everyone go home. He went home and. Everyone go home to London. Get out of here. He went home and had what they called later a year of miracles, the Anas Mirabilis. And it was a little bit mythical in that, supposedly, he came up with all the great stuff of his career

in this one year, probably played up for the newspapers. Or for his own reputation of the age. Because in reality, he did come up with a lot of great stuff, but he clearly didn't come up with everything in that year. He might have started a lot of good conversations in his head about things. But it was a little trumped up that there was a year of miracles.

So it probably, like you said, there were some things, I'm sure, that he thought of during this year. But again, he placed his entire career in this one year, including the apple falling from the tree. Should we go and cover that? Sure. Did it happen? Probably not.

And even if it didn't, historians are like, that is a fairy tale on its face. You can tell it's a fairy tale. But Newton himself is like, oh, no, this happened. This is really true. This is where the theory of gravitational force sure came from. Yeah, like he was laying on the ground, supposedly,

looking up at the moon, wondering, how's that thing just sitting up there? Yeah, why isn't it spin off into space? Yeah, apple falls, and he puts it all together. Sounds kind of unbelievable. It sounds like folklore to me. It does. But again, he promoted this story.

He was definitely, for somebody who was just a hair's breadth away from being shut in. And there was a D in there. It was breadth, not breadth. I know the difference. And he didn't have virtually any friends. He had not one, but two nervous breakdowns in his lifetime. Very insecure.

He was also like an astute self-promoter. Yeah, he had a lot of contradictory traits, I think. For sure. So like we said earlier, he was very much noted for his precision with notes and experimentation, with the averaging of data, and what else? The scientific method, of course, putting these things into place.

Yeah, the scientific method was already around. Yeah. And come up with a scientific method. But he definitely refined it and created the scientific method as we recognize it today. Under ideal scientific inquiry, when a scientist today follows that scientific procedure, what he's doing basically, or she,

is following in Newton's footsteps. Yeah. Like Newton took this thing and said, here's the best way to do this. Like you make some observations from these observations, you come up with a theory, and then you figure out an experiment to test that theory, and then you either discard the theory,

or you test it again until the theory becomes basically, for all intents and purposes, proven. And like you said, as a result, after this, coming up with it, when he laid this stuff down in his Principia Mathematica, which is his big, not his life's work, but his biggest published work, as far as being widely accepted, and remarkable, and game changing.

Yes, universe changing, quite literally. At least it changed our understanding of the universe. When he laid all this stuff down, it wasn't like you could just say, it is because God wills it anymore. It was like, here is the framework for science from here on out. Follow this, this is the best practice.

And there's math behind all of it. And that was another thing too. So let's talk about, you want to talk about his Principia Mathematica? Well, yeah. I mean, there was just a little thing in there called the Three Laws of Motion, no biggie for physics at all.

So there's inertia, a body that is at rest, tends to say at rest. Acceleration, which means things go super fast sometimes when they're falling. And action and reaction, which is the cue ball theory. Yeah. And while he didn't completely invent those, Galileo started a lot of that talk, a lot of that gibber

jabber. But Newton really solidified it all. And it's remarkable to think that all these years later, that's still the thing. Well, he solidified it. And so what Galileo did was he said, I've observed this, and it seems to be universally applicable. Right.

That if a ball is sitting there on a table and nothing's moving it, no wind is blowing, there's no force acting upon it, it's not going to spontaneously move. Yeah. And people went, Galileo, that's amazing. Can you explain why? And Galileo was like, no.

Newton came along, and he said, I can explain why. Right. And he added a third law of motion to that. And the whole point was he figured out that everything that has mass has some sort of force acting upon it. Right. And as a result, also can exert force

on other bodies that have mass. Yeah. And what he figured out that force was, or that magical thing, was gravity, universal gravitation. Right, which his law of universal gravitation, which is also in the Principia. And again, I don't think you can overstate this, Chuck. Yeah.

People knew that the moon went around the Earth and that it was somehow adhered to the Earth. Right. But they didn't really know why. Right. And out of nowhere. Like no one before him had ever suggested, maybe it's a thing called gravity.

Right. Newton, his perspective of the universe, gave us the idea of gravity. It wasn't there before Newton. It's amazing. It was there because of Newton. It's here now. Yeah.

Like that's a huge contribution, just that alone. And he's not one of these scientists that's like a seventh entry scientist said this. And he was close, but it turns out he was wrong in every way. But it was a good start. Like Einstein, although Einstein did go on to change and not adapt. Well, I guess he adapted.

But Newton was wrong in some cases. But some of these laws are still spot on. Right. And this is like the mid to late 1600s. Yeah, they definitely. It's amazing. Our understanding of gravity has been refined tremendously by Einstein and the idea of relativity and quantum

mechanics and all that. But for what Newton was doing, yes, he explained the universe. He was the OG. He was. He was the first person to say, you know what? This white light you see isn't actually white. It's actually a spectrum of colors. Yeah.

And everyone's like, what? He did this as a student. And he said, watch this. And he got out of prism and bam. And everyone went, whoa. He got out of prison? Prism. He, oh, I got you.

Yeah, and then we had the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. So you can thank Newton for that as well. That's right. And he published that in 1704, which is way after he experimented with prisms, because he was reluctant to publish things a lot. So let's talk about that. That was published in Optics with a CK.

Yeah, like magic. I guess they dropped magic. Yeah, sometimes magic is spelled with a K. Oh, really? As you know, it's like the real thing. Oh, gotcha. So let's talk about that, Chuck. He published Optics in 1704.

But he was doing these experiments in the 1660s. And he didn't publish this stuff, in part, because he could not handle being challenged or criticized. He didn't like that. He did not like it. And he got into it a lot. Like part of the scientific revolution that was going on was that scientists around the world, at least in the West,

were arguing with one another, were picking apart one another's theories, were corresponding with one another about ideas and sharing all these thoughts. But a lot of it was contentious. And Newton's first nervous breakdown came because Robert Hook said that he stole some of his ideas. And then they had it out in the journals through letters back and forth.

Through their whole life. Yeah. And then he also, the Jesuits, didn't accuse him of stealing any of their ideas. But he was corresponding with the monastery. And they were like, we like your thoughts, but we think your experiment might be slightly flawed. And he went berserk.

He was like, what? Yeah. And then he had a nervous breakdown, which was finally completed in 1669, I believe, or 1679, I'm sorry, with the death of his mother. Yeah. So he was doing experiments. He started to come out with them publicly.

They were challenged in question. He lost his, he went berserk. Yeah, it probably stems from his rejection from childhood, of course. That's what I would guess. He withdrew and then throughout the 1670s didn't do any kind of publishing or research. Yeah, it kind of went dark.

Yeah. Then his mom dies. And then he finally comes back out of it, thanks to the help of Isaac Barrow, and then later on other colleagues like Edmund Haley. Yeah, of Haley's comment. And then finally publishes. But if you notice the date of the publication of optics,

that comes after Robert Hook, who is his lifelong arch nemesis, has died. That's right. And they never worked it out. There wasn't some, like, leave on helm, Robbie Roberts, in deathbed, hey, I still love you, man. Right. Like they, spooning.

They died, no, come on. They died bitter rivals. Yeah, yeah. Newton and Hook. Right, no, I know. Yeah. I know a band reference is probably lost on most people. Just Google it.

Google the band. Yeah, and there's also like 100 dudes that are like, yes. What a reference. What else did he do? How about a little something called the reflecting telescope? Yeah, that's a big one. Back in the day, refracting telescopes were all their age. But you couldn't really focus that well on them,

which is sort of key with the telescope. They'd be like, is that a star? Sure, let's call it a star. And let's name it after me. But they use mirrors. So he said, you know what, dudes, let's use lenses. It can be about one-twelfth the size and in focus, boom. Yeah.

And all of a sudden. Like, if you drop the average size of a telescope down. That would have been good enough. Yeah. Even if it still was crappy. To a 12th of a size, yeah. Yeah. But he actually improved it as well.

That's right. And that got him into the Royal Academy when he presented it at the urging of Barrow again. I think that was Barrow that actually did the presenting. Oh, he did? Yeah. But he said it's this guy. And Newton just stood off to the side, quivering.

This little guy to my left. With his security blanket around his shoulders. He had his wooby. And he also created a little something that I hate called calculus. I don't even hate calculus because I am that unfamiliar with it. Yeah.

I had to take a calculus class and I wasn't good at it. The remarkable thing is he created calculus because the limits of geometry. Yeah. He was like, we need more higher level of math to figure this out. And I'm going to invent it. Not to figure it out, to explain what he figured out.

Yeah. So calculus is great with things in motion and geometry isn't. And he was all about, well, not all about. But he was keen on things in motion. Yeah. Well, you kind of needed them. Like you could say, well, an ellipse is, you can describe it geometrically,

but you can't really describe an orbit of something. It's motion in an ellipse just through normal geometry. So I'll just invent a supersized version of geometry to help explain my discoveries. Yeah. And it wasn't nuts. Yeah. It wasn't called calculus though.

It was called the fluxians, which I think we should bring back. Totally bring it back. Yeah. We should call it. Everyone should call it the fluxians. It might as well. I refer to calculus so infrequently that I can just call it the fluxians.

And people will be like, what does that mean? Yeah. I'll say look it up. All right. Let's take a break here. And we will get into the later years of Newton's life when things got a little weird. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s,

called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when

questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we mentioned his lifelong rivalry with Robert Hook. Not the pirate. Not the pirate. Was there a pirate named Robert Hook?

Captain Hook from Peter Pan. Was it Robert? I don't know. He didn't have any on him. No, I think, I want to say it's James Hook. I think James Hook. I think you're right. So not the pirate.

He also had a rivalry with, well, he had a rivalry with many scientists, but another dude who claimed he invented calculus. Oh, Libans. Yeah, Libans. So that's a weird story, the story of calculus. Who invented calculus? Because think about it.

People don't invent new, more refined forms of math every day, do they? Well, they don't. They think they might. Not even to say, well, when they come down off the acid, they realize that it's all just chicken scraps, right? And get this tinfoil hat off my head. So when not only Newton said that he created calculus,

Libans said that he did as well within a decade or so of each other, there was quite a bit of hubbub over who actually created calculus. And to make the whole thing even more murky, they had corresponded with one another about the ideas of calculus. Yeah, and scientists aren't not all scientists, so please don't write in and say, I'm not like that.

But scientists, a lot of times in history, some of the more notable scientists aren't big on being like, yeah, we totally help each other. It's usually like, no, I invented that. Because that's their legacy, I think, that they're fighting for. Sure. And sometimes it's definitely pride themselves on their legacy, and Newton was probably one of them.

Yeah, and big money. So he and Libans had this ongoing dispute, and they had their supporters as well who disputed. And it wasn't just the Libans versus Newton in who created calculus. It was also the Isles versus the continent, and the Catholics versus the Protestants. There were a lot more divisions to it than just these two men.

But from what I can gather, historians now believe that Libans and Newton independently developed calculus on their own. Really, is that the modern way of thinking? Yeah, Newton probably beat his notes, suggests that he came up with calculus before Libans, but that Libans came up with it on his own as well. OK, wow, that's pretty remarkable.

It is. It's almost like a soccer score. Everybody wins, you know? He also, in the dark years, we talked about when he sort of fell off the radar and wasn't publishing much. That's when he was getting into the alchemy, which we said. Ranges, what it really was, was sort of a precursor to chemistry in some ways.

And now, we look back on it with a little more understanding at the time, though, that it was illegal up until, like, I think a 20-year-old, right before his birth, was actually illegal because it was, I guess, sort of like one of the dark arts or something. Yeah, and they were burning people at the stake for practicing alchemy, which, again, at the time, it was a little fruity, you know?

But it wasn't so much so that science wasn't necessarily so close to the concept of mystical truths as it is today. So you could conceivably be involved in scientific inquiry and find yourself going down this alley of alchemy. Even still, Newton was like, this would be bad for my name, and I might be fired if they found out that I was into alchemy. And so he kept it a close to guarded secret. Yeah, not only did he, but his family, after his death,

kind of kept that stuff quiet for a while. And I think it was the early 1990s when all of his works were finally published. And they were like, whoa, this guy was really all over the place. A little out there. We also mentioned earlier briefly that he thought that alchemy was like an ancient riddle, and it was up to him and other.

Up to him, Jehovah sank this Eunus? Yeah, to figure it out, and the answer is out there, and he's one in a line of great men chosen to do so. Little screwy at this point. Or am I being cold? He believed in the philosopher's stone. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him having a scientific mind that was open to all sorts of stuff.

And again, this was the 17th century, so let's cut him some slack. But he did believe in the philosopher's stone, which was thought to aid in alchemy, cure disease, and some think or thought that the key to eternal life was in the philosopher's stone. Philosopher's stone, sorry. Sorcerer's stone, that's a whole different thing.

A little different. And Chuck, not only was he into alchemy and mysticism as well, he also was very much into obscure Christian stuff too. So one of his pursuits that he amused himself with on the side was chronology. He wanted to, he believed the Bible was a literal history of the world, and that the prophecies in the Bible were directly from God who could see to the end of time

and knew everything that was going to happen already. So everything in the Bible, he called a history of future events, basically. That's a better name. And so his whole thing was, if you can go back now that we understand timekeeping better and astronomy, you could go back and sink things that happened in the Bible to current astronomical dates.

You could put a current date on them. So you could say, when this happened, when the walls of Jericho actually fell. He believed all this stuff happened. Or when something might happen in the future. Exactly. And apparently, he did just that. He interpreted this one section of the Bible

about the end of the world coming, and he dated it to 2060. Coming up. We'll see. So I read a little blurb from a scholar on Newton who said, this is something he did to amuse himself in private. It was never meant for public consumption. But he probably would have believed

that he got that date right. Oh, really? Yeah. He worried about getting dates wrong and didn't think that people should mess around with stuff like that because you are fallible in setting dates like that, which is probably why he never meant it for publication.

But he probably thought he was right. And that had he lived to 2060, he would have seen the end of the world. He also dabbled in something called Arianism, which has nothing to do with white people. It was actually a priest named Arius. From Libya. Is he a Libyan priest?

Who came up with this? And the idea is that the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Christian theology, it disrupted that and said that Jesus may have been created by God, but he is not divine. If you believe in Arianism, that's what you believe. Right. And Newton was an adherent of Arianism, which

wasn't super popular at the time, or ever probably. It was basically stamped out by the 7th century. And here's Newton in the 17th and 18th century. He's a holdover. Yeah, who's like, oh, this makes a lot of sense to me. What an obscure arcane thing to think of. And he got into religion in college, actually, another weird thing to do, even at that time.

Yeah, that's when you get out of religion. Sure, that's when you start to question things, right? That's when he got into it. Apparently, one of the first things that he did, he was a bit of a prude. One of the first things he did was write down a list of every sin he ever committed. Yeah.

And they weren't exactly groundbreaking. Like Silverman points out that one of them was he broke the Sabbath by baking pies one Sunday. How dare he? Like, this is the kind of sins that he's, like, He also said he wanted to burn his mother and stepfather alive in their home, which was one of the sins he recorded. So he did have a darker side.

Did he really? Oh, yeah. Oh, he really did. Yeah, that wasn't a joke. Oh, I thought I was like, that was a weird joke. No, he had quite a range from baking pies to burning his parents alive. Like, just wanting to, though, right?

Yeah. OK, he didn't make an attempt to, right? No, no, no, no, no. That was, yeah, the sin was threatening to or wanting to. I'm not sure if he verbalized it or if he just bought it in his head. Yeah, but he was a rejected little kid. And I imagine he did that one.

Yeah, I'm sure God would have been like, yeah. Yeah, who wouldn't want to? So we were talking about Arianism, though. There's this very heretical thought that Jesus isn't divine, but that you should still worship him, right? Yeah, it was a very unusual line of thinking. Right, and critics of that kind of thinking

say, well, that that worships polytheism, because you're worshiping God, but you're also worshipping Jesus who's not divine. You are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And the Council of Nessia, which was a learned council that basically decided what went into the Bible, in the fourth century said, no, the Trinity's absolutely correct.

And anything against that is heresy, and you should be burned at the stake. So even that, I get the impression that his fellow Dons at Cambridge knew that he was into Arianism. Or if they didn't, they may have suspected that he had unorthodox beliefs about Christianity. And so that just created an even wider gulf

between him and the people who he saw on a daily basis. Well, he definitely thought that Catholicism and some other branches of major religions were very corrupt and not to be trusted. Yeah, he was an odd guy. We can't get that across enough. Later in life, but he did not sit on his laurels. Later in life, he was made, he accepted a position at the Mint.

And apparently, that sort of sounds like the old, I'm going to retire as a CEO and work as a consultant. Like, I'll make more money than I did ever before for not doing much work. Apparently, that was the deal with the Mint. You got appointed later on in your life to the Mint, and you kind of just made a lot of dough and didn't do much.

He was like, no, no, no, no, I'm going to actually do something. Like, three years later, became master of the Mint. And he is the one responsible for changing the English pound standard from sterling to gold. Is that right? Yeah. So he was actually trying to get things done. And he went after counterfeiters?

Went after counterfeiters. Pretty interesting. Yeah, not bad. He was also later in life elected the president of the Royal Society of London, which is the Academy of Sciences in the UK. Yeah. He was a member of parliament. He was elected to parliament.

But he, yes, he was twice. Yeah. And actually, he was knighted in 1705, and the queen apparently knighted him for political reasons. She wanted to help. He was standing for parliament again, and she wanted to help his chances of being elected. So she knighted him.

Not for scientific achievements, but because of the election of 1705. It didn't help. He still didn't unseat the guy that she wanted out of office. But he got knighted anyway. Good for him. Yeah. He was a complex dude. Yeah.

There's a t-shirt. Just a picture of him. Complex dude underneath. And we didn't really talk quite enough about it, but he definitely stole people's ideas in certain ways. There's a guy named John Flamsteed, and he, like Newton used a lot of his work to help form the basis of his theory of universal gravitation. And Flamsteed, I guess, rubbed Newton the wrong way, and Newton just removed

any reference to Flamsteed in his second edition of The Prince Pia. I think all scientists build on the backs of those who came before them. But it'd be cool to say, like, and this would not have been possible without the work of Flamsteed, not like, you know what, let's redact that and take his name out of there. I don't like how it's spelled. We'll end with his epitaph, though, because it definitely gets the point across.

I think correctly. His epitaph says, mortals rejoice at so great an ornament to the human race. Wow. I thought it was business in front, party in the rear. No? No. He invented the mullet, you know. Oh, I know.

You ready? I'm ready. If you want to know more about Isaac Newton, type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Don't Yuck, Someone's Yum. Oh. Hey, guys, after listening for years, love you guys.

Your Christmas episode had me yelling at my iPhone, and I decided I need to send a note. You were both adamant about never even trying fruitcake, and then went on to insult it with open barrels. I probably would have agreed with you three weeks ago, because I'd also never touched a fruitcake or eaten one. However, last week I finally looked at the ingredients and was amazed. Sugar, molasses, ginger, fruit, loaded with rum.

There is rum in the batter, and when done baking, you actually drizzle with more rum, wrap it in cheese cloth to soak it in even more with rum. The only bad thing I can figure out about fruitcake is that this particular recipe needs to sit and rum for 10 weeks before eating. Wow. So just because you have not tried fruitcake, you shouldn't be such naysayers. Give fruitcake a break. My nephew has several rules, and rule number four is don't yuck someone's

yum. You know, that's absolutely true. We were total yum yuckers. And as soon as I read this, I was like, man, I was a yum yucker. I need to try fruitcake. Apparently, there's this thing going on where Slate was like, beer is too much hops in it. What's the deal? I've seen a lot of that.

And somebody did a takedown of it that went viral that was like, what is it to you? If you don't like hops and your beer and drink different kinds of beer, why do you have to publish an article about how you don't like hops? At the same time, it's like, really, is that taking away from your enjoyment of your hoppy beer to know that somebody at Slate doesn't like it? I think what I've heard the complaint of, and this is on the Stuff You Should Know message board and otherwise, is that non-hopps enthusiasts are aggravated that the craft beer movement these days is way too hoppy, and it's hard to find things other than pale

ales and IPAs, but that's not true. There's plenty of craft beers out there that aren't IPAs. Seems to be that way. There's a lot of IPAs, but it seems like a lot of people love them. That's probably where they're making them. Right. Like, I can't stand barley wines, but you don't hear me saying, I can't stand barley wines.

Right. They're disgusting. Much less take the time to write an article about it. Yeah. Who cares? Yeah, I guess I'm conflicted about all this. They're both sides are wrong. Big shout out to our friends at Creature Comforts and Appens and their delicious Tropicalia

which made, I think their brewery was one of the top five best new breweries according to maybe Forbes, some big magazine. And a huge shout out check to Boulder Beer Company who sent us a bunch of huge barbers that were awesome. And I gave the barley wine one to Noel, by the way. Oh, really? He just soaked his beard in it and let it seep in. Yeah.

And while we're talking about free booze, I was lucky enough to take home the shaker and spoon box that got sent to us. What's that? It's like blue apron, but for cocktails. Oh. They send you everything but the booze, including like a zester, I needed a zester, like all the different kinds of like demarera syrup and everything you need, plus cocktail recipes. You've been enjoying it?

It's already long gone and enjoyed. Gotcha. They were great. It's just like add bourbon and follow the recipes, but they're like really sophisticated smart recipes that you may never try, that are like all the ingredients you need and easy instructions. So it was good. And the guy said, I think his name is Mike, he said, if you and Jerry wanted a box you

would totally hook you up. I strongly recommend it. Yes, there were more than one tincture in the box. And to follow up, this is the longest list your mail ever, on the Brooklyn, or I'm sorry, the Boulder Beer Company, your hoodie t-shirt that you sent me is one of my favorite new t-shirts. Yes. And I wear it all the time.

Yes, he does. All right. So that... Wait, hold on. We might as well thank Little Bit Suites for the nice character you just sent us. And thank you very much to Mona Collin Tine and her family for sending the box, the annual box of Christmas goodies that's always so delicious. So that's a precursor to our administrative details.

Oh, and thank you to the Hex. They sent us like a bunch of Caraba's gift certificates that we're going to use for lunch. Oh, really? Yeah, stuff too. But I mean, like they sent us a significant amount of Caraba's gift certificates. You got those in your wallet? Yeah.

I got them tucked in my cheek. So that is from Carolyn from New York and her nephew. We didn't mean to yuck the yum. Yeah, you're right, nephew. Yep. Sometimes kids can set adults straight. Yeah. Just don't do it much or you'll get the old belt.

Just kidding. If you want to get in touch with us to send us stuff, to send us an email, to take us to Task Who Cares, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast and you can hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.