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Laddar... Newton's Darkness: Two Dramatic Views (2003)av Carl Djerassi, David Pinner (Författare)
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Gå med i LibraryThing för att få reda på om du skulle tycka om den här boken. Det finns inga diskussioner på LibraryThing om den här boken. Two views of Isaac Newton and his disputes with...well, with nearly everyone. His famous temper is on display here; his dispute with Hooke is the focus of the first play and his dispute with Liebniz is center stage in the second offering. Newton is interesting not just because of his brilliance, but because his famous rages are a departure from the polite civility of London society. He was unable to stand even the slightest hint of criticism, and was famously rigid in his morality and Puritanical ethos. His heretical religious beliefs are also spotlighted in these offerings. Both the authors, but particularly Pinner, allude to the possibility that Newton was homosexual, though scholars are unwilling to go so far, because the evidence consists of absolutely nothing other than his close relationships to some male friends and his lack of a close relationship with women. Interesting, well written, and well researched, these plays allow us to come to grips with the reality that brilliance is not always wrapped up in a pleasant package. ( ) inga recensioner | lägg till en recension
"What purpose is served by showing that England's greatest natural philosopher is flawed ... like other mortals?" asks one of the characters in Newton's Darkness. "We need unsullied heroes!" But what if the hero is sullied? At stake is an issue that is as germane today as it was 300 years ago: a scientist's ethics must not be divorced from scientific accomplishments. There is probably no other scientist of whom so many biographies and other historical analyses have been published than Isaac Newton - all of them in the standard format of documentary prose because of their didactic purpose to transmit historical information. Newton's Darkness, however, illuminates the darker aspects of Newton's persona through two historically grounded plays dealing with two of the bitterest struggles in the history of science. The name of Isaac Newton appears in virtually every survey of the public's choice for the most important persons of the second millennium. Yet the term "darkness" can be applied to much of Newton's personality. Adjectives that have been used to describe facets of his personality include "remote", "lonely", "secretive", "introverted", "melancholic", "humorless", "puritanical", "cruel", "vindictive" and, perhaps worst of all, "unforgiving". The trait most relevant to the present book is Newton's obsessively competitive nature, which was often out of proportion to the warranted facts, as demonstrated in three of Newton's best-known bitter conflicts: with the physicist Robert Hooke, the astronomer royal John Flamsteed, and a German contemporary of almost equal intellectual prowess, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - the last fight eventually turning into an England vs Continental Europe competition. It is two of these three relentless drawn-out battles that are illuminated in Newton's Darkness in the form of historically grounded drama. After a summary of the historical evidence, the book starts with the Newton-Hooke struggle (Chapter 2), which was conducted mano a mano, and is then followed by little-known aspects of the Newton-Leibniz confrontation (Chapter 3), which was fought largely through surrogates - notably the infamous, anonymous committee of 11 Fellows of the Royal Society. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)812.54Literature English (North America) American drama 20th CenturyKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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