Happy birthday Newton, but really?

Article would have come a few hours before to say happy birthday to Newton which totally coincides with a religious-commercial wash-out, called as X-mas, Christmas, New-Year week. A total blast for religion, commerce and culturally minded society, forgetting pressing jobs that were errands last century but never carried out. How many holidays we need and how many we have? Same as How many Gods we need and how any we have?

But for this reason they discovered the word, belated. Happy belated birthday therefore. 25th December was the birthday of Newton, Isaac, Sir.

Incidentally today (yesterday actually from here in India, is many Gods a results of many time zones in the world, yes) is the birthday of two another luminary scientists. If I can. I would also mention their importance in science and who they are. Physics Today which has been wishing many scientists their birthdays, carries the story behind the birthday scientist fella.

There are no merry Christmas or happy Diwali wishes at the level of the quantum. At that level we are all screwed, and the only things that worked out in our favor is a likelihood thats a part per million. Thats why scientists call it: contingent, laws of nature are arbitrarily, favorable to our existence and not drafted by the mercy of a wishful blown-up entity as desired by intelligent design and goes by various names or forms. Thankfully enough, explicitly enough we have accessed the quantum since a 100 years although even the Greek Philosophy talks about indeterminacy of truth.

Thankfully enough we have also traversed as far as we could in our mission to know the cosmos, but we have been doing the first works since the time of Galileo. Newton, happy belated birthday Sir, last time we met was a bust of yours, standing in a garden, good enough only to make a joke about and of you, that was 3 years ago, you have changed the course of Physics for all time to come, in the right direction, more or less, by differentials, the ones that you invented,   and the ones that we are still putting into our favorite computers, just like you were using the formula of Ibn Sahl with same amount of impunity.

The one thing to be known about and of Newton was and is; Its Newton who is not the first father of Modern Physics, its Galileo, its not only Newton who totally changed our world views in Physics, not just him, but certainly perhaps in the only 10, that have, Newton is the one who changed a 2 milenia (yes 2 K years) or so old method, formalism, concept or idea, what you may call it, as befits, appropriateness to one that old, judged by the eyes that we have now, based on the calculations howsoever primitive they are by our standards now, of Aristotle, the guiding method for 2 K years, for Physics. Newton overhauled that Aristotelian formalism, the same way Einstein overhauled the Galilean-Newtonian formalism. Such total overhauls can’t always be expected faster than ever.

So, think of someone who can overhaul Einstein’s theory in 100 – 2000 years in the aftermath of Relativistic enlightenment, thats what Newton would be someone to describe as. Thats what Feynman would be someone to describe as, and thats what someone like Galileo would be to describe as. Just like Einstein refined the astronomy that existed before him, in terms of perihelion of mercury (purna-suraj, therefore closest of sun by Mercury) Newton had attempted much of astronomy and solved some problems, his moon’s astronomical turbulence, known as apogee of moon (again alpa-jaya = least of earth by moon) (known in general as apoapsis, perhaps alpa-jaya-sirsa = least of most primary, here earth)  [need to check factually exactly what of moon] DID NOT WORK out.

But his theory of gravity and of motion are together workable far deeper than is necessitated by modern Physics, not modern physicist though, in other words, Newton’s deeper understanding while not sufficient work for modern day astrophysics, the modern day astrophysicist does not fully grasp the depth of his work, the same way a modern day Physicist  may not fully grasp the depth of Einstein’s Relativity. The magic number 12, that says only these 12 understand Einstein, might still be at work at some level. Sorry about busting your ignorance like that, we tend to talk too much about stuff that we really do not know, rather than the other way round.