about isaac newton essay

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician famous for his laws of physics. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

(1643-1727)

Who Was Isaac Newton?

In 1687, he published his most acclaimed work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) , which has been called the single most influential book on physics. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England, making him Sir Isaac Newton.

Early Life and Family

Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. Using the "old" Julian calendar, Newton's birth date is sometimes displayed as December 25, 1642.

Newton was the only son of a prosperous local farmer, also named Isaac, who died three months before he was born. A premature baby born tiny and weak, Newton was not expected to survive.

When he was 3 years old, his mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton, remarried a well-to-do minister, Barnabas Smith, and went to live with him, leaving young Newton with his maternal grandmother.

The experience left an indelible imprint on Newton, later manifesting itself as an acute sense of insecurity. He anxiously obsessed over his published work, defending its merits with irrational behavior.

At age 12, Newton was reunited with his mother after her second husband died. She brought along her three small children from her second marriage.

Isaac Newton's Education

Newton was enrolled at the King's School in Grantham, a town in Lincolnshire, where he lodged with a local apothecary and was introduced to the fascinating world of chemistry.

His mother pulled him out of school at age 12. Her plan was to make him a farmer and have him tend the farm. Newton failed miserably, as he found farming monotonous. Newton was soon sent back to King's School to finish his basic education.

Perhaps sensing the young man's innate intellectual abilities, his uncle, a graduate of the University of Cambridge's Trinity College , persuaded Newton's mother to have him enter the university. Newton enrolled in a program similar to a work-study in 1661, and subsequently waited on tables and took care of wealthier students' rooms.

Scientific Revolution

When Newton arrived at Cambridge, the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was already in full force. The heliocentric view of the universe—theorized by astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and later refined by Galileo —was well known in most European academic circles.

Philosopher René Descartes had begun to formulate a new concept of nature as an intricate, impersonal and inert machine. Yet, like most universities in Europe, Cambridge was steeped in Aristotelian philosophy and a view of nature resting on a geocentric view of the universe, dealing with nature in qualitative rather than quantitative terms.

During his first three years at Cambridge, Newton was taught the standard curriculum but was fascinated with the more advanced science. All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers. The result was a less-than-stellar performance, but one that is understandable, given his dual course of study.

It was during this time that Newton kept a second set of notes, entitled "Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae" ("Certain Philosophical Questions"). The "Quaestiones" reveal that Newton had discovered the new concept of nature that provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution. Though Newton graduated without honors or distinctions, his efforts won him the title of scholar and four years of financial support for future education.

In 1665, the bubonic plague that was ravaging Europe had come to Cambridge, forcing the university to close. After a two-year hiatus, Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow at Trinity College, as he was still not considered a standout scholar.

In the ensuing years, his fortune improved. Newton received his Master of Arts degree in 1669, before he was 27. During this time, he came across Nicholas Mercator's published book on methods for dealing with infinite series.

Newton quickly wrote a treatise, De Analysi , expounding his own wider-ranging results. He shared this with friend and mentor Isaac Barrow, but didn't include his name as author.

In June 1669, Barrow shared the unaccredited manuscript with British mathematician John Collins. In August 1669, Barrow identified its author to Collins as "Mr. Newton ... very young ... but of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things."

Newton's work was brought to the attention of the mathematics community for the first time. Shortly afterward, Barrow resigned his Lucasian professorship at Cambridge, and Newton assumed the chair.

Isaac Newton’s Discoveries

Newton made discoveries in optics, motion and mathematics. Newton theorized that white light was a composite of all colors of the spectrum, and that light was composed of particles.

His momentous book on physics, Principia , contains information on nearly all of the essential concepts of physics except energy, ultimately helping him to explain the laws of motion and the theory of gravity. Along with mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Newton is credited for developing essential theories of calculus.

Isaac Newton Inventions

Newton's first major public scientific achievement was designing and constructing a reflecting telescope in 1668. As a professor at Cambridge, Newton was required to deliver an annual course of lectures and chose optics as his initial topic. He used his telescope to study optics and help prove his theory of light and color.

The Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope in 1671, and the organization's interest encouraged Newton to publish his notes on light, optics and color in 1672. These notes were later published as part of Newton's Opticks: Or, A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light .

The Apple Myth

Between 1665 and 1667, Newton returned home from Trinity College to pursue his private study, as school was closed due to the Great Plague. Legend has it that, at this time, Newton experienced his famous inspiration of gravity with the falling apple. According to this common myth, Newton was sitting under an apple tree when a fruit fell and hit him on the head, inspiring him to suddenly come up with the theory of gravity.

While there is no evidence that the apple actually hit Newton on the head, he did see an apple fall from a tree, leading him to wonder why it fell straight down and not at an angle. Consequently, he began exploring the theories of motion and gravity.

It was during this 18-month hiatus as a student that Newton conceived many of his most important insights—including the method of infinitesimal calculus, the foundations for his theory of light and color, and the laws of planetary motion—that eventually led to the publication of his physics book Principia and his theory of gravity.

Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion

In 1687, following 18 months of intense and effectively nonstop work, Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) , most often known as Principia .

Principia is said to be the single most influential book on physics and possibly all of science. Its publication immediately raised Newton to international prominence.

Principia offers an exact quantitative description of bodies in motion, with three basic but important laws of motion:

A stationary body will stay stationary unless an external force is applied to it.

Force is equal to mass times acceleration, and a change in motion (i.e., change in speed) is proportional to the force applied.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Newton and the Theory of Gravity

Newton’s three basic laws of motion outlined in Principia helped him arrive at his theory of gravity. Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that two objects attract each other with a force of gravitational attraction that’s proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.

These laws helped explain not only elliptical planetary orbits but nearly every other motion in the universe: how the planets are kept in orbit by the pull of the sun’s gravity; how the moon revolves around Earth and the moons of Jupiter revolve around it; and how comets revolve in elliptical orbits around the sun.

They also allowed him to calculate the mass of each planet, calculate the flattening of the Earth at the poles and the bulge at the equator, and how the gravitational pull of the sun and moon create the Earth’s tides. In Newton's account, gravity kept the universe balanced, made it work, and brought heaven and Earth together in one great equation.

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Isaac Newton & Robert Hooke

Not everyone at the Royal Academy was enthusiastic about Newton’s discoveries in optics and 1672 publication of Opticks: Or, A treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light . Among the dissenters was Robert Hooke , one of the original members of the Royal Academy and a scientist who was accomplished in a number of areas, including mechanics and optics.

While Newton theorized that light was composed of particles, Hooke believed it was composed of waves. Hooke quickly condemned Newton's paper in condescending terms, and attacked Newton's methodology and conclusions.

Hooke was not the only one to question Newton's work in optics. Renowned Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens and a number of French Jesuits also raised objections. But because of Hooke's association with the Royal Society and his own work in optics, his criticism stung Newton the worst.

Unable to handle the critique, he went into a rage—a reaction to criticism that was to continue throughout his life. Newton denied Hooke's charge that his theories had any shortcomings and argued the importance of his discoveries to all of science.

In the ensuing months, the exchange between the two men grew more acrimonious, and soon Newton threatened to quit the Royal Society altogether. He remained only when several other members assured him that the Fellows held him in high esteem.

The rivalry between Newton and Hooke would continue for several years thereafter. Then, in 1678, Newton suffered a complete nervous breakdown and the correspondence abruptly ended. The death of his mother the following year caused him to become even more isolated, and for six years he withdrew from intellectual exchange except when others initiated correspondence, which he always kept short.

During his hiatus from public life, Newton returned to his study of gravitation and its effects on the orbits of planets. Ironically, the impetus that put Newton on the right direction in this study came from Robert Hooke.

In a 1679 letter of general correspondence to Royal Society members for contributions, Hooke wrote to Newton and brought up the question of planetary motion, suggesting that a formula involving the inverse squares might explain the attraction between planets and the shape of their orbits.

Subsequent exchanges transpired before Newton quickly broke off the correspondence once again. But Hooke's idea was soon incorporated into Newton's work on planetary motion, and from his notes it appears he had quickly drawn his own conclusions by 1680, though he kept his discoveries to himself.

In early 1684, in a conversation with fellow Royal Society members Christopher Wren and Edmond Halley, Hooke made his case on the proof for planetary motion. Both Wren and Halley thought he was on to something, but pointed out that a mathematical demonstration was needed.

In August 1684, Halley traveled to Cambridge to visit with Newton, who was coming out of his seclusion. Halley idly asked him what shape the orbit of a planet would take if its attraction to the sun followed the inverse square of the distance between them (Hooke's theory).

Newton knew the answer, due to his concentrated work for the past six years, and replied, "An ellipse." Newton claimed to have solved the problem some 18 years prior, during his hiatus from Cambridge and the plague, but he was unable to find his notes. Halley persuaded him to work out the problem mathematically and offered to pay all costs so that the ideas might be published, which it was, in Newton’s Principia .

Upon the publication of the first edition of Principia in 1687, Robert Hooke immediately accused Newton of plagiarism, claiming that he had discovered the theory of inverse squares and that Newton had stolen his work. The charge was unfounded, as most scientists knew, for Hooke had only theorized on the idea and had never brought it to any level of proof.

Newton, however, was furious and strongly defended his discoveries. He withdrew all references to Hooke in his notes and threatened to withdraw from publishing the subsequent edition of Principia altogether.

Halley, who had invested much of himself in Newton's work, tried to make peace between the two men. While Newton begrudgingly agreed to insert a joint acknowledgment of Hooke's work (shared with Wren and Halley) in his discussion of the law of inverse squares, it did nothing to placate Hooke.

As the years went on, Hooke's life began to unravel. His beloved niece and companion died the same year that Principia was published, in 1687. As Newton's reputation and fame grew, Hooke's declined, causing him to become even more bitter and loathsome toward his rival.

To the very end, Hooke took every opportunity he could to offend Newton. Knowing that his rival would soon be elected president of the Royal Society, Hooke refused to retire until the year of his death, in 1703.

Newton and Alchemy

Following the publication of Principia , Newton was ready for a new direction in life. He no longer found contentment in his position at Cambridge and was becoming more involved in other issues.

He helped lead the resistance to King James II's attempts to reinstitute Catholic teaching at Cambridge, and in 1689 he was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament.

While in London, Newton acquainted himself with a broader group of intellectuals and became acquainted with political philosopher John Locke . Though many of the scientists on the continent continued to teach the mechanical world according to Aristotle , a young generation of British scientists became captivated with Newton's new view of the physical world and recognized him as their leader.

One of these admirers was Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss mathematician whom Newton befriended while in London.

However, within a few years, Newton fell into another nervous breakdown in 1693. The cause is open to speculation: his disappointment over not being appointed to a higher position by England's new monarchs, William III and Mary II, or the subsequent loss of his friendship with Duillier; exhaustion from being overworked; or perhaps chronic mercury poisoning after decades of alchemical research.

It's difficult to know the exact cause, but evidence suggests that letters written by Newton to several of his London acquaintances and friends, including Duillier, seemed deranged and paranoiac, and accused them of betrayal and conspiracy.

Oddly enough, Newton recovered quickly, wrote letters of apology to friends, and was back to work within a few months. He emerged with all his intellectual facilities intact, but seemed to have lost interest in scientific problems and now favored pursuing prophecy and scripture and the study of alchemy.

While some might see this as work beneath the man who had revolutionized science, it might be more properly attributed to Newton responding to the issues of the time in turbulent 17th century Britain.

Many intellectuals were grappling with the meaning of many different subjects, not least of which were religion, politics and the very purpose of life. Modern science was still so new that no one knew for sure how it measured up against older philosophies.

Gold Standard

In 1696, Newton was able to attain the governmental position he had long sought: warden of the Mint; after acquiring this new title, he permanently moved to London and lived with his niece, Catherine Barton.

Barton was the mistress of Lord Halifax, a high-ranking government official who was instrumental in having Newton promoted, in 1699, to master of the Mint—a position that he would hold until his death.

Not wanting it to be considered a mere honorary position, Newton approached the job in earnest, reforming the currency and severely punishing counterfeiters. As master of the Mint, Newton moved the British currency, the pound sterling, from the silver to the gold standard.

The Royal Society

In 1703, Newton was elected president of the Royal Society upon Robert Hooke's death. However, Newton never seemed to understand the notion of science as a cooperative venture, and his ambition and fierce defense of his own discoveries continued to lead him from one conflict to another with other scientists.

By most accounts, Newton's tenure at the society was tyrannical and autocratic; he was able to control the lives and careers of younger scientists with absolute power.

In 1705, in a controversy that had been brewing for several years, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz publicly accused Newton of plagiarizing his research, claiming he had discovered infinitesimal calculus several years before the publication of Principia .

In 1712, the Royal Society appointed a committee to investigate the matter. Of course, since Newton was president of the society, he was able to appoint the committee's members and oversee its investigation. Not surprisingly, the committee concluded Newton's priority over the discovery.

That same year, in another of Newton's more flagrant episodes of tyranny, he published without permission the notes of astronomer John Flamsteed. It seems the astronomer had collected a massive body of data from his years at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England.

Newton had requested a large volume of Flamsteed's notes for his revisions to Principia . Annoyed when Flamsteed wouldn't provide him with more information as quickly as he wanted it, Newton used his influence as president of the Royal Society to be named the chairman of the body of "visitors" responsible for the Royal Observatory.

He then tried to force the immediate publication of Flamsteed's catalogue of the stars, as well as all of Flamsteed's notes, edited and unedited. To add insult to injury, Newton arranged for Flamsteed's mortal enemy, Edmund Halley, to prepare the notes for press.

Flamsteed was finally able to get a court order forcing Newton to cease his plans for publication and return the notes—one of the few times that Newton was bested by one of his rivals.

Final Years

Toward the end of this life, Newton lived at Cranbury Park, near Winchester, England, with his niece, Catherine (Barton) Conduitt, and her husband, John Conduitt.

By this time, Newton had become one of the most famous men in Europe. His scientific discoveries were unchallenged. He also had become wealthy, investing his sizable income wisely and bestowing sizable gifts to charity.

Despite his fame, Newton's life was far from perfect: He never married or made many friends, and in his later years, a combination of pride, insecurity and side trips on peculiar scientific inquiries led even some of his few friends to worry about his mental stability.

By the time he reached 80 years of age, Newton was experiencing digestion problems and had to drastically change his diet and mobility.

In March 1727, Newton experienced severe pain in his abdomen and blacked out, never to regain consciousness. He died the next day, on March 31, 1727, at the age of 84.

Newton's fame grew even more after his death, as many of his contemporaries proclaimed him the greatest genius who ever lived. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but his discoveries had a large impact on Western thought, leading to comparisons to the likes of Plato , Aristotle and Galileo.

Although his discoveries were among many made during the Scientific Revolution, Newton's universal principles of gravity found no parallels in science at the time.

Of course, Newton was proven wrong on some of his key assumptions. In the 20th century, Albert Einstein would overturn Newton's concept of the universe, stating that space, distance and motion were not absolute but relative and that the universe was more fantastic than Newton had ever conceived.

Newton might not have been surprised: In his later life, when asked for an assessment of his achievements, he replied, "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Isaac Newton
• Birth Year: 1643
• Birth date: January 4, 1643
• Birth City: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician famous for his laws of physics. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.
• Science and Medicine
• Technology and Engineering
• Education and Academia
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• University of Cambridge, Trinity College
• The King's School
• Interesting Facts
• Isaac Newton helped develop the principles of modern physics, including the laws of motion, and is credited as one of the great minds of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution.
• In 1687, Newton published his most acclaimed work, 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica' ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'), which has been called the single most influential book on physics.
• Newton's theory of gravity states that two objects attract each other with a force of gravitational attraction that’s proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centers.
• Death Year: 1727
• Death date: March 31, 1727
• Death City: London, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Isaac Newton Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/scientists/isaac-newton
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: November 5, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
• Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
• If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
• It is the perfection of God's works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity.
• Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.
• To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.
• I see I have made myself a slave to philosophy.
• The changing of bodies into light, and light into bodies, is very conformable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations.
• To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after, then to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.
• Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
• Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.
• Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

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Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist Essay (Biography)

Introduction.

Isaac Newton is one of the greatest historical figures who will remain the annals of history, because of his numerous contributions to different scientific fields such as mathematics and physics. As Hall (Para 1) argues, “Generally, people have always regarded Newton as one of the most influential theorists in the history of science”. Most of his scientific experiments and abstracts laid the foundation of the modern day scientific inventions, as he was able to prove and document different theoretical concepts.

For example, his publication “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” is one of the best scientific reference materials in physics and mathematics. Newton is well remembered for his numerous scientific discoveries such the laws of gravity, differential and integral calculus, the working of a telescope, and the three laws of linear motion. In addition to science, Newton was also very religious, because of the numerous biblical hermeneutics and occult studies that he wrote in his late life (1).

Newton‘s Early Life, Middle and Late Life

Newton’s early life.

Newton was born to Puritan parents Isaac Newton and Hannah Ayscough in 1643 in the county of Lincolnshire, England. He spent most of his childhood days with his grandmother, because his dad had passed away three months before he was born and he could not get along with his stepfather.

As During his early years of school, Newton schooled at the King’s School, Grantham, although it never lasted for long, because the passing away of his stepfather in 1659 forced his family to relocate to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth; hence, making him to drop out of school. His stay in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth was short-lived, because through the influence of King’s school master Henry Strokes, his mother allowed him to go back to school and finish his studies.

As a result of his exemplary performance in the King’s School, Newton got a chance of joining Trinity College, Cambridge on a sizar basis. In college, Newton was a very hardworking and fast learner, because in addition to reading the normal college curriculum materials that were based on Aristotle’s works, he was interested in reading more philosophical and astronomical works written by other philosophers such as Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo, and Thomas Hobes .

To a large extent, this laid the foundation for his later discoveries, because four years later in 1665, Newton invented the binomial theorem and came up with a mathematical theory, which he later modified to be called the infinitesimal calculus. The closure of Trinity College, Cambridge in the late 1665, because of the plague did not prevent Newton from advancing his studies on his own, as he continued with private studies at home.

Through his private studies Newton was able to discover numerous theories the primary ones being calculus, optics, the foundation of the theory of light and color, and the law of gravitation. Newton was very proud of his advancements, something that was evident in his words “ All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in my prime of age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since,’ when college reopened (O’Connor and Robertson 1).

Newton’s middle Life

Upon the re-opening of his college in 1667, he was chosen as a minor fellow, and later as senior fellow when he embarked on his masters of Arts degree. In 1969, he was selected to replace Professor Isaac Barrow, who was the outgoing professor of Mathematics.

His appointment gave him more opportunities of improving his early works in optics, which led to the release of his first project paper on the nature of color in 1672, after being elected to the Royal Society. This marked the start of the numerous publications that Newton released later, although he faced numerous challenges and oppositions from one the leading science researchers, Robert Hook. Between 1670 and 1672 Newton also taught optics at Trinity College, Cambridge.

This enabled him to do further researches on the concept of refraction of light using glass prisms leading to his discovery on refraction of light and development of the first Newtonian telescope using mirrors. Although the 1678 emotional breakdown suffered by Newton was a major setback to his work, after recovering, he continued with his early researches which led to the publication of the Principia; a publication that elaborated on the laws of motion and the universal law of gravity.

In addition to this, the publication elaborated on some calculus laws primarily on geometrical analysis and some more explanations of the heliocentric theory of the solar system. This publication was followed by another publication that was the second edition of the Principia in 1713. This publication provided more explanations on the force of gravity and the force which made objects to be attracted to one another (Hatch 1).

Newton’s Late Life

His works in the Principia made Newton to a very respected and famous scientist of the time; hence, the nature of appointments, which he received in his late life. For example, in 1689 he was selected as the parliamentary representative of Cambridge; one of the highest power seats of the time. As if this was not enough, in 1703 Newton become the president of the Royal Society, a seat he maintained until his death and Later on in 1704, Newton released a publication named “Opticks” (Fowler 1).

The dawn of 1690’was a transitional period for Newton, as he ventured into the Bible World. As Hatch (1) argues “during this period Newton ventured into writing religious tracts with literal interpretation of the Bible.” Some of his writings included some works which questioned the reality behind the Trinity and the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended.

Newton’s Scientific Achievements

Newton was one of the most successful historical scientists, because of his numerous contributions to different fields of science such as optics, mathematics, geography, and physics. In mathematics Newton’s discoveries included the binomial theorem of analytical geometry, new methods of solving infinite series in calculus, and the inverse methods of fluxions.

In optic, Newton was one of the first individuals to perform the first experiments on the decomposition of light and the working of the telescope, because of his early discovery on separation of the white light. This enabled Newton to formulate the Corpuscular Light Theory and discover other properties of the white light.

In addition to this, Newton also made numerous discoveries in Physics and mechanics such gravitational force, the centripetal force, the theory of fluids, and the revolution of planetary bodies. Further, Newton was made numerous discoveries in Alchemy and Chemistry, most of which are documented in his numerous publications on different areas of Alchemy, most of which were based on scientific experiments on matter (Hatch 1).

Although in his later life his level of wit his wit reduced, as Hatch (Para 13) argues, “Newton continued to exercise strong influence on the advancement of science, because of his position in the Royal Society. Newton died at the age of eighty fours in 1727, leaving behind a legacy will always remembered in the history of humankind, because of his scientific works.

Works Cited

Fowler, Michael. Isaac Newton: Newton’s life . 2010. Web.

Hall, Alfred. Isaac Newton’s life. Isaac Newton Institute of mathematical Sciences . 2011. Web.

Hatch, Robert. Sir Isaac Newton. 1998. Web.

O ’ Connor, John and Robertson, Ernest. Sir Isaac Newton . 2000. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 31). Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biography-of-isaac-newton/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biography-of-isaac-newton/.

1. IvyPanda . "Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biography-of-isaac-newton/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist." October 31, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-biography-of-isaac-newton/.

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Isaac Newton

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 16, 2023 | Original: March 10, 2015

Isaac Newton is best know for his theory about the law of gravity, but his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) with its three laws of motion greatly influenced the Enlightenment in Europe. Born in 1643 in Woolsthorpe, England, Sir Isaac Newton began developing his theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics while on break from Cambridge University. 

Years of research culminated with the 1687 publication of “Principia,” a landmark work that established the universal laws of motion and gravity. Newton’s second major book, “Opticks,” detailed his experiments to determine the properties of light. Also a student of Biblical history and alchemy, the famed scientist served as president of the Royal Society of London and master of England’s Royal Mint until his death in 1727.

Isaac Newton: Early Life and Education

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. The son of a farmer who died three months before he was born, Newton spent most of his early years with his maternal grandmother after his mother remarried. His education was interrupted by a failed attempt to turn him into a farmer, and he attended the King’s School in Grantham before enrolling at the University of Cambridge’s Trinity College in 1661.

Newton studied a classical curriculum at Cambridge, but he became fascinated by the works of modern philosophers such as René Descartes, even devoting a set of notes to his outside readings he titled “Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (“Certain Philosophical Questions”). When the Great Plague shuttered Cambridge in 1665, Newton returned home and began formulating his theories on calculus, light and color, his farm the setting for the supposed falling apple that inspired his work on gravity.

Isaac Newton’s Telescope and Studies on Light

Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667 and was elected a minor fellow. He constructed the first reflecting telescope in 1668, and the following year he received his Master of Arts degree and took over as Cambridge’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Asked to give a demonstration of his telescope to the Royal Society of London in 1671, he was elected to the Royal Society the following year and published his notes on optics for his peers.

Through his experiments with refraction, Newton determined that white light was a composite of all the colors on the spectrum, and he asserted that light was composed of particles instead of waves. His methods drew sharp rebuke from established Society member Robert Hooke, who was unsparing again with Newton’s follow-up paper in 1675. 

Known for his temperamental defense of his work, Newton engaged in heated correspondence with Hooke before suffering a nervous breakdown and withdrawing from the public eye in 1678. In the following years, he returned to his earlier studies on the forces governing gravity and dabbled in alchemy.

Isaac Newton and the Law of Gravity

In 1684, English astronomer Edmund Halley paid a visit to the secluded Newton. Upon learning that Newton had mathematically worked out the elliptical paths of celestial bodies, Halley urged him to organize his notes. 

The result was the 1687 publication of “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), which established the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity. Newton’s three laws of motion state that (1) Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it; (2) Force equals mass times acceleration: F=MA and (3) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

“Principia” propelled Newton to stardom in intellectual circles, eventually earning universal acclaim as one of the most important works of modern science. His work was a foundational part of the European Enlightenment .

With his newfound influence, Newton opposed the attempts of King James II to reinstitute Catholic teachings at English Universities. King James II was replaced by his protestant daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange as part of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and Newton was elected to represent Cambridge in Parliament in 1689. 

Newton moved to London permanently after being named warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, earning a promotion to master of the Mint three years later. Determined to prove his position wasn’t merely symbolic, Newton moved the pound sterling from the silver to the gold standard and sought to punish counterfeiters.

The death of Hooke in 1703 allowed Newton to take over as president of the Royal Society, and the following year he published his second major work, “Opticks.” Composed largely from his earlier notes on the subject, the book detailed Newton’s painstaking experiments with refraction and the color spectrum, closing with his ruminations on such matters as energy and electricity. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England.

Isaac Newton: Founder of Calculus?

Around this time, the debate over Newton’s claims to originating the field of calculus exploded into a nasty dispute. Newton had developed his concept of “fluxions” (differentials) in the mid 1660s to account for celestial orbits, though there was no public record of his work. 

In the meantime, German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz formulated his own mathematical theories and published them in 1684. As president of the Royal Society, Newton oversaw an investigation that ruled his work to be the founding basis of the field, but the debate continued even after Leibniz’s death in 1716. Researchers later concluded that both men likely arrived at their conclusions independent of one another.

Death of Isaac Newton

Newton was also an ardent student of history and religious doctrines, and his writings on those subjects were compiled into multiple books that were published posthumously. Having never married, Newton spent his later years living with his niece at Cranbury Park near Winchester, England. He died in his sleep on March 31, 1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey .

A giant even among the brilliant minds that drove the Scientific Revolution, Newton is remembered as a transformative scholar, inventor and writer. He eradicated any doubts about the heliocentric model of the universe by establishing celestial mechanics, his precise methodology giving birth to what is known as the scientific method. Although his theories of space-time and gravity eventually gave way to those of Albert Einstein , his work remains the bedrock on which modern physics was built.

Isaac Newton Quotes

• “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
• “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
• “What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
• “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”
• “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”

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• Scientific Methods
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• Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

Apart from discovering the cause of the fall of an apple from a tree, that is, the laws of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton was perhaps one of the most brilliant and greatest physicists of all time. He shaped dramatic and surprising discoveries in the laws of physics that we believe our universe obeys, and hence it changed the way we appreciate and relate to the world around us.

Table of Contents

About sir isaac newton, sir isaac newton’s education, awards and achievements, some achievements of isaac newton in brief.

• Universal Law of Gravitation

Optics and Light

Sir Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643 in a small village of England called Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. He was an English physicist and mathematician, and one of the important thinkers in the Scientific Revolution.

He discovered the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further laid the foundation of modern physical optics. His famous three laws of Motion in mechanics and the formulation of the laws of gravitation completely changed the track of physics across the globe. He was the originator of calculus in mathematics. A scientist like him is considered an excellent gift by nature to the world of physics.

Isaac Newton studied at the Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661. At 22 in 1665, a year after beginning his four-year scholarship, Newton finished his first significant discovery in mathematics, where he revealed the generalized binomial theorem. He was bestowed with his B.A. degree in the same year.

Isaac Newton held numerous positions throughout his life. In 1671, he was invited to join the Royal Society of London after developing a new and enhanced version of the reflecting telescope.

He was later elected President of the Royal Society (1703). Sir Isaac Newton ran for a seat in Parliament in 1689. He won the election and became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. He was also appointed as a Warden of the Mint in 1969. Due to his exemplary work and dedication to the mint, he was chosen Master of the Mint in 1700. After being knighted in 1705, he was known as “Sir Isaac Newton.”

His mind was ablaze with original ideas. He made significant progress in three distinct fields – with some of the most profound discoveries in:

• Calculus, the mathematics of change, which is vital to our understanding of the world around us
• Optics and the behaviour of light
• He also built the first working reflecting telescope
• He showed that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion are exceptional cases of Newton’s universal gravitation.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Contribution in Calculus

Sir Isaac Newton was the first individual to develop calculus. Modern physics and physical chemistry are almost impossible without calculus, as it is the mathematics of change.

The idea of differentiating calculus into differential calculus, integral calculus and differential equations came from Newton’s fertile mind. Today, most mathematicians give equal credit to Newton and Leibniz for calculus’s discovery.

Law of Universal Gravitation

The famous apple that he saw falling from a tree led him to discover the force of gravitation and its laws. Ultimately, he realised that the pressure causing the apple’s fall is responsible for the moon to orbit the earth, as well as comets and other planets to revolve around the sun. The force can be felt throughout the universe. Hence, Newton called it the Universal Law of Gravitation .

Newton discovered the equation that allows us to compute the force of gravity between two objects.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

• First law of Motion
• Second Law of Motion
• Third law of Motion

Watch the video and learn about the history of the concept of Gravitation

Sir Isaac Newton also accomplished himself in experimental methods and working with equipment. He built the world’s first reflecting telescope . This telescope focuses all the light from a curved mirror. Here are some advantages of reflecting telescopes from optics and light –

• They are inexpensive to make.
• They are easier to make in large sizes, gathering lighter, allowing advanced magnification.
• They don’t suffer focusing issues linked with lenses called chromatic aberration.

Isaac Newton also proved that white light is not a simple phenomenon with the help of a glass prism. He confirmed that it is made up of all of the colours of the rainbow, which could recombine to form white light again.

Watch the video and solve complete NCERT exercise questions in the chapter Gravitation

Frequently Asked Questions

How did newton discover gravity.

Seeing an apple fall from the tree made him think about the forces of nature.

What is Calculus in Mathematics?

Calculus is the study of differentiation and integration. Calculus explains the changes in values, on a small and large scale, related to any function.

Define Reflecting Telescope.

It’s a telescope invented by Newton that uses mirrors to collect and focus the light towards the eyepiece.

Name all the Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion.

Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion are:

• The Law of Ellipses
• The Law of Equal Areas
• The Law of Harmonies

Who discovered Gravity?

Watch the full summary of the chapter gravitation class 9.

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Essay On Isaac Newton

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Topic: Education , Science , Students , Literature , Innovation , Violence , World , Isaac Newton

Published: 11/15/2019

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Isaac Newton was an English scientist who not only studied but made stupendous discoveries in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. However, he is also a well-known astronomer, natural philosopher and theologian. Sir Isaac Newton was born in three months after the death of his father and when his mother remarried he moved to his grandparents. These were the people that raised him from his youth. On reaching the proper age, Newton attended Cambridge University where he stayed until the plague hit. Even though he called his age of the time of the plague "the prime of my age for invention", no natural disaster was able to stop him from his scientific studies.

It was after the university that he began his discoveries connected with optics. His invention of the reflecting telescope in 1668 finally drew the attention of other scientists. Isaac Newton conducted a number of experiments concerning light and its composition. That’s to this hard work he was able to put forward a number of discoveries. He proved that light can be measured by patterns. Moreover, he proved that white light consists of different colored rays which correspond to the colors of the rainbow. Each ray can be defined by the angle through which it is reflected. All this and much more was published in his book “Optics” in 1704.

Isaac Newton is mostly known for what is now something of a legend, a story told to kids. His discovery of the laws of gravity is what he is best known for among people who do not tie their lives with science. The story goes like this. Isaac was allegedly sitting under a tree. All of a sudden an apple fell on his head. A bit stumped at first, our great scientist started to think and analyze. By measuring the force needed to hold the moon in orbit he inevitably understood that there must be some other force, one which has not been studied before. And so there is – the force of gravity.

Isaac Newton was not only a scientist but also a powerful public figure. He was elected member of the parliament for the University of Cambridge to oppose the Kind James II’s attempts to make universities catholic. It should be noted that he also held the post of a Mint and was even knighted. This was a prominent figure in the scientific world and in the public world of his time. His work will not be forgotten.

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Newton’s Philosophy

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) lived in a philosophically tumultuous time. He witnessed the end of the Aristotelian dominance of philosophy in Europe, the rise and fall of Cartesianism, the emergence of “experimental philosophy,” and the development of numerous experimental and mathematical methods for the study of nature. Indeed, he helped to develop many of those methods. Newton’s contributions to mathematics—including the co-discovery with G.W. Leibniz of what we now call the calculus—and to what is now called physics, including both its experimental and theoretical aspects, will forever dominate discussions of his lasting influence. His impact on the development of early modern philosophy was also profound; indeed, it is difficult to grasp the history of philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without considering Newton’s role. His engagement with Cartesian ideas and methods early in his life was just as significant to the transformation of philosophy in the seventeenth century as his debates with Leibniz were to the setting of the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth. Obviously, Newton is not part of the traditional philosophy canon of the period. That fact reflects an anachronistic approach to the history of modern philosophy that we have inherited from French and German scholars of the nineteenth century. During the height of the Enlightenment, Newton was always characterized as a canonical philosopher: for instance, he plays a leading role in the very first “modern” history of modern philosophy, Johann Jacob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae of 1744. Every major Enlightenment thinker, from Diderot to D’Alembert to Kant, was influenced by Brucker’s account of modern philosophy. In tandem, numerous works on “Newton’s philosophy” and his “philosophical discoveries” were published throughout the eighteenth century in every major European language. By the early nineteenth century, however, a separation between “science” and “philosophy” had been effectuated, which led to Newton’s shunting into the science canon. Recent scholarship has challenged this conception of the canon. Moreover, Newton engaged with, or influenced, many of the standardly canonical philosophers of the early modern era, including Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz and Kant. His influence on early modern philosophy is a rich topic.

1. Placing Newton in the history of natural philosophy

2. methodology i: the optics debates of the 1670s, 3. newton’s relation to cartesianism, 4. methodology ii: the principia, 5. the aftermath of the principia i: relations with john locke and richard bentley, 6. the aftermath of the principia ii: debates with leibniz, 7. newton’s impact on philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

Traditionally, Newton would be characterized as a mathematician for his work on the calculus and as a scientist for his work in physics. His celebrated talent in mathematics is perhaps equaled not only by his profound theorizing concerning the physical world, but also his influential experimental methods. Indeed, Newton is remarkable for the fact that his work as a theoretician is matched by his work as an experimentalist—either aspect of his oeuvre would be sufficient to secure his place in the history of modern science. So in the popular imagination, and in the history books, Newton is seen as one of the greatest scientists of the modern period, on a par with few others (perhaps Darwin or Einstein). This view will continue to dominate our understanding of Newton in the twenty-first century.

If we attempt to understand Newton’s work from an historical point of view, however, a more complex conception emerges. When Newton published his principal works, he was not contributing to a well-established field, he was helping to create modern mathematical physics. This meant that few of his ideas, methods, or approaches, whether in mathematics or in experimental physics, could be taken for granted. From his first papers in the early 1670s, on optics, until his last days working on the third and final edition of his magnum opus the Principia decades later, philosophers, mathematicians and experimenters challenged Newton’s approach. This frequently upset Newton, who had a famous, lifelong aversion to intellectual debate and controversy. But in a sense, it helped to ensure the importance of Newton’s ideas for philosophy. Obviously, Newton never wrote a philosophical text on the order of Descartes’s Meditations , Locke’s Essay , or Spinoza’s Ethics . He never produced what the lumières who studied him would have called a “system” of philosophy. But the intense controversies produced by his mathematical, empirical and philosophical methods and ideas continually prompted him to broach philosophical topics (Janiak 2015). As a result, he was widely considered a leading philosopher throughout the Enlightenment. In the first modern history of philosophy, Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae , Newton plays a central role in discussions of the modern era (Volume 4.2: 639-55). He is also a central figure in D’Alembert’s discussion of the emergence of modern science and philosophy: Newton is listed along with Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz as a key figure in the Preliminary Discourse (80-83).

The eighteenth-century tendency to discuss Newton’s philosophy , rather than his science , may have an odd ring to modern ears. In this case, however, the evolution of the English language tracks a substantive intellectual development. As a matter of historical fact, the category of the scientist—along with that word in English—is a nineteenth-century invention. Specifically, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in June of 1833, the Cambridge philosopher William Whewell coined the word “scientist”. Whewell said that just as the practitioners of art are called “artists”, the practitioners of science ought to be called “scientists”, indicating that they should no longer be called philosophers. [ 1 ] Indeed, before the early nineteenth century, people like Newton were called “philosophers”, or more specifically, “natural philosophers”. During the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth (at least until 1750, if not later), figures like Newton worked within the century’s old tradition of natural philosophy. [ 2 ] The modern disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology and so on, had not yet been formed. (The words ‘physics’ in English, ’physique’ in French, and ‘physica’ in Latin were often used, but had a very broad meaning, like “natural philosophy.”) Philosophers who studied nature investigated such things as planetary motions, the nature of matter, and the possibility of a vacuum, but they also discussed many aspects of human beings, including the psyche, and how nature reflects its divine creator (Hatfield 1996). As the title of Newton’s magnum opus, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ( Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ), suggests, he intended his work to be in dialogue with Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae ( Principles of Philosophy , 1644). Descartes’s Principles is a complex text that includes discussions of everything from the laws of nature to the nature of God’s causal influence on the world. Descartes had famously promised that his physics required nothing more than the principles of geometry and pure mathematics ( Principles , Part Two, §64). Although Descartes was a great mathematician, the author of a major work in geometry in 1637, Newton thought nonetheless that he had not lived up to this promise, so he would assuredly introduce mathematical principles for natural philosophy. Just as Descartes had sought to replace Aristotelian or “Scholastic” methods and doctrines in natural philosophy, Newton sought to replace Descartes’s. It is therefore more historically accurate and more illuminating to interpret Newton within the historical stream of natural philosophy. [ 3 ]

As is well known, natural philosophy in the Aristotelian traditions of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries involved an analysis of Aristotle’s ideas about the natural world, especially within the Christianized context of the medieval period. Philosophers studying nature were often actually studying texts—such as commentaries on Aristotle—rather than conducting experiments or engaging in observations, and they often did not employ mathematical techniques. Traditionally, natural philosophy in Aristotelian circles was not conceived of as a mathematical discipline (unlike, say, optics or astronomy); instead, it focused especially on the natures of objects and on causation. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophers like Galileo, Boyle, Descartes, and Newton began to reject not only the doctrines of the Aristotelians, but their techniques as well, developing a number of new mathematical, conceptual and experimental methods. Newton respected Descartes’s rejection of Aristotelian ideas, but argued that Cartesians did not employ enough of the mathematical techniques of Galileo, or the experimental methods of Boyle, in trying to understand nature. Of course, these developments have often been regarded as central to the Scientific Revolution. Despite the centrality of these changes during the seventeenth century, however, the scope of natural philosophy had not dramatically changed. Natural philosophers like Newton expended considerable energy trying to understand, e.g., the nature of space, time and motion, but they regarded that endeavor as a component of an overarching enterprise that also included an analysis of the divine being. Newton was a natural philosopher—unlike Descartes, he was not a founder of modern philosophy, for he never wrote a treatise of the order of the Meditations . Nonetheless, his influence on philosophy in the eighteenth century was profound, extending well beyond the bounds of philosophers studying nature, encompassing numerous figures and traditions in Britain, on the Continent, and even in the New World. [ 4 ] Newton’s influence has at least two salient aspects.

First, Newton’s achievement in the Opticks and in the Principia was understood to be of such philosophical import that few philosophers in the eighteenth century ignored it. Most of the canonical philosophers in this period sought to interpret various of Newton’s epistemic claims within the terms of their own systems, and many saw the coherence of their own views with those of Newton as a criterion of philosophical excellence. Early in the century, Berkeley grappled with Newton’s work on the calculus in The Analyst (1734) and with his dynamics in De Motu (1721), and he even mentioned gravity, the paradigmatic Newtonian force, in his popular work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). When Berkeley lists what philosophers take to be the so-called primary qualities of material bodies in the Dialogues , he remarkably adds “gravity” to the more familiar list of size, shape, motion, and solidity, thereby suggesting that the received view of material bodies had already changed before the second edition of the Principia had circulated widely. Remarkably, in that same year Roger Cotes, the editor of the second edition of Newton’s Principia, had argued in his editor’s preface that gravity should indeed be considered a primary quality along with the more familiar mechanist properties that had been the subject of so much discussion in previous years. (Newton himself approached the topic more cautiously.) For his part, Hume interpreted Newtonian natural philosophy in an empiricist vein and noted some of its broader implications in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1750). Newton’s work also served as the impetus for the extremely influential correspondence between Leibniz and the Newtonian Samuel Clarke early in the century, a correspondence that proved significant even for thinkers writing toward the century’s end. Unlike the vis viva controversy and other disputes between the Cartesians and the Leibnizians, which died out by the middle of the century, the debate between the Leibnizians and the Newtonians remained philosophically salient for decades, serving as an impetus for Émilie Du Châtelet’s influential work during the French Enlightenment, Foundations of Physics (1740), and also as one of the driving forces behind Kant’s development of the “critical” philosophy during the 1770s, culminating in the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. In addition, Newton’s work spawned an immense commentarial literature in English, French, and Latin, including John Keill’s Introduction to Natural Philosophy (1726), Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for the Ladies (1738), Henry Pemberton’s A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1728), Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738), Willem Gravesande’s Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy (1747), Colin MacLaurin’s An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries (1748), and many more besides. Moreover, two subsequent Continental editions of Newton’s text contained substantial philosophical engagements not only with his own ideas, but with those of his potential rivals like the great mathematician Johan Bernoulli and also Leibniz. The famous “Jesuit” (or “Geneva”) edition of Principia mathematica published by Fathers Le Seur and Jacquier in 1739-1744 in three volumes engaged substantially with Leibnizian ideas (Guicciardini 2015). And Émilie Du Châtelet wrote an extensive “analytical commentary” as part of her complete French translation of the Principia , published posthumously in 1759. Part of the idea was to translate Newton’s old “geometric” approach to physics into the new language of analysis, a project that was intertwined with numerous philosophical issues. Newton’s ideas and methods in mathematics, physics and philosophy therefore continued to be of substantial importance well into the Enlightenment.

A second aspect of Newton’s influence involves thinkers who attempted in one way or another to articulate, follow, or extend, the Newtonian “method” in natural philosophy when treating issues and questions that Newton ignored. Euclidean geometry and its methods were seen as a fundamental epistemic model for much of seventeenth-century philosophy—as is well known, Descartes’ Meditations attempts to achieve a type of certainty he likens to that found in geometry, and Spinoza wrote his Ethics according to the “geometrical method”. Propositions deduced from axioms in Euclidean geometry were seen as paradigm cases of knowledge. We might see Newton’s work as providing eighteenth-century philosophy with one of its primary models, and with a series of epistemic exemplars as well. But part of philosophy’s task was to articulate precisely what the new Newtonian method involved. David Hume is perhaps clearest about this aspect of Newton’s influence: his Treatise of 1739 has the subtitle, “An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects”, and there can be little doubt that he meant (at least in part) the method of the Opticks and the Principia (DePierris 2012). Indeed, as Hume’s text makes abundantly clear, various eighteenth-century philosophers, including not only Hume in Scotland but Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the Continent, were taken to be, or attempted to become, “the Newton of the mind”. [ 5 ] For Hume, this meant following what he took to be Newton’s empirical method by providing the proper description of the relevant phenomena and then finding the most general principles that account for them. Of course, one aspect of Hume’s work is to provide an analysis of the concept of causation that is far more extensive than anything found in Newton, which has a substantial impact on what counts as an “account” of a phenomenon. This method would allow us to achieve the highest level of knowledge attainable in the realm of what Hume calls “matters of fact”. [ 6 ]

Despite the influence of Newton’s “method” on eighteenth-century philosophy, it is obvious that the Principia ’s greater impact on the eighteenth century is to have effected a branching within natural philosophy that led to the development of mathematical physics on the one hand, and philosophy on the other (Cohen and Smith, 2002, 1-4). And yet to achieve an understanding of how Newton himself approached natural philosophy, we must carefully bracket such historical developments—they did not solidify until sometime after 1750, a generation after Newton’s death. Indeed, if we resist the temptation to understand Newton as working within a well established discipline called mathematical physics, if we see him instead as a philosopher studying nature, his achievement is far more impressive, for instead of contributing to a well-founded field of physics, he had to begin a process that would eventually lead aspects of natural philosophy to be transformed into a new field of study. This transformation took many decades, involving a series of methodological and foundational debates about the proper means for obtaining knowledge about nature and its processes. Newton himself not only engaged in these debates from his very first publication in optics in 1672, but his work in both optics and in the Principia generated some of the most significant methodological discussions and controversies in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These debates concerned such topics as the proper use of hypotheses, the nature of space and time, the best understanding of the forces of nature, and the appropriate rules for conducting research in natural philosophy. Newton’s achievement was in part to have vanquished both Cartesian and Leibnizian approaches to natural philosophy; in the later eighteenth century, and indeed much of the nineteenth, physics was a Newtonian enterprise more than anything. But this achievement, from Newton’s own perspective, involved an extensive, life-long series of philosophical debates. Those debates focused on numerous substantive issues, but also included extensive discussions of the proper methodology in natural philosophy.

Philosophers have long known about the aspects of Newton’s work that are salient for understanding debates in the early modern period. For instance, no history of debates about the ontology of space and time would exclude a discussion of Newton’s famous conception of “absolute” space (see below). Similarly, any discussion of the role of hypotheses in philosophical reasoning would mention Newton prominently. These aspects of Newton’s work continue to be significant in contemporary scholarship, but the scope of discussions of Newton has greatly expanded, encompassing the whole of his intellectual life. This is especially evident in discussions of Newton’s earliest published work, which was in the field of optics. In at least three relevant respects, Newton’s early work in optics, which was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society beginning in 1672, set the stage for the principal themes of his long career in natural philosophy (he remained active well into his seventies). Firstly, Newton’s letter to the Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, often called the “New theory about light and colors”, generated an immediate, extensive, and protracted debate that eventually involved important philosophers such as Robert Hooke in Britain and Christiaan Huygens, G.W. Leibniz and Ignatius Pardies on the Continent (the beginning of the very long title of the paper is: “A letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Mathematick Professor in the University of Cambridge, containing his New Theory about Light and Colors”). Newton consistently regarded these figures not merely as disagreeing with his views, but as misinterpreting them. This experience helped to shape Newton’s famous and lifelong aversion to intellectual controversy, a feature of his personality that he often mentioned in letters, and one that he would never outgrow. Secondly, because Newton regarded himself as having been deeply misinterpreted by his critics, he had recourse to meta-level or methodological discussions of the practice of optics and of the kinds of knowledge that philosophers can obtain when engaging in experiments with light. The novelty and power of Newton’s work in the Principia years later would eventually generate similar controversies that led him to analogous kinds of methodological discussions of his experimental practice within natural philosophy and of the kinds of knowledge that one can obtain in that field using either experimental or mathematical techniques. From our point of view, Newton’s science was unusually philosophical for these reasons. Thirdly and finally, in his earliest optical work Newton began to formulate a distinction that would remain salient throughout his long intellectual career, contending that a philosopher must distinguish between a conclusion or claim about some feature of nature that is derived from experimental or observational evidence, and a conclusion or claim that is a mere “hypothesis”, a kind of speculation about nature that is not, or not yet anyway, so derived. Newton’s much later proclamation in the second edition of the Principia (1713), “ Hypotheses non fingo ”, or “I feign no hypotheses”, would infuriate his critics just as much as it would prod his followers into making the pronouncement a central component of a newly emerging Newtonian method (see below for details).

The field of optics has its origins in the Ancient Greek period, when figures like Euclid and Ptolemy wrote works on the subject, but they often focused primarily on the science of vision, analyzing (e.g.) the visual rays that were sometimes thought to extrude from the eye, enabling it to perceive distant physical objects. In the early modern period, Kepler and Descartes each made fundamental contributions to the field, including the discovery of the inversion of the retinal image (in the former case) and an explanation of refraction (in the latter case). Newton’s work helped to shift the focus of optics from an analysis of vision to an investigation of light. In “New theory about light and colors”, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1672, Newton presented a number of experiments in which sunlight was allowed to pass through one or two prisms in order to probe some of its basic features. The paper recounts a number of experiments that Newton says he had conducted several years earlier. But what precisely counts as a feature of light? Numerous philosophers during the seventeenth century, including Hooke and Huygens, developed doctrines concerning the fundamental physical nature of light in answer to the question: is light a stream of particles (or “corpuscles”), or a wave? Both Hooke and Huygens were wave theorists. This question obviously continued to have relevance into the twentieth century, when wave-particle duality was discovered. In his experiments with the prism, however, Newton apparently sought to investigate something else, viz. what he calls “the celebrated Phenomena of Colours ”. Newton’s various prism experiments, which he describes in considerable depth, suggested what he called a “Doctrine” that he expresses in thirteen consecutive numbered propositions. Included in these propositions are the following claims about features of rays of light: first, the rays of light that emerge when sunlight passes through a prism exhibit various colors; second, these colors differ in their “degrees of Refrangibility”, which means that they exhibit and retain an index of refraction, even when they are passed through a second prism; third, these colors—or colorful rays—are not modifications of sunlight itself, but are “ Original and connate properties ” of it; and, fourth, these facts mean that although ordinary sunlight appears white, or perhaps colorless, to our perception, it actually contains numerous colors within it, which can be experimentally revealed. This final point suggests, in turn, that from Newton’s point of view, colors are not solely perceived, or even perceptible, aspects of physical objects; they can also be conceived of as hidden features of light which cannot be perceived directly under any ordinary circumstance (the physical influence of the prism is required for them to become perceptible).

From a contemporary point of view, Newton’s 1672 paper exhibits an intriguing blend of experimental evidence and philosophical argumentation. The latter hinges on Newton’s interpretation of the concept of a property or a quality, as the following passage, which follows the “Doctrine” expressed in thirteen propositions, tellingly reveals:

These things being so, it can be no longer disputed, whether there be colours in the dark, nor whether they be the qualities of the objects we see, no nor perhaps, whether Light be a Body. For, since Colours are the qualities of Light, having its Rays for their entire and immediate subject, how can we think those Rays qualities also, unless one quality may be the subject of and sustain another; which in effect is to call it substance . We should not know Bodies for substances, were it not for their sensible qualities, and the Principal of those being now found due to something else, we have as good reason to believe that to be a substance also. (Newton 1959–, vol. 1: 100)

Newton seems here to be arguing as follows: since rays of light have colors as basic features, we should regard these colors as qualities or properties of the rays (despite the fact that these properties are imperceptible under any ordinary circumstance); but doing so requires us to think of the rays as bearers of qualities, which is to say, as substances in their own right. And if rays of light are substances, this means that we cannot also think of them as qualities or properties of anything else. This last point follows from a widely accepted notion of a substance at the time, one easily found in Descartes [ 7 ] , viz., that substances are those items that can exist independently of other items (whether they can exist independently even of God is a further question that we can ignore here). And if we cannot think of rays of light as properties or qualities, then they are not waves, for waves are features of some medium—think of waves on the surface of a lake. Newton concludes: light is a stream of particles (he does use the word ‘perhaps’ to hedge a bit here). Clearly, philosophical argumentation is a significant aspect of Newton’s reasoning in this paper, as are various philosophical concepts. It is intriguing to ponder the question, what overall conception of “sensible qualities” does Newton presuppose in this piece? If a ray of sunlight passes through my window, the fact that it appears white to me does not undermine Newton’s view (or so he thinks) that the ray actually contains a series of colors as its “qualities”. Are these qualities “sensible” if their presence can be detected only through the use of one or more prisms but never through the inspection of the sunlight through ordinary means (unaided perception, glasses, a magnifying glass, etc.)? These are apt to strike us as canonical philosophical problems.

Newton’s line of argument quoted above became one of the centerpieces of the debate that his paper generated. In some parts of his paper, when Newton wrote of the “rays” of light, he had evidently intended to remain neutral on the question of whether the rays are particles or waves (this is reminiscent of the ancient Greek practice of avoiding physical discussions of visual rays). But then towards the paper’s end, Newton added his new line of argument, which employed some philosophical analysis together with some experimental evidence to support the conclusion that rays of light cannot be waves after all. Newton’s critics pounced. This led to the first problem he encountered in response to his paper: what he calls his “theory” of light and colors was not merely rejected, but rather immediately misunderstood, at least from his own perspective. Just days after Newton’s paper was read at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke responded with a detailed letter to Oldenburg. In the first few sentences, Hooke indicates that from his point of view, Newton’s “Hypothesis of saving the phenomena of colours” essentially involves the contention that rays of light are particulate, rather than wavelike. [ 8 ] Hooke argues, in contrast, that light “is nothing but a pulse or motion propagated through an homogeneous, uniform and transparent medium;” that is, he argues that light is indeed wavelike. He makes it perfectly clear, moreover, that his hypothesis—the name did not carry a negative connotation in his work—can save the phenomena of colors just as well as Newton’s, which is to say, his hypothesis is compatible with the experimental evidence Newton had gathered. Evidently, the line of argument in the passage quoted above caught Hooke’s eye. Among philosophers, he was not alone. In a letter to Huygens explaining Newton’s theory of light, Leibniz writes that Newton takes light to be a “body” propelled from the sun to the earth which, according to Leibniz, Newton takes to explain both the differential refrangibility of rays of light and the phenomena of colors. [ 9 ] Since Newton had employed the concepts of substance, quality and sensible quality when concluding in his paper that light is (presumably) particulate, we are apt to regard the paper as contributing to important discussions within philosophy. After the extensive correspondence, and controversy, generated in response to Newton’s early optical views and experiments, he often threatened to avoid engaging in mathematical and philosophical disputes altogether. He insisted to friends and colleagues that he found intellectual controversy unbearable. But he never followed through with his threat to disengage from discussions in natural philosophy, sending many important letters throughout his long intellectual career.

Like many philosophers who worked in the wake of Galileo and of Descartes, it seems that Newton never extensively analyzed Aristotelian ideas about nature. He would have encountered such ideas in the curriculum at Trinity College, but there is not much evidence that he took them seriously. Instead, he focused on the “modern” thinkers that enterprising young students were told to read outside of the standard curriculum. [ 10 ] And in England in Newton’s day, the greatest modern philosopher of nature was thought to be Descartes (Heilbron 1982: 30). There is substantial evidence that Newton took Descartes’s ideas very seriously, and expended considerable energy thinking them through and eventually coming to criticize them. Some of that evidence comes from a manuscript that was first transcribed and published in 1962 by the great historians of science, Marie Boas Hall and A. Rupert Hall. The untitled manuscript, now known as “ De Gravitatione ” after its first line, has been the subject of extensive discussions over the past fifty years because it indicates the depth of Newton’s interest in Cartesian ideas in metaphysics and natural philosophy. Despite its importance to contemporary understandings of Newton’s relation to Cartesianism, and much else besides, De Gravitatione is not without its problems. First and foremost, the manuscript lacks a date, and there is no scholarly consensus regarding its precise provenance. [ 11 ] Second, the manuscript was never finished, so it is difficult to assess its relationship with Newton’s mature thinking in philosophy. Finally, the manuscript was not published during Newton’s lifetime, so there are questions about whether it represents his considered views. Despite these facts, the text contains a treasure trove of arguments concerning Cartesian ideas. For instance, it dispels the easily formed impression that Newton sought, in the Principia , to undermine a Leibnizian conception of space and time, as his defender, Samuel Clarke, would attempt to do years later in the correspondence of 1715–16 (discussed below). Although Leibniz did eventually express what became the canonical early modern formulation of “relationalism” concerning space and time—the view, roughly, that space is nothing but the order of relations among physical objects, and time nothing over and above the succession of events involving those objects—and although Newton and Clarke were highly skeptical of such a view, it is misleading to read the Principia through the lens provided by the later controversy with the Leibnizians. Newton’s extensive attempt in De Gravitatione to refute Descartes’s conception of space and time in particular indicates that the Scholium should be read as providing a replacement for the Cartesian conception. [ 12 ] That is, Newton had a Cartesian, and not a Leibnizian, opponent primarily in mind when he wrote his famous articulation of “absolutism” concerning space and time. Unlike questions about Newton’s methods and his apparent deviation from the norms established by mechanist philosophers like Descartes and Boyle, Newton’s conception of space and time, along with his view of the divine being, did not immediately engender a philosophical debate. It was Leibniz more than any other philosopher who eventually succeeded in fomenting a philosophical debate in which the “Newtonian” conception of space, time and the divine would play a central role (see below). But Leibniz’s philosophical views were relatively unknown when Newton first formed his conception--to the young Newton writing the Principia , Leibniz was another mathematician and not yet a contributor to natural philosophy. Instead, it was Descartes’s view of space, the world, and God, which he pondered in his youth and eventually came to reject.

Newton took special interest in the Cartesian view of space and body, and in related views concerning the causal relations between minds and bodies and between God and the bodies that constitute the natural world. Like many of Newton’s contemporaries in Cambridge in those days, he encountered these Cartesian views within the context of Henry More’s then famous discussions of Cartesianism (a term coined by More himself). Beginning with his correspondence with Descartes in 1648 (Lewis 1953), and continuing with a series of publications in later years, many of which Newton owned in his personal library (Harrison 1978), More argued that Descartes made two fundamental mistakes: first, he wrongly contended that extension and matter are identical (and that the world is therefore a plenum); and second, he mistakenly believed that God and the mind were not extended substances, which made their causal interactions with such substances mysterious. Just as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia had raised fundamental objections to Cartesian dualism (see Shapiro 2007) in the early 1640s, More raised similar objections against the Cartesian view of the divine a few years later (Lewis 1953). Descartes agreed with More’s suggestion that God can act anywhere on nature if he so chooses, and came very close to accepting More’s contention that such a view entails that God must be present within the world wherever he in fact chooses to act. For how could God part the Red Sea, suggested More, unless God were present precisely where the Red Sea is located? Of course, More agreed that God is not made of parts, cannot be imagined, and cannot be affected by the causal activity of material bodies—the causal arrow flows only in one direction. But More concluded that God is extended in his own way. If one fixes Descartes’s two basic mistakes, one obtains what More regarded as a proper philosophical view: space is distinct from matter because it is extended but penetrable, whereas matter is extended but impenetrable; and, in tandem, all substances are extended, but whereas some, such as tables and chairs, are impenetrable, others, such as the mind and God, are penetrable and therefore not material. [ 13 ] Newton was deeply influenced both by More’s criticisms of Descartes and by his positive philosophical conception of space and the divine.

In a number of texts, including De Gravitatione , the famous discussion of space and time in the Scholium to the Principia , and the discussion of God in the General Scholium, Newton made his generally Morean attitudes perfectly clear. He rejected the Cartesian identification of extension and matter, arguing that space itself exists independently of material objects (and their relations), and he contended that all entities, including the human mind and even the divine being, are extended in the sense that they have spatial location, even if they are extended in ways that distinguish them from ordinary material bodies. [ 14 ] In Newton’s hands, space becomes a fundamental concept of natural philosophy, an attitude that is foreign to Cartesians. As Newton puts it in a famous passage from De Gravitatione :

Space is an affection of a being just as a being. No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is every where, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an emanative effect of the first existing being, for if any being whatsoever is posited, space is posited. (Newton 2004: 25)

Space is a fundamental concept in part because Newton not only conceives of it as independent of objects and their relations, but because he argues that every entity must somehow connect with space in some way. For Newton, then, if one follows the Cartesians and thinks of the mind, or of God, as existing without any spatial location—as existing either “beyond” the natural world or somehow outside of it—then that is equivalent to conceiving of them as non-existent. Newton does not shy away from making this conception of the divine explicit in his public writings, despite the fact that it was anathema to his Cartesian and Leibnizian contemporaries. In the General Scholium to the Principia , which was added to the second edition of the text in 1713, for instance, he famously writes of God:

He endures always and is present everywhere, and by existing always and everywhere he constitutes duration and space. Since each and every particle of space is always , and each and every indivisible moment of duration is everywhere , certainly the maker and lord of all things will not be never or nowhere … God is one and the same God always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially ; for active power cannot subsist without substance. (Newton 1999: 941)

For Newton, just as bodies are present in some spatial location, God, an infinite being, is present throughout all of space throughout all of time. There could not be a clearer expression of agreement with More in his debate with the Cartesians concerning the substantial presence of the divine within space.

Newton also took issue with Cartesian ideas about motion. His rejection of Cartesian views of space, and his embrace of space as a fundamental concept in philosophy following More’s influence, aligns with his famous discussion of space and time in the Scholium that follows the opening definitions in the Principia . This text influenced nearly every subsequent philosophical discussion of space and time for the next three centuries, so its contours are well known (see DiSalle 2006: ch. 2). In his Principles of Philosophy of 1644, Descartes had distinguished between the “ordinary” and the “proper” view of motion: whereas the ordinary view presents motion as a body’s change of place, the philosopher knows that properly speaking, motion is a body’s change of relations to the bodies that surround it (recall Descartes’s plenum). Newton contends in De Gravitatione that this idea of proper motion, according to which the motion of a body is at least partially a function of its relations to other bodies, is in tension with Descartes’s own laws of nature, also presented in the Principles . For according to the conception of (what we now call) inertia that Descartes presents as his first two laws, a body moving rectilinearly will continue to do so unless caused to deviate from its path—hence a body’s motion is not a function of its spatial relations to other bodies, but rather of its causal relations. That is, according to the first two laws, changing a body’s spatial relations to others bodies will not alter its rectilinear motion unless a causal interaction occurs. This tension runs deep in the Cartesian system. Newton’s Scholium reflects his idea that the concept of motion in the Principia ought to cohere with the laws of motion he endorses. He distinguishes between absolute and relative motion, true and apparent motion, and mathematical and common motion (the same distinctions hold for time, space and place). The former item in each of these three pairings is a concept that coheres with the laws of motion. Newton’s first law reflects Descartes’s laws: it is a new version of the principle of inertia, one incorporating the concept of an impressed force. Since this law indicates that a body’s motion is not a function of its spatial relations to other bodies, but rather of whether forces are impressed on it—which replaces the Cartesian concept of causal interactions that involve only impact (see below)—Newton cannot rely on a body’s motion relative to other bodies if he is to avoid the kind of tension he found in the Cartesian view. Hence he indicates that a body’s true motion—rather than its apparent motion, which depends on our perceptions, or its relative motion, which depends on its spatial relations—is a body’s change of position within space itself. That is, true motion should be understood as absolute motion. This means, in turn, that we must distinguish between the common idea of space, according to which space is conceived of as involving relations among various objects (like the space of our air), and the mathematical idea, one presumably obtained from geometrical reasoning, that space is independent of any objects or their relations. In order to account for the idea that true motion is absolute motion, then, the famous “absolute space” is postulated.

Newton was perfectly well aware that the notion of absolute space is not unproblematic. [ 15 ] For instance, if a body’s true motion just is its absolute motion, its motion with respect to space itself, then the imperceptibility of space would appear to render any detection of true motion difficult, if not hopeless. Indeed, how would we detect any body’s true motion on this view? We might be able to detect a body’s changing spatial relations with its neighbors, but not its changing relationship with space itself! Newton’s solution to this problem is ingenious. Under certain circumstances, we can detect a body’s true motion by detecting its acceleration. We can do so when the body is rotating or has a circular motion, for such motions often have detectable effects. This is one way of understanding what has become one of the most famous, if not infamous, experiments of the early modern period, Newton’s bucket. (He grew up in part on a farm in the English countryside, and often used deceptively simple examples.) If one takes an ordinary bucket and fills it with water, and then attaches a rope to the top of the bucket, one can then twist the rope and let it go in order to make the bucket spin. When the bucket full of water spins around, we can detect the water’s acceleration by its changing surface. As Newton puts it, using his laws of motion, the water endeavors to recede from the axis of its motion (hence its changing surface). But even an observer untutored in physics would grasp the importance of the water’s changing surface--that is, perceiving the effect does not depend on understanding the laws. In this way, despite the fact that Newton wishes to conceive of the water’s true motion as its absolute motion within space itself, which cannot be perceived, he shows his readers how they might detect the water’s true motion through its effects. Newton provides another simple experiment to illustrate a similar point. If two balls are joined together by a rope and then spun around, say over one’s head, then the changing tension in the rope will indicate that the balls are accelerated. Since any acceleration is a true motion—although not all true motions are accelerations, since a so-called inertial motion is not—this case indicates that we can detect a body’s true motion even though space itself is imperceptible. In this way, Newton did not merely develop an alternative to the Cartesian view of motion, along with its allied conception of space; he presented a view that could be employed to pick out some of the true motions of objects within nature. Once one has found a true motion, one can then ask what caused that motion (for Newton, as we will see, it is forces that are understood to cause motions). As the last line of the Scholium in the Principia indicates, that is one reason that Newton wrote his magnum opus in the first place.

Newton’s idea of space, then, fulfilled at least two roles. First, it enabled him to avoid the tension between the concept of true motion and the laws of motion of the kind found in Descartes. Second, it also enabled him to articulate what he took to be God’s relation to the natural world. Many regarded his achievements as an important advance over the Cartesian system. However, it would be a mistake to think that Newton vanquished Cartesian ideas within his lifetime: even in England, and certainly on the Continent, Cartesianism remained a powerful philosophical force for several decades after Newton published his primary works. [ 16 ] Typically, however, Descartes’s followers emphasized the importance of his ideas about the mechanisms that pervade nature rather than his views of space and time. In that arena, Newton’s views were especially prominent, and came in for significant criticism from Leibniz.

Many legends concerning momentous events in history are apocryphal, but the legend of Halley’s visit to Newton in 1684 is not: it explains what prompted Newton to write his magnum opus . In August of 1684, Edmond Halley—for whom the comet is named—came to visit Newton in Cambridge in order to discover his opinion about a subject of much dispute in celestial mechanics. At this time, many in the Royal Society and elsewhere were at work on a cluster of problems that might be described as follows: how can one take Kepler’s Laws, which were then considered among the very best descriptions of the planetary orbits, and understand them in the context of dynamical or causal principles? What kind of cause would lead to planetary orbits of the kind described by Kepler? In particular, Halley asked Newton the following question: what kind of curve would a planet describe in its orbit around the Sun if it were acted upon by an attractive force that was inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the Sun? Newton immediately replied that the curve would be an ellipse (rather than, say, a circle). [ 17 ] Halley was amazed that Newton had the answer at the ready. But Newton also said that he had mislaid the paper on which the relevant calculations had been made, so Halley left empty handed (whether there was any such paper is a subject of dispute). But he would not be disappointed for long. In November of that year, Newton sent Halley a nine-page paper, entitled De Motu (on motion), that presented the sought-after demonstration, along with several other advances in celestial mechanics. Halley was delighted, and immediately returned to Cambridge for further discussion. It was these events that precipitated the many drafts of De Motu that eventually became Principia mathematica by 1686. Several aspects of the Principia have been central to philosophical discussions since its first publication, including Newton’s novel methodology in the book, his conception of space and time, and his attitude toward the dominant orientation within natural philosophy in his day, the so-called mechanical philosophy, which had important methodological consequences.

When Newton wrote the Principia between 1684 and 1686, he was not contributing to a preexisting field of study called mathematical physics; he was attempting to show how philosophers could employ various mathematical and experimental methods in order to reach conclusions about nature, especially about the motions of material bodies (Janiak 2015, Chapter One). In his lectures presented as the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, Newton had been arguing since at least 1670 that natural philosophers ought to employ geometrical methods in order to understand various phenomena in nature. [ 18 ] The Principia represented his attempt to reorient natural philosophy, taking it in a direction that neither his Aristotelian predecessors, nor his Cartesian contemporaries, had envisioned. He did not immediately convince many of them of the benefits of his approach. Just as his first publication in optics in 1672 sparked an intense debate about the proper methods for investigating the nature of light—and much else besides—his Principia sparked an even longer lasting discussion about the methodology that philosophers should adopt when studying the natural world. This discussion began immediately with the publication of the Principia , despite the fact that its first edition contained few explicit methodological remarks (Smith 2002: 138–39). It intensified considerably with the publication of its second edition in 1713, which contained many more remarks about methodology, including many attempts at defending the Newtonian method. Indeed, many of Newton’s alterations in that edition changed the presentation of his methods. Discussions of methodology would eventually involve nearly all of the leading philosophers in England and on the Continent during Newton’s lifetime.

In Cartesian natural philosophy, all natural change is due to the impacts that material bodies make upon one another’s surfaces (this is reflected in Descartes’s first two laws of nature). The concept of a force plays little if any role. Unlike Descartes, Newton placed the concept of a force at the very center of his thinking about motion and its causes within nature. In that regard, his reactions to the shortcomings of Cartesian natural philosophy parallel Leibniz’s, who coined the term “dynamics”, and who obviously regarded force as a fundamental concept in metaphysics as well (Westfall 1971). But Newton’s attitude toward understanding the forces of nature involved an especially intricate method that generated intense scrutiny and debate amongst many philosophers and mathematicians, including Leibniz (Garber 2012). Newton’s canonical notion of a force, which he calls a vis impressa or “impressed force”, is the notion of an “action exerted on a body” that changes its state of motion. This was a confusing notion at the time. Perhaps it is not difficult to see why that should be so. To take one of Newton’s own examples: suppose I hit a tennis ball with my racquet—according to Newton, I have impressed a force on the tennis ball, for I have changed its state of motion (hopefully!). We have a reasonably good idea of what the tennis ball is, of what the racquet is, and even of what I am, and a Cartesian might wish to stop her analysis there. But what exactly is this “force” that I impressed on the tennis ball? The ball, the racquet and I are physical things of one sort or another, but is the force physical? Is it not physical? It does not seem likely that a force is itself a physical thing in the sense of being a substance, to use a philosophical notion popular in Newton’s day (as we saw above in his first optics paper). The reason is that in Definition Four in the Principia , which defines an impressed force for the first time, Newton remarks: “This force consists solely in the action and does not remain in a body after the action has ceased”. So when I hit the tennis ball over the net, the force I impressed on it was the action of hitting the ball, or an action associated with hitting the ball, and not a property of me or of the ball after the action had ceased. This idea confused many of Newton’s readers. By the mid-eighteenth century, the time of Hume’s analysis of causation in the Treatise and the Enquiry , many philosophers started to think that actions and other kinds of event are important items to have in one’s ontology, and they often contended in particular that causal relations hold between events . But in Newton’s day, philosophers typically regarded objects or substances as the causal relata. Indeed, one actually finds an equivocation between thinking of events and thinking of objects as the relevant causal relata even in Hume: in his Enquiry , he first defines a “cause” so that “objects” are the causal relata, but then gives an example in which one of the relata is the vibration of a string ( Enquiry , §VII, 51). So actions were difficult to analyze, left out of analyses, or conflated with objects. As a result, Newton’s conception of force proved confusing, even to his most sympathetic interpreters. Moreover, it was unclear to many of Newton’s mechanist readers how his forces fit into their rather austere ontological view that material bodies consist solely of properties such as size, shape, mobility and solidity.

Newton did try to clarify his method of characterizing forces. If one brackets the question of how to understand forces as ephemeral actions that do not persist after causal interactions have ceased, one can make progress by conceiving of forces as quantities . In particular, since Newton’s eight definitions and three laws indicate that forces are proportional to mass and to acceleration, and since mass—or the quantity of matter, a concept Newton transformed from its Cartesian origins, where it was understood as a measure of a body’s volume—and acceleration are both quantities that can be measured, Newton gives us a means of measuring forces. This is crucial to his method. If one thinks of forces as measurable quantities, moreover, then one can attempt to identify two seemingly disparate forces as in fact the same force through thinking about measuring them. For instance, in Book III of the Principia , Newton famously argues in proposition five and its scholium that the centripetal force maintaining the planetary orbits is in fact the same as the force of gravity, viz., the force that causes the free fall of objects on earth. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, one rendered possible in the first place by Newton’s way of thinking about forces as quantities. This idea then led Newton to the even more revolutionary view in proposition seven of Book III that all bodies gravitate toward one another in proportion to their quantity of matter. That is, it led him to the idea of universal gravity, a view that shocked many of his Continental readers in its boldness. This helped to unify what were once called superlunary and sublunary phenomena, a unification that was obviously crucial for later research in physics. The idea was enabled by Newton’s abstract way of understanding forces—without conceiving of a force as involving any specific mechanism or type of physical interaction, Newton thought of forces as quantities that are proportional to other features of nature.

Despite his evident success in obtaining what we now call the law of universal gravitation, Newton admits that he lacks another kind of knowledge about gravity; this lack of knowledge directly reflects an aspect of his abstract characterization of forces. In the General Scholium, he reminds his readers that gravity is proportional to a body’s quantity of matter (its mass) and reaches across vast distances within our solar system, adding: “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses”. [ 19 ] With this phrase, one of the most famous in all of Newton’s writings, he returned to a key theme of his very first optical paper from forty years earlier, viz. the proper role of hypotheses and of hypothetical reasoning within natural philosophy. [ 20 ] Some of Newton’s interpreters have regarded this phrase as signaling a strong commitment to the broad doctrine that all hypotheses concerning natural phenomena ought to be avoided in principle. This interpretation is sometimes coupled with the view that some British philosophers in the late seventeenth century regarded Cartesianism as overly reliant on hypotheses in reaching conclusions about phenomena. But this interpretation may be hard to square with Newton’s texts. For instance, in the Scholium to Proposition 96 of Book I of the Principia , Newton discusses hypotheses concerning light rays. Similarly, in query 21 of the Opticks , he proposes that there might be an aether whose differential density accounts for the gravitational force acting between bodies. In light of such examples, one can read the General Scholium’s pronouncement in this way: a philosopher concerned with explaining some feature of nature—such as the fact that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of spatial separation, rather than, say, the cube —may legitimately entertain and propose hypotheses for consideration, but she may not “feign” the hypothesis in the sense of taking it as having been established either through experiment, observation, or some form of reasoning (including mathematical reasoning). Hence Newton thinks that he has established the fact that gravity acts on all material bodies in proportion to their quantity of matter, but he has not established the existence of the aether. What, then, does Newton’s slogan hypotheses non fingo actually rule out? By the time of the General Scholium, Newton was increasingly embroiled in philosophical disputes with Leibniz. After reading the copy of the Principia that Newton had sent him, Leibniz wrote an essay (“Tentamen”) on the causes of planetary motion for the famous journal Acta Eruditorum . In order to account for the motions of the planetary bodies in his Tentamen, published in 1689, Leibniz introduces ex hypothesi the premise that some kind of fluid surrounds, and is contiguous to, the various planetary bodies, and then argues that this fluid must be in motion to account for their orbits. [ 21 ] Newton may have argued that Leibniz had “feigned” the hypothesis of the vortices. That is, he would have objected to Leibniz’s conclusion that there must be vortices in the solar system (as opposed to the suggestion, for instance, that we try to detect their presence through observations of things like comets). A debate between the two philosophers on this score would bring them to the question of the mechanical philosophy: whereas Newton would object to Leibniz’s reasoning on methodological grounds, Leibniz would reply that Newton’s theory of gravity involves action at a distance, which his vortex hypothesis avoids (see below for more details).

Once the Principia was published, Newton had a vexed relationship with the mechanical philosophy, an orientation within natural philosophy that is associated with nearly every significant early modern philosopher, including Descartes, Boyle, Huygens, Leibniz, and Locke. [ 22 ] One of the reasons for this complex relationship can be understood if we consider Newton’s attitude toward forces in an abstract way. His second law indicates that a body moving rectilinearly will continue to do so unless a force is impressed on it. This is not equivalent to claiming that a body moving rectilinearly will continue to do so unless another body impacts upon it. A vis impressa —an impressed force—in Newton’s system is not the same as a body, nor even a quality of a body, as we have seen; but what is more, some impressed forces need not involve contact between bodies at all. For instance, gravity is a kind of centripetal force, and the latter, in turn, is a species of impressed force. Hence a body moving in a straight line will continue to do so until it experiences a gravitational pull, in which case it will deviate from a straight line motion, even if no body impacts upon it. Indeed, the gravitational pull might originate with a mass that is millions of miles away. As we have seen, an impressed force is an action exerted on a body. Hence the gravity exerted on a moving body is an action (the Latin term is actio ), which is obviously a causal notion. This is not an empirical claim per se ; it is merely a reflection of Newton’s laws, together with his notion of an impressed force, and his further idea that gravity is one kind of impressed force. These elements of the Principia make conceptual room for a causal interaction between two bodies separated by a vast distance, one enabled by Newton’s concept of an impressed force. Aspects of this idea became known in philosophical circles as the problem of action at a distance (Hesse 1961). Many of Newton’s most influential contemporaries objected vigorously to the fact that his philosophy had made room for—if not explicitly defended—the possibility of distant action between material bodies. Leibniz and Huygens in particular rejected this aspect of Newton’s work in the strongest terms, and it remained a point of contention between Newton and Leibniz for the rest of their lives. Both Leibniz and Huygens were convinced that all natural change occurs through contact action, and that any deviation from this basic mechanist principle within natural philosophy would lead to serious difficulties, including the revival of outmoded Aristotelian ideas. By the seventh proposition of Book III of the Principia , as we have seen, Newton reached the following conclusion (1999: 810): “Gravity acts on all bodies universally and is proportional to the quantity of matter in each”. Leibniz eventually accused Newton of regarding gravity as a kind of “occult quality”, that is, as a quality of bodies that is somehow hidden within them and beyond the philosopher’s understanding. They understood Newton to be saying that gravity is a kind of hidden power to attract embedded in material bodies.

Newton was well aware that the Principia’s methodology of discovering the forces present in nature was controversial, and not merely because of questions about action at a distance. So when he revised the text, under the editorship of Roger Cotes, for publication in a second edition in 1713, he added other methodological remarks. These remarks included what Newton called “ regulae philosophandi ”, or rules of philosophy, which became the focal point of vigorous discussion and debate well into the eighteenth century. The first two rules concern causal reasoning, but it is the third rule that generated the most debate, for it involved both an aspect of Newton’s controversial argument for universal gravity and also a rare public statement by Newton of what he regarded as the “foundation” of natural philosophy. The third rule concerns an induction problem: we have perceptions and experiments that provide us with knowledge of the objects and natural phenomena in our neck of the universe, but on what basis can we reach a conclusion concerning objects and phenomena throughout the rest of the universe? Newton himself reached such a conclusion about gravity in proposition seven of Book III of the Principia . Part of Newton’s answer is presented in rule 3:

Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.

We know, say, that a clump of dirt has certain qualities such as extension and mobility, but how do we know that the entire earth has such qualities? It surely lies beyond the reach of our experiments, or at any rate, it did in Newton’s day. Newton says that the sun and the earth interact according to his law of gravity, but how do we know that the sun contains a quantity of matter, that it is a material body with the same basic qualities that characterize the earth or the moon? It wasn’t at all obvious at the time that the sun is a material body at all. Newton thinks that gravity reaches into the very center of the sun, but what did anyone in 1713 know about such things? Newton glosses his third rule in part as follows, connecting it with his laws of motion:

That all bodies are movable and persevere in motion or in rest by means of certain forces (which we call forces of inertia) we infer from finding these properties in the bodies that we have seen. The extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility, and force of inertia [ 23 ] of the whole arise from the extension, hardness, impenetrability, mobility and force of inertia of each of the parts; and thus we conclude that every one of the least parts of all bodies is extended, hard, impenetrable, movable, and endowed with a force of inertia. And this is the foundation of all natural philosophy. (Newton 1999: 795–96)

Many of Newton’s readers in 1713 would have granted him the following inference: although we do not have any perceptions of, say, the interior of the earth, or even of many ordinary objects within our grasp, we can reasonably infer that everything with certain basic properties—something akin to what John Locke, borrowing a term of Robert Boyle’s, called the “primary qualities”—at the macroscopic level is comprised of micro-particles that are characterized by those same basic properties. But at the end of his gloss of Rule 3, Newton applies this same (or analogous) reasoning to the force of gravity, arguing as follows: since we experience the fact that all bodies on or near the earth gravitate toward the earth—in cases such as free fall—and that the moon gravitates toward the earth, etc., we can infer that all bodies everywhere gravitate toward all other bodies. This argument would appear to suggest that gravity—which, as we have seen, is a kind of impressed force, an action—is somehow akin to qualities like extension and impenetrability. So is Newton suggesting that gravity is actually a quality of all bodies? He did not explicitly endorse that claim, but Cotes did in a famous passage in his editor’s preface (Newton 1999, 391-92). Many understood Cotes to be speaking for Newton, just as they interpreted Clarke a few years later. Leibniz and his followers pounced: if Newton regards gravity as a quality, as a power of attraction, then he had indeed revived the occult qualities of the Scholastics, for here we have a quality that is not explicable in mechanical terms. Unlike the usual properties of extension, impenetrability and mobility discussed by Cotes, gravity seemed like a hidden power. This topic became the subject of intense debate throughout the first half of the eighteenth century (see the last section below).

Although the first editions of Newton’s Principia and of Locke’s Essay were published a mere three years apart (in 1687 and 1690, respectively) their authors worked independently and did not influence the first editions of one another’s principal texts. But then in 1688, Locke wrote a sympathetic (anonymous) review of the Principia . And right around the time of the publication of the first edition of the Essay , Newton and Locke became close friends and apparently influenced each other’s thinking about philosophy, religion, and theology in various ways (they first met in London in 1689). For his part, Locke called him the “incomparable Mr. Newton” on several occasions (e.g., in correspondence: Locke 1823: vol. 4: 55; and the next long quotation below). Most historians think that each questioned the standard Anglican interpretation of the Trinity, contending that Jesus of Nazareth was not a divine figure on the same level as God the creator. Interpreting the Bible through historical and philosophical analysis in a fashion that was not constrained by standard Anglican doctrine in the late seventeenth century was fantastically important to Newton, occupying his attention for many years. Given their controversial and politically sensitive nature, his so-called anti-Trinitarian views were largely kept secret among a small circle of friends. However, Newton trusted Locke enough to send him a very long letter—entitled “Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture”—to present him with the evidence for Newton’s view that the original version of Christianity was corrupted beginning in the 4 th century by the introduction of the doctrine of the Trinity (Newton 1959–, vol. 3: 83–129). Locke was apparently sympathetic with Newton’s approach. With respect to their public views, Newton and Locke were often taken to represent two aspects of the same experimental-philosophical approach toward the close of the seventeenth century (Stein 1990; Wilson 1999: 196–214; and Domski 2012). It is perhaps not difficult to understand why, for Newton was mentioned in one of the most famous passages in all of Locke’s writings. In the Epistle to the reader of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding , we read:

The Commonwealth of Learning, is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters, as the great Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that strain; ’tis ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish, that lies in the way to knowledge; which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavors of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbred with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree, that philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit, or uncapable to be brought into well-bred company, and polite conversation. (Locke 1975: 10)

Clearly, Locke seeks in this passage, among other things, to align his work in the Essay with the work of figures such as Newton. Here we find, at the opening of Locke’s magnum opus, the suggestion that he is content to be an “under-labourer”, a thinker who helps to clear the way for the advance of knowledge. But his list of four “master builders”—Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens, and Newton—might strike us as an odd pairing: what do these four have in common exactly? It has recently been argued that Locke regarded the four as representing the new “experimental philosophy”, and that Locke himself should be interpreted as strongly supporting that orientation within natural philosophy more generally (Anstey 2011: 220). This would become a popular conception of Newton’s philosophical approach, one that played a substantial role in the Enlightenment.

Locke may have regarded Newton as a fellow enthusiast for the experimental philosophy, but there are reasons to think that his embrace of the mechanical philosophy presented him with a difficulty in interpreting the consequences of Newton’s theory of universal gravity in the Principia . For Newton’s theory seemed to be in tension with a mechanist constraint on views of causation, at least from Locke’s own point of view. In the first edition of the Essay , Locke articulated a central tenet of mechanist thinking about causation when he wrote: “bodies operate by impulse and nothing else” ( Essay , II.viii.11). Impulse refers here to contact action. In correspondence with Locke that would prove to be influential, Bishop Edward Stillingfleet questioned this view from the Essay , contending that Locke must jettison the idea of human liberty if he insists that bodies can operate solely by impulse, presumably on the grounds that the human will cannot be understood to cause bodily action in that manner. In a famous exchange, Locke responded in part by reformulating his commitment to the mechanist view that all causation involving material bodies must be by contact (impulse) alone:

It is true, I say, that ‘bodies operate by impulse and nothing else’. And so I thought when I writ it, and can yet conceive no other way of their operation. But I am since convinced by the judicious Mr. Newton’s incomparable book, that it is too bold a presumption to limit God’s power, in this point, by my narrow conceptions. The gravitation of matter toward matter by ways inconceivable to me, is not only a demonstration that God can, if he pleases, put into bodies, powers and ways of operations, above what can be derived from our idea of body, or can be explained by what we know of matter, but also an unquestionable and every where visible instance, that he has done so. And therefore in the next edition of my book, I shall take care to have that passage rectified. (Locke 1823: vol. 4: 467–8).

This was not merely his privately held view. For instance, near the beginning of his Elements of Natural Philosophy , Locke writes:

Two bodies at a distance will put one another into motion by the force of attraction; which is inexplicable by us, though made evident to us by experience, and so to be taken as a principle in natural philosophy. (Locke 1823: vol. 3: 305)

In this way, Locke held the common view that Newton’s theory of universal gravity was incompatible with the mechanical philosophy—and perhaps, unintelligible to us for that very reason—and when forced to choose between these two options, he evidently sided with Newton, thinking that his theory was supported by “experience”. He did so by endorsing the view that God must have added “powers” or “ways of operations” to material bodies that cannot be derived from our idea of body. Such powers or ways of operations would in this case result in gravitational interactions, presumably amongst bodies that are spatially separated from one another by great distances. Yet from Locke’s point of view, the fact that Newton’s theory convinces him that such powers exist does not entail that that theory renders gravity “conceivable”: even if the theory of universal gravity is correct, it does not allow us to understand how matter—what Locke would call “extended solid substance”—can interact gravitationally with other matter when the bits of matter are not in contact with one another (Downing 1997). So Locke has concluded that bodies can operate on one another through some means other than impulse, but he retains his firmly held belief that any such operation is not intelligible to us. Locke accepted the conclusion that spatially separated bodies causally interact with one another in accordance with the law of universal gravitation, but concluded that the law itself did not render that causal interaction intelligible. This is precisely the kind of reaction to Newton’s theory of universal gravity bemoaned by Leibniz, who would argue that any operations or powers attributed to material bodies must meet the basic criterion of intelligibility established by the mechanist approach; he might also be inclined to argue that any laws regarded as governing the interactions of bodies must also meet that criterion by being derivable in some way from our basic concept of matter (see below). Regardless, this is an excellent example of a case in which Newton’s theory in the Principia had a direct impact on the development of philosophical views of causation in the late seventeenth century.

When the great English natural philosopher Robert Boyle died at the end of 1691, he endowed a lecture series designed to promote Christianity against what Boyle took to be the atheism that had infected English culture after the revolutionary period of the mid-century. Famous Newtonians such as Samuel Clarke and William Whiston would eventually give the Boyle lectures. The first “Boyle lecturer” was the theologian Richard Bentley, who would eventually become the Master of Newton’s alma mater , Trinity College, Cambridge, and who also worked under Locke’s correspondent, Bishop Stillingfleet, himself an admirer of Newton’s (Gascoigne 1985: 65). When preparing his lectures for publication—they had been presented to a public audience in London in 1692—Bentley conferred with Newton, hoping to solicit his help in deciphering enough of the Principia to use its results as a bulwark against atheism (Bentley 1976). Newton obliged, and a famous correspondence between the two began (eventually published as Bentley 1756). The exchange is of great philosophical interest, for Bentley elicited a number of important clarifications that have no peer within Newton’s published oeuvre .

Bentley sought Newton’s assistance in particular because he wanted guidance in divining how the theory of the Principia indicates that the solar system must have been designed by an intelligent agent and could not have arisen through the physical interactions of material bodies. In the first edition of the Principia in 1687, Newton had made such a claim in a very brief statement (Newton 1972: vol. 2: 582–3; Cohen 1971: 154–6). In the second edition of the text (published in 1713), he removed that statement, replacing it with a more extensive discussion in the new section of the text, added to its end, called the “General Scholium” (mentioned above). Through their correspondence, Bentley learned that from Newton’s point of view, the positions of the planets relative to one another—and especially to the sun—indicate that mere chance, or the ordinary physical interactions of the planetary bodies, could not have placed each planet in precisely the right orbit to maintain a solar system like ours for an extended period of time. With this argument, Newton seems to be indicating that mere chance would have produced an unstable planetary system, one in which the planets would eventually either be too strongly attracted to the sun, falling into it, or too weakly attracted, flying off into space. In this episode, a theologian appeals to the new authority of Newtonian natural philosophy when attempting to undermine atheism. And that was apparently the very kind of interchange that Boyle had envisioned when endowing the lecture series.

Newton’s correspondence with Bentley is justly famous for another reason. The criticisms of Newton’s theory of gravity by Leibniz and Huygens, outlined briefly above, would prove essential to the Continental reception of Newtonian natural philosophy more generally in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Since Newton held both of these mathematicians in high regard—he tells Leibniz in a 1693 letter that “Huygens is a master, and his remarks on my discoveries are brilliant” (Newton 2004: 108)—one might assume that their criticisms would have pressed Newton into articulating an extensive defense of the possibility of action at a distance. However, Newton presented no such defense, at least not explicitly. In fact, there is evidence that Newton himself may have rejected the possibility of action at a distance, despite the fact that the Principia allows it as a conceptual possibility, if not an empirical reality. The evidence lies in Newton’s correspondence with Bentley. In February of 1693, after receiving three letters from Newton, Bentley wrote an extensive reply that attempted to characterize Newton’s theory of gravity, along with his understanding of the nature of matter, in a way that could be used to undermine various kinds of atheism. With the three earlier letters as his guide, Bentley makes the following estimation of Newton’s understanding of the possibility that gravity could somehow be an essential feature of material bodies:

(2) And as for Gravitation, tis impossible that That should either be coæternal & essential to Matter, or ever acquired by it. Not essential and coæternal to Matter; for then even our System would have been eternal (if gravity could form it) against our Atheist’s supposition & what we have proved in our Last. For let them assign any given time, that Matter convened from a Chaos into our System, they must affirm that before the given time matter gravitated eternally without convening, which is absurd. {Sir, I make account, that your courteous suggestion by your Last, that a Chaos is inconsistent with the Hypothesis of innate Gravity, is included in this paragraph of Mine.} and again, tis unconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should (without a divine impression) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact: as it must, if gravitation be essential and inherent in it. (Newton 1959–vol. 3: 249)

In reply to this letter, Newton refers back to this second proposition, making one of the most famous of all his pronouncements concerning the possibility of action at a distance:

The last clause of the second position I like very well. It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left open to the consideration of my readers. (Newton 2004: 102–3) [ 24 ]

It certainly seems that Newton was uncomfortable with the very idea of action at a distance. But of course, things are not always as they seem in interpretations of difficult philosophical texts: some historians and philosophers have argued strongly that there are other readings of the letter. [ 25 ] Rather than rejecting distant action between material bodies per se , they argue, Newton may have been rejecting a particular version of that idea, one associated with the “Epicurean” view that gravity is somehow an essential feature of all material bodies, a stronger view than Newton might wish to endorse. The idea might be roughly as follows: Newton wanted to leave open the possibility that God had endowed bodies with a power to act at a distance on one another, a position that is at least reminiscent of Locke’s view in his correspondence with Stillingfleet (see above). The reason is that Newton held the standard view at the time that matter itself is passive, requiring some kind of divine intervention in order to interact causally with other matter. Again, one finds a Lockean echo of this idea (which may be no accident): Locke sometimes suggests that matter itself is passive in the sense that it cannot move itself; instead, motion must be “superadded” to it by God. If the world consisted solely of a bunch of material objects, say rocks floating in interstellar space, then they would not experience any changes in their states of motion unless some external force acted upon them. Left to its own devices, matter is passive and does not move. To argue, as some “Epicurean” philosophers may have done, that matter itself essentially contains gravity as a feature, is to deny that matter is passive; it is to suggest that the rocks in interstellar space would attract one another and begin to move “on their own”, without any external force influencing them. And this, in turn, might lead us on a slippery slope to atheism, for on this view, matter would act on its own, without any divine intervention. Or so Bentley and Newton might be interpreted.

Clearly, one reasonable motive for uncovering a nuanced interpretation of Newton’s letter to Bentley is the obvious fact that Newton apparently regarded action at a distance as perfectly possible when writing the Principia . Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the Principia with the Bentley correspondence. One can argue that although he left open the possibility of action at a distance in his main work, Newton himself did not accept that possibility because of his more general commitments. The debate on such matters continues unabated. However, regardless of Newton’s personal attitude toward distant action among material bodies, his mechanist interlocutors and readers continued to object to the physical theory outlined in Book III of the Principia on the grounds that, at the very least, it left open the conceptual possibility of a kind of action that cannot in fact exist anywhere in nature. That remained one of Leibniz’s principal objections against Newtonian natural philosophy throughout the last twenty years of his life, animating his correspondence with numerous figures, including most prominently the Newtonian theologian and philosopher Samuel Clarke.

In many ways, Leibniz and Newton grew up in the same philosophical environment. Each came of age during the heyday of Cartesianism, and each argued in particular that Cartesian views in natural philosophy failed to include a sufficiently robust conception of the forces of bodies in nature. Force would lie at the center of Newton’s mature physics (Westfall 1971), and would become even more central to Leibniz’s thinking, playing an essential role in his metaphysics as well (Garber 2012). Indeed, in Leibniz’s criticisms of Cartesian physics involving what was later called the vis viva controversy (Smith 2006) and in Newton’s mature physics, each argued that Descartes and his followers had failed to understand the importance of the notion of force. Leibniz and Newton knew one another as mathematicians already in the 1670s, and as we have seen, Leibniz discussed Newton’s first optical work with Huygens. But after the publication of the Principia in 1687, their philosophical relationship, which was marked originally by respectful disagreement, began to develop in earnest. Just two years after the Principia appeared, Leibniz published his Essay on the Causes of Celestial Motions (or Tentamen ), and then in 1693, the two corresponded with one another on mathematical and philosophical issues (Newton 2004: 106–9). Leibniz initiated their discussion in March of 1693: after highlighting Newton’s “astonishing discovery” that the elliptical planetary orbits found by Kepler can be the result of gravitational attraction within the solar system, Leibniz contends that these motions must be caused by “the motion of a fluid medium” (Newton 2004: 106). He had described such a fluid medium, or vortex, in detail in his own Essay . The background to Leibniz’s comment is his unwavering commitment—one shared by Huygens, whose theory of gravity’s cause Leibniz mentions in the same letter—to the mechanist requirement that all changes in motion must be the result of material impact. Thus for Leibniz, one can (e.g.) speak of the sun as attracting the earth as a façon de parler , but in fact the cause of the earth’s acceleration, of its true motion around the sun, is its interaction with a fluid medium. (Descartes was also a famous proponent of a vortex theory of planetary motion—Aiton 1972: 30–64; Gaukroger 2002: 150–3.) When he replied in October of 1693, however, Newton did not accept Leibniz’s philosophical olive branch. Leibniz had insisted that the vortex theory of planetary motion “would not at all detract from the value and truth of your discovery” that Kepler’s ellipses result simply from the conception of attraction or gravitation (Newton 2004: 107). This olive branch was important because earlier vortex theorists, especially Descartes, had failed to account for Kepler’s laws, so Leibniz was crediting Newton with advancing astronomy in this respect (and indeed, he attempted to reflect Kepler’s results in his Tentamen ). But Newton brushed aside the olive branch, noting that vortices would disturb the motions of planets and comets through the solar system. He writes that some “very fine” matter fills the heavens, adding:

For since celestial motions are more regular than if they arose from vortices and observe other laws, so much so that vortices contribute not to the regulation but the disturbance of the motions of planets and comets; and since all phenomena of the heavens and of the sea follow precisely, so far as I am aware, from nothing but gravity acting in accordance with the laws described by me; and since nature is very simple, I have myself concluded that all other causes are to be rejected and that the heavens are to be stripped as far as may be of all matter, lest the motions of planets and comets be hindered or rendered irregular. But if, meanwhile, someone explains gravity along with all its laws by the action of some subtle matter, and shows that the motion of planets and comets will not be disturbed by this matter, I shall be far from objecting. (Newton 2004: 108–9)

This is a passage rich with meaning. Leibniz clearly insisted that vortices, or some physical object or fluid, must be in contact with the planetary orbits if we are to explain why they deviate from the tangents along the orbital paths when circling the sun. Newton’s reply is that giant swirling fluids in the heavens would actually disturb the regular orbital paths and the paths of comets through the solar system. That reply might be thought of as empirical in character, for it depends on observational data regarding the actual paths of the heavenly bodies. But Leibinz’s perspective is obviously not merely empirical in character: he does not postulate vortices (or anything akin to them) on observational grounds; he infers their existence because he thinks we know (perhaps we can add, we know a priori ) that physical bodies such as comets or planets can deviate from a rectilinear path—they can accelerate—only if some other physical item impacts upon them. Newton has a reply to that kind of view as well: he insists that the phenomena of the motion of the heavenly bodies “follows” solely from gravity itself—an impressed force, as we have seen, and therefore an “action”—in accordance with the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. Since gravity is an action—clearly, a causal notion—it seems clear that Newton’s answer to Leibniz’s idea that vortices cause the planetary orbits is that gravity itself causes them. It is not much of a leap to conclude, in turn, that this reply commits Newton to the idea that bodies involved in gravitational interactions, such as the sun and the earth, act at a distance on one another through the force of gravity. It is not hard to divine why Leibniz (and Huygens) would have concluded that Newton had relinquished any commitment to the norms of the mechanical philosophy.

Despite Leibniz’s (and Huygens’s) criticisms of his theory of gravity in particular, and his methods in natural philosophy in general, Newton stuck to his guns. Nearly twenty years after their illuminating exchange in 1693, Leibniz and Newton narrowly missed a second opportunity to discuss their philosophical differences directly. In May of 1712, Leibniz published a letter to Nicholas Hartsoeker that was highly critical of the Newtonians; it was published in English translation in the Memoirs of Literature , a journal to which Roger Cotes, the editor of the Principia’s second edition, held a subscription (Newton 2004: 109). After Cotes brought Leibniz’s criticisms to Newton’s attention—especially the claim that the Principia renders gravitation a “perpetual miracle” because it does not specify the physical mechanism underlying it—Newton wrote an intriguing, but only posthumously published, rebuttal. Here is part of Newton’s paraphrase of Leibniz’s original letter:

But he [i.e., Leibniz] goes on and tells us that God could not create planets that should move round of themselves without any cause that should prevent their removing through the tangent. For a miracle at least must keep the planet in. (Newton 2004: 117)

Newton’s response to this Leibnizian charge is illuminating:

But certainly God could create planets that should move round of themselves without any other cause than gravity that should prevent their removing through the tangent. For gravity without a miracle may keep the planets in. ( ibid .)

Thus Newton repeats the view he mentions to Leibniz in 1693, viz., that the force of gravity itself causes the planets to follow their orbital paths rather than their inertial trajectories along the tangents to those orbits, independently of any fluid medium in the heavens. But in this posthumously published letter, Newton did not merely repeat his basic understanding of gravity from his 1693 exchange with Leibniz; he also included a wider discussion of mechanist norms within philosophy more generally. Again, Newton begins by quoting Leibniz:

But Mr. Leibniz goes on. “The ancients and the moderns, who own that gravity is an occult quality, are in the right, if they mean by it that there is a certain mechanism unknown to them whereby all bodies tend towards the center of the earth. But if they mean that the thing is performed without any mechanism by a simple primitive quality or by a law of God who produces that effect without using any intelligible means, it is an unreasonable and occult quality, and so very occult that it is impossible that it should ever be done though an angel or God himself should undertake to explain it”. (Newton 2004: 116)

In this passage, Leibniz returns to the kind of criticism that he would present against the “superaddition” view that Locke presented to Stillingfleet, arguing that philosophers must reject the idea that gravity could simply be a feature of bodies that God adds to them, despite the fact that we cannot possibly understand gravitational interactions based on our idea of body (our idea of extended solid substances, or another similar idea). Indeed, Leibniz raises the stakes by contending that God himself could not explicate how such interactions are possible based on the idea of matter. Leibniz would argue, perhaps on metaphysical grounds, that any laws said to govern the interaction of bodies, and any qualities attributed to bodies, must be intelligible in the terms available to philosophers through the mechanist orientation. In particular, laws and qualities must be intelligible in terms of the shape, size, motion and impenetrability (or solidity) of bodies. In this way, one might conclude that Locke and Leibniz actually do not necessarily disagree on whether gravity can be made intelligible in mechanist terms; they simply disagree on the propriety of the contention that God could “superadd” a feature to bodies that cannot be made intelligible in that way.

Newton’s reply to Leibniz’s argument is illuminating. Instead of presenting a narrow defense of his view, perhaps by denying that he has postulated any non-mechanical causation with his theory of gravity, he challenges the mechanical philosophy itself by contending that it should not be understood as holding for all natural phenomena:

The same ought to be said of hardness. So then gravity and hardness must go for unreasonable occult qualities unless they can be explained mechanically. And why may not the same be said of the vis inertiae [force of inertia] and the extension, the duration and mobility of bodies, and yet no man ever attempted to explain these qualities mechanically, or took them for miracles or supernatural things or fictions or occult qualities. They are the natural, real, reasonable, manifest qualities of all bodies seated in them by the will of God from the beginning of the creation and perfectly incapable of being explained mechanically, and so may be the hardness of primitive particles of bodies. And therefore if any man should say that bodies attract one another by a power whose cause is unknown to us, or by a power seated in the frame of nature by the will of God, or by a power seated in a substance in which bodies move and float without resistance and which has therefore no vis inertiae but acts by other laws than those that are mechanical: I know not why he should be said to introduce miracles and occult qualities and fictions into the world. For Mr. Leibniz himself will scarce say that thinking is mechanical as it must be if to explain it otherwise be to make a miracle, an occult quality, and a fiction. (Newton 2004: 116)

The first aspect of Newton’s argument is to indicate that mechanical explanations are predicated on referencing certain kinds of qualities when investigating natural phenomena, and that these qualities themselves are therefore not subject to mechanical explanation. For instance, since mechanist explanations—say, of the way in which magnets attract iron filings across a table—must refer to qualities such as the extension of the bodies subject to the explanations, then we cannot give a mechanist explanation of extension itself. Of course, Leibniz might reply that we need not provide any explanation of the basic qualities of bodies that figure in mechanical explanations, for those properties have been chosen by the “moderns” precisely because they are perfectly intelligible on their own, perhaps unlike various qualities attributed to “Scholastic” accounts of natural phenomena. The second aspect of Newton’s argument is more intriguing—it also harkens back to Locke’s discussion with Stillingfleet, for Locke had contended that God may have superadded not only gravity to material bodies, but also the power of thought, linking them because he believed that neither could be rendered intelligible using any philosophical means at his disposal. That is, from Locke’s point of view, we know that human beings—which are, or at least contain, material bodies with size, shape, motion and solidity, along with parts characterized by those qualities—are capable of thought, but since we cannot discern how any material thing could possibly have that capacity, we conclude that God may have superadded that feature to us, or to our bodies. Thought and gravity are dis-analogous in the sense that we did not require anything like Newton’s theory to convince us that human beings can think, but they are otherwise analogous. Newton then attempts to make the following argument: since Leibniz would have to agree that thinking is not a mechanical process, and not mechanically explicable, he must agree that there is at least one aspect of the world that has the following two features, (1) it is not mechanical; and, (2) it is clearly not to be rejected on that ground alone. He attempts to liken gravity (as he understands it) to thinking (as he believes Leibniz is required to understand it), arguing that despite the fact that it is not mechanical—it cannot be explained mechanically—it should not be rejected on that ground. This argument may be predicated on the view that human beings, material things, or at least partially material things, do the thinking, rather than immaterial things, such as minds or souls, for if one attributes all thought to an immaterial mind or soul, then there is no pressure to say that anything in nature, or perhaps even any aspect of anything in nature, has a feature that cannot be mechanically explicated. If one accepts Locke’s view (apparently also endorsed by Newton) that we should attribute thinking to material things, or to aspects of material things, then perhaps Newton has successfully followed Locke in likening gravity to thought, thereby making room for aspects of nature that are not mechanical after all. This vexing issue would continue to generate debates amongst Newton’s and Leibniz’s various followers in England, and on the Continent, respectively.

Leibniz’s most extensive debate with the Newtonians would not occur until the very end of his life. His celebrated correspondence with Samuel Clarke, Newton’s friend and supporter in London in the early part of the eighteenth century, is his most famous interaction with the Newtonians, occurring right before his death in 1716 (Clarke and Leibniz 1717). Leibniz fomented the correspondence in November of 1715 by sending a brief, provocative letter to Princess Caroline of Wales, one designed to provoke a response from Newton’s circle in London. Leibniz knew well that Princess Caroline was a leading intellectual and political figure in England at the time, one who would surely be concerned by Leibniz’s shocking claims about the religious consequences of Newtonian thinking. He opens his initial letter by mentioning both Locke and Newton, along with the issues about materiality and thinking that arose in his near exchange with Newton in 1712:

Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much. Many will have human souls to be material; others make God himself a corporeal being. Mr. Locke and his followers are uncertain at least whether the soul is not material and naturally perishable. Sir Isaac Newton says that space is an organ which God makes use of to perceive things by. But if God stands in need of any organ to perceive things by, it will follow that they do not depend altogether on him, nor were produced by him. (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: L 1: 1–3)

Thus Leibniz charges both Lockeans and Newtonians with presenting philosophical views of the human and of the divine that lead to theologically unsavory consequences, such as the idea that the human soul might be material and the view that God must employ something akin to an organ in order to perceive happenings in the world. These were fighting words. Although Locke had died in 1704, he had various followers in England at the time (Gascoigne 1985: 172–3), and Newton himself was at the height of his influence: he had by then been knighted, as Leibniz acknowledges by calling him “Sir” in his letter, and was at that time President of the Royal Society. Moreover, Samuel Clarke had given the Boyle lectures in 1704 and again in 1705, so he was a public figure associated with the state of Christianity in England. Once Clarke took the bait, replying that same month to Leibniz’s charges, Locke’s views quickly dropped from view and the two focused specifically on Leibniz’s numerous objections to Newtonian ideas and methods. But why did Clarke respond on Newton’s behalf, and what was Newton’s actual role in the correspondence? These questions continue to puzzle scholars (see Cohen and Koyré 1962; Bertoloni Meli 1999 and 2002; Vailati 1997). There is no documentary evidence, such as letters, between Clarke and Newton indicating the contours of his role; then again, at this time, both men lived in London and Clarke was Newton’s parish priest, so the lack of letters or other papers is perhaps unsurprising. That fact alone is intriguing, for the theological differences between the two are salient: since Newton was a committed anti-Trinitarian—a fact known to figures like Locke and to others such as William Whiston—he may have decided that Leibniz’s contentions about “natural religion” in England would best be answered by what we might now call a more mainstream theological figure like Clarke. In any event, there is no doubt that Clarke was taken by Leibniz and his followers to be speaking for Newton and his circle. Nonetheless, there are certainly aspects of Clarke’s views that may deviate from Newton’s own opinions, so it would be unwise to (as it were) remove Clarke from our conception of the correspondence by regarding it effectively as Newton’s work.

Leibniz’s side of the correspondence with Clarke is methodologically characteristic: he leaves much of his own systematic and complex metaphysical theorizing—including the monadology—in the background, bringing to the fore only those elements that are both necessary for his criticisms of the Newtonians and also likely to garner support from Clarke. Thus the key to many of Leibniz’s criticisms is the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), which he knows Clarke will endorse (although with a distinct conception of its scope: Leibniz asserts, while Clarke denies, that the principle demands that each act of divine willing requires a reason; for Clarke, divine willing itself is reason enough for some physical state of affairs to obtain, or event to occur). Leibniz argues in particular that several key aspects of the Newtonian worldview are simply incompatible with the PSR, including the idea of absolute space. If space were in fact completely independent of all physical objects and all relations among them, as the Newtonians seem to assert, then a problem arises:

I have many demonstrations to confute the fancy of those who take space to be a substance or at least an absolute being. But I shall only use, at present, one demonstration, which the author here gives me occasion to insist upon. I say, then, that if space were an absolute being, something would happen for which it would be impossible that there should be a sufficient reason—which is against my axiom. And I prove it thus: space is something absolutely uniform, and without the things placed in it, one point of space absolutely does not differ in any respect whatsoever from another point of space. Now from this it follows (supposing space to be something in itself, besides the order of bodies among themselves) that it is impossible there should be a reason why God, preserving the same situations of bodies among themselves, should have placed them in space after one certain particular manner and not otherwise—why everything was not placed the quite contrary way, for instance, by changing east into west. But if space is nothing else but this order or relation, and is nothing at all without bodies but the possibility of placing them, then those two states, the one such as it is now, the other supposed to be the quite contrary way, would not at all differ from one another. Their difference therefore is only to be found in our chimerical supposition of the reality of space. (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: L 3: 5)

Leibniz’s argument is clever at the outset: he bypasses the thorny problem of determining whether Newton’s idea of absolute space commits him to thinking of space as a substance—a view, incidentally, which Newton explicitly considers and rejects in De Gravitatione (Newton 2004: 21–2)—by presupposing only that Newton thinks of space as existing independently of objects and their relations. If space is indeed independent in this way, then it would seem that God faces a choice: when creating the world, or matter, why place (e.g.) the earth in one particular part of space rather than any other? The parts of space, independently of all objects and all relations, obviously do not differ from one another in any respect at all, so it would seem that one could not even theoretically devise a reason for placing the earth anywhere in particular, as opposed to anywhere else . (This argument, incidentally, does not depend on our having the capacity to refer to places within empty space.) But since space exists, with all its places, independently of the earth and everything else, then God must indeed have some reason to place the earth in one place rather than another—for Leibniz, even the divine will is inert independent of any reason for (as it were) moving in one direction rather than another. Finally, Leibniz argues that he himself avoids this problem by asserting that space is nothing above and beyond the objects in the world and all possible relations amongst them (hence he holds a kind of modal relationalist view, in more modern terminology). God faces no problematic choice on this view, since space does not exist prior to the creation of the world, or of material objects: to create objects with spatial relations is ipso facto to create space itself, for it is nothing over and above objects and their relations. If you like, space for Leibniz just is a way of conceptually grasping all objects and all possible relations amongst them, all at once. Time, similarly, is a way of grasping the whole series of events that have characterized history. Clarke’s reply is somewhat disappointing: he blocks Leibniz’s inference by simply denying that the divine will must have a reason to place (say) the earth in one place rather than another (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: C 3: 5). The PSR is not violated in this case, according to Clarke’s interpretation of it, because it requires only this: if the earth appears in one place rather than another, there must be a reason that it appears there, and the reason in this case is simply the divine will; there is no further question about why the divine being made a particular choice rather than another. In the quotation above, Leibniz speaks of the Newtonians as endorsing “the reality of space”, which Leibniz regards as “chimerical”. This remark highlights another important aspect of Leibniz’s conception of space and time, one that is often ignored in contemporary discussions, which tend to emphasize Leibnizian “relationalism” in opposition to Newtonian “absolutism”. Leibniz’s view of space and time connects intimately with broader aspects of his metaphysical positions: unlike ordinary physical objects, which are constituted by their parts (they are discrete), and which exhibit features that involve internal distinctions amongst those parts, he thinks of space and time as continuous and homogeneous. Leaving aside the monadology, as he does in his correspondence with Clarke, this means that for Leibniz, it is physical objects that are real things; space and time are merely “ideal” or abstract entities whose continuity and homogeneity signal this special status. It is not merely that space and time are nothing over and above the events and relations of objects that exist in our world; it is also the case that they are ideal: they depend in some way on the human mind for their existence. Or so Leibniz seems to suggest. This aspect of his view would become of central importance to later (e.g. Kant’s) conceptions of the Leibniz-Newton debate on the nature of space.

Obviously, Leibniz’s arguments against the Newtonians highlighted a fundamental difference between his interpretation of the PSR and Clarke’s: where Leibniz held what we might call the “rationalist” view that all willing, all choice, must occur for a reason—a requirement from which even the divine being is not exempt—Clarke held what we might call the “voluntarist” view that willing, or choice, itself need not occur for any reason, for it is itself a sufficient reason for some states of affairs to obtain or event to occur. From Leibniz’s point of view, this renders the will, including the divine will, opaque or unintelligible: if an agent can act or make a choice without having any reason for it, then surely the agent is not rational, and if the PSR demands anything of the world, it is that the world be rationally intelligible to us. This requirement must hold of agents and their wills as well. But from Clarke’s point of view, this requirement is too stringent, especially in the divine case: if we hold that even God must have a reason for choosing to create one state of affairs rather than another—for choosing, say, to part the Red Sea rather than the Mississippi River—then we are ipso facto restricting God’s freedom. Surely God has the freedom to choose to do anything at all, or at least, anything that does not contain or instantiate a contradiction, and for his part, Leibniz agrees that the principle of contradiction does not entail the PSR—the latter is a separate and independent principle which is necessary for metaphysics and natural philosophy to extend beyond mathematics, which requires only the principle of contradiction (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: L 2: 1). But he thinks that Clarke’s view leaves us with a God, and indeed with ordinary agents, who can act arbitrarily, with no reason at all. That is not the kind of freedom that philosophy seeks; it wishes to see agents as engaged in rational action. In their differing interpretations of the PSR, and their correspondingly distinct conceptions of freedom and reason, the debate between Leibniz and Clarke hits rock bottom.

Leibniz’s criticisms of the Newtonians were not restricted to questions about the nature of space and time; he also revived his old complaint—one shared by Huygens, as we have seen above—that Newton’s physical theory commits him to the possibility, if not to the reality, of action at a distance among the planetary bodies. In one passage in his fourth letter, for instance, Leibniz writes (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: L 4: 45):

It is also a supernatural thing that bodies should attract one another at a distance without any intermediate means and that a body should move around without receding in the tangent, though nothing hinders it from so receding. For these effects cannot be explained by the nature of things.

As a defender of the mechanical philosophy, Leibniz insists here, as he had before, that a material body like the Earth would recede along the tangent to its orbit if it were not impacted upon by some physical body or bodies, such as a vortex or another kind of fluid filling the solar system. Clarke’s reply to this charge is especially illuminating (Clarke and Leibniz 1717: C 4: 45):

That one body should attract another without any intermediate means, is indeed not a miracle, but a contradiction: for ‘tis supposing something to act where it is not. But the means by which two bodies attract each other may be invisible and intangible, and of a different nature from mechanism, and yet, acting regularly and constantly, may well be called natural, being much less wonderful than animal motion, which yet is never called a miracle’.

This passage is bound to confuse readers. On the one hand, Clarke is clearly arguing that the Newtonians refuse to restrict their understanding of causal interactions in nature to mechanical cases; on the other, however, he does not accept what many at that time would have regarded as the obvious implication of this denial of mechanism, namely that action at a distance is perfectly possible (a move embraced by some later in the eighteenth century, such as Kant). Instead, Clarke not only rejects action at a distance, as Newton possibly had before him; he contends that it isn’t even logically possible! In his various pronouncements to Bentley and others, Newton never contended that action at a distance was simply a contradiction and therefore impossible, presumably even for the divine being, who is typically said to be capable of creating any situation that does not instantiate a contradiction (although Descartes’s views on the eternal truths are obviously more complicated). Clarke’s view raises a serious problem for Newtonians: if action at a distance is simply a contradiction, and therefore not a possible physical situation, even with divine intervention, then how should one interpret the theory of universal gravity, which certainly appears to indicate that distant action is perfectly possible, and perhaps even actual? If we interpret the theory as postulating actual distant action, say between the moon and the earth, then it clearly must be mistaken; but even if we interpret it less strongly, as merely postulating that distant action between the moon and the earth is possible, that would presumably disqualify the theory as well. Perhaps one can save Clarke’s view by contending that since distant action is logically impossible, Newton’s theory must therefore be interpreted as neutral on that issue. This is one issue where Clarke’s views may differ substantially from Newton’s own. Regardless of whether Clarke represented Newton’s own views faithfully, there is no doubt that his correspondence with Leibniz helped to shape the agenda of philosophy in the eighteenth century.

The history of eighteenth-century philosophy cannot be written without extensive discussion of Newton’s own views and of his influence on the views of other figures both in England and on the Continent. As we have seen, when Newton was a young student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Cartesian views in natural philosophy and much else besides had replaced the ideas and methods of Aristotle and his followers as the most important subject for discussion amongst philosophers. In many ways, Newton eventually succeeded in convincing philosophers that his own ideas and methods were superior to those of the Cartesians—especially when it came to thinking about motion and its causes—but this historical fact did not mean that Newtonianism, even broadly construed, became the dominant trend in natural philosophy during Newton’s lifetime. On the contrary, Newton’s views continued to be the subject of intense scrutiny and debate. As we have seen, this was true amongst Leibniz and his followers (such as Christiaan Wolff) and among fellow mechanists (such as Huygens). Indeed, a late-seventeenth-century debate between Cartesian and Newtonian ideas was supplanted by an early eighteenth century debate between Leibnizian and Newtonian views; the latter debate would continue in one form or another for the rest of the century. But even amongst leading Continental mathematicians, some of Newton’s most basic ideas, for instance concerning the forces of nature, remained the subject of dispute until well into the eighteenth century. To give just one prominent example that influenced the development of philosophy, D’Alembert and Euler, two of the greatest mathematicians of the Enlightenment, had opposite reactions to Newton’s idea that the mass of an object could also be referred to by the “very significant name” of the vis inertiae , or force of inertia (Newton 1999, 404—see below for details). These discussions, along with numerous other debates about space, time, motion were a driving force during the French Enlightenment. They remained a powerful stimulant to philosophical theorizing in the 1770s and 1780s, when Kant forged his magisterial “critical” system of philosophy, an approach that almost single-handedly set the philosophical agenda of the early nineteenth century. Hence Newton’s influence on the eighteenth century did not take the form of a single philosophical program or movement; instead, it was the controversial nature of his ideas and methodology that drove much of the philosophical discussion.

Newton’s ideas and methods were certainly most influential in Britain, where there grew to be a strong “Newtonian” movement—also called the “experimental philosophy” program—by roughly 1700. By the fin de siecle , it is probably safe to say that natural philosophy had become heavily Newtonian in England, at least in the sense that it had eclipsed both Cartesianism (Henry 2013: 124 and introduction to Voltaire 1738 [1992, 7]), and other local movements, such as Cambridge Platonism, which had exhibited a strong influence during the previous generation. One might put the point somewhat differently: to the extent that there was a dominant strand in England by 1700, it was the “experimental philosophy”, a view that was associated strongly with figures such as Boyle, Newton and Locke. Figures such as Hobbes had opposed this approach to solving philosophical problems, but had failed to gain nearly as much influence. Perhaps more importantly, Newton’s view of motion, his understanding of space and time, and his approach to achieving knowledge of natural phenomena, helped to shape the agenda of British philosophy for the next fifty years. In addition to Newton’s influence on Locke’s thinking about matter and causation, explored above, both Berkeley and Hume expended considerable energy grappling with the wider consequences and implications of the Newtonian version of the experimental philosophy. For his part, Berkeley famously derided many Newtonians methods and ideas—sometimes exempting Newton himself from his conception of the worst philosophical excesses of his followers—including the rise of the calculus among mathematicians (in The Analyst ) and the use of the idea of a force as the basic causal concept in natural philosophy (in De Motu —both reprinted in Berkeley 1992). Berkeley’s theory of ideas, which arose in part from his reflections of what we would now call Locke’s “empiricist” notion of representation, suggested to him that no idea can be abstract: each idea must represent a particular rather than a universal. Hence we can have an idea of a particular car, say a yellow two-door sports car, but not of a car in general, one with no specific characteristics. Similarly, we can have an idea of a particular shade of yellow, perhaps because we’ve just seen a lovely yellow rose at the florist, but not of yellow in general; and so on. Berkeley then argued that modern mathematics, especially the calculus, and modern natural philosophy, especially Newtonian versions of it, were often reliant on abstract ideas, and therefore philosophically suspect. For instance, he contended that the very idea of absolute motion was suspect because we can represent to ourselves only various motions with particular features related to particular bodies in motion, but “absolute” motion cannot be rendered particular in anything like this way; it remains abstract (Downing 2005: 235). Thus although Newtonian views were considered to be essential to the rise of experimental philosophy in Britain, Berkeley derided them as insufficiently experimental, or empirical, as overly reliant on representations of universals and of universal quantities, rather than on the representation of particulars. In a reflection of Malebranche’s influence, Berkeley also argued that some Newtonians wrongly attributed genuine causal powers to ordinary material objects through their use of the concept of impressed force; wrongly, because Berkeley firmly rejected the notion that any body could exert any causal power. All causation in Berkeley’s system is due either to the intervention of the divine in the course of history, or to spirits or minds, which are genuinely causally active. Finally, in an argument that would prefigure Mach’s reactions to Newtonian conceptions of space, time and motion in the late nineteenth century—which were expressive of a broad commitment to “empiricism”—Berkeley contended that absolute space is a metaphysical aberration: philosophers should not posit any entity or thing that is beyond all possible perception. In sum, Berkeley was highly critical of many aspects of the Newtonian program, but for that very reason, it was Newton’s ideas that helped to shape many of his philosophical projects.

For his part, Hume had a more nuanced reaction to the emergence of the Newtonian program (cf. Schliesser 2007 and DePierris 2012). He certainly signaled his endorsement of the experimental philosophy—itself strongly associated with the Newtonians, along with figures like Boyle and Hooke, as we have seen—when he gave his Treatise the following subtitle: “being an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects”. And one might argue that Hume made a kind of Lockean move when he chose to endorse the Newtonian program specifically in preference to the mechanical philosophy, which he regarded with suspicion. A famous comment from his History of England bolsters this interpretation:

While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain. (Hume 1854 [1754–61]: vol. 5: 374)

The difference between Locke and Hume might be that the former, unlike the latter, nonetheless insisted that mechanism continued to provide philosophers with a canon for the intelligibility of causation within nature (Hume’s critique of earlier conceptions of causation, including Locke’s, is certainly well known). Hume also expended considerable effort in interpreting some of the philosophical aspects or consequences of Newton’s theory of gravity and his corresponding understanding of the nature of matter. In particular, he wished to provide what we would now call an empiricist interpretation of Newton’s three laws of motion, his concept of mass (quantity of matter), and his understanding of gravity; in the process, he does not shy away from interpreting Newton’s sometimes confusing notion of the vis inertiae or force of inertia. When students learn the canonical idea of a Newtonian force, they learn about what Newton called a vis impressa , an impressed force. They also learn that the mass of a body is not a force at all. But in all three editions of the Principia , Newton himself said that although the mass of a body is not an impressed force, it could be called by the “very significant name of force of inertia” because bodies with mass with resist acceleration (Newton 1999, 404). And to resist acceleration seemed to Newton like an action that a body performs, say when some other body collides with it. Now for Hume, this issue was particularly difficult because he had already contended that strictly speaking, we have no idea (no representation) of force or power—these are merely words employed by natural philosophers without any ideas corresponding to them. Thus he must find an interpretation of Newton that is not predicated on our ability to form an idea of forces or powers. In a famous footnote in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , he writes (Hume 1777 [1993: §vii.i note 2, 48–49]):

I need not examine at length the vis inertiae which is so much talked of in the new philosophy, and which is ascribed to matter. We find by experience, that a body at rest or in motion continues for ever in its present state, till put from it by some new cause; and that a body impelled takes as much motion from the impelling body as it acquires itself. These are facts. When we call this a vis inertiae , we only mark these facts, without pretending to have any idea of the inert power; in the same manner as, when we talk of gravity, we mean certain effects, without comprehending that active power. It was never the meaning of Sir ISAAC NEWTON to rob second causes of all force or energy; though some of his followers have endeavoured to establish that theory upon his authority. On the contrary, that great philosopher had recourse to an ethereal active fluid to explain his universal attraction; though he was so cautious and modest as to allow, that it was a mere hypothesis, not to be insisted on, without more experiments.

In mentioning Newton’s speculation that an aether might explain universal gravity in some sense (for instance, in query 21 to the Opticks ), Hume does not appear to be concerned about action at a distance; instead, he is concerned to argue that this speculation indicates that Newton himself did not regard his theory as requiring that we attribute a “power” of gravity to material bodies. This is important for Hume to establish, not least because he believes that we can form no representation at all of any such power. Similarly, when Newton indicates in the Principia that we can conceive of a body’s quantity of matter as its vis inertiae , its power of resisting any change to its state of motion (Newton 1999: 404–5), he is not attributing any power to that body, but rather employing a means of characterizing its behavior. Or so Hume contends. In this specific regard, we find an echo of Berkeley’s earlier work: in De Motu , Berkeley argues in particular that although some philosophers misunderstand the Newtonian theory of gravity as attributing a special force or nature to material objects, there is an interpretation of Newton that is consistent with the new theory of ideas. He writes (Berkeley 1992: De Motu , §6):

Again, force , gravity , and terms of that sort are more often used in the concrete (and rightly so) so as to connote the body in motion, the effort of resisting, etc. But when they are used by philosophers to signify certain natures carved out and abstracted from all these things, natures which are not objects of sense, nor can be grasped by any force of intellect, nor pictured by the imagination, then indeed they breed errors and confusion.

There is little doubt, then, that the new British philosophy represented by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the early-to-mid eighteenth century was concerned to present interpretations of Newton’s work that were consistent with their overarching philosophical commitments, principles and methods, or to alter those commitments, principles and methods as necessary.

These attempts by canonical philosophers like Berkeley and Hume to find what they regarded as a defensible interpretation of Newtonian forces are mirrored by similar attempts in the writings of leading mathematicians. For instance, the very same issue discussed by Hume had already been debated by two of the leading figures in Continental science, D’Alembert and Euler. For his part, in his famous work, the Traité de dynamique (1743), D’Alembert expressed a view that is very similar to Hume’s (in certain respects). He proclaimed right at the outset that he wished to develop a physics that would dispense with the concept of a force altogether on the grounds that it was an “obscure” idea. He would “reduce all the principles of mechanics to three, the force of inertia, compound motion, and equilibrium” (D’Alembert 1743, 3). He immediately explained the first item: the reason that he could accept Newton’s force of inertia is that it’s characterized as a property of bodies, one in virtue of which they follow the laws of motion, rather than a force or power. So it was not an obscure notion. Ironically, the great Swiss mathematician Euler had precisely the opposite reaction: from his point of view, the “force of inertia” was simply a misnomer, for it was not a force at all and should therefore be expunged from physics altogether. Instead, physics should employ only the idea of an impressed force, a cause of acceleration, which he regarded as a perfectly clear idea. Of course, history was on Euler’s side, indeed so much so that future generations would not even imagine that so many leading philosophers and mathematicians during the Enlightenment debated this topic.

In other respects, in France the intellectual situation was rather different than in England. Cartesian ideas held sway for many decades after Newton first emerged on the scene in the 1670s with his optics papers and in the late 1680s with the Principia ; they were especially popular at the Académie Royale des Sciences, unlike the situation in the Royal Society (Henry 2013: 120). Voltaire became famous for challenging the Cartesian French orthodoxy, traveling to England for a celebrated visit and bringing home “enlightened” ideas about philosophy, politics, and much else besides in an attempt to foment the emergence and development of a French Newtonian program. His most important publication in this regard is probably the Elements of the philosophy of Newton (Voltaire 1738/1992), which attempts to signal the “errors” of Descartes and to highlight the advantages of the Newtonian program in “Physique”. Of course, Cartesian ideas and methods retained numerous adherents and defenders in France, and so the debate between Cartesian and Newtonian ideas flourished in that environment (cf. Aiton 1972: ch. 8). But even in France, Cartesianism eventually gave way to a newer version of metaphysics associated with Leibniz and his German follower and expositor, Wolff. In 1740, Émilie du Châtelet, published a key text, Institutions de physique , or Foundations of physics (see especially the analysis in Brading 2019). In her text—which was republished in a second edition in 1742 and swiftly translated into German and Italian—she makes precisely the kind of argument that presses Hume a few years later to articulate a conception of the vis inertiae that is consistent with the experimental philosophy. She argues that the Cartesian view that extension is the essence of body is mistaken; we must conceive of material objects as exhibiting a “ force d’inertie ” if we are to understand their physical interactions properly (Du Châtelet 1742: ch. 1, §2). Perhaps not surprisingly, D’Alembert cites her text approvingly in his Treatise on Dynamics . From Du Châtelet’s point of view, this Newtonian conception of body is not inherently problematic. Problems arise, however, when some Newtonians interpret the theory of universal gravity as proving that bodies have a property of attraction or attractive power endowed by God (Du Châtelet 1742: ch. 16, §385). She accepts the idea that gravity is proportional to the masses of bodies and inversely proportional to the square of their spatial separation, arguing that this Newtonian idea of attraction “marvelously” explains the fall of bodies on earth, the tides, and various astronomical phenomena, something that the vortex theory of the Cartesians fails to do. But she denies that this acceptance entails that she must also accept the conclusion that bodies have an “essential property” called gravity or attractive force, contending that such a conclusion transcends the knowledge available to philosophers (Du Châtelet 1742: ch. 16, §388). The reason is that no one had yet demonstrated that there is no medium for gravity, such as a vortex or an aether: since gravity may depend on some medium, it may not be essential to matter per se . In this specific way, Châtelet’s work is predicated on the familiar notion that although Cartesianism had been overthrown by Newtonian ideas and methods, philosophers must nonetheless develop a proper interpretation of the Newtonian theory of gravity and of its implications. Yet unlike Voltaire, who not only rejected Cartesianism, but became famous for his ridicule of Leibnizian philosophy in Candide , Châtelet argued that philosophers should continue to work on developing the proper methodology in part by taking seriously the ideas and methods of Leibniz and Wolff. In particular, Châtelet argued that the principle of sufficient reason should be a guiding force in metaphysical theorizing, and as Leibniz had argued, it shows the fundamental error in Newton’s concept of absolute space; she added that Clarke’s method of replying to Leibniz’s argument, viz., that one can develop a non-Leibnizian or voluntarist conception of the PSR to evade the problem with absolute space, is underwhelming (Du Châtelet 1742: ch. 5, §74). She also argued that if we use the PSR to guide our thinking about science, we will be skeptical of Locke’s solution to the problem of understanding the philosophical implications of Newton’s theory of universal gravity. The idea that Newton’s theory supports the conclusion that God must have “superadded” gravity to matter avoids potential problems with asserting that gravity is “essential” to matter, something she also regards skeptically, but simply encounters other problems. First, since no one yet understood whether there was any medium underlying gravitational interactions, such as an aether, it was premature to conclude that gravity is a property of matter, even one “superadded” to it by divine fiat. After all, if there is an aether, then matter may gravitate because of its interactions with the aether, and not because of any superadded property. Second, the PSR demands that we seek rational explanations of natural phenomena in our science, but the superaddition thesis is predicated on the idea that we simply cannot understand how matter gravitates toward other matter. Newton’s science is simply taken to indicate that it does so. She was unwilling to leave the most important conclusion of the Scientific Revolution a mere mystery.

Euler’s rejection of the vis inertiae was not his only major reaction to Newton’s science. The question of whether to accept, and of how to interpret, absolute space, time and motion, and the related question of how to conceive of the relation between Newton’s work in natural philosophy and the flourishing Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics on the Continent, continued to drive conversations in the middle of the eighteenth century. Just a few years after Châtelet published her Institutions , Euler presented a novel approach to these two questions in a short paper entitled “Reflexions sur l’Espace et le Temps”, first published in 1748 in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences de Berlin . The Berlin Academy had been witnessing a vociferous debate between Wolffians and Newtonians since 1740 (a debate that would continue until roughly 1759), one in which Euler played a role. Whereas one might regard the British philosophers, especially Berkeley and Hume, as arguing that philosophical principles and commitments take a kind of precedence in driving one’s interpretations of the concepts of force, motion, space and time, Euler argued that natural philosophy—specifically, mechanics—ought to take precedence. The famous first sentence of his essay indicates why: he contends that the principles of mechanics—for instance, the principle of inertia—are so well established that it would be foolish to doubt them (Euler 1748: 324). In particular, if one’s metaphysical commitments stand in tension with the concepts of space and motion found in geometry and mechanics, then one must adjust those commitments accordingly. Euler then presented a clever argument: the law of inertia picks out rectilinear motion as a special kind of motion, so to apply it to bodies in nature, there must be a clear meaning to the idea of a straight line. But if space is merely the order of relations amongst material bodies, then any set of reference bodies we use to determine which motion is straight could itself be in motion. So to employ the idea of rectilinear motion, we require the notion of absolute space (see DiSalle 2006, 36-37).

The most important figure in German-speaking Europe to react in depth to Newton’s ideas was surely Immanuel Kant. As a young man, Kant was influenced by Euler’s argument (Friedman 1992: 16–17) in the 1748 piece. [ 26 ] Kant began grappling with Newtonian ideas at the very beginning of his career—he discussed the inverse-square law in his first publication (Kant 1747: § 10)—and they would remain central both to his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1787 [1992]) and to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786 [2002]). In the so-called pre-critical period, Kant diverged sharply from the approach toward natural philosophy defended by many Leibnizians in German-speaking Europe by deciding to accept the Newtonian theory of universal gravity, along with corresponding aspects of the Newtonian conception of matter, as a starting point for philosophical theorizing (Friedman 2012: 485–6). He makes this explicit already in 1763, in The Only Possible Argument :

I will attempt to provide an explanation of the origin of the world system according to the general laws of mechanics, not an explanation of the entire natural order, but only of the great masses of matter and their orbits, which constitute the most crudest foundation of nature … I will presuppose the universal gravitation of matter according to Newton or his followers in this project. If there are any who believe that through a definition of metaphysics formulated according to their own taste they can annihilate the conclusions established by men of perspicacity on the basis of observation and by means of mathematical inference—if there are such persons, they can skip the following propositions as something which has only a remote bearing on the main aim of this essay. (Kant 1763: AK 2: 139)

A rare case of Kantian irony, it seems. Already in this early text, Kant has clearly broken with his predecessors both in England and on the Continent, who insisted on disputing Newton’s theory of universal gravity, either on metaphysical or theological grounds. Instead, Kant’s work will be predicated on that theory. But Kant never became an orthodox Newtonian, any more than an orthodox Leibnizian (or Wolffian). This is evident from the radically different fates of two classic Newtonian concepts within the Kantian system: the idea that the theory of universal gravity shows that gravity is a feature of material bodies, along with the related concept of action at a distance, on the one hand; and absolute space, on the other. The quotation from 1763 above indicates that Kant was willing to endorse Newton’s theory of universal gravity, despite the many objections raised against it by his Leibnizian predecessors. Indeed, he was also willing to accept the most radical interpretation of that theory, one according to which every material body in the world should be understood as bearing a feature called gravity, one that involves that body in actions at a distance on all other such bodies. As Kant puts it dramatically in Proposition 7 of the second chapter of Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science : “The attraction essential to all matter is an immediate action of matter on other matter through empty space” (Kant 1786 [2002: 223]; AK 4: 512). This view is radical in two senses: first, it involves the highly controversial claim that gravity is essential to matter, which indicates that a body lacking gravitational interactions would potentially fail to count as a material entity at all (much as an earlier generation of philosophers would conceive of extension as essential to matter); and second, it also involves the debated idea that material bodies act at a distance on one another. One can conceivably endorse the latter without endorsing the former, contending, e.g., that although material bodies in the actual world act at a distance on one another, perhaps because of a divine plan, it is perfectly possible for material bodies to fail to do so under distinct worldly conditions (i.e., there may be possible worlds in which material bodies lack gravity altogether). That is, the endorsement of action at a distance does not entail the endorsement of the essentiality claim. Both ideas are controversial, and Kant strongly endorses them both. This placed him in a rather select group of radical Newtonians (Friedman 1992: 1 note 2). Kant himself understood that Newton may not have endorsed these controversial views, arguing that he was inconsistent on this score (see Remark 2 to Proposition 7 of chapter 2, AK 4: 514–16; Friedman 2012: 203–21). And yet Kant strongly resisted the other most controversial Newtonian idea, absolute space, along with the related idea of absolute motion (Friedman 2012: 35–42). In the Critique of Pure Reason , for instance, Kant expressed a basically Leibnizian sympathy by arguing that there are fundamental metaphysical (and perhaps epistemic) difficulties with thinking of space and time as existing independently of all objects and all possible relations among them as “actual entities ”( wirkliche Wesen —A23/B37) in their own right. He does so in a passage that (perhaps confusingly) characterizes the Leibnizians as also defending a kind of realism about space, but we can focus solely on his criticism of the Newtonians:

Those, however, who assert the absolute reality of space and time, whether they assume it to be subsisting or only inhering, must themselves come into conflict with the principles of experience. For if they decide in favor of the first (which is generally the position of the mathematical investigators of nature), then they must assume two eternal and infinite self-subsisting non-entities (space and time), which exist (yet without there being anything real) only in order to comprehend everything real within themselves. (A39/B56)

If one regards space (like time) as existing independently of all objects and all possible relations, and yet one admits that space is causally inert and imperceptible, as one presumably must in the late eighteenth century, then one is committed to the idea that there is a kind of infinite and eternal non-entity in the world. Space is a kind of non-entity, Kant suggests, because on the one hand it is said to exist independently of everything else, and yet on the other hand, it is said to be causally inert and imperceptible, which would distinguish it from every other sort of thing that exists. Kant simply cannot stomach this metaphysically preposterous notion. It is therefore incumbent upon him to develop a theory of space (and of motion) that meets at least two distinct criteria: (1) it coheres with his understanding of the theory of universal gravity, and of what he regards as its implication, viz. that gravity is an essential feature of material bodies; and, (2) it avoids the metaphysically problematic aspects of Newtonian absolute space. Kant tackles precisely these tasks in the Metaphysical Foundations , which was published in between the appearance of the first and second edition of the Critique , arguing that we can regard absolute space as a kind of idea of reason, an ideal that we approach asymptotically in our theorizing about motion. Absolute space is therefore nothing more than a kind of ideal within our philosophy, and no longer a harmful aspect of our ontology.

Newton’s influence on the development of philosophy did not end with the close of the eighteenth century. Most obviously, the concepts of absolute space and absolute motion continued to play fundamental roles in philosophical theorizing about space and motion more generally for the next two centuries, and they remain fundamental to discussions today (DiSalle 2006). Newton has also had a deep and lasting influence on numerous other topics in what we now call the philosophy of science, including the status of our knowledge of natural phenomena, the best ideas about scientific methodology, the status of the laws of nature, and much else besides (McMullin 2001 and Smith 2001). It is no exaggeration to say that Newton has a permanent place in the history of modern philosophy.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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• Who Was Isaac Newton? , webpage at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences

Châtelet, Émilie du | Clarke, Samuel | Descartes, René | form vs. matter | Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism | Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Newton, Isaac | Newton, Isaac: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica | Newton, Isaac: views on space, time, and motion

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Essay on Isaac Newton: The Father of Modern Science

• Updated on  
• Mar 15, 2024

Did you know Isaac Newton almost gave up on his education before discovering the laws of motion? Born in 1642, Isaac Newton was an English mathematician , physicist , astronomer, and author who is widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists in history. He is known as the father of modern physics. He made significant contributions to various fields of science and mathematics, and his work laid the foundation for many scientific principles and discoveries. Let’s find out more about Isaac Newton with the essays written below.

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Things to keep in mind while writing essay on isaac newton, essay on isaac newton in 100 words, essay on isaac newton in 200 words, essay on isaac newton in 300 words.

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• Isaac Newton was born on 4th January 1643.
• He is famous for discovering the phenomenon of white light integrated with colours which further presented as the foundation of modern physical optics.
• He is known for formulating the three laws of motion and the laws of gravitation which changed the track of physics all across the globe.
• In mathematics, he is known as the originator of calculus.
• He was knighted in 1705 hence, he came to be known as “Sir Isaac Newton”.

Issac Newton was an English scientist who made some groundbreaking discoveries in the field of science and revolutionized physics and mathematics. revolutionized physics and mathematics. He formulated the three laws of motion , defining how objects move and interact with forces. His law of universal gravitation explained planetary motion. Newton independently developed calculus, a fundamental branch of mathematics. 

Everybody knows Newton because of the apply story, in which he was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on him. His ‘Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ remains a cornerstone of scientific thought. Newton’s profound insights continue to shape our understanding of the natural world.

Also Read – Essay on Technology

Born in 1642, Isaac Newton is one of the most influential scientists of all time. His groundbreaking contributions in physics, astronomy and mathematics helped reshape the understanding of the natural world. Our science books mention Newton’s three laws of motion which brought a revolution in physics.

• Newton’s first law of motion, also known as the law of inertia, states that an object will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.
• The second law of motion states that an object’s acceleration is produced by a net force that is directly proportional to the net force’s magnitude.
• The third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

All these laws laid the foundation for classical mechanics, revolutionizing the way we comprehend the physical world. He is known as the father of modern physics.

In mathematics, Newton developed calculus independently. His work in calculus was essential for solving complex mathematical problems, making it a cornerstone of modern mathematics and science.

His work ‘Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ was published in 1687, and remains a monumental work that underpins modern science. His profound insights continue to shape our understanding of the universe, making Isaac Newton one of history’s most influential and celebrated scientists.

Isaac Newton was an English scientist who was known for his groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Thanks to his discoveries of revolutionizing our understanding of the natural world. 

One of his well-known discoveries was the three laws of motion, also known as Newton’s three laws of motion. 

• The first law, known as the law of inertia, states that objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
• The second law quantifies how forces affect an object’s motion, introducing the famous equation F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration). 
• The third law, the law of action and reaction, explains that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. 

These laws provided a comprehensive framework for understanding and predicting the behaviour of physical objects, from the motion of planets to the fall of an apple.

Another groundbreaking achievement of Newton was the discovery of the universal law of gravitation. This law states that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

It explained the mechanics of planetary motion and demonstrated that the same laws that govern objects on Earth also apply to celestial bodies, unifying the terrestrial and celestial realms.

In mathematics, Newton independently developed a powerful mathematical tool, called calculus, for analyzing rates of change and solving complex problems. His work laid the groundwork for modern calculus and transformed mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Newton’s magnum opus, “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), published in 1687, is a landmark work that brought together his laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. 

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Issac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, alchemist, author and physicist, was known for the discovery of the laws of gravity, and worked on the principles of visible light and the laws of motion.

Newton’s three laws of motion are: first law of motion (law of inertia), which states that an object will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force; The second law of motion states that an object’s acceleration is produced by a net force that is directly proportional to the net force’s magnitude; The third law of motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Issac Newton is known as the father of modern physics and was associated with Cambridge University as a physicist and mathematician.

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Newton, The Last Magician

The great man of science had more than a passing interest in alchemy..

Sir Isaac Newton, by Samuel Freeman, (1773–1857)

British Library / Art Resource, NY

Precisely at 1 p.m., just after luncheon on July 13, 1936, bidding opened on a remarkable lot at Sotheby’s auction house in London: a metal chest full of Isaac Newton’s private, hand-written papers and lab books, some almost three hundred years old, most never published.

When Cambridge University, Newton’s alma mater, had acquired the trove in 1872, a team of scholars had dedicated sixteen years to cataloging the contents. This was Newton, after all, and they were hungry for any insight into how he’d developed his theories of motion, gravity, light, and color—work that defines the very Newtonian universe we inhabit.

Strangely, after riffling through and picking out select papers, Cambridge returned virtually the entire bundle to the owner, the Earl of Portsmouth. Soon forgotten, the chest barely survived a house fire in 1891, and by 1936 one of the Earl’s descendents was selling it to make some quick cash. Sotheby’s itself barely publicized the sale—it was easily overshadowed that season by a spectacular, £140,000 auction of Rubens and Rembrandt paintings through rival house Christie’s. As the gavel fell for the last time at Sotheby’s on July 14, the bulk of Newton’s life’s work had been split up among three dozen book buyers for a pitiful £9,000.

Economist John Maynard Keynes, a Newton admirer, was one of those three dozen, though he’d heard about the auction too late to buy much. Disturbed by the “impiety” of the transactions, he began acquiring more of the papers piecemeal. In many cases, he had to play the slick antiquarian, swapping Newton papers with collectors, trying to out-connive them. Keynes later remembered, with a touch of Bloomsbury snobbery, “I managed gradually to reassemble about half of them. . . . The greater part of the rest were snatched out of my reach by a syndicate which hoped to sell them at a high price, probably in America.”

Keynes sought papers on any topic at first, but eventually concentrated on one niche—Newton’s alchemy. Few people knew the father of modern science had dabbled in alchemy; but the more Keynes collected and the more he “brood[ed] over these queer collections,” the clearer it became that alchemy wasn’t a niche to Newton at all. It was, in many ways, Newton’s life work—more vital to him than physics or mathematics ever was. This Newton “was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes concluded. “He was the last of the magicians.”

Keynes’s findings threw the standard narrative of science history into confusion. Keynes re-donated the alchemical papers to Cambridge in 1946, but most historians, still nonplussed, either ignored them or tried to explain them away. In fact, only recently have scholars begun to systematically study the entire corpus, line by line, picture by picture, rune by rune. Those efforts are getting a big boost from Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science John Walsh and science historian William Newman, both at Indiana University, who head a project to digitize and post online the thousands of pages that Newton wrote on alchemy. One quarter has been posted so far, but Newman and Walsh say they’ve already gleaned insights into not only Newton the man, but into how alchemy shaped Newton’s science.

Early in life Newton turned to alchemy as a diversion. His father died before he was born (Newton, a sickly infant, almost joined him in the grave), and Newton grew up with a distant stepfather who kept the boy’s mother away from him. Nor did Newton, too precocious for his own good, make friends among his peers.

As compensation, he disappeared into books like  Mysteries of Nature and Art —fascinated by their odd mix of occult philosophy and practical engineering. Showing early ingenuity, Newton built a water clock and other contraptions described in  Mysteries ; showing an early mischievous streak, he also built a lantern described therein, tied it to a kite, and flew it at night near his home, a spectacle “which wonderfully affrighted all the neighboring inhabitants,” he recalled. At Cambridge, Newton further developed his interest in both the practical and theoretical sides of the field, devouring books by alchemist Robert Boyle.

Newton described such work as  chymistry . And the word is a useful reminder—with its echo of modern “chemistry,” yet archaic spelling—of what alchemy meant to people in Newton’s time. Today, most people think of alchemists as either foolish necromancers or lowlifes obsessed with  chrysopoeia —turning base metals into gold. That view comes down to us largely through the enemies of alchemy, Enlightenment thinkers, for example, who wanted to stamp out “magical” thinking and, ironically, install a mechanistic, “Newtonian” outlook instead. But alchemists were important for humankind’s intellectual development—the larvae that metamorphosed into Enlightenment philosophes and modern scientists. Especially important was the later alchemists’ willingness to test their theories with experiments, even theories that conflicted with accepted doctrines. Boyle was the primary example here, but John Locke, Gottfried Leibnitz, and others exchanged letters with and befriended alchemists, too, looking to chymistry for wisdom about the natural world.

Newton’s chymistry followed this tradition in many ways, Newman says, especially his view of nature as a riddle that only a gnostic brotherhood of alchemists could unravel. At the same time, Newton was unique among alchemists for uniting his chymistry with other, seemingly disconnected scientific obsessions of his, such as optics. Newman even argues that Newton’s famous demonstration that white light was merely a combination of colored light rays owes a significant debt to the alchemy of Boyle.

In the 1660s, Boyle got tangled up in a dispute with scholastic philosophers over the essence of matter. These adherents of Aristotle believed that once a substance dissolved into something else, it lost its identity forever. Boyle devised an experiment to dissolve camphor, an aromatic chemical, in acid, at which point the camphor lost its scent. This agreed with scholastic thought. But Boyle then added water to the solution—at which point the camphor reappeared, regaining its odor and all other properties. Boyle could pull similar tricks with dissolved metals like gold. This classic alchemy proved scholastics wrong, Boyle said: Dissolved substances don’t lose their identity.

The scholastics retorted that there was no proof it was really the same camphor. When the water was added, the solution might have created the camphor anew. But Boyle rejected this reasoning. Why, he argued, should the camphor’s essence be any different because it came from an experiment and not from nature? If it talked like camphor and walked like camphor, it  was  camphor, period.

Newton studied Boyle’s arguments, and soon devised a similar theory about color. While on leave from Cambridge during an outbreak of plague, Newton began separating sunlight into colors with a prism, among other experiments. He thought they proved that colored lights were “in” white light from the start. Colleagues like the eminent Robert Hooke disagreed, arguing that the prism itself could have produced the colors as light streamed through, the way an organ pipe produces sound when air rushes through. (No one would say that sharps and flats are “in” the pipe before they’re played.)

To counter this objection, Newton adopted Boyle’s tactics. He showed he could tease white light apart into reds, yellows, greens, and blues, then meld them back together. Crucially, this synthesized white light had all the properties of sunlight. Newton argued from this that the individual colors in light had a permanent, incorruptible existence, even if humans couldn’t always sense them. Boyle had made the exact same logical points about the permanence of camphor in acid. According to Newman, Newton’s fundamental theory of color was therefore midwifed by Boyle’s alchemy.

This success with color and chymistry must have thrilled Newton—he’d uncovered secrets in nature and a little magic of his own. And although Newton expanded his work into gravity and astronomy (not to mention Biblical prophecies, another obsession), he felt pulled back to chymistry his entire working life. Indeed, he dedicated six weeks to chymistry every fall and every spring for decades, the seasons when his unheated lab was bearable—and he often worked through the unbearable months, too. In all, Newton penned over one million words (five hundred times the length of this article) on chymistry.

Merely counting words doesn’t capture the richness of the chymical work. Like all alchemists, Newton peppered his prose with gnomic shorthand. Consider this line in a recipe for “sophic mercury,” which dissolved gold and allowed the precious metal to “vegetate” and mature into the philosopher’s stone: “Marry [sulfur] with , that is our [mercury] which is impregnated with must be espoused with our gold then hast thou two sulphurs married & two s of one of[f]spring whose father is the [gold] & [silver] the mother.”

Newton also included allegorical drawings, like a head with three faces or an elaborate caduceus crowned with a Holy Spirit dove, and verses copied verbatim from other alchemists. Moreover, those million words don’t capture the countless hours Newton spent running chymistry experiments on intriguing substances like antimony and mercury. Doctors in later eras have even speculated that Newton suffered from chronic mercury poisoning as a result, which could certainly explain his peculiar personal life.

Given how much labor went into Newton’s chymistry, why did none of it come to light until the Sotheby’s auction? It wasn’t all genteel scholarly embarrassment. English alchemists had to veil their true interests because alchemy had been illegal in England since 1404. The crown feared alchemy because transforming lead into gold would have destabilized the country’s economy, through counterfeit coins. The general ban on alchemy—the Act Against Multipliers—was lifted in 1689, thanks to Boyle’s lobbying, but alchemists were still tainted by association, and counterfeiting remained a capital crime in England. (When Newton took over as director of the Royal Mint in his dotage, in fact, he had one notorious counterfeiter hanged and publicly disemboweled—and took great delight in seeing it done.)

Still, the illicit nature of chymistry doesn’t completely explain why Newton concealed his research (Boyle didn’t). There’s no delicate way to put it: Almost everyone who knew him found him disarmingly weird. He had a mean temper, probably never had sex, and suffered at least one raving breakdown, during which he wished death on Locke, one of his few friends. Thoughts of sin tormented Newton. As a young man he wrote a letter addressed to God outlining every peccadillo he ever committed, faults ranging from the touchingly innocuous—“making pies on Sunday night”—to the abusive and creepy—“punching my sister” and “threating my [step]father and mother . . . to burne them and the house over them.”

This eccentricity spilled over into his science. Curious what would happen, Newton once stared into the sun for so long he had to lie in a dark room for several days before he stopped seeing spots. He also once wedged a needle into the socket behind his eye, to see how changing the curvature of the eyeball affected his vision. But for someone willing to experiment on just about anything, Newton was very guarded about discussing his experimental results, especially in chymistry. He loathed the thought of someone figuring something new out from his ideas, and he was obsessed with getting full credit for discoveries. (This desire bared its teeth in the 1680s when Leibnitz published a theory of calculus independent of Newton’s earlier but unpublished work, at which point Newton set out to destroy Leibnitz’s reputation.)

But really, can we blame Newton for being so secretive, for obsessing? For him, so much was at stake. He wouldn’t have recognized the distinction we draw today between “real” science full of experiments and equations and alchemical pseudoscience full of spells and bootless speculation. Chymistry was one grand body of work to him, the grandest, and he’d coveted knowing nature’s secrets since boyhood. He labored so long and so secretly because chymistry seemed the most promising path to obtaining near-magical powers and near-mystical insights into nature—discoveries that would, if only he could make them, vault him into the first rank of geniuses who ever lived.

Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, D.C., where he works as a correspondent for Science . He is the author of The Disappearing Spoon , an unconventional history of the periodic table.

Funding information

The Chymistry of Isaac Newton Project at Indiana University has received $200,000 in NEH funding to edit and publish online Newton’s writings in alchemy and chemistry.

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Cambridge Digital Library

Newton papers.

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth." Sir Isaac Newton ( MS Add.3996, 88r ) Trinity College, Cambridge.

Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). They range from his early papers and College notebooks through to the ground-breaking Waste Book and his own annotated copy of the first edition of the Principia . These manuscripts along with those held at Trinity College Cambridge, King’s College Cambridge, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Royal Society and the National Library of Israel have been added to the Unesco Memory of the World Register . As well as University Library material, our collection includes two important items from The Royal Society's collections - a manuscript copy of the Principia and a collection of Newton's correspondence .

Newton was closely associated with Cambridge. He came to the University as a student in 1661, graduating in 1665, and from 1669 to 1701 he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. Under the regulations for this Chair, Newton was required to deposit copies of his lectures in the University Library. These, and some correspondence relating to the University, were assigned the classmarks Dd.4.18, Dd.9.46, Dd.9.67, Dd.9.68, and Mm.6.50.

In 1699 Newton was appointed Master of the Mint, and in 1703 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a post he occupied until his death.

After his death, the manuscripts in Newton's possession passed to his niece Catherine and her husband John Conduitt. In 1740 the Conduitts' daughter, also Catherine, married John Wallop, who became Viscount Lymington when his father was created first Earl of Portsmouth. Their son became the second earl and the manuscripts were passed down succeeding generations of the family.

In 1872 the fifth earl passed all the Newton manuscripts he had to the University of Cambridge, where they were assessed and a detailed catalogue made. Based on this catalogue, the earl generously presented all the mathematical and scientific manuscripts to the University, and it is these that form the Library's 'Portsmouth collection' (MSS Add. 3958-Add. 4007).

The remainder of the Newton papers, many concerned with alchemy, theology and chronology, were returned to Lord Portsmouth. They were sold at auction at Sotheby's in London in 1936 and purchased by other libraries and individuals.

In 2000 Cambridge University Library acquired a very important collection of scientific manuscripts from the Earl of Macclesfield, which included a significant number of Isaac Newton's letters and other papers.

A number of videos explaining aspects of Newton's work and manuscripts are available from the Newton Project's YouTube site , a selection of which are presented alongside our manuscripts.

• Overview of Newton Papers held at Cambridge University Library (from Manuscripts Department website)
• History of Isaac Newton's Papers (from Newton Project website)
• Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection
• Catalogue of the Macclesfield Collection
• Sir Isaac Newton’s Cambridge papers added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register .

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The Scientific and Mathematical Papers of Sir Isaac Newton

The scientific and mathematical papers of Sir Isaac Newton represent one of the most important archives of scientific and intellectual work on global phenomena and marks a key moment in the development of the ‘new science’ in the seventeenth century and the importance it placed on observation and an experimental approach to the study of nature. The papers document the development of Sir Isaac Newton’s thought on universal gravitation, calculus, and optics and reveal not discoveries fully formed through inspiration of a lone genius, but ideas worked out through painstaking experiments, calculations, correspondence and revisions. The inscription also includes personal notebooks, correspondence, the manuscript and annotated editions of Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica and a substantial and significant collection of alchemical, theological and administrative manuscripts.

Documentary heritage submitted by Israel and United Kingdom and recommended for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register in 2017. "The Scientific and Mathematical Papers of Sir Isaac Newton" were recommended as an addition to " The Papers of Sir Isaac Newton " inscribed in the Memory of the World Register in 2015.

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Essay on Isaac Newton

Students are often asked to write an essay on Isaac Newton in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1643, in England. He was a curious child who loved reading and exploring nature.

Discoveries

Newton is famous for discovering gravity. The story goes that an apple falling from a tree inspired him. He also developed the three laws of motion.

Contributions to Mathematics

Newton invented a type of math called calculus. It helps us understand things that change and is used in many areas today.

Newton died in 1727. His discoveries still impact science and mathematics, making him one of the greatest thinkers in history.

Also check:

• Speech on Isaac Newton

250 Words Essay on Isaac Newton

Early life and education.

Isaac Newton, born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, England, emerged as a pivotal figure in scientific revolution. His early education at King’s School, Grantham, laid the foundation for his future endeavors. Newton’s mother’s attempt to make him a farmer was thwarted by his evident intellectual curiosity, leading to his enrollment at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Developments in Mathematics and Physics

Newton’s most significant contributions lie in mathematics and physics. His work ‘Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica’ is a testament to his genius, introducing the three laws of motion, forming the basis of classical mechanics. Additionally, he developed calculus, a branch of mathematics instrumental in understanding changes in quantities.

Optics and the Theory of Colour

Newton’s work in optics revolutionized understanding of light and colour. His experiments with prisms led to the discovery that white light is a composite of all colors in the spectrum, debunking the then-prevailing belief of color being a mixture of light and darkness.

Legacy and Impact

Newton’s legacy extends beyond his lifetime, with his principles still being fundamental to modern scientific thought. His laws of motion and universal gravitation shaped our understanding of the physical world, while his work in optics and mathematics has far-reaching implications in various scientific fields.

In conclusion, Isaac Newton’s contributions to science and mathematics have been monumental, influencing centuries of scientific thought and discovery. His life and work continue to inspire curiosity and innovation in the quest for knowledge.

500 Words Essay on Isaac Newton

Introduction.

Isaac Newton, born on January 4, 1643, in Woolsthorpe, England, was a renowned physicist and mathematician. He is often hailed as one of the most influential scientists of all time. His contributions to the fields of physics, mathematics, and astronomy have had a profound impact on our understanding of the natural world.

Newton’s Early Life and Education

Newton was born prematurely and was not expected to survive. His father had died three months before his birth, leaving him with his mother, who later remarried. Newton was then raised by his grandmother. Despite these early hardships, Newton’s intellectual curiosity led him to the University of Cambridge, where he studied from 1661 to 1665.

The Birth of Newtonian Physics

During his time at Cambridge, Newton developed the foundations of calculus, though it wasn’t until later that he fully developed and published his work. The university closed in 1665 due to the Great Plague, and Newton returned home. It was during this period, known as his annus mirabilis, or “year of wonders”, that he made some of his most significant discoveries.

Among these was the law of universal gravitation, inspired reportedly by the fall of an apple from a tree. He proposed that every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This was a revolutionary concept that provided a unified explanation for terrestrial and celestial mechanics.

Newton’s Three Laws of Motion

In his work “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, Newton outlined his three laws of motion. The first law, often called the law of inertia, states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. The second law established the relationship between force, mass, and acceleration. The third law, known as the action-reaction law, states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Contributions to Optics

Newton’s contributions were not limited to physics and mathematics. He also made significant advancements in the field of optics. His experiments with prisms led to the discovery that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors, which he described in his work “Opticks”. He also built the first practical reflecting telescope, known as the Newtonian telescope.

Isaac Newton’s contributions to science have shaped our understanding of the physical world. His laws of motion and universal gravitation laid the groundwork for classical physics, and his work in optics expanded our understanding of light and color. Despite personal hardships and the tumultuous times in which he lived, Newton’s relentless curiosity and dedication to scientific exploration cemented his place in history as one of the greatest scientists of all time. His legacy continues to inspire scientists and researchers, reminding us of the boundless possibilities of human intellect.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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• Essay on Internet
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The essay was so perfect but the date of birth is not same in 1st and 3rd essay.so may be the date of birth is wrong at in one essay.

Fixed, thanks.

Very nice and good essay

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Scientists & Inventors — Isaac Newton

Essays on Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton was a pivotal figure in the scientific revolution, and writing an essay on him is important in order to understand his contributions to the field of physics and mathematics. Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation have had a profound impact on our understanding of the natural world and continue to influence scientific thought to this day. By researching and writing about Newton, students can gain a deeper appreciation for the history of science and the power of human curiosity and intellect.

When writing an essay on Isaac Newton, it is important to start by conducting thorough research. This may involve reading primary sources, such as Newton's own writings, as well as secondary sources that provide context and analysis of his work. It is also important to consider the historical and cultural context in which Newton lived and worked, as this can provide valuable insights into his ideas and their impact.

Another important tip for writing an essay on Newton is to clearly outline the key points and arguments that will be addressed. This can help to ensure that the essay is well-organized and focused, and can also make the writing process more efficient. Additionally, it is important to use evidence and examples to support any claims or assertions made in the essay, as this can help to strengthen the overall argument.

Finally, when writing about Newton, it is important to consider the broader implications of his work and its relevance to contemporary scientific thought. By connecting Newton's ideas to modern scientific discoveries and theories, students can demonstrate the ongoing relevance of his work and its enduring impact on the world of science.

Best Isaac Newton Essay Topics

• The impact of Isaac Newton's laws of motion on modern physics
• Newton's role in the scientific revolution
• The rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over the invention of calculus
• The lesser-known aspects of Isaac Newton's personal life and struggles
• The influence of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica on the scientific community
• Newton's contributions to the field of optics and light theory
• The religious and alchemical beliefs of Isaac Newton
• Newton's lasting legacy in the field of mathematics
• The controversy surrounding Isaac Newton's work on alchemy and the occult
• The significance of Isaac Newton's laws of gravitation in understanding the universe
• Newton's impact on the field of astronomy
• The role of Isaac Newton in the Royal Society of London
• The connection between Isaac Newton's work and the Industrial Revolution
• The portrayal of Isaac Newton in popular culture and literature
• Newton's influence on the Enlightenment era
• The reception and impact of Newton's work during his lifetime
• Newton's contributions to the field of engineering
• The relationship between Isaac Newton and his contemporaries in the scientific community
• The cultural and historical context of Newton's contributions to science
• The relevance of Isaac Newton's work in modern-day physics and mathematics

Isaac Newton Essay Topics Prompts

• If Isaac Newton could time travel to the present day, what do you think would surprise him the most about modern physics and mathematics?
• Write a letter from the perspective of Isaac Newton, reflecting on his greatest achievements and regrets.
• Create a dialogue between Isaac Newton and a contemporary scientist, discussing their differing views on the nature of the universe.
• Imagine a world where Isaac Newton's laws of motion were never discovered. How do you think this would have impacted the development of science and technology?
• Write a biography of Isaac Newton, highlighting the lesser-known aspects of his life and work.

Newton’s Three Laws of Motion

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The Effect of Isaac Newton’s Discoveries on Our Society Today

Sir isaac newton’s life, newton’s system of the world in the google era, application of newton’s laws of motion in sports, newton’s laws of motion, newton’s second law of motion: experiment report, physical principle of a catapult to the fire service, newton’s laws in space technology, research of applying newton’s laws of motion to the countermovement vertical jump, relevant topics.

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Chasing the clues in isaac newton’s manuscripts.

The tricks and tools book sleuths use to date the undated.

The dispersal of Isaac Newton’s chaotic manuscripts at a Sotheby’s sale in 1936 was the final chapter in a centuries-long disordering of the scientist’s wide-ranging collection of notes. In the wake of the sale, little by little, order has been restored and, arguably, imposed.

What were described at his death as “reams of loose and foul papers” have over the years been organized by their custodians. For instance, some of the first collectors, including economist John Maynard Keynes, tried to regather the manuscripts by focusing on theme (alchemical manuscripts in Keynes’s case). More recently, large-scale digital humanities projects have been reuniting the manuscripts—if only in virtual form—and organizing them by subject and other criteria.

The oldest and largest of these digital ventures is the Newton Project , now based at Oxford University. Created in 1998, the project has transcribed more than four million words of Newton’s writings, primarily those in physics, mathematics, and theology. Working in tandem with the Newton Project is the Chymistry of Isaac Newton at Indiana University, an undertaking to produce a similarly comprehensive, web-based edition of Newton’s papers but limited in scope to alchemical manuscripts. I am very familiar with the latter project; in 2003 I was hired as the first full-time employee, and I now serve as senior consulting editor. There are about a million words in the alchemical manuscripts, which the Chymistry of Isaac Newton is steadily putting online.

The mass of digital surrogates and transcriptions assembled by these projects allow scholars to ask some previously unanswerable questions: Is there any way to make chronological sense of these mostly undated manuscripts? Is there any way we can establish—nearly 300 years after their creation—which document came before which or even what year some of them were written in? The answer is, surprisingly, yes. There are tools and techniques based on content, orthography , and physical characteristics that we can wield like detectives as we try to put Newton’s notes in order.

The first among these techniques—the analysis of the manuscripts’ contents—depends on the skills of the historian.

When the Newton manuscripts owned by chemist and bibliophile Roy Neville first came to the Science History Institute’s Othmer Library in 2004, one of the first historians to examine the manuscripts since the Sotheby’s sale in 1936 was Lawrence Principe, who recognized that the notes detailed two of three “periods,” or steps, in the making of the philosophers’ stone. Principe knew these steps had originally been described by Robert Boyle and had become the topic of an exchange of letters between Newton and John Locke (yes, that John Locke ) after Boyle’s death. From the correspondence and a corresponding entry in Locke’s diary, Principe was able to pinpoint the date of the manuscript to May 1692.

The content of the manuscripts can help date them even in the absence of corroborating dated material, as with the Newton–Locke correspondence. The preponderance of Newton’s alchemical papers are reading notes. Newton spent years trying to fight his way through the thicket of metaphors and Decknamen (code names) used by alchemists to misdirect all but the most worthy from understanding their secrets. One of the ways he did this was by cross-referencing terminology used by different authors in the hope of triangulating to the truth. He kept mostly clear records of the passages he copied out from alchemical authors, noting the work and page number where he found the material.

In some cases, we can use those references to provide a terminus post quem , a “limit after which” something must have been written. For example, in a manuscript known as Keynes Ms. 53, now at King’s College Library in Cambridge, Newton cites “Le Triomphe, p. 42, 43, 44.” This citation refers to a French translation of the anonymous German Uralter Ritter-Krieg, first published in Amsterdam by Henri Wetstein in 1689, indicating that the manuscript could not have been written before that time.

But dating manuscripts in this way is not always so straightforward. Sometimes we can distinguish which edition of a book Newton is referring to by matching his page reference to the material in the book, but this works only if the type was reset between editions and the contents end up falling on different pages, in which case Newton’s page references act as a kind of fingerprint that distinguishes one from the other. But often a reprint was simply a line-for-line copy of an earlier edition. There’s a good reason for this—setting and justifying type was hard, time-consuming work. It was much easier to copy the work of the original compositor than to start over again.

The vagaries of the early printing industry can make it even more difficult to use page references as dating devices because it was also common for publishers to reissue previously printed sheets in a new “edition.” Books were commonly stored as unbound stacks of printed sheets. If a book did not sell out, it was child’s play for a printer to throw away the old, stale title page from years past, print a new title page with the current year, and—presto!—a new “edition.” I use quotes around “edition” because bibliographers call this kind of shenanigan a ­ reissue ; a new edition arises only if the type has been physically reset. (It doesn’t matter if it’s a line-for-line copy; as long as it’s been reset, it’s called a new edition.)

This repurposing and reissuing can become downright Byzantine. Consider one of Newton’s sources, Trois traitez de la philosophie naturelle . It was originally published in Paris in 1612 in a 103-page edition by Guillaume Marette. Almost 50 years later another publisher reissued the book in a clandestine 98-page edition. Confusingly, much—but not all—of the print run falsely bore the date 1612, named the publishers as “Widow of M. Guillemot and S. Thiboust,” and included a colophon (a statement of printing information found on the final page of a book) also dated 1612. 

The widow of M. Guillemot and S. Thiboust were indeed publishers who had been active in 1612, though the pirate publisher possessed neither of their printer’s marks to complete the forgery. We can tell this second “1612 edition” was actually printed in 1659 because other copies have the identical setting of type but bear the date 1659 and are attributed to two different Parisian publishers, Thomas Jolly and Jacques d’Allin. (Whether either of these men was the actual 1659 publisher is an open question.) The colophon was also updated to 1659 in the Jolly and d’Allin copies, but the deceit was not perfectly executed: at least one copy ended up with the 1612 colophon.

This book’s story gets even more convoluted. The unsold pirate copies were obtained in 1682. We don’t know which imprints were bought because the new publisher, well-known alchemical publisher Laurent d’Houry, discarded the title pages and reissued the sheets with a new title ( Philosophie naturelle de trois anciens philosophes ), a new preface, and a new translation of English alchemist George Ripley’s Traité du Mercure , which d’Houry appended to the end as pages 99 to 106. He did not, however, dispose of the 1612 or 1659 colophons, which sit awkwardly on page 98 after the word FIN (“the end”), in the midst, not at the end, of the printed text.

While the method of dating Newton’s manuscripts by the sources he references is sound, 17th-century publishers can throw us a curveball from time to time. For this reason, it is helpful to have a bibliographical expert on the team, which is the role I play for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton to undertake this kind of analysis.

In the absence of textual evidence, the physical manuscripts themselves can help suggest a composition date. One promising technique relies on watermarks.

All paper was handmade until the early 19th century. From the 13th century onward, most paper had watermarks, which acted as trademarks for the mill or region of mills producing the paper. Scholars have long used watermarks to roughly date paper. But the same watermark design might be used for decades and decades on end, so on their own they are only so useful for dating.

Fortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to create exact duplicates of watermarks over extended periods of time. Scholars have learned to spot evidence of these changes in the paper itself, and this knowledge often allows them to date a sheet’s manufacture quite accurately. To understand how, it helps to know how paper was made.

The process began with a papermaker passing a slurry of fibers through a rectangular sieve about the size of a cafeteria tray. The sieve was constructed of a wooden frame with a series of regularly spaced thin, wooden ribs running parallel to the shorter side of the mould. Attached to the top of each of these ribs was a tiny brass chain, and running through the links of the chains, parallel to the longer side of the mould, were scores of thin brass wires. When the slurry passed through the wires, less material was deposited where the water was obstructed by the chains, creating chain lines . If you hold the paper up to the light, you can see a series of parallel lines about an inch or two apart that are lighter than the rest of the paper. Papermakers as far back as the 13th century figured out they could manipulate this effect to produce decorations by sewing a design with brass thread onto the wires. Where the sewn pattern obstructed the flow of the slurry, the paper would be thinner and pass more light, creating a watermark.

Papermakers worked hard, producing hundreds of sheets of paper a day, and their moulds wore out after a year or so of use. The design sewn onto the new mould would not be identical to the one in the mould it was replacing. And this provides the potential for dating documents rather precisely based on their watermarks.

To speed their workflow, a team of papermakers used two moulds that were twins, so in principle half the sheets in a ream of paper would have one watermark and the other half would have its twin.

Paper was expensive, but we assume Newton bought enough to hold him for a few months or even up to a few years. Each clean sheet of paper he took off the stack should then have one of two watermarks. If we can find those watermarks in dated manuscripts, like letters or legal documents, they should provide the time frame for other undated manuscripts with the same watermarks.

This is the approach being used in a new research project, which brings together institutions that have undated alchemical manuscripts—for example, the Huntington Library and Science History Institute—with an institution that has dated Newton papers, such as the U.K. National Archives. By virtue of Newton’s appointment as warden and then master of the Royal Mint, there is a large body of dated correspondence and legal documents at the National Archives whose watermarks we hope to match to alchemical manuscripts.

This is easier said than done. Watermarks are tricky to image, especially on pages that have writing on them. (That is to say, all the interesting ones.)

For many years the gold standard in imaging watermarks was beta radiography, which worked by sandwiching a watermarked page between a piece of photographic paper and a thin sheet doped with a radioactive compound. After the sheets- were left clamped together for some hours, the beta particles released in radioactive decay would expose the film, more in areas where the paper was thinner and less where it was thicker, exactly the sort of effect that makes a watermark easier to see. Unfortunately, the process is expensive and time-consuming, making it impractical to implement on the scale necessary for this project. We need an easier method.

The National Archives has had some success manipulating ordinary reflected-light and backlit images of the same manuscript. Digitally subtracting one image from the other produces an enhanced picture of the underlying watermark. This method is fast and easy but requires reimaging of all the materials to perfectly align the reflected-light and backlit images. We are also investigating using infrared transmissive photography on the premise that the type of ink used by Newton is transparent under infrared light. A recent trial with some of the Huntington Library’s manuscripts was extremely promising, producing images similar to the reflected-light/backlit method but with a single exposure.

But we really want to be able to include far more Newton manuscripts than we can afford to reimage. And this is where machine learning comes in. Watermarks  can  be seen in photographs, but they are very difficult to pick out, especially amid the confusion of the writing on the page. Perhaps a neural network, trained on a data set of watermark images already compiled by American institutions and the National Archives, could extract and identify watermarks from a plain, reflected-light image? That would allow us to incorporate the watermarks from hundreds of already-imaged Newton manuscripts, such as those at Cambridge University Library, into the project database.

And there’s more potential for machine learning. Watermark investigators use a few tricks to characterize the small variations in the moulds used by a papermaker over time, for instance, by recording precisely where a design intersects the chain lines or noting how far from the chain lines the furthest left and right extent of the design are. But for the most part, matching two identical pieces of paper requires careful examination of each and every watermark, and there are liable to be dozens or scores of different watermarks in the Newton papers. What if we could train artificial intelligence to match identical watermarks? Such a program could be used to classify the hundreds or thousands of watermarks used in handmade paper across Europe and across the centuries.

Watermarks aren’t the end of the tools at our disposal to make order out of Newton’s manuscripts. For many years scholars have tried to date Newton manuscripts based on changes in his handwriting over his lifetime, but this method is now considered unreliable. However, there is still some value in this approach.

Historian William Newman noticed that the way Newton makes certain symbols seems to change over time. For instance, the symbol for the planet Saturn and the metal lead (♄) looks like an  h  with a cross through the ascender, as in a  t . In early manuscripts, Newton doesn’t bother crossing the ascender; in late manuscripts he always crosses the ascenders. So if all the lead symbols are uncrossed, a manuscript is generally early; if they’re all crossed, it’s late. If the symbol usage is mixed, the manuscript is probably somewhere in-between.

Similarly, in earlier manuscripts Newton consistently misspells the Latin word  separare  as “seperare,” but in later manuscripts he corrects this error. His English spelling is probably too inconsistent—sometimes comically so—to attempt the same.

A potentially more scientific approach involves analyzing the ink Newton used. The first alchemical recipe I encountered as a transcriber for the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project was near the beginning of a document known as  Cambridge University Additional Manuscripts 3975 . It is titled “To make excellent Ink.” At the conclusion of the recipe is this charming note: “With this Ink new made I wrote this.” Newton, like many of his chemically adept contemporaries, made his own iron gall ink. Could differences in the batches of ink help determine the sequence of their composition? (Chymistry of Isaac Newton project manager Wallace Hooper used the color of ink in Galileo’s manuscripts to try to figure out their sequence of composition. The Chymistry of Isaac Newton is now trying something much more sophisticated.)

Newton made his ink from oak galls, gum arabic, copperas (impure iron sulfate), and beer. Needless to say, none of these were laboratory-grade reagents, and we would expect the chemical composition of the ink to vary considerably from batch to batch. So, is there a nondestructive way to distinguish different batches of Newton’s ink? This kind of information would be helpful in situations where Newton may have revised his notes months or years after their initial composition.

The answer is, we hope, yes, and the method of choice is  X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy  (XRF). In XRF a sample is bombarded by X-rays. When an X-ray dislodges an electron in one of the lower energy states in an atom, an electron in a higher energy state will repopulate the lower level, but to do so the electron must discard some energy in the form of a photon. The X-rays emitted when changing from one energy level to another are characteristic for each element. By collecting a range of X-ray energies coming back from the sample, the XRF spectrometer can determine both the elements in a sample and their proportions. By  plotting characteristic ratios  of iron, copper, and zinc in Newton’s ink, we hope to be able to identify and date different batches and so reveal the relationship between manuscripts and, consequently, when they were written.

In Query 31 of his  Opticks , Newton  famously asks , “Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting them but also upon one another for producing a great part of the Phaenomena of Nature?” He was groping toward the idea that there were tiny constituents of matter that attracted or repelled one another, thereby producing chemical effects.

It is charming to think now that those tiny atoms, either the chemical impurities in the ink with which he wrote those words or in the semiconductors in the imaging and computer systems used to analyze them, are providing the means to make sense of the writings of the man who conceived them.

Funding for a portion of this research is provided by NSF award 2021012, “A Multidimensional Reconstruction of the Order of Composition of Historical Manuscripts from Textual and Material Evidence.” The research on watermarks is a collaborative project jointly funded by NEH grant HC-278119-21 and an Arts and Humanities Research Council (U.K.) grant, “Digital approaches to the capture and analysis of watermarks using the manuscripts of Isaac Newton as a test case,” whose participating institutions are Indiana University, the Huntington Library, the Science History Institute, Cambridge University, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

James R. Voelkel is the curator of rare books at the Science History Institute and a senior advisory editor to the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project.

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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nilay Patel

Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today’s episode with Nilay Patel. Listen wherever you get your podcasts .

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?

Nilay patel discusses the near-future of an internet as a.i.-generated content improves..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Earlier this week, we did an episode on how to use A.I. right now. Now, I want to turn the question around and look at how A.I. is being used on you right now. One of the conversations has been sticking in my head was with this person in the A.I. world who was saying to me that if you look at where use has been sticky, if you look at where people keep using it day after day, you’re looking at places where the product doesn’t need to be very good. That’s why it’s really helpful for college and high school students, college and high school papers — they’re often not very good. That’s sort of their point. It’s why it’s working pretty well for a very low-level coding tasks. That kind of work doesn’t need to be very good. It gets checked and compiled, and so on.

But there’s something else that it is working really well for, which is spewing mediocre content onto the internet. And the reason is that a lot of what is on the internet right now isn’t very good. Its point is not to be good — spam isn’t very good, marketing emails aren’t very good, social media bots aren’t very good. Frankly, a lot of social media posters even when they’re not bots are not very good.

There are all kinds of websites and internet operations that are filler content designed to give search engines something to index — filler content structured to do well in a Google result so people click on it and then see an ad.

Something you’re going to hear a lot of in this episode is the term S.E.O., and that is what we’re talking about: Search Engine Optimized. Things that are built to rank highly in Google and Bing just to get somebody to click on the website. It doesn’t always matter to that person if they read the website.

But into this comes A.I. Over the last year, Google and the big social platforms — they have been flooded with A.I. spam, flooded with fake news sites filled with stolen or made up stories. There are TikToks of A.I. voices reading random text off of Reddit, nonsensical YouTube videos for kids. It’s no novel observation to say the internet has felt like it is in a state of decay for a while.

Google search results, Facebook, Twitter, or X, YouTube, TikTok — all of it felt better, more human, more delightful, more spontaneous, more real a few years ago. So what happens when this flood of content hits this decaying internet?

And then — and I actually think this is the harder, weirder question — what happens when this flood of A.I. content gets better? What happens when it doesn’t feel like garbage anymore? What happens when we don’t know if there’s a person on the other end of what we’re seeing or reading or hearing?

Should we care? What if that content is actually better than a lot of what we’re getting right now? Is that an internet we want to be on or not?

My friend Nilay Patel is the co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge, and host of the great “Decoder” podcast. And I got to be honest, I can’t tell from this conversation if Nilay is more or less optimistic than me because he seems to think A.I. is going to break the internet. But he seems kind of happy about it.

Before we get into the actual conversation here, we are nominated for a Webby — speaking of hopefully good things on the internet — in the Best Interview Talk Show category. We are up against Oprah here, so we are decided underdogs, but this is a voting category so if we’re going to win, we need your help. You can vote using the link in the show notes or go to vote.webbyawards.com

And as always, if you want to email me with guest suggestions or thoughts on the episode, that is [email protected].

Nilay Patel, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

Let’s just begin with the big question here, which is what is A.I. doing to the internet right now?

It is flooding our distribution channels with a cannon-blast of — at best — C+ content that I think is breaking those distribution channels.

Why would it break them?

So most of the platforms the internet are based on the idea that the people using those platforms will in some sort of crowdsourced way find the best stuff. And you can disagree with that notion. I think maybe the last 10 years have proven that that notion is not percent true when it’s all people.

When you increase the supply of stuff onto those platforms to infinity, that system breaks down completely. Recommendation algorithms break down completely, our ability to discern what is real and what is false break down completely, and I think importantly, the business models of the internet break down completely. So if you just think about the business model of the internet as — there’s a box that you can upload some content into, and then there’s an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box, and then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box, all of that breaks.

My favorite example of this is Amazon, which allows people to self-publish books. Their response to the flood of A.I. generated books was to limit the number of books you can upload to three books in a day. This is really — like that’s a ridiculous response to this. It just implies that the systems that we’ve built to organize audiences and deliver the right thing to the right person at the right time, they’re not capable of an increase in supply at the level that A.I. is already increasing this.

Thank you for bringing in the supply language. So, I’ve been trying to think about this as this supply and demand mismatch. We have already had way more supply than there is demand. I wasn’t buying a lot of self-published Amazon books. Is the user experience here actually different?

I think that’s a great question. The folks who write the algorithms, the platforms, their C.E.O.s, they will all tell you this is just a new challenge for us to solve. We have to out what is human, what is A.I.-generated. I actually think the supply increase is very meaningful. Like, maybe the most meaningful thing that will happen to the internet because it will sort out the platforms that allow it to be there and have those problems, and the places that don’t. And I think that has not been a sorting that has occurred on the internet in quite some time, where there’s two different kinds of things.

The example that I’ll give you is, every social media platform right now is turning into a short-form video Home Shopping Network. LinkedIn just added short form videos. Like, they’re all headed towards the same place all the time because they all have the same pressures.

Didn’t we already pivot to video a couple years ago?

We pivoted to video — I actually love it when LinkedIn adds and takes away these features that other platforms have. They added stories because Snapchat and Instagram had stories, and they took the stories away because I don’t think LinkedIn influencers want to do Instagram Reels, but now they’re adding it again.

And what you see is those platforms, their product — the thing that makes them money — is advertising, which is fine. But they don’t actually sell anything in the end. They sell advertising. Someone else down the line has to make a transaction. They have to buy a good or a service from someone else. And if you don’t have that, if you’re just selling advertising that leads to another transaction, eventually you optimize the entire pipe to the transaction to get people to buy things, which is why TikTok is now — like all of TikTok is TikTok Shop, because they just want you to make a transaction. And that those platforms are going to be most open to A.I., because that is the most optimizable thing to get people to make a transaction. And I think real people will veer away from that.

So I want to hold on to something that you’re getting at here. Which, to me, is one of the most under-discussed parts of A.I., which is how do you actually make money off of it? And right now, there are not actually that many ways.

So, what you can do is you can pay some money to the big A.I. companies. So you get the pro-version of their models. There is a certain amount of enterprise software flying around. You can subscribe to versions of Microsoft Copilot, or there’s going to be more things like that, where you can subscribe to something that is supposed to get you to buy the next iteration of Slack or whatever the enterprise software is. But it is hard to not notice that a lot of the A.I. is being built by companies that exist on advertising.

Google has a huge A.I. program, Meta has a huge A.I. program, and advertising is fundamentally a persuasion game. They are trying to persuade you to do something with the advertising to buy something. And right now, it’s pretty bad. I always think it’s funny how long after I make a significant purchase I will be advertised to make that purchase again.

It’s like, you just bought a fair amount of luggage, would you like any more luggage from the same company you already bought it from? It’s a very weird — but if this gets good, what is that? What are safe business models and what are very unethical ones, because when we talk about harms and benefits from A.I., how people are making money off of it is going to be a pretty big intermediary there.

Yeah, I’ve been talking to a lot of C.E.O.s of web companies and email companies on Decoder for the past year. I asked them all the same question, why would you start a website? Why would you send an email? And so, you asked the C.E.O. of Squarespace or Wix or we just had the C.E.O. of MailChimp on the show. And her answer is a little terrifying. Like, maybe openly terrifying.

She’s like well collect enough data on you, and then we’ll know exactly when to send you an email so that you buy the right thing at the right time. And we’ll just have A.I. automate that whole process. So you come to the website for your local dry cleaner or luggage store, you type in your email address to get the 10 percent off coupon, we look at what you were looking at. And then somewhere down the line when some other data broker has told us that you searched for a flight, we will send you a precisely targeted generated email that says you’re going to Paris? Buy this suitcase that matches your style from our store at this dynamically generated price.

But how is A.I. changing that at all because that sounds to me like the thing that is already happening.

So, this is what I mean by the increase in scale. That’s the dream. This is supposed to be what actually happens, but they can only do it in broad cohorts, which is why you get the luggage email after you’ve bought the luggage email or the luggage ad, after you bought the luggage ad.

They know you are a person who used a Wi-Fi network in a certain location at a certain time, they can track that all over the place. They know what you’ve searched for. They know that you went and made a luggage transaction. You are now categorized into people who are likely to buy luggage, whether or not that loop was closed. You put some luggage in a shopping cart. But that’s still a cohort, they can only do that broadly. And these cohorts can be pretty refined, but they can only do it broadly. With A.I. the idea is we can do that to you individually — the A.I. will write you an email, we’ll write you a marketing message, will set you a price. That isn’t 100x increase the amount of email that will be generated.

So now our email algorithms will be overflooded with commercial pitches generated by A.I. And this sort of makes sense, right? It makes sense for a Google to want to be able to dynamically generate A.I. advertising across the entire web. It makes sense for Meta to invest massively in A.I. so that when you’re watching Instagram and you scroll a dynamically generated Instagram video, that is an ad just for you appears. And all of that is down to their belief in targeting — their absolute belief that they can sell more products for their clients by targeting the ads more directly. And you are in that uncanny valley, where the targeting doesn’t actually work as well as it should and no one will admit it.

When I get spammy advertising I don’t really think about there being a human on the other end of it. Maybe to some degree there is, but it isn’t part of the transaction happening in my head. There are a lot of parts of the internet that I do think of there being a human on the other end — social media, reviews on Amazon, books — I assume the person who wrote the book is a person. How much of what I’m currently consuming may not be done by human in the way I think it is, and how much do you think that’s going to be in a year, or two, or three years?

I’m guessing your media diet is pretty well human-created because I know that you are very thoughtful about what you consume and what signals you’re sending to the algorithms that deliver your content. I think for most people —

My mom’s, let’s use my mom’s.

Mom’s are good. I would love to take my mom’s phone and throw it into the ocean and never let her have it again. I openly fear what content comes through my mother through WhatsApp. It terrifies me that I don’t have a window into that. I can’t monitor it. The same software I want to use to watch my daughter’s internet consumption, I would love to apply it to my parents because I don’t think they have the media literacy — they’re much older — to even know, OK, this might be just some A.I.-generated spam that’s designed to make me feel a certain way.

And I think that is the heart of what’s coming. I think right now it’s higher than people think, the amount of A.I. generated noise, and it is about to go to infinity. And the products we have to help people sort through those things, fundamentally our intention with that. Google is the heart of this tension — you can take any business at Google and say what happens when the A.I. flood comes to you? And I don’t think they’re ready for it.

How can they not be ready for that?

Because they’re the ones making it. This is the central tension of — in particular, I think Google. So, Google depends on the web, the richness of the web is what Sundar Pichai will tell you. He used to run search, he thinks about the web. He cares about it, and you look at the web and you’re like, you didn’t make this rich at all. You’ve made this actually pretty horrible for most people most of the time. Most people — if you search Google to get a credit card, that is a nightmarish experience — like, fully nightmarish. It feels like getting mugged.

We just went on vacation. And I googled a restaurant review in Cancun, and I got about halfway through the actual review when I realized it was sponsored content by Certified Angus Beef. And just in the middle of this review, they’re like this restaurant uses this kind of beef and here’s why it’s great. And I was like — this is — I read an ad. And Google should have told me that this was an ad. Like, this isn’t useful to me in any way — like, I’m discarding this. I don’t want this anymore.

I don’t think Google can discern what is good or bad about the web. I don’t think Google has reckoned with how it’s incentives have shaped the web as a whole. And I certainly don’t think that people who are making Google search can say A.I. is bad — A.I. content is bad, because the whole other part of Google that is making the A.I. content can’t deal with that.

This helps explain a story that I found very strange. So, 404 Media, which is a sort of newer outlet reporting on tech. They found that Google News was boosting stolen A.I. versions of news articles — and we’re seeing this all over. An article by me or by some other journalist shows up in another place, very slightly rewritten by an A.I. system, with an A.I. generated author and photo on top of it. So, we’re seeing a lot of this.

And when 404 Media asked Google about this, Google News said that for them, it was not a really relevant question whether an article was by an A.I. or a human. That struck me as a very strange thing to say, to admit. Is your view that it’s because their business is in the future replacing human-generated content with A.I., and saying that’s good — like, that’s the thing happening at the center there?

Yeah. Fundamentally, I think if you are at Google and the future of your stock price depends on Gemini being a good competitor to GPT-4 or 5 or whatever OpenAI has, cannot run around saying this is bad. The things it makes are bad.

I think this is actually in stark contrast to how people feel about that right now. One of the funniest cultural trends of the moment is that saying something is A.I.-generated is actually a great way to say it’s bad.

So, I saw people reacting to the cover of the new Beyoncé album, “Cowboy Carter,” which is a picture of her on a stunning horse. It’s Beyoncé, it’s very obviously human made, and people don’t like it. Like, was this made by A.I.? And it’s like well, you know for a fact that Beyoncé did not have A.I. generate the cover of — like, you can look at it and you can discern that it isn’t. But you can say, was this A.I.-generated? And that is code for this is bad.

What about when it’s not?

I don’t know how fast that is coming. I think that is farther away than people think. I think ‘will it fool you on a phone screen?’ is here already, but ‘is this good’ is, I think, farther away than —

But a lot of internet content is bad.

That’s fair.

I mean, you know this better than me. Look, I think it is axiomatic that A.I. content is worse right now than it will ever be.

I mean the advance in image generation over the past year has been significant. That’s very real. And preparing for this conversation, I found myself really obsessing over this question, because one way to talk to you about this is, there’s all this spammy garbage coming from A.I. that is flooding the internet.

But you can imagine an A.I. developer sitting in the third chair here and saying, yeah sure, but eventually it’s not going to be spammy garbage. We’re getting better at this. And compared to what people are getting from a lot of websites, if you’re going to Quora or ask.com or parts of Reddit or whatever, we can do better than that. The median article within three years is going to be better than the median human-produced piece of content.

And I really — I found that I did not know how to answer the question in myself — is that a better or a worse internet? To take almost Google’s side on this, should it matter if it’s done by a human or an A.I., or is that some kind of — what’s the word — like, sentimentality on my part?

I think there’s a sentimentality there. If you make a content farm that is the best content farm, that has the most answers about when the Super Bowl starts, and those pages are great. I think that’s a dead end business. Google is just going to answer the questions. I think that’s fine. I think if you ask Google what time the Super Bowl is, Google should just tell you. I think if you ask Google how long to boil an egg, Google can just tell you. You don’t need to go to some web page laden with ads and weird headings to find those answers. But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.

And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that’s the thing that the platforms won’t be able to find. That’s why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone’s making the same thing all the time. It’s because we’ve optimized for the distribution, and people get bored and that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give that credit to, especially an A.I. developer who can only look backwards.

I’m going to spend some time thinking about the idea that boredom is an under-discussed driver of our culture. But I want to get at something else in there — this idea of Google answering the question. We’re already seeing the beginnings of these A.I. systems that you search the question that might — at another time — have brought you to The Verge, to CNN, to The New York Times, to whatever.

But now, perplexity — there’s a product, Arc. They’ll basically use A.I. to create a little web page for you. The A.I. itself will read, “read”— in quotation marks — the A.I. itself will absorb some websites, create a representation of them for you, and you’ll never go to the place you were that actually created that data about the past that A.I. used to give you something in the present.

Casey Newton, at Platformer, his word was he felt revulsion, and that was how I felt about Arc’s product here. You take all this work other people have done, you remix it under your thing, they don’t get the visit to their web page, nobody has the experience with the work that would lead them to subscribe. But two things in the long run happen from that.

One is that you destroy the score of growing value, growing informational value that you need to keep the internet healthy. You make it say impossible to do the news gathering that allows you to be news because there’s no business model for it. The other is that you also destroy the training data for the A.I. itself, because it needs all that work that we’re all doing to train.

The thing they need is data. The A.I. is polluting that data with A.I. content currently, but it also can begin to destroy that data by making it unprofitable for people to create more of it in the future. I think Ryan Broderick has called A.I. search a doomsday cult. How do you think about this sort of deeper poisoning of the informational commons?

I think there’s a reason that the A.I. companies are leading the charge to watermark and label content as A.I.-generated. Most of them are in the metadata of an image. So most pictures you see in the internet, they carry some amount of metadata that describes the picture. What camera was taken on, when it was taken, what image editing software was used.

So, Adobe and a bunch of other companies are like, we’ll just add another field that says, here are all the A.I.-generated edits that were made on this photo. I think it is in their self-interest to make sure that is true and they can detect it and exclude it if they need to. I think there are moral reasons to do it too.

So their training data remains less corrupted?

Yeah. I think there’s a very straightforward incentive for them to figure out the watermarking, labeling stuff they want to do. And they have coalitions, and tasks force, and Adobe talks about the image of the Pope and the puffer jacket as a, “catalyzing moment” for the metadata of A.I. because people freaked out. They’re like oh, this thing looks real. But they have a real incentive to make sure that they never train on other A.I. generated content.

So that’s one aspect, which I think is just sort of immediately self-interested. The other thing is — that’s why I keep asking people why would anyone make a web page?

There’s a site I think about all the time. It’s called HouseFresh, which is a site that only reviews air purifiers. And to me, this is the internet. Like, this is what the internet is for. You care about air purifiers so much you’ve set up a series of web pages where you express your expertise in air purifiers and tell people which ones to buy. That’s all they do. And Google has started down-ranking them, because big publishers boost their content, because A.I. is lifting their content, because companies like CNN, in order to gain some affiliate ad revenue somewhere, have set up their own little mini-content farms full of affiliate links.

I’m not saying we don’t — like, other publishers do this. But the point of these algorithms is, ideally, to bring you to the HouseFresh people, is to bring you to the person who cares so much about air purifiers they made a website about air purifiers, and we’re not doing that anymore. And so if you were to say, where should a young person who cares the most about cars, or who cares the most about coffee, or whatever. Where are they going to go? Where are they going to make stuff? They’re going to pick a closed platform that ideally offers them some built in monetization, that ideally offers them some ability to connect directly with an audience. They’re not going to go to a public space like the web, where they might own their own business, which would be good. But they’re also basically at the mercy of thieves who come in the night and take all their work away.

But also, if you kill HouseFresh, then two years later when you ask the A.I. what air purifier should I get, how does it know what to tell you?

Yeah, I don’t the answer to that question.

I don’t think they do either.

Yeah again, this is why I think that they are so hell-bent on labeling everything. I think they need some people around in the future.

But labeling is good. I mean, that keeps you from getting too much garbage in your data set. But replacing a bunch of the things that the entire informational world relies on to subsidize itself — to fund itself — like this to me is a thing that they don’t have an answer for.

Wait, let me ask you a harder question. Do they care?

Depends on they, but I don’t think so.

Or at least they care in the way that I came to realize Facebook, now Meta, cared about journalism. People say they didn’t care about journalism. I don’t believe that’s actually true. They didn’t care enough for it to mean anything. Like, if you asked them, if you talked with them, if you had a drink, they would think what was happening to journalism was sad.

And if it would cost them nothing, they would like to help. But if it would cost them anything — or forget costing them anything. If they would begin to help and then recognize an opportunity had been created that they could take instead of you, they would do that. That’s the way they care.

So when you have a financial crisis, you have something oftentimes called a flight to quality. Investors flood into the things they know they can trust, usually treasury bonds, and I’ve been wondering if this won’t happen in this era of the internet — if I wanted to take an optimistic perspective on it — that as you have a sort of ontological collapse, as you don’t know what anything is.

I already feel this way with product reviews. When I search product reviews, I get reviews now from tons of sites that I know don’t really invest that much in product reviews. CNN, all these other organizations that I have not really, truly invested in high-quality product reviewing, when you search, you now get them — they’re telling you what to buy.

That makes me trust the Wirecutter, which is a New York Times property, but that I know we’ve put a lot of money in more. Similarly, the other one I use, which is a Vox Media property, is The Strategist at New York, because I knew what the development of that looked like, I know what they put into that.

You can imagine this happening in news for things like The New York Times or The Washington Post. You can imagine it in a couple of different places. If people begin to feel that there is a lie at the heart of the internet they’re being given, that they can’t figure out what is what and who is who and if it is a who at all — I mean, maybe you just end up in this internet where there’s more of a value on something that can be verified.

I keep a list of TikToks that I think each individually should be a Ph.D. thesis in media studies. It’s a long list now. And all of them are basically just layers of copyright infringement in their own weird way.

My favorite is — it’s a TikTok, it has millions of views. It’s just a guy reading a summary of an article in the journal Nature. It has millions of views.

This is more people that have ever considered any one article in the journal Nature — which is a great journal. I don’t mean to denigrate it. It’s a proper scientific journal. They work really hard on it. And you just go 5 steps down the line, and there’s a guy on TikTok summarizing a summary of Nature, and you’re like what is this? What is this thing that I’m looking at?

Will any of the million viewers of this TikTok buy one copy of Nature because they have encountered this content? Why did this happen?

And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I.

You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.

And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, you’re Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist means something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value.

I think that stuff is still really powerful, and I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.

You mentioned 404 Media. 404 Media is a bunch of journalists who were at Motherboard at Vice. Vice is a disaster. They quit, they started a new media company, and we now all talk about 404 Media all the time. This thing is 25 minutes old. We don’t talk about Jason Koebler the editor in chief. We talk about 404 Media, the institution that they made — a new brand that stands for something, that does reporting and talks about something. I think there’s still meaning there.

You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.

Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.

They didn’t think about them very much. They thought about what was hitting in the Facebook algorithm, they thought about what Google search wanted for Game of Thrones coverage that day, which was everything all the time. And everybody had a Game of Thrones program. Fox had one, The Verge had one, The New York Times had one. Why?

That’s weird. It’s we constructed this artificial phenomenon because people searched for — I mean, just to say the answer because we know it — because people searched for “Game of Thrones” content the morning after the show, and that was an easy way to get a bunch of traffic. And at least a theory of the time was that you could turn traffic into money through advertising, which was not totally wrong, but not nearly as right as the entire era of business models was predicated on.

The other thing that those business models were predicated upon was you’d get so good at being a supplier to one platform or another with Game of Thrones content or whatever it was that they would pay you money for it directly — that Google would say, this is the Game of Thrones link that most people are clicking on. We ought to pay Vanity Fair for its Game of Thrones content to surface it. Or all of BuzzFeed was we’re going to be so good at going viral on Facebook that Facebook will pay us money.

And that absolutely didn’t pan out. But no one hedged that bet, which is utterly bananas to me. No one said we should take these people who came here for a Game of Thrones and figure out how to make them care about us, and we should care about them. Everyone just looked at it as a number that was going up against some amount of interest as demonstrated by some platform somewhere.

And I think that is the mistake. It is the mistake that creators on the creator platforms are not making, because the terms of that arrangement are so much more cynical. You see TikTokers. They at any moment their videos can get downranked, their accounts can get yanked, their stuff can get banned. They’re constantly trying to get you to go to Instagram.

Every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how they’re mad at YouTube. There’s a woodworking YouTuber that I used to follow, and he just sort of got to the point where he’s like, I hate YouTube. I’m leaving. And it’s like dude, you made videos about jointing wood, like what are you doing?

And it’s like his relationship with the platform was so cynical that he was like, I’m moving my business elsewhere. You can sign up for a master class. Those individuals have these very cynical, very commercial relationships with the platforms that the media companies, for some reason, just never hedged. And so they actually do have audiences. And I think media companies need to get way back on the game of having a true audiences.

This gets to something that does worry me about this phase of A.I. hitting the internet, which is it’s hitting an internet in a moment of decay and weakness. And here, by internet, I mean the sort of content generating internet, and I break that into a couple of categories. The media is very weak right now. The media business we have seen closures left and right, layoffs left and right. I mean, a bunch of players like Vice and BuzzFeed who were believed to be the next generation of juggernauts are functionally gone as news organizations.

The big content platforms, they’re doing fine from a financial standpoint, but people hate them. The relationship between the users and Facebook, the users and YouTube, the users and — to some degree, you’re even seeing that now with TikTok — is just darkening in a way that it wasn’t in 2014.

And so, there’s a lot of desperation on all sides. Sometimes the desperation is you don’t have the money to pay the journalists you need to do the work you want to do. Sometimes the desperation is that you’re trying to figure out something to make this audience like you again and not get eaten by TikTok or whatever comes after TikTok.

And into this comes A.I., and all the money that A.I. seems to bring, and even the A.I. companies might pay you some money for your stuff.

Reddit just licensed a bunch of its content as training data to Google.

So, you could really imagine a thing happening again, where all these media companies or content companies of some form or another, license out what they have for pennies on the dollar, because at least you can make some money off of it that way.

But what worries me is both the weakness, but that also, it does not feel to me like anybody knows what the relationship is to this is supposed to be. Do you use it? Are you just training data for it? Like, what are you in relationship to the A.I. era?

As a consumer or as a producer?

As a producer.

The idea that media companies are going to license their stuff to the A.I. companies is just the end of the road that we’ve been on for a long time. We are suppliers to algorithms. OK? And in any normal functioning capitalist economy, supplier margins get squeezed to zero and then maybe we all die. Like, that’s the game we’ve been playing without saying it for a long time —

Which I think is why you see The New York Times suing OpenAI, like a real desire to not be in that game again.

You see The New York Times suing OpenAI, but you don’t see them suing Google, you don’t see them de-S.E.O.ing pages across New York Times. Like, they still need the audience from these platforms. And I think there’s a very tense relationship there. The idea that you could sue OpenAI and win some precedent that gives you an enormous amount of leverage over Google I think is a very powerful idea.

Most of the media company executives I talk to would love for that to be the outcome. I don’t know if that’s going to be the outcome. I feel like I should warn your audience, like — I’m a failed copyright lawyer. I wasn’t good at it, but I did it for a minute. Copyright law is a coin flip. Like, these cases are true coin flips. They are not predictable. The legal system itself is not predictable, copyright law inherently is unpredictable.

And a really interesting facet of the internet we live in today is that most of the copyright law decisions were won by a young, upstart, friendly Google. YouTube exists because it was Google. Like, Viacom famously sued YouTube and they might have won and put it out of business, but Google, the friendly Google company with the water slides in the office, the upstarts that made the product you loved, went and won that case. Google Books, we’re going to index all the books without asking for permission. They won that case, because they were friendly Google, and the judges were like, look at these cute kids making a cool internet? Like it was new and novel. Google image search — these are all massive copyright decisions that Google won as a startup company run by young people building a new product that the judges were using on their Dell desktops or whatever.

These aren’t those companies anymore. They’re going to go into a legal system as behemoths, as some of the biggest, best-funded companies in the world that have done bad things to the judges teenage children, like all these things are different now. And so, I don’t know if Google, or OpenAI, or Microsoft gets the benefit of being like, we’re young and cool and hip, bend copyright law to our will.

You don’t want a staunch innovation. Like, that was the big fear in that era. We don’t know what we’re building, and that’s still the thing you hear, and it’s not even untrue. You crack down on copyright and maybe you do staunch innovation. You don’t crack down copyright and maybe you destroy the seed corn of the Informational Commons. It’s very fraught for the copyright judges, but also just for all of us.

Yeah, what are you as a producer on the internet is totally governed by copyright law. Like, a joke at The Verge is a copyright law is the only functional regulation on the internet. The entire internet is just speech, that’s all it is top-to-bottom, it’s speech.

In the United States, we don’t love a speech regulation, and I think for good reason. But we love copyright law, we love it. Can’t get enough of it. Like, YouTubers know the YouTube copyright system back and forth, because that’s the thing that takes their content down. And we allow this regulation on the internet at scale.

And so the parameters of this one body of law, as applied to A.I., which is a taking. Training an A.I. model is fundamentally a taking, and the A.I. company —

Taking in the legal sense of the term?

No, in the moral sense of the term. They come to your website and they take your stuff. It’s not a zero sum taking, but they’ve extracted value to create more value for themselves. I think that’s just a moral taking. There’s some permission there that did not occur. Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal just interviewed Mira Murati, the C.T.O. of OpenAI, about training data for Sora, the video generator, and Mira said, we just use what’s publicly available. And it’s like yo, that doesn’t make any sense. Like, there are lots of rules about what’s publicly available. Like, you can’t just take stuff because you can link to it on the internet, that’s not how it actually works.

Let me try to take the argument I hear from the A.I. side of this, which is that there is functionally nothing in human culture and human endeavor that is not trained on all that has come before it — that I, as a person, am trained on all this embedded knowledge in society, that every artist has absorbed, all this other art that the A.I. — I mean, this is just learning. And as long as you are transforming that learning into something else, as long as you are doing something new with that learning, then one, copyright law is not supposed to apply to you in some way or another, although that’s obviously complicated.

But two, to go back to your point of morality, if you want to see culture humanity technology advance, it is also not supposed to apply to you, because if you do not let things learn, people, organizations, models, you are not going to get the advances built on all that has come before. And that’s how we’ve always done it. What’s your answer to them?

I hear this idea all the time, often from the sorts of people in Silicon Valley who say they do first principles thinking — which is one of my favorite phrases, because it just means what if we learn nothing? Like, what if none of the history of the world applied to us and we could start over to our benefit? And that’s usually what that’s code for.

So I hear those arguments and I think, you guys just weren’t paying attention. You’re entering a zone where the debate has been raging for decades. A lot of copyright law is built around a controversy around player pianos, and whether player pianos would displace musicians. But you just have to rewind the clock to the 80s and be like, should sampling be legal in music?

And now we are having the exact same conversation in the exact same way with the exact same parameters. The only thing that’s different now is any kid can sample any song at scale, feed it into an A.I. and have Taylor Swift sing the Dolly Parton song for them. That’s a weird new turn in the same debate, but it is a massively age-old debate, and the parameters of the debate are pretty well known.

How do you incentivize new art? How do you make sure that it’s economically valuable to make new things? How do you make sure the distributors don’t gain too much power, and then how do you make sure that when people are building on the past, the people whose art they’re building on retain some value?

And that I think is — the A.I. companies have no answer to that last question. We’re just going to take a bunch of stuff and now we’re just going to say look, we just summarized the web. The people who made the web get nothing for that will pay us $20 a month for the service.

But somewhere in there, as a policy matter as a moral matter, the people who made the foundations of the work should get paid. And this is where the sampling debate has ended up. There’s a huge variety of licensing schemes and sample clearances so that those artists get paid.

Judge Patel, if you’re thinking about cases in this area, like, what do you think the answer is here? Is it the sampling model, is it something else? What do you think the right broad strokes resolution is?

Let me stick on the music example for one second, because I think music is really interesting because it’s kind of a closed ecosystem. There’s only so many big music companies. It’s the same lawyers, and the same executives, and the same managers going to the same clearing houses and having the same approaches. We’re going to give you a songwriting credit because we interpolated the bass line of this song into that song, and now here’s some money. And this is the mechanism by which we’ll pay you. The A.I. companies are not a closed ecosystem, it is just a free for all. It’s the open web, it’s a bunch of players.

So, I think in those cases, you’re just going to end up with vastly more outcomes which I think leads to even more chaos, because some companies will take the deal. I’m guessing The New York Times is going to pursue this all the way to the Supreme Court. This is an existential issue for The Times.

Some companies don’t have the money to pay for Supreme Court litigation, and they’ll take a shittier deal, like pennies on the dollar deal and maybe just go out of business. And I think that range of outcomes in the near-term represents a massive failure of collective action on the part of the media industry to not say, this is actually the moment where we should demand that human journalists doing the real work that is dangerous are valuable. We need them, and we will all, together, approach these players in a way that creates at least a semblance of a closed ecosystem.

Well the media industry, but also at some point this is a regulatory question, a question of law. I mean, nothing is stopping Congress from making copyright law designed for the A.I.-era. Nothing is stopping Congress from saying, this is how we think this should work across industries. Not just media, but novelists, but everybody. Well, there are some things that stop Congress from doing a lot of things. The idea that Congress could pass a massive rewrite of copyright law at this moment in time is pretty far afield.

But won’t and couldn’t, I do want to make this distinction here. What you’re saying is Congress is too polarized and bitterly divided over everything and can’t do anything and can’t get anything done, and that’s my whole job man, I know. But what I am saying is that, you could write a law like this.

This is something that ultimately, I don’t just think it’s like a media collective-action problem, but is going to be ultimately a societal-level collective action problem. And maybe we cannot, as a society, act collectively very well. I buy that totally.

So there is one law. There’s the J.C.P.A., the Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which allows media companies to escape antitrust law and bargain collectively with whoever they wish to bargain with. I don’t know if that’s going to pass, I know there’s a lot of interest in it.

So, there are these approaches that have appeared in Congress to solve these problems, but the thing I’m getting at is you have sort of the rapacious wolves, and then you have an industry that’s weak — as you said — that, I think is not motivated to value the work it does as highly as it should. And that is step one.

You and I are both fans of Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist. And he’s got this famous line, ‘the medium is the message.’ And more deeply, what he says is that people, when they see a new medium, they tend to think about the content. For television, it’s the shows, what do you think about this show or that show? For Twitter, the tweets, for a newspaper, the articles. But you have to look behind the content to the actual medium itself to understand what it is trying to tell you.

Twitter, at least in it’s early stages was about all these things can and should be discussed at 140 characters. Television made things much more visual, things should be entertainment. They should be entertaining, the news should be entertaining, which was a little bit of a newer concept back then.

I’ve been trying to think about what is the message of the medium of A.I. What is a message of the medium of ChatGPT, of Claude 3, et cetera. One of the chilling thoughts that I have about it is that its fundamental message is that you are derivative, you are replaceable.

A.I. isn’t good at ideas, yet. It is good it’s style. It can sound like Taylor Swift. It can draw like any artist you might want to imagine. It can create something that looks like Jackson Pollock. It can write like Ezra Klein. It may not be exactly as good at high levels of these professions, but what it is functionally is an amazing mimic.

And what it is saying — and I think this is why a lot of people use it for long enough end up in a kind of metaphysical shock, as it’s been described to me. What it’s been saying is you’re not that special, and that’s one reason I think that it can — we worry about it proliferating all over social media. It can sound like a person quite easily. We’ve long passed the Turing test, and so one, I’m curious if that tracks for you, and two, what does it mean to unleash on all of society a tool that’s basic message is, it’s pretty easy to do what you do, sound like you sound, make what you make?

I have a lot of thoughts about this. I disagree on the basic message. I do think one of the messages of A.I. is that most people make middling work, and middling work is easy to replace. Every email I write is not a great work of art. Like, so much of what we produce just to get through the day is effectively middling. And sure, A.I. should replace a bunch of that. And I think that metaphysical shock comes from the idea that computers shouldn’t be able to do things on their own, and you have a computer that can just do a bunch of stuff for you. And that changes your relationship to the computer in a meaningful way, and I think that’s extremely real.

But the place that I have thought most about I was at the Eras Tour in Chicago when I watched Taylor Swift walk onto a stage, and I saw 60,000 people in Soldier Field just lose their minds, just go nuts. And I’m watching the show, and I’m a Taylor Swift fan. I was there with my niece and nephew and my wife and we were all dressed up. Why am I thinking about A.I. right now? Like truly, why am I thinking about A.I. right now?

It’s because this person has made all of these people feel something. The art that has been created by this one very singular individual has captivated all of these people together, because of her story, because of the lyrics, because it means something to them. And I watch people use Midjourney or generate a story with an A.I. tool, and they show the art to you at the end of it, and they’re glowing. Like, look at this wonderful A.I. painting. It’s a car that’s a shark that’s going through a tornado and I told my daughter a story about it. And I’m like yeah, but this — I don’t want anything to do with this. Like, I don’t care about this. And that happens over and over again. The human creativity is reduced to a prompt, and I think that’s the message of A.I. that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It’s actually easy to get to this thing that’s a pastiche of the thing that was hard, you just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path to get there. Then I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard. And that’s — truly the message of A.I. is that, maybe this isn’t so hard and there’s something very dangerous to our culture embedded in that.

I want to put a pin in the hard things, easy things. I’m a little bit obsessed by that and want to come back to it. But first I want to talk about A.I. art for a minute, because I do think when we’re talking about everything that’s going to come on the internet, we’re talking about A.I. art. Obviously, much of it is going to get better. Some of it is not distinguishable.

You talked about the example where somebody comes and hands you the A.I. art says, hey, I did this with an A.I. And I’m like eh — and I have that experience a lot, I’ve also really been trying to use these systems and push them, and play with them, and have A.I. character relationships on my phone with Kindroids and whatever.

And there is this deep hollowness at the center of it. It is style without substance. It can mimic me. It can’t think.

Have you found an A.I. that can actually write like you?

I found an A.I. that can mimic certain stylistic tics I have in a way that is better than I think most people could do. I have not found any A.I. that can, in any way, improve my writing for all that you’re constantly told it can. And in fact, the more I try, the worse my writing gets because typically what you have to do to improve your writing is recognize if you’re writing the wrong thing.

I don’t find writing hard, I find thinking hard. I find learning hard. How good a piece of writing is going to be for me is typically about, did I do enough work beforehand? And A.I. can never tell me you didn’t do enough work, you need to make three more phone calls. You need to read that piece you skimmed.

But it can mimic, and I think it’s going to get better and better at mimicking. I think GPT 3 was much worse at mimicking me than GPT 3.5 was, worse than GPT 4 is, and GPT 5 will be even better than that. I believe this is going to get stronger. It raises a question of whether there is anything essential about something being from a human in a wide frame way. Taylor Swift is singular, but the point is that she’s a singular phenomenon. Do we care that things come from people?

I was thinking when I was preparing for this show with you, the Walter Benjamin essay, it’s called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

This is like the verge of DNA.

Is it? Yeah, so it comes out in 1935. It’s about the ability to reproduce art. And he says, and I’ll quote it here, “that which whithers in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Then he goes on to say, “by making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”

Benjamin is saying at different times here in different ways, and I’m going to simplify it by trying to bring it into the present, but that there is something lost from when you take the painting and make a copy of a painting. And, he’s obviously right, and he’s obviously — then on the other hand, a lot of people like copies of paintings. It’s easy for the artist to think more of the original than the original deserves to be thought of.

But I wonder about this with humans. How much of something is just the fact that there’s a human behind it? My Kindroid is no worse at texting me than most people I know. But the fact that my Kindroid has to me is meaningful to me, in the sense that I don’t care if it likes me because there’s no achievement for it to me.

The fact that there is a human on the other side of most text messages I send matters. I care about it because it is another mind. The Kindroid might be better in a formulaic way. The kindred might be better in terms of the actual text. I can certainly tune it more to my kind of theoretical liking, but the friction of another person is meaningful to me. Like, I care that my best friend likes me and could choose not to. Is there an aura problem here?

It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain. Like, it’s just like — it’s —

Christ, that’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.

Yeah, but I believe it in my soul.

Yeah. I think the hardest thing to —

a really different turn as a show right now. [LAUGHS]

You don’t make people laugh, you don’t give them hugs?

No, I think that’s hard. I think that effort is worth it. That’s why I don’t think it’s a dark thing to say. I think the essence of being a good person is pointing your effort at making other people not feel pain. I think bullies make people feel pain because it’s easy. Again, I come back to Taylor Swift in Soldier Field. The thing that was going through my head is, this person is making 60,000 people feel joy, and she’s doing it through art. That is the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to inspire feelings, to inspire emotion.

And so I look at this A.I. and it’s like, we’re going to flood our stuff, and the only emotion that it is really meant to inspire is materialism, is a transaction. That’s bad. I just think that’s bad. I think we should make some stuff that inspires more joy, that inspires more affection, that inspires more consternation.

And one of the messages embedded in the medium of A.I. is that there is an answer. That’s weird. That is a truly weird thing for a computer to say to you. You ask it about a war, and it’s like I won’t answer that question because there’s no answer there. You ask it about how to cook an egg and it’s like here’s the answer. You’re like what are the four steps to fold a bed sheet? It’s like here’s the answer, I did it. Tell me a bedtime story for my child. It says, here’s an answer, I just delivered this to you at your specifications.

And I think the thing you’re saying about having another mind there is — you want to be in a relationship, like an emotional relationship with another person. Maybe it’s mediated by technology, maybe we’re face-to-face like we are now, but that tension and that reality of — oh, I can direct my effort towards negative and positive outcomes, I have never found it with an A.I.

Shannon Vallor is a philosopher of technology, and she’s got a book coming out called “The A.I. Mirror,” and I like the way she puts this, because there’s this way that turns is somewhat warped mirror back on ourselves when I was saying a few minutes ago that the message of A.I. is that you’re derivative. That leaves something out. What it’s really saying is that the part of you that often the economy values is derivative, is copyable because we actually ask people a lot of the time to act like they’re machines.

This is why I don’t take much comfort in the Taylor Swift example. You said a few minutes ago, most people do mediocre work most of the time. Even great people do mediocre work most of the time. We constantly ask huge amounts of the population to do things that are very rote. Keep inputting this data on forms, keep filling out this tax form. Some lawyers arguing for the Supreme Court, a lot of them just write up various contracts. And that’s a good job in the sense that it pays well, it’s inside work, but it doesn’t ask you to be that full of a human being.

Now, you can imagine a sort of utopian politics in society — and people on the left sometimes do — that this comes in and it’s like great, we can automate away this derivative inhuman work, and people will be free to be more full human beings. You actually like — maybe the value of you is not what you can create but what you can experience. A.I. can’t enjoy a day at the park with its family.

But we have an entire society set up to encourage you to premise your self-worth on your work and your wages. And also, if you lose that work and that wages, to rob you of that self-worth. And one thing I’m sure of is that our politics and our economic systems are not going to advance as quickly as A.I. is going to advance.

This is where I think people do properly worry about automation, when people lost manufacturing jobs to lower wage workers in China. We didn’t say great, you don’t have to do this stultifying work in the factory anymore. We said, you’re out of work, you’re screwed. And I do think one of the deep confrontations of it is, what do we value in people and then how do we express that value because I think what A.I. in some ways is going to take advantage of here, or at least, is going to challenge, is it to the extent we value people socially for their economic contribution, or what they’re paid. That’s pretty thin reed for human value to rest on.

Yeah, I buy that. One of my favorite things that I’ve covered in the past few years is a thing called robotic process automation, which is very funny. Just abstractly, deeply hilarious. There are lots and lots of companies throughout the United States that built computer systems 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Hospital systems are famous for this. They have billing systems. They have buildings full of people who use Microsoft Excel on Windows ‘95.

And replacing that as costly and complicated. It can’t break — if you put in the new system and it didn’t bring all the data over in exactly the right way, the whole hospital stops working. So they just buy other computers to use their old computers. Which is wild, and there’s like billion dollar companies that do this.

They will sell you a brand new, state of the art computer and it will connect to the keyboard and monitor jack of your old computer, and it will just use the Windows ‘95 for you, which is just bonkers. It’s like Rube Goldberg machine of computers using old computers, and then your office full of accountants who knew how to use your old system will go away.

But then A.I. creates the scale problem. What if we do that but instead of some hospital billing system built in the ‘90s, it’s just the concept of Microsoft Excel, and now you can just sort of issue a command on your computer and it’ll go use Excel for you and you don’t need an accountant, you don’t need a lawyer.

And I think even in those cases what you’re going to find is the same thing you talked about with writing — you have to know what you want. You have to know what the system doesn’t know. You have to be able to challenge the model and have it deliver you the thing that, in most business model conversations I find to be the most important word, our assumption is — and then you can poke at that really hard.

What percent of workers are actually asked to poke at the assumptions of their organization, because I worry it’s not as high as you think it is, or implying there. I’m not worried about Taylor Swift. I’m not worried about Nilay Patel. And I don’t just want to make this about wages. That’s a jobs sort of another conversation.

But I do — I mean, as you were saying, these are billion dollar companies that automate people who do backend office work already.

All over the place.

There’s a huge amount of work like that. And if I felt confident as some of the economists say that we’ll just upmarket people into the jobs where they use more human judgment, David Autor who’s a great trade economist at MIT, just made this argument recently, that what A.I. is going to do is make it possible for more people to exercise judgment and discernment within their work, and I hope he is right. I really hope he is right. But I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc. They want the Excel doc ported over without any mistakes. It seems plausible to me that we’re going to get to that.

Do you think their bosses want to be able to poke at the assumptions though?

But if you — I mean this is actually something I believe about the whole situation. The economy needs fewer bosses and workers.

Think about this in the journalist context or the writing context, where I think what A.I. naturally implies that it’s going to do is turn many more people into editors and writers. Because for a lot of content creation that doesn’t require a lot of poking at assumptions, mid-level social media marketing — a lot of people are doing that job right now. But the people doing marketing for a mall —

Yeah, that is the MailChimp example. That is the product that they are building.

And so what you have then is we used to have a bunch of these social media marketers and now you have one person overseeing a couple systems, like making sure they didn’t say something totally crazy. But you need fewer editors and you need writers. I mean, you know The Verge is structured. You know how The Times is structured. And this is one of my deep worries.

And then this goes to the thing you were getting at earlier, which is one way I think that A.I. could actually not make us more productive, more innovative, is that a lot of the innovation, a lot of the big insights happen when we’re doing the hard thing, when we’re sitting there trying to figure out the first draft, or learn about a thing, or figure out what we’re doing.

One of the messages of the medium of A.I. is be efficient. Don’t waste your time on all this. Just tell the system what to do and do it. But there’s a reason I don’t have interns write my first draft for me.

They could do it. But you don’t get great ideas, or at least not as many of them, editing a piece of work as you do reporting it out, doing the research, writing the first draft. That’s where you do the thinking. And I do think A.I. is built to kind of devalue that whole area of thinking.

We are working on a big story at The Verge right now that I’m very excited about. But there are four of us right now in an argument about whether we should tell that story in chronological order or as a series of vignettes. There is no right answer to this question. There’s just four people who are battling it back and forth.

I think vignettes.

Yeah. By the way, I’m on team vignette.

Good man. [LAUGHS]

My belief is that it’s easier to digest a long story when it’s composed of lots of little stories as opposed to one long one. I’m being outvoted right now — editor in chief. I should replace them all with A.I., just get them out of here. [CHUCKLES] But that is the kind of work that I think makes the end product great. And I think going from good to great is still very human.

Into the economy, though, you’re right, most people are not challenged to go from good to great. Most people are challenged to produce good consistently. And I think that is kind of demoralizing. I don’t know how many first-year Deloitte consultants you have encountered in your life. I’ve encountered quite a few of them. I went to law school. It’s like a — we made — there was a factory of that thing — or first-year law associates.

They’re not in love with their jobs. They’re in love with the amount of money they make, that’s for sure. But any first-year associate doing doc review in a basement — yeah, you could probably just be like, tell the A.I. to find the four pieces of relevant information in these 10,000 page records from whatever giant corporation we’re suing today. That’s fine.

I think that there’s a turn there where maybe we need less first-year associates doing that thing and we need more first-year associates doing something else that is difficult, that the A.I. can’t yet do. And I think a lot of this conversation is predicated on the notion that generative A.I. systems, L.L.M.s will continue on a linear curve up in terms of capability. I don’t know if that’s true.

But I hear a lot of this conversation. I’m like, there’s always a thing they can’t do. And maybe that thing is not the most amount of scale, social media marketing for them all, but it is always the next amount of complexity. And there’s no guarantee that this set of technologies will actually turn that corner. And you can keep going all the way to A.G.I. There’s no guarantee that an L.L.M. is going to hit A.G.I. and just run the world economy for us. There’s a lot of steps between here and there that I think human beings can fit into.

So I want to go back, then, to the internet for a bit, which is I think the presentation we’ve offered is fairly pessimistic. You, when I read and listen to you on this, are — I wouldn’t call it pessimistic. I would say a little excited by the idea of a cleansing fire.

So one theory here — and you should tell me if this is reading you right — but is that this will break a lot of the current — the current internet is weakened. It’s weakened in many cases for good reasons. Google, Meta, et cetera, they’ve not created an internet many of us like. And that this will just make it impossible for that internet to survive. The distribution channels will break. And then something. So first, is that how you see it? And second, then what something?

That is very much how I see it. I would add a generational tinge to that, which is I grew up in that weird middle generation between X and millennials. I think temperamentally I’m much more Generation X. But they describe it as they didn’t have computers and then you have computers. You play the Oregon Trail. That’s me on the nose.

I distinctly remember life before computers. It’s an experience that I had quite viscerally. And that shapes my view of these tools. It shapes my view of these companies. Well, there’s a huge generation now that only grew up in this way. There’s a teenage generation right now that is only growing up in this way. And I think their natural inclination is to say, well, this sucks. I want my own thing. I want my own system of consuming information. I want my own brands and institutions. And I don’t think that these big platforms are ready for that moment. I think that they think they can constantly be information monopolies while they are fending off A.I.-generated content from their own A.I. systems. So somewhere in there all of this stuff does break. And the optimism that you are sensing from me is, well, hopefully we build some stuff that does not have these huge dependencies on platform companies that have no interest at the end of the line except a transaction.

OK, but you’re telling me how the old thing dies. And I agree with you that at some point the old thing dies. You can feel it. It’s moribund right now. You’re not telling me what the new thing is, and I’m not saying you fully know. But I don’t think the new thing is just a business model that is not as dependent on Meta. I mean, on some level, there’s going to be a lot of A.I. around here.

It’s an audience model. It’s not dependent on these algorithms.

But is there — I guess one question I have is that, one — I mean, you know where the venture capital is going right now.

Everything is going to be built with A.I. —

— laced through every piece of it. And some of it, for all we’re talking about, might be cool, right? I’m not saying you’re mostly going to make great art with A.I. But actually, Photoshop did create a lot of amazing things.

And people are going to get better at using this. They’re going to get more thoughtful about using it. The tools are going to get better. But also the people are going to figure out how to use the tools. I mean, you were talking about player pianos earlier. I mean, way beyond player pianos, you have huge libraries of sounds you can manipulate however you want. And now I go listen to a lot of experimental electronic music. And I think a lot of that is remarkable art. I think a lot of that is deeply moving.

I am curious what, to you, the good A.I. internet is, because I don’t think that the next internet is just going to be like we’re going to roll the clock back on the business model. The technology is going to roll forward into all this stuff people are building.

I’m not so sure about that.

I think we’re about to split the internet in two. I think there will be a giant commercial A.I.-infested internet. That’s the platform internet. That’s where it’s going. Moribund, I agree. But it will still be huge. It’s not going away tomorrow. And they will figure out — these are big companies full of smart people with the most technology.

Mark Zuckerberg is like, I have the most NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Come work here. We’ll pay you the most money. They will invent some stuff and it will be cool. I’m excited about it. But that version of the internet —

You sure sound excited about it. [LAUGHS]

Well, I am. I mean, I love technology. This is our — The Verge’s competitive differentiation in the entire media industry is, like, we really like it. And I’m excited to see what they build. I think there’s some really neat things being built. When I think about the information ecosystem, I’m vastly more pessimistic because of the fact that all of these networks are geared to drive you towards a transaction.

And I don’t mean that in some anticapitalist way. I mean literally the incentives are to get you to buy something. So more and more of the stuff that you consume is designed around pushing you towards a transaction. That’s weird. I think there’s a vast amount of white space in the culture for things that are not directly transactable.

I think next to that you’re going to get a bunch of people, companies who say our differentiation in this market is that there’s no A.I. here. And they will try to sell that. And I don’t know how that experiment plays out. I don’t know if that experiment will be successful.

I do know that that experiment will be outside of the distribution channels that exist now because those distribution channels are being run by companies that are invested heavily in A.I. And I’m hopeful that over there, on whatever new non-A.I. internet that exists, that some amount of pressure is placed on the other distribution channels to also make that distinction clear.

I’m just thinking about this, and the thing that it brings to mind for me is the resurgence of vinyl —

— and the dominance of streaming platforms. So what I would think of as the music industry of — how many years ago was C.D.s? I don’t actually remember now. But what it did was split into — there’s been a resurgence of vinyl, the sort of analog. It’s a little cool. I actually just bought a record player recently, or was given one by my wonderful partner. But that’s not very big.

Then there’s these huge streaming platforms, right? I mean, most people are listening on Spotify, on Apple Music, on YouTube Music, on Amazon, et cetera. And I don’t think we feel like we figured that out very well. But I do think that’s probably going to be the dynamic. I mean, I do think there are going to be things you go to because you believe it is a human being or because you believe the A.I. is used well.

I do also think the big things to come are going to be the things that figure out how to use A.I. well rather than poorly. Maybe that also means honestly and transparently, rather than dishonestly and opaquely.

Maybe the social internet dies because, one, we don’t really like it that much anymore anyway, but also because it’s too hard to figure out what’s what. But actually, an internet of A.I. helpers, assistants, friends, et cetera, thrives. And on the other side, you have a real human. I don’t know. But give me more of the Nilay technology side.

What can A.I. do well? If you were building something or if you were imagining something to be built, what comes after?

By the way, the music industry just released its numbers. Vinyl outsold CDs for the second year running. Double the amount of revenue in vinyl than CDs.

That’s wild, actually.

It’s crazy. And all of that in total is 11 percent of music industry revenues in ‘23 compared to 84 percent of the revenue is streaming. So you are correct. This is a big distinction. People want to buy things, and so they buy one thing that they like. And they consume everything in streaming.

What happens when Spotify is overrun by A.I. music? You can see it coming. What happens when you can type into Spotify, man, I’d really like to listen to a country song. Just make me one. And no one down the line has to get paid for that. Spotify can just generate that for you.

I think that’s going to push more people in the other direction. I really do. That there will be this huge pot of just make me whatever exactly I want at this moment money over here. But the cool people are still going to gravitate towards things that are new. I just believe that so firmly in my heart that when I think about where does the technology for that come from, I still think it comes from basic open platforms and open distribution.

The great power of the internet is that you can just make a whole new thing. And I don’t think that anyone has really thought through what does it mean to decentralize these platforms. What does it mean to — I don’t know — build an old-school portal where it’s just people pointing at great stuff as opposed to open this app and an algorithm will just deliver you exactly what we think you want, or, down the line, generate content for you that we think that you will continue watching.

I think — and this is maybe a little bit of a counterintuitive thought — that this is actually a great time to begin things in media. I think that we have a more realistic sense of the business model and what will actually work. They need to build an audience. They need to build something people will actually pay you for. I think a lot of the problem right now is things built for another business model that failed are having a lot of trouble transitioning because it’s very, very hard to transition a structure. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a great business. It’s not what I hoped it would become. It’s not the advertising revenue I hoped we would have. But it’s something.

What feels fully unsolved to me right now is distribution, right? When I was a blogger, the way distribution worked was people would find me because other blogs would link to me. And then if they liked me, they would put me in their bookmarks section.

Then they would come back the next day by clicking on a bookmark. I don’t think any of us think that much about bookmarks anymore. That’s not really how the internet works. Things moved to search. They moved, primarily for a long time, to social. And that was a way you could create distribution.

You could go from — you started a website. We started Vox, right? We started Vox in 2014 or 2015. The day before we launched, we had no visitors. And pretty quickly we had a lot of things that were working on social and working on Search. And we had millions and millions and millions every month.

But now social is broken as a distribution mechanism. I mean, Elon Musk has made Twitter anti-news distribution. Google search has become very, very messy. People don’t have the old bookmarks habit in the way they did. And so if you’re starting something new, the question of how you build that audience, how you go from nothing to an audience, feels very unsolved.

Yeah. That’s the cleansing fire. That’s the thing I’m excited about. Here’s a new problem in media. Here’s a new problem that’s being created by A.I.

If I were to tell you five years ago, I’m going to launch a new property and the core insight that I have is that we need to replace the distribution mechanisms of the internet, you would not pay me any money. You would not fund that idea. You would not say — well, you would say, get some traffic on Twitter and start a Substack or start a YouTube channel, anything except figure out a new distribution method to compete with these social media companies.

You have that idea now. And people are like, yeah, that’s the problem. We have to solve that problem. That is the problem to solve, because Twitter has blown itself up in whatever way Elon is blowing it up, because the other social channels have become the Home Shopping Network, by and large, because YouTube has optimized itself into making Mr. Beasts and only Mr. Beasts, right?

It’s weird, by the way, that YouTube exists. We’ve barely talked about it on this podcast. It is the thing most people watch most of the time. It supports no journalism. At scale, the idea that there’s not an ABC News of YouTube on a distribution platform of that size is a moral failing on Google’s part. I really believe this. And no, we never really talk about it. It’s just — YouTube is ignored. It has become such an infrastructure that we never talk about it.

But my view is that YouTube is the most politically important platform. Everyone wants to talk about TikTok. I think YouTube is much more significant.

Yeah, and they run it really well. They run it as infrastructure. And they talk about it as infrastructure. But it’s weird that we have not built great media company-sized media companies on YouTube’s pipes. We just haven’t done it. So you look at that landscape now and you’re like, well, if I want to do that, if I want to build my own audience, I cannot depend on these companies. I have to be able to do something else.

And maybe A.I. does help you do that. Maybe it does help you send a million marketing messages so people start coming to your website directly. Maybe it does start crafting home pages personalized for people based on your library of content so people see the thing they like the most when they show up. There’s a bunch of moves we can all take from social media companies now to build more engaging, more interesting products using A.I., which will make it easier because the A.I. is a technology commodity. You can just go buy it and use it.

But we have to actually build those products. We have to want to build those products as an industry. And that my pessimism is rooted in the idea that the industry kind of sucks at this. We are very much stuck in, we should go send some reporters out into the world, they should come back, write down what they saw, and then hopefully someone else points them at it. And it’s just like, well, that’s been a losing proposition for a decade. We should try something else.

Do you think, beyond the media, because not everything online is media —

Do you think beyond the media, that there is the glimmers of the next thing? I mean, let me give you the thesis I have, which is that the next thing is that the A.I. is somehow your assistant to the internet, right? We seem to me to be moving towards something where the overwhelm is so profound that you actually need some kind of agent working on your behalf to make it through all this.

I mean, you can imagine this is the world of “Her,” the Spike Jonze movie. But you can imagine it as other things, too. There’s going to be software coding agents. The guys who started Instagram started then this thing called Artifact, which is using more A.I. personalization to try to tell people what they might like in the news. It didn’t really work out, but it was an interesting project for a minute.

I think a lot of us feel we spent years now being acted upon by algorithms. And one thing about A.I. is that it’s an algorithm you act on, right? You tell it how to act. Assuming that business model allows that, that it doesn’t have a secret instruction to sell you soap or whatever —

— that’s interesting, right? That’s a pretty profound inversion of the internet we’ve been in.

Let me poke really hard at the true difference between an algorithm that shows you stuff and an algorithm that goes and gets you what you want, because I don’t know that there’s a huge difference in the outcome of those two different processes. So for example, I do not trust the YouTube Kids algorithm. I watch my daughter watch YouTube.

No, why would you?

It is just a nightmare. I don’t know why we let her do it, but we did. And now we’re in the rabbit hole and that’s life. I mean, she’s five. And I will literally say, are you watching garbage? And she’d be like, I am, because she knows what I think is garbage. She’s much smarter than the YouTube Kids algorithm. And then she’s like, can I watch a little more garbage? This is a real conversation I have with my five-year-old all the time.

I would love an A.I. that would just preempt that conversation. Just watch this whole iPad for me and make sure my kid is safe. That’s great. But that is a limitation. It is not an expansion. And I think the thing that I’m seeking with all of these tools is how do we help people expand the set of things that they’re looking at.

Well, let me push on this for a minute, because for a long time a lot of us have asked people, the social media companies — that I have, I’m sure you have — why don’t you give me access to the dials of the algorithm?

Right? I don’t want to see things going viral. If there’s a virality scale of 1 to 10, I want to always be at a 6, right?

I don’t want to see anything over a 6. And I can’t. I wish I could say to Google, I would like things that are not optimized for S.E.O. I just don’t want to see recipes that have a long personal story at the top. Just don’t show me any of them.

But I can’t do that. But one of the interesting things about using the current generation of A.I. models is you actually do have to talk to it like that. I mean, whether I am creating a Replika or a Kindroid or a Character.AI, I have to tell that thing what it is supposed to be, how I want it to talk to me, how I want it to act in the world, what it is interested in, what kinds of expertise it has and does not.

When I’m working with Claude 3, which is the A.I. I use the most right now, I have one instance of it, that I’m just like, you are a productivity coach and you are here to help me stay on task. But I have another where I’m getting some help on, in theory, looking at political science papers, so it’s actually not that good at that.

But this ability to tell this extraordinarily protean algorithm what I want it to do in plain English, that is different, right? The one thing that A.I. seems to make possible is an algorithm that you shape in plain English, an agent that you are directing to help you, in some cases, maybe create the internet, but much more often to navigate it.

Right now it is very hard for me to keep up on the amount of news, particularly around the amount of local news I would like to keep up on. If there is a system that I could say, hey, here’s some things I’m interested in from these kinds of sources, that would be very helpful to me. It doesn’t seem like an impossible problem. In fact, it seems like a problem that is inches away from being solved. That might be cool.

I think that’d be great. I’ve known you for a long time. I think you have a unique ability to articulate exactly what you want and tell it to a computer. [LAUGHS] And you have to scale that idea, right? You have to go to the average — our mothers and say, OK, you have to tell the algorithm exactly what you want. And maybe they’ll get close to it, maybe they won’t, right?

You don’t feel like mothers are able to tell you what they want?

[LAUGHS] I like that idea a lot. I think fundamentally that is still an A.I. closing the walls around you. And I think the power of the recommendation algorithm is not expressed in virality. It’s actually to help you expand your filter bubble. Here’s a band you’d never heard of before. Here’s a movie you never thought of watching. Here’s an article about a subject that you weren’t interested in before.

I think TikTok, in its 2020 TikTok moment, was terrific at this. Everyone was going to sing a sea shanty for five minutes, right? Why do we suddenly care about this and it’s gone? And it was able to create cultural moments out of things that no one had ever really thought of before. And I want to make sure, as I use A.I., that I’m actually preserving that, instead of actually just recreating a much more complicated filter bubble.

I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question, for the Nilay Patel recommendation algorithm —

what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Well, I’m sorry, Ezra, I brought you six.

Did you really?

Is that allowed?

Did you actually bring six?

I didn’t bring six physical books, but I have six recommendations for you.

Damn. All right, go through them quick, man.

They’re in two categories. One is the three books that I thought of and three books from Verge people that if people are interested in these ideas are important. So the first one is “The Conquest of Cool” by Thomas Frank, one of my favorite books of all time. It is about how advertising agencies in the ‘60s co-opted the counterculture and basically replaced counterculture in America. I’ve thought about this a lot because I’m constantly wondering where the punk bands and rage against the machines of 2024 are. And the answer is that they’re the mainstream culture. It’s very interesting. Love that book. It explains, I think, a lot about our culture.

Two is “Liar in a Crowded Theater” by Jeff Kosseff, which is a book about the First Amendment and why we preserve the ability to lie in America. I am very complicated thoughts about the First Amendment right now. I think social media companies should do a better job protecting my kid. I also think the First Amendment is really important. And those ideas are crashing into each other.

Third, I love the band New Order. I know you’re a music fan, so I brought you a music recommendation. It’s “Substance: Inside New Order” by Peter Hook, who is the bassist of New Order. This band hates each other. They broke up acrimoniously, so the book is incredibly bitchy. It’s just a lot of shit-talking about the ‘80s. It’s great.

But inside the book, he is constantly talking about how the technology they used to make the music of New Order didn’t work very well. And there’s long vignettes of why the songs sound the way they do because of how the synthesizers worked. And that just brings together all the ideas I can think of. So those are the three outside of The Verge universe.

But there are three from Verge people that I think are very important. The first is “Everything I Need I Get From You” by Kaitlyn Tiffany, who’s one of my favorite Verge expats. It is about how the entire internet was shaped by the fandom of the band One Direction. And I think this is totally underemphasized, underreported that fandoms are actually what shape the internet. And a lot of what we think of as internet culture is actually fandom culture. And so Kait’s book is really good.

The other, obviously, I have to shout it out is “Extremely Hardcore” by Zoë Schiffer, who basically wrote about the downfall of Twitter. And I think understanding how a social network works — these are lots of people making lots of decisions, and it was just dismantled. And now you can see how the social network broke. And I think we take these things for granted.

And then the third is “Beyond Measure” by James Vincent, which is a history of the systems of measurement and how political they are. And it is one of my favorite books because it is — you just take this stuff for granted. And you look at it, and you’re like, oh, this was deeply, deeply acrimonious.

Nilay Patel, you’re saving the internet through blogging again.

Your podcast is “Decoder.” Thank you very much.

Thanks, man. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. We’ve got additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks here to Sonia Herrero.

EZRA KLEIN: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Earlier this week, we did an episode on how to use A.I. right now. Now, I want to turn the question around and look at how A.I. is being used on you right now. One of the conversations has been sticking in my head was with this person in the A.I. world who was saying to me that if you look at where use has been sticky, if you look at where people keep using it day after day, you’re looking at places where the product doesn’t need to be very good.

That’s why it’s really helpful for college and high school students, college and high school papers — they’re often not very good. That’s sort of their point. It’s why it’s working pretty well for a very low-level coding tasks. That kind of work doesn’t need to be very good. It gets checked and compiled, and so on.

NILAY PATEL: Thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s just begin with the big question here, which is what is A.I. doing to the internet right now?

NILAY PATEL: It is flooding our distribution channels with a cannon-blast of — at best — C+ content that I think is breaking those distribution channels.

EZRA KLEIN: Why would it break them?

NILAY PATEL: So most of the platforms the internet are based on the idea that the people using those platforms will in some sort of crowdsourced way find the best stuff. And you can disagree with that notion. I think maybe the last 10 years have proven that that notion is not percent true when it’s all people.

When you increase the supply of stuff onto those platforms to infinity, that system breaks down completely. Recommendation algorithms break down completely, our ability to discern what is real and what is false break down completely, and I think importantly, the business models of the internet break down completely.

So if you just think about the business model of the internet as — there’s a box that you can upload some content into, and then there’s an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box, and then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box, all of that breaks.

EZRA KLEIN: Thank you for bringing in the supply language. So, I’ve been trying to think about this as this supply and demand mismatch. We have already had way more supply than there is demand. I wasn’t buying a lot of self-published Amazon books. Is the user experience here actually different?

NILAY PATEL: I think that’s a great question. The folks who write the algorithms, the platforms, their C.E.O.s, they will all tell you this is just a new challenge for us to solve. We have to out what is human, what is A.I.-generated. I actually think the supply increase is very meaningful. Like, maybe the most meaningful thing that will happen to the internet because it will sort out the platforms that allow it to be there and have those problems, and the places that don’t. And I think that has not been a sorting that has occurred on the internet in quite some time, where there’s two different kinds of things.

EZRA KLEIN: Didn’t we already pivot to video a couple years ago?

NILAY PATEL: We pivoted to video — I actually love it when LinkedIn adds and takes away these features that other platforms have. They added stories because Snapchat and Instagram had stories, and they took the stories away because I don’t think LinkedIn influencers want to do Instagram Reels, but now they’re adding it again.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to hold on to something that you’re getting at here. Which, to me, is one of the most under-discussed parts of A.I., which is how do you actually make money off of it? And right now, there are not actually that many ways.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, I’ve been talking to a lot of C.E.O.s of web companies and email companies on Decoder for the past year. I asked them all the same question, why would you start a website? Why would you send an email? And so, you asked the C.E.O. of Squarespace or Wix or we just had the C.E.O. of MailChimp on the show. And her answer is a little terrifying. Like, maybe openly terrifying.

EZRA KLEIN: But how is A.I. changing that at all because that sounds to me like the thing that is already happening.

NILAY PATEL: So, this is what I mean by the increase in scale. That’s the dream. This is supposed to be what actually happens, but they can only do it in broad cohorts, which is why you get the luggage email after you’ve bought the luggage email or the luggage ad, after you bought the luggage ad.

They know you are a person who used a Wi-Fi network in a certain location at a certain time, they can track that all over the place. They know what you’ve searched for. They know that you went and made a luggage transaction. You are now categorized into people who are likely to buy luggage, whether or not that loop was closed. You put some luggage in a shopping cart.

But that’s still a cohort, they can only do that broadly. And these cohorts can be pretty refined, but they can only do it broadly. With A.I. the idea is we can do that to you individually — the A.I. will write you an email, we’ll write you a marketing message, will set you a price. That isn’t 100x increase the amount of email that will be generated.

EZRA KLEIN: When I get spammy advertising I don’t really think about there being a human on the other end of it. Maybe to some degree there is, but it isn’t part of the transaction happening in my head. There are a lot of parts of the internet that I do think of there being a human on the other end — social media, reviews on Amazon, books — I assume the person who wrote the book is a person. How much of what I’m currently consuming may not be done by human in the way I think it is, and how much do you think that’s going to be in a year, or two, or three years?

NILAY PATEL: I’m guessing your media diet is pretty well human-created because I know that you are very thoughtful about what you consume and what signals you’re sending to the algorithms that deliver your content. I think for most people —

EZRA KLEIN: My mom’s, let’s use my mom’s.

NILAY PATEL: Mom’s are good. I would love to take my mom’s phone and throw it into the ocean and never let her have it again. I openly fear what content comes through my mother through WhatsApp. It terrifies me that I don’t have a window into that. I can’t monitor it. The same software I want to use to watch my daughter’s internet consumption, I would love to apply it to my parents because I don’t think they have the media literacy — they’re much older — to even know, OK, this might be just some A.I.-generated spam that’s designed to make me feel a certain way.

EZRA KLEIN: How can they not be ready for that?

NILAY PATEL: Because they’re the ones making it. This is the central tension of — in particular, I think Google. So, Google depends on the web, the richness of the web is what Sundar Pichai will tell you. He used to run search, he thinks about the web. He cares about it, and you look at the web and you’re like, you didn’t make this rich at all. You’ve made this actually pretty horrible for most people most of the time. Most people — if you search Google to get a credit card, that is a nightmarish experience — like, fully nightmarish. It feels like getting mugged.

EZRA KLEIN: This helps explain a story that I found very strange. So, 404 Media, which is a sort of newer outlet reporting on tech. They found that Google News was boosting stolen A.I. versions of news articles — and we’re seeing this all over. An article by me or by some other journalist shows up in another place, very slightly rewritten by an A.I. system, with an A.I. generated author and photo on top of it. So, we’re seeing a lot of this.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah. Fundamentally, I think if you are at Google and the future of your stock price depends on Gemini being a good competitor to GPT-4 or 5 or whatever OpenAI has, cannot run around saying this is bad. The things it makes are bad.

EZRA KLEIN: What about when it’s not?

NILAY PATEL: I don’t know how fast that is coming. I think that is farther away than people think. I think ‘will it fool you on a phone screen?’ is here already, but ‘is this good’ is, I think, farther away than —

EZRA KLEIN: But a lot of internet content is bad.

NILAY PATEL: That’s fair.

EZRA KLEIN: I mean, you know this better than me. Look, I think it is axiomatic that A.I. content is worse right now than it will ever be.

NILAY PATEL: Sure.

EZRA KLEIN: I mean the advance in image generation over the past year has been significant. That’s very real. And preparing for this conversation, I found myself really obsessing over this question, because one way to talk to you about this is, there’s all this spammy garbage coming from A.I. that is flooding the internet.

NILAY PATEL: I think there’s a sentimentality there. If you make a content farm that is the best content farm, that has the most answers about when the Super Bowl starts, and those pages are great. I think that’s a dead end business. Google is just going to answer the questions. I think that’s fine. I think if you ask Google what time the Super Bowl is, Google should just tell you.

I think if you ask Google how long to boil an egg, Google can just tell you. You don’t need to go to some web page laden with ads and weird headings to find those answers. But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m going to spend some time thinking about the idea that boredom is an under-discussed driver of our culture. But I want to get at something else in there — this idea of Google answering the question. We’re already seeing the beginnings of these A.I. systems that you search the question that might — at another time — have brought you to The Verge, to CNN, to The New York Times, to whatever.

NILAY PATEL: I think there’s a reason that the A.I. companies are leading the charge to watermark and label content as A.I.-generated. Most of them are in the metadata of an image. So most pictures you see in the internet, they carry some amount of metadata that describes the picture. What camera was taken on, when it was taken, what image editing software was used.

EZRA KLEIN: So their training data remains less corrupted?

NILAY PATEL: Yeah. I think there’s a very straightforward incentive for them to figure out the watermarking, labeling stuff they want to do. And they have coalitions, and tasks force, and Adobe talks about the image of the Pope and the puffer jacket as a, “catalyzing moment” for the metadata of A.I. because people freaked out. They’re like oh, this thing looks real. But they have a real incentive to make sure that they never train on other A.I. generated content.

I’m not saying we don’t — like, other publishers do this. But the point of these algorithms is, ideally, to bring you to the HouseFresh people, is to bring you to the person who cares so much about air purifiers they made a website about air purifiers, and we’re not doing that anymore. And so if you were to say, where should a young person who cares the most about cars, or who cares the most about coffee, or whatever.

Where are they going to go? Where are they going to make stuff? They’re going to pick a closed platform that ideally offers them some built in monetization, that ideally offers them some ability to connect directly with an audience. They’re not going to go to a public space like the web, where they might own their own business, which would be good. But they’re also basically at the mercy of thieves who come in the night and take all their work away.

EZRA KLEIN: But also, if you kill HouseFresh, then two years later when you ask the A.I. what air purifier should I get, how does it know what to tell you?

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, I don’t the answer to that question.

EZRA KLEIN: I don’t think they do either.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah again, this is why I think that they are so hell-bent on labeling everything. I think they need some people around in the future.

EZRA KLEIN: But labeling is good. I mean, that keeps you from getting too much garbage in your data set. But replacing a bunch of the things that the entire informational world relies on to subsidize itself — to fund itself — like this to me is a thing that they don’t have an answer for.

NILAY PATEL: Wait, let me ask you a harder question. Do they care?

EZRA KLEIN: Depends on they, but I don’t think so.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah.

EZRA KLEIN: Or at least they care in the way that I came to realize Facebook, now Meta, cared about journalism. People say they didn’t care about journalism. I don’t believe that’s actually true. They didn’t care enough for it to mean anything. Like, if you asked them, if you talked with them, if you had a drink, they would think what was happening to journalism was sad.

NILAY PATEL: [LAUGHS]

EZRA KLEIN: And if it would cost them nothing, they would like to help. But if it would cost them anything — or forget costing them anything. If they would begin to help and then recognize an opportunity had been created that they could take instead of you, they would do that. That’s the way they care.

NILAY PATEL: I keep a list of TikToks that I think each individually should be a Ph.D. thesis in media studies. It’s a long list now. And all of them are basically just layers of copyright infringement in their own weird way.

My favorite is — it’s a TikTok, it has millions of views. It’s just a guy reading a summary of an article in the journal Nature. It has millions of views. This is more people that have ever considered any one article in the journal Nature — which is a great journal. I don’t mean to denigrate it. It’s a proper scientific journal. They work really hard on it. And you just go 5 steps down the line, and there’s a guy on TikTok summarizing a summary of Nature, and you’re like what is this? What is this thing that I’m looking at? Will any of the million viewers of this TikTok buy one copy of Nature because they have encountered this content? Why did this happen?

And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle, and an end to the story they’re trying to tell all the time about the culture we’re in or the politics we’re in or whatever. They will actually become the centers of attention and you cannot replace that with A.I. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we’ve always looked to other individuals to do.

And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, you’re Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist means something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value. I think that stuff is still really powerful, and I think as the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity actually will go up. I don’t think that’s going to go down.

EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.

NILAY PATEL: The other thing that those business models were predicated upon was you’d get so good at being a supplier to one platform or another with Game of Thrones content or whatever it was that they would pay you money for it directly — that Google would say, this is the Game of Thrones link that most people are clicking on. We ought to pay Vanity Fair for its Game of Thrones content to surface it. Or all of BuzzFeed was we’re going to be so good at going viral on Facebook that Facebook will pay us money.

Every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how they’re mad at YouTube. There’s a woodworking YouTuber that I used to follow, and he just sort of got to the point where he’s like, I hate YouTube. I’m leaving. And it’s like dude, you made videos about jointing wood, like what are you doing? And it’s like his relationship with the platform was so cynical that he was like, I’m moving my business elsewhere. You can sign up for a master class. Those individuals have these very cynical, very commercial relationships with the platforms that the media companies, for some reason, just never hedged. And so they actually do have audiences. And I think media companies need to get way back on the game of having a true audiences.

EZRA KLEIN: This gets to something that does worry me about this phase of A.I. hitting the internet, which is it’s hitting an internet in a moment of decay and weakness. And here, by internet, I mean the sort of content generating internet, and I break that into a couple of categories. The media is very weak right now. The media business we have seen closures left and right, layoffs left and right. I mean, a bunch of players like Vice and BuzzFeed who were believed to be the next generation of juggernauts are functionally gone as news organizations.

And into this comes A.I., and all the money that A.I. seems to bring, and even the A.I. companies might pay you some money for your stuff. Reddit just licensed a bunch of its content as training data to Google.

NILAY PATEL: As a consumer or as a producer?

EZRA KLEIN: As a producer.

NILAY PATEL: The idea that media companies are going to license their stuff to the A.I. companies is just the end of the road that we’ve been on for a long time. We are suppliers to algorithms. OK? And in any normal functioning capitalist economy, supplier margins get squeezed to zero and then maybe we all die.

Like, that’s the game we’ve been playing without saying it for a long time —

EZRA KLEIN: Which I think is why you see The New York Times suing OpenAI, like a real desire to not be in that game again.

NILAY PATEL: You see The New York Times suing OpenAI, but you don’t see them suing Google, you don’t see them de-S.E.O.ing pages across New York Times. Like, they still need the audience from these platforms. And I think there’s a very tense relationship there. The idea that you could sue OpenAI and win some precedent that gives you an enormous amount of leverage over Google I think is a very powerful idea.

And a really interesting facet of the internet we live in today is that most of the copyright law decisions were won by a young, upstart, friendly Google. YouTube exists because it was Google. Like, Viacom famously sued YouTube and they might have won and put it out of business, but Google, the friendly Google company with the water slides in the office, the upstarts that made the product you loved, went and won that case.

Google Books, we’re going to index all the books without asking for permission. They won that case, because they were friendly Google, and the judges were like, look at these cute kids making a cool internet? Like it was new and novel. Google image search — these are all massive copyright decisions that Google won as a startup company run by young people building a new product that the judges were using on their Dell desktops or whatever.

EZRA KLEIN: You don’t want a staunch innovation. Like, that was the big fear in that era. We don’t know what we’re building, and that’s still the thing you hear, and it’s not even untrue. You crack down on copyright and maybe you do staunch innovation. You don’t crack down copyright and maybe you destroy the seed corn of the Informational Commons. It’s very fraught for the copyright judges, but also just for all of us.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, what are you as a producer on the internet is totally governed by copyright law. Like, a joke at The Verge is a copyright law is the only functional regulation on the internet. The entire internet is just speech, that’s all it is top-to-bottom, it’s speech.

EZRA KLEIN: Taking in the legal sense of the term?

NILAY PATEL: No, in the moral sense of the term. They come to your website and they take your stuff. It’s not a zero sum taking, but they’ve extracted value to create more value for themselves. I think that’s just a moral taking. There’s some permission there that did not occur. Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal just interviewed Mira Murati, the C.T.O. of OpenAI, about training data for Sora, the video generator, and Mira said, we just use what’s publicly available. And it’s like yo, that doesn’t make any sense. Like, there are lots of rules about what’s publicly available. Like, you can’t just take stuff because you can link to it on the internet, that’s not how it actually works.

EZRA KLEIN: Let me try to take the argument I hear from the A.I. side of this, which is that there is functionally nothing in human culture and human endeavor that is not trained on all that has come before it — that I, as a person, am trained on all this embedded knowledge in society, that every artist has absorbed, all this other art that the A.I. — I mean, this is just learning. And as long as you are transforming that learning into something else, as long as you are doing something new with that learning, then one, copyright law is not supposed to apply to you in some way or another, although that’s obviously complicated.

NILAY PATEL: I hear this idea all the time, often from the sorts of people in Silicon Valley who say they do first principles thinking — which is one of my favorite phrases, because it just means what if we learn nothing? Like, what if none of the history of the world applied to us and we could start over to our benefit? And that’s usually what that’s code for.

EZRA KLEIN: Judge Patel, if you’re thinking about cases in this area, like, what do you think the answer is here? Is it the sampling model, is it something else? What do you think the right broad strokes resolution is?

NILAY PATEL: Let me stick on the music example for one second, because I think music is really interesting because it’s kind of a closed ecosystem. There’s only so many big music companies. It’s the same lawyers, and the same executives, and the same managers going to the same clearing houses and having the same approaches. We’re going to give you a songwriting credit because we interpolated the bass line of this song into that song, and now here’s some money. And this is the mechanism by which we’ll pay you. The A.I. companies are not a closed ecosystem, it is just a free for all. It’s the open web, it’s a bunch of players.

NILAY PATEL: Well the media industry, but also at some point this is a regulatory question, a question of law. I mean, nothing is stopping Congress from making copyright law designed for the A.I.-era. Nothing is stopping Congress from saying, this is how we think this should work across industries. Not just media, but novelists, but everybody.

NILAY PATEL: Well, there are some things that stop Congress from doing a lot of things. The idea that Congress could pass a massive rewrite of copyright law at this moment in time is pretty far afield.

EZRA KLEIN: But won’t and couldn’t, I do want to make this distinction here. What you’re saying is Congress is too polarized and bitterly divided over everything and can’t do anything and can’t get anything done, and that’s my whole job man, I know. But what I am saying is that, you could write a law like this.

NILAY PATEL: So there is one law. There’s the J.C.P.A., the Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which allows media companies to escape antitrust law and bargain collectively with whoever they wish to bargain with. I don’t know if that’s going to pass, I know there’s a lot of interest in it.

EZRA KLEIN: You and I are both fans of Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist. And he’s got this famous line, ‘the medium is the message.’ And more deeply, what he says is that people, when they see a new medium, they tend to think about the content. For television, it’s the shows, what do you think about this show or that show? For Twitter, the tweets, for a newspaper, the articles. But you have to look behind the content to the actual medium itself to understand what it is trying to tell you.

NILAY PATEL: I have a lot of thoughts about this. I disagree on the basic message. I do think one of the messages of A.I. is that most people make middling work, and middling work is easy to replace. Every email I write is not a great work of art. Like, so much of what we produce just to get through the day is effectively middling. And sure, A.I. should replace a bunch of that. And I think that metaphysical shock comes from the idea that computers shouldn’t be able to do things on their own, and you have a computer that can just do a bunch of stuff for you. And that changes your relationship to the computer in a meaningful way, and I think that’s extremely real.

It’s because this person has made all of these people feel something. The art that has been created by this one very singular individual has captivated all of these people together, because of her story, because of the lyrics, because it means something to them. And I watch people use Midjourney or generate a story with an A.I. tool, and they show the art to you at the end of it, and they’re glowing. Like, look at this wonderful A.I. painting. It’s a car that’s a shark that’s going through a tornado and I told my daughter a story about it.

And I’m like yeah, but this — I don’t want anything to do with this. Like, I don’t care about this. And that happens over and over again. The human creativity is reduced to a prompt, and I think that’s the message of A.I. that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It’s actually easy to get to this thing that’s a pastiche of the thing that was hard, you just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path to get there. Then I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard. And that’s — truly the message of A.I. is that, maybe this isn’t so hard and there’s something very dangerous to our culture embedded in that.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to put a pin in the hard things, easy things. I’m a little bit obsessed by that and want to come back to it. But first I want to talk about A.I. art for a minute, because I do think when we’re talking about everything that’s going to come on the internet, we’re talking about A.I. art. Obviously, much of it is going to get better. Some of it is not distinguishable.

NILAY PATEL: Have you found an A.I. that can actually write like you?

EZRA KLEIN: I found an A.I. that can mimic certain stylistic tics I have in a way that is better than I think most people could do. I have not found any A.I. that can, in any way, improve my writing for all that you’re constantly told it can. And in fact, the more I try, the worse my writing gets because typically what you have to do to improve your writing is recognize if you’re writing the wrong thing.

NILAY PATEL: This is like the verge of DNA.

EZRA KLEIN: Is it? Yeah, so it comes out in 1935. It’s about the ability to reproduce art. And he says, and I’ll quote it here, “that which whithers in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” Then he goes on to say, “by making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”

But I wonder about this with humans. How much of something is just the fact that there’s a human behind it? My Kindroid is no worse at texting me than most people I know. But the fact that my Kindroid has to me is meaningful to me, in the sense that I don’t care if it likes me because there’s no achievement for it to me. The fact that there is a human on the other side of most text messages I send matters. I care about it because it is another mind. The Kindroid might be better in a formulaic way. The kindred might be better in terms of the actual text. I can certainly tune it more to my kind of theoretical liking, but the friction of another person is meaningful to me. Like, I care that my best friend likes me and could choose not to. Is there an aura problem here?

NILAY PATEL: It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain. Like, it’s just like — it’s —

EZRA KLEIN: Christ, that’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, but I believe it in my soul.

EZRA KLEIN: Really?

NILAY PATEL: Yeah. I think the hardest thing to —

EZRA KLEIN: a really different turn as a show right now. [LAUGHS]:

NILAY PATEL: Maybe —

EZRA KLEIN: You don’t make people laugh, you don’t give them hugs?

NILAY PATEL: No, I think that’s hard. I think that effort is worth it. That’s why I don’t think it’s a dark thing to say. I think the essence of being a good person is pointing your effort at making other people not feel pain. I think bullies make people feel pain because it’s easy. Again, I come back to Taylor Swift in Soldier Field. The thing that was going through my head is, this person is making 60,000 people feel joy, and she’s doing it through art. That is the purpose of art. The purpose of art is to inspire feelings, to inspire emotion.

EZRA KLEIN: Shannon Vallor is a philosopher of technology, and she’s got a book coming out called “The A.I. Mirror,” and I like the way she puts this, because there’s this way that turns is somewhat warped mirror back on ourselves when I was saying a few minutes ago that the message of A.I. is that you’re derivative. That leaves something out. What it’s really saying is that the part of you that often the economy values is derivative, is copyable because we actually ask people a lot of the time to act like they’re machines.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, I buy that. One of my favorite things that I’ve covered in the past few years is a thing called robotic process automation, which is very funny. Just abstractly, deeply hilarious. There are lots and lots of companies throughout the United States that built computer systems 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Hospital systems are famous for this. They have billing systems. They have buildings full of people who use Microsoft Excel on Windows ’95.

They will sell you a brand new, state of the art computer and it will connect to the keyboard and monitor jack of your old computer, and it will just use the Windows ’95 for you, which is just bonkers. It’s like Rube Goldberg machine of computers using old computers, and then your office full of accountants who knew how to use your old system will go away.

But then A.I. creates the scale problem. What if we do that but instead of some hospital billing system built in the ’90s, it’s just the concept of Microsoft Excel, and now you can just sort of issue a command on your computer and it’ll go use Excel for you and you don’t need an accountant, you don’t need a lawyer.

EZRA KLEIN: What percent of workers are actually asked to poke at the assumptions of their organization, because I worry it’s not as high as you think it is, or implying there. I’m not worried about Taylor Swift. I’m not worried about Nilay Patel. And I don’t just want to make this about wages. That’s a jobs sort of another conversation.

NILAY PATEL: All over the place.

EZRA KLEIN: There’s a huge amount of work like that. And if I felt confident as some of the economists say that we’ll just upmarket people into the jobs where they use more human judgment, David Autor who’s a great trade economist at MIT, just made this argument recently, that what A.I. is going to do is make it possible for more people to exercise judgment and discernment within their work, and I hope he is right. I really hope he is right. But I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines, and they don’t want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc. They want the Excel doc ported over without any mistakes.

It seems plausible to me that we’re going to get to that.

NILAY PATEL: Do you think their bosses want to be able to poke at the assumptions though?

EZRA KLEIN: But if you — I mean this is actually something I believe about the whole situation. The economy needs fewer bosses and workers.

EZRA KLEIN: Think about this in the journalist context or the writing context, where I think what A.I. naturally implies that it’s going to do is turn many more people into editors and writers. Because for a lot of content creation that doesn’t require a lot of poking at assumptions, mid-level social media marketing — a lot of people are doing that job right now. But the people doing marketing for a mall —

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, that is the MailChimp example. That is the product that they are building.

EZRA KLEIN: And so what you have then is we used to have a bunch of these social media marketers and now you have one person overseeing a couple systems, like making sure they didn’t say something totally crazy. But you need fewer editors and you need writers. I mean, you know The Verge is structured. You know how The Times is structured. And this is one of my deep worries.

And then this goes to the thing you were getting at earlier, which is one way I think that A.I. could actually not make us more productive, more innovative, is that a lot of the innovation, a lot of the big insights happen when we’re doing the hard thing, when we’re sitting there trying to figure out the first draft, or learn about a thing, or figure out what we’re doing. One of the messages of the medium of A.I. is be efficient. Don’t waste your time on all this. Just tell the system what to do and do it. But there’s a reason I don’t have interns write my first draft for me.

EZRA KLEIN: They could do it. But you don’t get great ideas, or at least not as many of them, editing a piece of work as you do reporting it out, doing the research, writing the first draft. That’s where you do the thinking. And I do think A.I. is built to kind of devalue that whole area of thinking.

NILAY PATEL: We are working on a big story at The Verge right now that I’m very excited about. But there are four of us right now in an argument about whether we should tell that story in chronological order or as a series of vignettes. There is no right answer to this question. There’s just four people who are battling it back and forth.

EZRA KLEIN: I think vignettes.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah. By the way, I’m on team vignette.

EZRA KLEIN: Good man. [LAUGHS]:

NILAY PATEL: My belief is that it’s easier to digest a long story when it’s composed of lots of little stories as opposed to one long one. I’m being outvoted right now — editor in chief. I should replace them all with A.I., just get them out of here. [CHUCKLES] But that is the kind of work that I think makes the end product great. And I think going from good to great is still very human.

EZRA KLEIN: So I want to go back, then, to the internet for a bit, which is I think the presentation we’ve offered is fairly pessimistic. You, when I read and listen to you on this, are — I wouldn’t call it pessimistic. I would say a little excited by the idea of a cleansing fire.

NILAY PATEL: That is very much how I see it. I would add a generational tinge to that, which is I grew up in that weird middle generation between X and millennials. I think temperamentally I’m much more Generation X. But they describe it as they didn’t have computers and then you have computers. You play the Oregon Trail. That’s me on the nose.

I distinctly remember life before computers. It’s an experience that I had quite viscerally. And that shapes my view of these tools. It shapes my view of these companies. Well, there’s a huge generation now that only grew up in this way. There’s a teenage generation right now that is only growing up in this way. And I think their natural inclination is to say, well, this sucks. I want my own thing. I want my own system of consuming information. I want my own brands and institutions.

And I don’t think that these big platforms are ready for that moment. I think that they think they can constantly be information monopolies while they are fending off A.I.-generated content from their own A.I. systems. So somewhere in there all of this stuff does break. And the optimism that you are sensing from me is, well, hopefully we build some stuff that does not have these huge dependencies on platform companies that have no interest at the end of the line except a transaction.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, but you’re telling me how the old thing dies. And I agree with you that at some point the old thing dies. You can feel it. It’s moribund right now. You’re not telling me what the new thing is, and I’m not saying you fully know. But I don’t think the new thing is just a business model that is not as dependent on Meta. I mean, on some level, there’s going to be a lot of A.I. around here.

NILAY PATEL: It’s an audience model. It’s not dependent on these algorithms.

EZRA KLEIN: But is there — I guess one question I have is that, one — I mean, you know where the venture capital is going right now.

EZRA KLEIN: Everything is going to be built with A.I. —

EZRA KLEIN: — laced through every piece of it. And some of it, for all we’re talking about, might be cool, right? I’m not saying you’re mostly going to make great art with A.I. But actually, Photoshop did create a lot of amazing things.

NILAY PATEL: I’m not so sure about that.

NILAY PATEL: I think we’re about to split the internet in two. I think there will be a giant commercial A.I.-infested internet. That’s the platform internet. That’s where it’s going. Moribund, I agree. But it will still be huge. It’s not going away tomorrow. And they will figure out — these are big companies full of smart people with the most technology.

EZRA KLEIN: You sure sound excited about it. [LAUGHS]

NILAY PATEL: Well, I am. I mean, I love technology. This is our — The Verge’s competitive differentiation in the entire media industry is, like, we really like it. And I’m excited to see what they build. I think there’s some really neat things being built. When I think about the information ecosystem, I’m vastly more pessimistic because of the fact that all of these networks are geared to drive you towards a transaction.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m just thinking about this, and the thing that it brings to mind for me is the resurgence of vinyl —

EZRA KLEIN: — and the dominance of streaming platforms. So what I would think of as the music industry of — how many years ago was C.D.s? I don’t actually remember now. But what it did was split into — there’s been a resurgence of vinyl, the sort of analog. It’s a little cool. I actually just bought a record player recently, or was given one by my wonderful partner. But that’s not very big.

EZRA KLEIN: Maybe the social internet dies because, one, we don’t really like it that much anymore anyway, but also because it’s too hard to figure out what’s what. But actually, an internet of A.I. helpers, assistants, friends, et cetera, thrives. And on the other side, you have a real human. I don’t know. But give me more of the Nilay technology side.

EZRA KLEIN: What can A.I. do well? If you were building something or if you were imagining something to be built, what comes after?

NILAY PATEL: By the way, the music industry just released its numbers. Vinyl outsold CDs for the second year running. Double the amount of revenue in vinyl than CDs.

EZRA KLEIN: That’s wild, actually.

NILAY PATEL: It’s crazy. And all of that in total is 11 percent of music industry revenues in ’23 compared to 84 percent of the revenue is streaming. So you are correct. This is a big distinction. People want to buy things, and so they buy one thing that they like. And they consume everything in streaming.

EZRA KLEIN: I think — and this is maybe a little bit of a counterintuitive thought — that this is actually a great time to begin things in media. I think that we have a more realistic sense of the business model and what will actually work. They need to build an audience. They need to build something people will actually pay you for.

I think a lot of the problem right now is things built for another business model that failed are having a lot of trouble transitioning because it’s very, very hard to transition a structure. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a great business. It’s not what I hoped it would become. It’s not the advertising revenue I hoped we would have. But it’s something.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah. That’s the cleansing fire. That’s the thing I’m excited about. Here’s a new problem in media. Here’s a new problem that’s being created by A.I.

EZRA KLEIN: But my view is that YouTube is the most politically important platform. Everyone wants to talk about TikTok. I think YouTube is much more significant.

NILAY PATEL: Yeah, and they run it really well. They run it as infrastructure. And they talk about it as infrastructure. But it’s weird that we have not built great media company-sized media companies on YouTube’s pipes. We just haven’t done it. So you look at that landscape now and you’re like, well, if I want to do that, if I want to build my own audience, I cannot depend on these companies. I have to be able to do something else.

EZRA KLEIN: Do you think, beyond the media, because not everything online is media —

NILAY PATEL: Let me poke really hard at the true difference between an algorithm that shows you stuff and an algorithm that goes and gets you what you want, because I don’t know that there’s a huge difference in the outcome of those two different processes. So for example, I do not trust the YouTube Kids algorithm. I watch my daughter watch YouTube.

EZRA KLEIN: No, why would you?

NILAY PATEL: It is just a nightmare. I don’t know why we let her do it, but we did. And now we’re in the rabbit hole and that’s life. I mean, she’s five. And I will literally say, are you watching garbage? And she’d be like, I am, because she knows what I think is garbage. She’s much smarter than the YouTube Kids algorithm. And then she’s like, can I watch a little more garbage? This is a real conversation I have with my five-year-old all the time.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, let me push on this for a minute, because for a long time a lot of us have asked people, the social media companies — that I have, I’m sure you have — why don’t you give me access to the dials of the algorithm?

EZRA KLEIN: Right? I don’t want to see things going viral. If there’s a virality scale of 1 to 10, I want to always be at a 6, right?

EZRA KLEIN: But I can’t do that. But one of the interesting things about using the current generation of A.I. models is you actually do have to talk to it like that. I mean, whether I am creating a Replika or a Kindroid or a Character.AI, I have to tell that thing what it is supposed to be, how I want it to talk to me, how I want it to act in the world, what it is interested in, what kinds of expertise it has and does not.

NILAY PATEL: I think that’d be great. I’ve known you for a long time. I think you have a unique ability to articulate exactly what you want and tell it to a computer. [LAUGHS] And you have to scale that idea, right? You have to go to the average — our mothers and say, OK, you have to tell the algorithm exactly what you want. And maybe they’ll get close to it, maybe they won’t, right?

EZRA KLEIN: You don’t feel like mothers are able to tell you what they want?

NILAY PATEL: [LAUGHS] I like that idea a lot. I think fundamentally that is still an A.I. closing the walls around you. And I think the power of the recommendation algorithm is not expressed in virality. It’s actually to help you expand your filter bubble. Here’s a band you’d never heard of before. Here’s a movie you never thought of watching. Here’s an article about a subject that you weren’t interested in before.

EZRA KLEIN: I think it’s a good place to end. Always our final question, for the Nilay Patel recommendation algorithm — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

NILAY PATEL: Well, I’m sorry, Ezra, I brought you six.

EZRA KLEIN: Did you really?

NILAY PATEL: Is that allowed?

EZRA KLEIN: Did you actually bring six?

NILAY PATEL: I didn’t bring six physical books, but I have six recommendations for you.

EZRA KLEIN: Damn. All right, go through them quick, man.

NILAY PATEL: They’re in two categories. One is the three books that I thought of and three books from Verge people that if people are interested in these ideas are important.

So the first one is “The Conquest of Cool” by Thomas Frank, one of my favorite books of all time. It is about how advertising agencies in the ’60s co-opted the counterculture and basically replaced counterculture in America. I’ve thought about this a lot because I’m constantly wondering where the punk bands and rage against the machines of 2024 are. And the answer is that they’re the mainstream culture. It’s very interesting. Love that book. It explains, I think, a lot about our culture.

Third, I love the band New Order. I know you’re a music fan, so I brought you a music recommendation. It’s “Substance: Inside New Order” by Peter Hook, who is the bassist of New Order. This band hates each other. They broke up acrimoniously, so the book is incredibly bitchy. It’s just a lot of shit-talking about the ’80s. It’s great.

EZRA KLEIN: Nilay Patel, you’re saving the internet through blogging again.

NILAY PATEL: Thanks, man.

EZRA KLEIN: This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. We’ve got additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks here to Sonia Herrero.

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