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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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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.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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

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

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist'. 31 October.

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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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.

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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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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

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
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Astrological Sign: Capricorn
University of Cambridge, Trinity College
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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

By: History.com Editors

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

Sir Isaac NewtonENGLAND - JANUARY 01: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) .Canvas. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) . Gemaelde.]

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.”

HISTORY Vault: Sir Isaac Newton: Gravity of Genius

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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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Scientific Methods
Famous Physicists
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.

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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View all collections

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 .

University of Cambridge

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Introduction to the Texts

Mathematical
His Notebooks
by category
His Life & Work at a Glance
His Personal Life
18th Century
19th Century
The Portsmouth Papers
The Sotheby Sale
Newton-related Papers of John Maynard Keynes
Other Attempts to Publish Newton's Papers
About Newton's Library
Books in Newton's Library
Bibliography
The Newton Project
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Tagging & Transcription Guidelines
Acknowledgments

A. The Religious Papers

B. the mathematical and scientific papers, c. the mathematical and scientific correspondence, d. political materials, e. historical contextual materials.

Newton’s more polished religious writings are among the most original treatises on theology in the early modern period, and their publication allows researchers to see this work in its totality for the first time. Given their scope and quality, as well as their status as previously unseen works by Isaac Newton, their release constitutes a major event in the history of early modern thought. The approximately 2.2m words of Newton’s religious writings published since the start of 2008 show each stage of his creative process, from his note-taking to his idiosyncratic redrafting of various texts, and then finally on to the polished and virtually complete texts, written for a still largely mysterious audience. These texts transform what we know of the scale and nature of Newton’s researches, and make it possible for the first time to understand the links between different strands of his religious writings; the order of their composition; their putative links with other areas of his intellectual life; and their relations to the wider social and intellectual contexts in which he worked. They are available in both diplomatic and normalised form, and from November 2013 have been linked to images of the originals held by the NLI. At the time of writing, fourteen of Newton’s original Latin productions have been translated (all but one by Michael Silverthorne). [1]

It is impossible to say exactly to what extent the religious archive as it stands was organised by Newton himself, and to what degree it has resulted from later organising efforts by his relatives, editors and owners. Fortunately, and despite the fact that the archive is now distributed across the globe, we have very good evidence that virtually nothing has been lost from the collection of papers that existed at Newton’s death. Having said that, we also know that many efforts have been made to re-order the papers by bringing together drafts or disparate documents that concern the same topic, or by joining together parts of one document that have been separated for hundreds of years.

Some of the collections that have come down to us contain a large number of much smaller documents that seem to have been put into a pile on the grounds that they belonged nowhere else. One good example is the extensive set of papers at New College Oxford (designated New College Oxford 361.2). This contains calculations associated with the second edition of the Principia , papers connected with Newton’s business at the Mint, and numerous drafts of his work on prophecy and chronology. Many of these topics can be found together on one single sheet, and often on letters addressed to Newton. Many of these pages are charred through burning, and numerous pages are genuine palimpsests whose interpretation, transcription and encoding is a monumental act of scholarly labour. For that very reason, the checking and proofing of this most resistant of documents will not occur until the spring of 2014.

The Newton Project has greatly expanded our knowledge of three aspects of Newton’s religious interests:

(i) the publication of his theological writings reveals the full range of his private religious opinions, and answers questions about his beliefs that have beguiled the curious for over three centuries. Newton’s religious nachlass has proved to be much larger and much more complex than we envisaged when we began the work fifteen years ago, and the texts available via the Newton Project are now among the largest set of religious resources for any individual. The papers demonstrate that in this field Newton was a thinker of the highest calibre and intellectual daring, though our respect for his courage may well be tempered by the fact that he published almost nothing of it in his lifetime. These would be fascinating texts if we did not know who their author was, or if we knew that they were not by Newton. As it is, the fact that they are certainly written by Newton, and that many of his most exciting non-scientific works were composed when he was at the peak of his intellectual powers (in the 1670s and 80s), allows researchers for the first time to assess the degree to which these texts are similar to his contemporary work in natural science.

Newton’s religious views covered a wide range of subjects though he did his best to avoid discussing what he thought were overly ‘metaphysical’ opinions, or those doctrines that had no basis in Scripture. He was deeply committed however, to showing how and why these same doctrines had been introduced early in the early Christian church in order to corrupt the true religion. Indeed, at every opportunity Newton used historical evidence found in the writings of the Church Fathers and others, rather than engaging in abstruse theological discussions over doctrine. It was not that he could not grasp the fine points about doctrine, but rather that he felt discussion of certain doctrines (such as the nature of God’s offer of grace, and the nature of predestination) led only to the sort of barren disputes that he condemned in the field of natural philosophy. Going far beyond what for him were permissible religious discussions, disputes over unscriptural fictions were decidedly unchristian.

Newton’s interests concerned early church history, Jewish and Christian prophecy, Scriptural exegesis, and the fate of the Noachid religion that — as he saw it — spanned the globe soon after the Flood. Some of these projects were independent of each other but from the 1670s his central interest was the rise of the Great Apostasy that (as he saw it) corrupted the Christian church in the fourth century after the birth of Jesus Christ. This had introduced the fundamental doctrines and practices of Roman Catholicism, and in his early work Newton wrote at length about how the chief perversions introduced into Christianity at this time had been engineered by the Devil himself. In assuming that Catholicism was the Devil’s own religion, Newton did not deviate markedly from the analyses offered by Anglican contemporaries such as his friend Henry More, a student of the great exegete Joseph Mede and the most prolific writer on prophecy in Restoration England. He did, however, break with almost all his contemporaries in condemning the concept of the Holy Trinity as the central doctrinal plank of that antichristian religion that came to dominate the Western world. In the domain of religion, it was his attack on the Trinity that made him cautious about revealing his true beliefs to others. The writings now published on the Newton Project website betray no evidence that Newton’s pronounced anti-Trinitarianism was engendered by contact with like-minded people, but they suggest that his deep abhorrence of the doctrine was a logical extension of his deep-seated hatred of idolatry.

Over two million of Newton’s words on the early Christian church survive, a testament to his immense efforts to document the decline and fall of the Apostolic faith. Much of the way he thought about the corruption of Christanity was, of course, premised on his beliefs about what the original form of Christianity actually was. Newton argued repeatedly was that it was a simple religion, preached to ordinary people, whose central feature was the principle of charity (or the Golden Rule) rather than any abstruse claim about the nature of Jesus Christ or about the precise manner in which he had redeemed humanity by his suffering. There were more difficult truths to be gleaned by learned men of more mature years (such as himself), but that was a different matter.

These truths concerned the meaning of prophecy and the way in which a proper understanding of church history revealed the working of the divine hand throughout history. Newton’s mastery of the historical evidence from this period — matched by only a handful of contemporaries — was energised and wholly shaped by his radical Protestant understanding of the Apocalypse. He built his system on what he believed were the core ‘discoveries’ of Mede, who described the essentials of antichristian idolatry and who argued that it was obvious that all these signs depicted Roman Catholicism. Like Mede and others working in the Protestant tradition, Newton argued that Revelation had its own internal ‘order’, and that once this was decoded, the Revelation narrative described in detail the rise and fall of Roman Catholicism. Although he agreed with Mede about the historical guilt of popery, Newton transformed Mede’s system so that his own definition of idolatry included the doctrine of the Trinity.

(ii) aside from their status as religious writings, the publication of all of Newton’s ’spiritual workshop’ makes it possible to understand how it fits into his larger intellectual world. When the Newton Project began in 1998, scholars at that stage belonged in two main camps. Those in the first group argued on positivist grounds that Newton’s work in the exact sciences was self-evidently more ‘valuable’ than his work in other fields, and they asserted that there could be no connection whatsoever between the gold of his mathematical and scientific effusions, and the dross of his religious fancies. In the 1960s and 70s other historians reacted vigorously to this fractured view of Newton’s work, and citing new evidence from his correspondence and other papers, they argued that all of his work was interconnected in some mysterious but coherent whole. [2]

For many decades there has been a mutual incomprehension between both camps, each unwilling or more likely, unable to examine the documents that were the staple primary sources for the other side. The texts on the Newton Project site make it possible to address this issue using evidence rather than making crude a priori statements. Apart from his vaulting ambition, and what some scholars have unhelpfully termed his ‘quest for truth’, the papers reveal no empirical smoking gun that connects the disparate areas of all of his writings. However, the compartmentalised nature of his work gives little succour to positivists. Rather, a broad examination of Newton’s archive demonstrates his capacity (shared, it should be said, by his contemporaries) to work in a wide range of fields according to the narrative conventions, types of evidence, and styles of proof appropriate to each domain. Having said that, it is possible that future research will find much deeper consonances between ostensibly unrelated areas of his fields of study. For example, the future implementation on the site of new investigative tools such as Latent Semantic Analysis will allow researchers to search for the possible re-use of concepts and phrases in different domains (and, as it happens, make the task of conventional editing much easier).

(iii) The existence of these novel materials allows researchers to assess how Newton’s religious work was related to that of his contemporaries, as well as to the social, religious and political contexts in which he lived. The search for Newton’s links to his own world is complicated by the fact that with one or two exceptions, he showed little concern with publishing his religious writings, or in participating in any religious controversy. Apart from the issue of manuscript warrant for the doctrine of the Trinity, he evinced little interest in contemporary debates, and was primarily concerned with the interpretation of Revelation and the events that took place in the early church. Moreover, it remains hard to tie his writings to specific events, since neither internal evidence (from the publication date of his sources) nor physical documentary evidence (in the form of watermarks) has permitted us to date Newton’s writings in these areas with any precision. Although he was almost wholly reliant on editions produced by others, and was interested in the same topics and questions that captivated the energies of other early modern scholars, he was an independent thinker who set great store by that independence. To that extent, the theological writer betrayed exactly the same scholarly ethos as the author of the Principia .

(i) Writings on the Ancient Religion

Given both the heretical nature of many of Newton’s beliefs, and his general abhorrence of print as a vehicle for his own writings, it remains unclear what the audience was supposed to be for his draft chapters and more complete tracts. In the early to mid-1680s, he turned his attention to a series of related projects concerning what he took to be the ‘true’ ancient religion that he believed was the most ‘rational’ of all. Taken as a whole, this was an enormous undertaking that would form the basis of his more mature works on chronology in the eighteenth century. The earliest of these efforts may well be his attempt to use euhemerist techniques drawn from authors such as Gerard Vossius and Samuel Bochart in order to situate his history of the ancient religion within a genealogy of the ancient peoples of Europe and the Middle East. In another related project, he examined the ancient religion in more detail and yet another series of writings he set out to show that the ancient religion was rational precisely because it embodied a series of natural, Newtonian elements. In 1685 he summarised elements of these works in the first paragraphs of the ’ De Motu Corporum Liber Secundus’, a work that was essentially the draft of the Third Book of the published Principia . Soon afterwards he wrote a remarkable text on the religious and scientific practices of the Ancients that was related both to his more extensive treatment of the Ancient Vestal religion and also to his draft classical scholia that he was at one time intending to include in the second edition of the Principia . Over 100,000 words of notes for these projects have been transcribed over the last five years, the most interesting probably being the notes on Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System and the extended excerpts that formed the basis of his ‘classical scholia’.

By the early eighteenth century Newton had greatly expanded his knowledge of the political and religious state of the ancient world. The most extensive of his drafts for a comprehensive chronology of the ancient world are now published, all for the first time. Although hyperbole about Newton’s erudition can be wearing, these texts show that he had a mastery of a vast range of sources and facts that he had brought together — using a series of interpretive principles — into one coherent whole. When these views were published in a truncated form in his 1728 Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended , critics took issue with the ways in which he had used his principles — as well as evidence from astronomy — to lop off many centuries from the histories of ancient kingdoms given by historians from different cultures. [3]

(ii) Writings on Scriptural exegesis

The fascinating analysis of textual corruption that Newton sent to Locke in November 1690 reveals both his doctrinal commitments and also his capacity to generate in a matter of months an extended, innovative tract on a particular topic. Newton argued that all putative Trinitarian proof-texts were either forgeries, inserted by ignorant or scheming priests, or had been misinterpreted by Catholics and Protestants to the present day. Newton already had a serious interest in supposed corruptions of Scripture, notably (as many of his contemporaries also did) in the history of 1 John 5:7-8 and 1 Timothy 3:16. The background to the creation of this text has been examined elsewhere, but the Newton Project now provides a rich set of resources for understanding how Newton’s various attempts to ascertain the truth about these documents were part of a much larger analysis of the general corruption of Christianity in the early Christian church. The texts on the project site include Hopton Haynes’s 1709 translation of the work.

One of the most remarkable and technically demanding documents (both to decipher and encode) published by the Project over the last five years was the result of a request to Newton made in 1693 by the Oxford divine John Mill, who had known Newton for around a decade. Mill asked Newton to send a list of variant readings of the Apocalypse from his own notes on various printed sources such as Brian Walton’s Polyglot , as well as gleanings he had noticed in two manuscripts owned by their mutual friend John Covel. Newton, who had made short records of textual variants in the past, made two lengthy sets of notes of variant readings and sent them to Mill, who recorded his gratitude for Newton’s extraordinary labours in two letters . Ultimately, he included a number of Newton’s observations in his variorum New Testament of 1707.

(iii) Writings on Prophecy and Jewish Worship

The Project has also published all the documents relating to Newton’s work on the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple and the practices of the people who worshipped within it. Newton believed that the dimensions of objects mentioned in Old Testament prophecy had a figurative or non-literal meaning (so prophetic days meant real years). Understanding Jewish religious practices, and in particular the spatial structure of worship, was crucial because it was the key to understanding the Apocalypse, whose setting was the holiest part of the Temple. The inner court, for example, represented the chosen people while the outer court represented the gentiles; specific religious rituals described in the Old Testament or the writings of Josephus and others were referenced by the account of heaven in the first chapters of Revelation. Nevertheless, Newton’s ’ Prolegomena ’, his extended analysis of Ezekiel and other books connected with the dimensions of the temple, is not primarily concerned with typology but with ascertaining the exact dimensions (in terms of cubits) and structure of the temple. The Project has also published and transcribed texts that are closely related to the ‘Prolegomena’, both offering detailed accounts of the internal structure of Solomon’s Temple and its copies. In this context it is also worth mentioning the notes Newton took from Maimonides’s De Cultu Divino , which was a major source for those contemporaries of Newton who wrote on the size and shape of the Temple.

Although the Project published three extensive prophetic treatises between 2004 and 2007, it transcribed an even greater amount of prophecy-related material between January 2008 and December 2013. On the basis of internal evidence, Newton’s small and unfinished essay on Christ’s Second Coming and the Day of Judgment can be related to the lengthy treatise on prophecy known to have been composed between 1684 and 1689. However, the largest portion of writings on prophecy was composed in the last three decades of his life. The monumental redraftings of his work on prophecy, transcribed and encoded from 2009-13, explore the relationships between Old Testament prophecy and its fulfilment both in the life and deeds of Christ and in the events of the early Christian church.

(iv) Writings on the early Christian church

Among the vast range of textual fragments that make up Newton’s oeuvre are a series of fascinating individual chapters on the early church whose inter-relationships are as yet undetermined. One of these is an extraordinary Proemium to a multiple volume work on early church history. As an account of the rise of the monastic orders it is unique among Newton’s writings for its explicit treatment of the ascetic practices carried out by the first monks, and for those interested, it gives the best evidence of Newton’s sexual proclivities. Another stray chapter offers a detailed account of the way Athanasius (as Newton saw it) had corrupted the writings of the ante-Nicene writers in order to make the early Church Fathers more orthodox, and a lengthy essay deals with the discussions at Alexandria between the bishop of the city, Alexander, and the presbyter Arius, which gave rise to the great Arian controversies in the 320s and 30s. Newton gave vent to his dislike of the morals and machinations of Constantine, whose personal behaviour and interference in religious affairs he condemned in the harshest terms. Finally, in a much longer tract Newton brought together many of the analyses found in draft chapters elsewhere in his writings to provide a large and coherent narrative of the nature and origins of the Arian controversy.

The relationship between the hundreds of thousands of raw notes that remain in his archive, and the more polished writings on prophecy, chronology and church history will take many years to study — though this undertaking is made much easier by the fact that the writings are in digital form. There are a number of documents that contain the raw materials of Newton’s key work in these areas, including some of his notesfrom Book One, Tome 2 of Petavius’s (Petau’s) Dogmata Theologica , and a vast reservoir of excerpts (NLI Yahuda Ms. 14) from Baronius’s Annals and various editions of the Church Fathers. Another set of documents , now classified under one heading (NLI Yahuda Ms. 2.5b), is made up of a number of different notes from primary sources along with parts of longer tracts composed by Newton. Occasionally Newton’s writings either degenerate into notes or they are in fact composed of lengthy quotations from original sources, with the odd bridging sentence that indicates that the text is in fact to be classed as one of Newton’s own texts.

(v) Calendrical reform and natural theology

The Project has published a number of texts related to calendrical reform , a subject in which Newton took a keen interest when he moved to London in 1696. This was in connection with the irregularities regarding the dating of Easter created by the Julian calendar, which Protestant England and Scotland still used. Some of Newton’s ideas for making religious festivals more consistent across Christendom (allegedly twice as accurate as was possible within the Gregorian calendar) were radical for the time, but some of them were adopted when the Julian calendar was finally abandoned in 1752.

Although the scholar of Newton’s working practices is drawn to the most heavily re-worked and intractable documents, many provide much easier pickings. At the start of 2008 the Project published full diplomatic transcriptions of the short but fascinating correspondence that Newton conducted with Thomas Burnet in the winter of 1680-1. Burnet sought reassurance from the Lucasian Professor in connection with his Telluris Theoria Sacra (Sacred Theory of the Earth), the first volume of which appeared in 1681. Burnet offered a sophisticated, physical account of the creation of the cosmos, arguing that Moses had delivered a false theory of Creation that was rendered acceptable to the inferior mental and physical faculties of the vulgar. Newton responded politely but negatively, arguing that Moses’s account had been ‘accommodated’ to the vulgar but was not for that reason false. Burnet’s story, he said, was plausible but in key places he had effectively exchanged his own views in the place of what was clearly stated in Genesis. As evidence for Newton’s interest in natural theology, the Burnet correspondence should be examined alongside Newton’s exchanges with Richard Bentley in the winter of 1692-3, which the Newton Project published early on in its existence.

(vi) The notes of Barnabas Smith

Lastly, among of the highlights of the series of texts published over the last three years are writings that are not by Newton himself, but which were composed by his step-father, Barnabas Smith. Those acquainted with the history of Newton’s childhood will be aware that his mother left the home at Woolsthorpe Manor to become the wife of Smith, the rector of the local parish of North Witham. Of the ten year period during which Newton was brought up at the Manor by his maternal grandmother, he left only one direct piece of evidence. This testimony, in which he remembered wanting to burn down the house that his mother and step-father slept in, is all the more remarkable in that he recorded it almost ten years after the thought must have occurred. William Stukeley told John Conduitt that Newton inherited the 200 or 300 volumes of theological texts left by Smith at his death, but he also managed to acquire Smith’s theological notebook .

As we shall see below, Smith’s notebook became the ‘Wastebook’ in which Newton expressed many of his most important early mathematical discoveries. Smith listed a large series of theological topics alphabetically; the date of these mainly Latin entries is unknown, and they could have been made at any time in the half-century before his death in 1653. In his own theological notebook, Newton organised his theological notes in a similar form (as did most others), but he seems to have drawn nothing from his step-father’s jottings. A detailed study of these notes, and of Smith’s theological views is yet to be made, and as a result of this we may be in a better position to understand whether Smith, or Newton’s maternal uncle William Aiscough, played a larger role in Newton’s religious upbringing. In any case, it is obvious that Newton’s mature radical doctrinal commitments left him with little in common with Smith’s orthodox concerns. However, it is the jarring disjunction between the theological content of Smith’s notes and the innovative mathematical work of his step-son, with a line drawn between the two sets of entries, that is the most visually striking .

By the end of 2007, it had become obvious that in order to make use of the full power of the digital medium, and to allow the religious materials to be understood in the contexts of Newton’s other work, the Project was obliged to incorporate into the edition the totality of his work in the exact sciences. The Newton Project accordingly made a series of bids to fund the transcription of Newton’s key writings in these areas and as a consequence, the project has published in full his key notebooks in science and mathematics, along with his subsequent enhancement of the key ideas contained within them. The significance of these texts for the history of the exact sciences cannot be overestimated. The transcribed notebooks and early writings in mechanics and mathematics contain all the documentary remains of Newton’s pioneering work on the calculus, the binomial theorem and the value for acceleration due to gravity. Newton wrote down his most important mathematical discoveries in these texts, and to some extent he made these discoveries through the acts of writing them. For the first time they are available in their entirety, with links to high quality images of the originals at CUDL. In many cases these documents have been embedded in the digital infrastructure at Cambridge that permits the side-by-side viewing of the transcription and the image.

(i) Component JISC projects

The transcription and publication of these documents has been made possible by two awards from JISC in 2009 and 2011. In ‘ Enlightening Science ’ the project used Enlightenment popularisations of Newton’s scientific work to convey basic principles of physics to modern day audiences. We worked with a number of schools and other institutions and pioneered the use of videos both to record interviews with historians of science and to capture the recreation of core Newtonian experiments from the eighteenth century. Directed by Iliffe, the project published a series of podcasts and a wide range of lectures and popular texts from the eighteenth century that now constitute one of the most popular parts of the site.

The second JISC project, ‘ Windows on Genius ’, designed and directed by Iliffe, allowed us to publish in full the texts of all of Newton’s pioneering work on the method of series and fluxions (as he named the differential and integral calculus), the binomial theorem, and the genesis of the Principia Mathematica . JISC-funded work on this project was carried out between March and December 2011, and it remains an on-going and highly successful collaboration with Cambridge University Digital library to make images of Newton’s foundational scientific and mathematical works accessible alongside searchable transcriptions of the materials. The transcriptions of Newton’s two Cambridge mathematical notebooks alone took two and a half years, and presented unprecedented encoding problems both in terms of representing the original features of Newton’s notation, and also of displaying the layout of the mathematics systematically and precisely across different browsers. About 45% of the content of each of these documents is now published for the first time, and in unprecedented detail. The availability of these documents, along with later texts that develop their ideas, allows researchers to examine all the contexts necessary for understanding the evolution of his ideas. Secondly, and for the first time, researchers can see specific arguments and projects that have previously been uprooted from their original contexts setting now replaced in their correct position within the document.

(ii) The Optical Papers

The Newton Project now offers unrivalled resources for studying Newton’s pioneering studies in the field of optics. The last of his letters on optical subjects were published in 2012-13, but it is now possible to track the development of Newton’s optical thought in its entirety. His undergraduate philosophy notebook and his subsequent essay ’ Of Colours ’ show in detail the development of his theory of light and colours, according to which white light was understood to be composed of more basic (primary) colour-making rays. Initially he discovered that individual rays each had their own specific index of refraction (or as he put it, ‘degree of refrangibility’), so that given the same angle of incidence of a ray of sunlight entering a given prism at minimum deviation, red rays would always be refracted at a specific angle, and so would yellow and purple rays. Then, in a dramatic assault on all previous theories (whether Aristotelian or ‘mechanical’), Newton argued that colour did not arise from the transformation or modification of light as it passed from one medium to another, but instead it was an original property of specific ‘colour-making’ rays. Bodies possessed the colours they did only because they were ‘disposed’ to reflect some colours and to absorb others. When primary rays were brought together again by a subtle arrangement of prisms or by introducing a lens, white light would result. This was essentially the theory of the heterogeneity of white light that Newton announced in his famous paper on light and colours of February 1672.

During what was later termed his ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1666, Newton composed an essay on refraction , which he entered into his mathematical notebook (see below). At the outset of his 1672 paper, Newton claimed that he had begun to grind non-spherical (hyperbolic, parabolic or elliptical) lenses at the start of 1666. Probably inspired by reading Hooke’s Micrographia , he had bought a triangular prism to reproduce the experiment in Descartes’s Dioptrique (Newton used the Latin edition of 1650), where the latter had reproduced the colours of the rainbow by shining a white light through a prism. In his earlier essay on refraction, his interest in improving refracting telescopes took him back to Descartes’s equally important remarks on the sine law of refraction where Descartes had announced that because of the law, spherical lenses could not bring parallel rays to an exact focus. ‘Of Refractions’ recorded Newton’s practical efforts to grind glass in non-spherical conic sections. [4]

In the end, if we are to believe Newton in his 1672 paper, it was his discovery that primary coloured rays have intrinsically different indexes of refraction, and that there were constraints on the exactitude of images that could be produced by even the most perfectly ground non-spherical lenses, that made him end his "Glass works". The text shows Newton’s immense self-confidence and his talent for building practical devices, a continuation of the early tendency noted by his school friends and much later, by William Stukeley . It was this proclivity, of course, along with his understanding of the limits to simple refracting telescopes caused by chromatic aberration, which would lead him to make the first working reflecting telescope some time in 1668.

In December 2013 the Project published a diplomatic transcription of an earlier version of the optical lectures that Newton delivered as his first Lucasian lectures from January 1670. Neither these, the ’ Lectiones Opticae’ , nor a later version (designated by Alan Shapiro as ‘Optica’) are the verbatim accounts of the lectures Newton gave in 1670-1 and indeed they are different versions of a longer tract that he was intending (at one stage) to publish alongside a magnificent treatise on calculus and infinite series. By giving lectures on the topic of optics, Newton was following the path laid out by Isaac Barrow, his predecessor as Lucasian Professor. The first two lectures proved that sunlight consists of rays that have different indexes of refraction, and then from lecture 3 Newton discoursed at length on the nature of colours. It was in the third lecture that Newton for the first time pleaded that mathematics should play a central role in natural philosophy — and that there could be a mathematical science of colours. Lecture 9 as having been given in July 1670) was the first of three lectures on the subject of measuring refractions, and the remainder of the lectures concerned various propositions that followed from his analysis to that point. In the ‘Optica’ (which is being transcribed by the Newton Project throughout 2014), Newton reversed the order of the sections on colour and measuring refractions. [5]

In 2007, a substantial grant from the Royal Society enabled us to begin work on transcribing the extensive manuscript drafts of the ‘Queries’ that Newton appended to the successive editions of his Opticks , along with full transcriptions of all the printed editions of that text ( 1704 , 1706 and 1717/18 ). The transcription and encoding of the drafts were completed in 2008 and they were published online in the same year. The published ‘Queries’ were presented by their ultra-cautious author in a tentative and hypothetical form, but there is no doubt that they, and their drafts, represent his private views on various philosophical subjects such as the nature of life, electricity, gravity, force, the mind-body problem, and the relationship between God and his creation. Whatever Newton’s views about their epistemic status, the ‘Queries’ appended to the 1717/18 edition of Opticks cast in a more acceptable language his long held views about the existence of an ‘aether’, to which he had been committed since he was a student. The topics of the ‘Queries’ show a substantial degree of continuity with earlier projects conducted within alchemy , and many of them contained results from experiments on electricity and light that were conducted under Newton’s direction while he was president of the Royal Society. Many of the claims articulated in them are impossible to reconcile with the doctrines and general approach of the Principia Mathematica , but his views on the aether would exert an immense influence on natural philosophy throughout the eighteenth century.

(iii) The ‘Mathematical Notebook’ and the ‘Waste book’

The first of two major student documents published in full for the first time, the so-called ’ Mathematical notebook ’, records Newton’s initial engagement with the works of Johannes Hudde, François Viète, René Descartes, Frans van Schooten and John Wallis. Some of these researches may have been inspired by the lectures of the first Lucasian professor, Isaac Barrow (which began in the spring of 1664), though it is more likely that Newton had guidance on what books to read from Barrow himself. In any case, the content of his first notes shows that he was quickly able to engage in independent and original research. Later accounts of his initial problematic encounter with Euclid’s Elements and then his engagement with Descartes’s Géometrie (in van Schooten’s Latin edition) and Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum — based on the memorandum of Abraham de Moivre (and Newton’s own recollections ) — have become famous. However, the documentary history of Newton’s early researches is now for the first time available in its entirety. The first excerpts in the notebook concern the extraction of square, cube and higher roots and are from Schooten’s 1646 edition of Viète’s Opera Mathematica . Nothing in theseearly notes indicates that their author was about to engage in one of the most fertile bursts of creativity in the history of mathematics. [6]

The other great research notebook published in full by the Newton Project for the first time is the ’ Waste Book’ . Originally his step-father Barnabas Smith’s theological notebook (see above), Newton recorded his earliest investigations into reflection and refraction and at some point wrote down a fascinating list of all the problems he believed remained to be determined by mathematicians of his generation . He would go on to tackle nearly all of them, mostly with great success. From the summer of 1664 Newton immersed himself in Descartes’s great mathematical work Géometrie , available to him in van Schooten’s second Latin edition. In a number of research projects beginning the winter of 1664/5 (ff. 30v-33v and 47r-50r ), he examined equations for both basic and complicated curves. At the start of 1665, in research written down in the mathematical notebook (ff. 93v-116r and 120r-149r ) he extended Descartes’s techniques for constructing subtangents and subnormals to curves. By the summer of 1665 he had mastered these, and could derive the tangent to any curve by assuming that two lines converged to meet at a single point on a circle whose circumference coincided with the curve in question. These researches would culminate in Newton’s expression of the fundamental algorithm for determining the tangent at any point ("An universall theorem for tangents to crooked lines") to a wide variety of curves — what we now call the differential calculus. [7]

Among the most important entries in the Mathematical notebook are the notes that start on fol. 15r , which record Newton’s reading of Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum in the winter of 1664/5. Momentously, Newton soon developed various techniques published in Wallis’s book and discovered the generalised binomial theorem that allowed him to expand expressions of the form ( a + x ) m/n for negative and fractional powers. Newton later developed these foundational researches on the binomial theorem . Further notes from Arithmetica Infinitorum represent his initial confrontation with ‘the theory of indivisibles’, ’squaring’ or ‘quadratures’ , an approach to the calculation of areas under curves and volumes of that would evolve into the nascent version of what we now term the integral calculus. At about the same time, if not before, Newton began to use integral tables to solve anti-differentiation problems, in what was known as the ‘inverse problem of tangents’. Newton would be the first mathematician to understand and express the inverse relationship between the differential and integral calculus, articulating this in his great 1666 paper discussed below. [8]

(iv) Mathematical tracts

Another collection of texts represent extensions and more polished versions of work already done in the notebooks. Newton’s justly famous mathematical tract of October 1666, is made up of a series of propositions giving procedures for resolving increasingly complex problems by motion, that is, by treating various points that mark out various curves as if the points moved with a ‘velocity’ in time through a virtual space. Newton had developed this technique while in Lincolnshire the previous Autumn (again conceivably gleaned from Barrow’s lectures), and it was as a result of this that he coined the term ‘fluxion’ (its instantaneous rate of change, or what we now call a derivative), which became the general term he used to describe his method. The approach blurred the division between mathematics and mechanics, and many early propositions in the 1666 tract deal with rotations of planes and figures, and with the location of centres of gravity. In this work Newton wrote down for the first time in a systematic way the basic rules for finding the ‘tangent’ to a curve at any point and for finding the areas of surfaces bounded by curves and the volumes of three-dimensional figures. He also expressed his finding that the methods of tangents and quadratures (differentiation and integration) were inverse operations. [9]

Newton’s early ’ Laws of Motion ’, which date from about the same time, are unrelated to the more famous laws that formed the basis of the Principia Mathematica . They extend and attempt to formalise studies already carried out under the heading ’ Of Reflections ’ in the ‘Waste Book’ on rules concerning the impact of two bodies. As earlier, Newton was more interested in analysing the total force required to keep a body revolving around a central point. This fact betrays his underlying interest in the analysis of orbital dynamics, and shows his commitment to the view that such motion was to be analysed in terms of infinitesimally small ‘impacts’ that prevented an orbiting body from moving in a straight line along its tangent (and away from the centre of revolution). In the later work Newton generalised earlier findings that were based on various conservation principles and was the first to express the area law for central force motion (what we nowadays identify as the principle of conservation of angular momentum).

Newton first came to prominence when his paper on the analysis of equations by infinite series was circulated in the summer of 1669 to a group of London mathematicians by Barrow and the mathematical intelligencer John Collins (see below). This, Newton’s most notorious mathematical work on account of its key role in the priority dispute with Leibniz, summarised and extended the results of his work to that point and was effectively his first publication, albeit in a non-printed or ’scribal’ form. Although its contents went unheralded at the time, probably because none of its readers could grasp the magnitude of what he had done, Newton expressed three basic ‘rules’ for integrating simple curves. Collins made a point of contacting Newton and meeting him when the latter, now enshrined as Barrow’s successor in the Lucasian chair, travelled to London in late November. Newton initially impressed Collins by showing that he had contrived infinite (converging) series for log (1 + x) as well as for a number of other curves or ‘crooked lines’. Others, most notably Nicolas Mercator, had developed series that enabled them to determine the areas under various curves by creating infinite series for various curves and integrating them term-by-term. Despite his reticence in revealing his underlying methods, or indeed any of his work at all, Newton was however, far ahead of contemporaries. De Analysi was the result of Newton’s reading of the work (passed to him via Barrow, who had received it from Collins) and his recognition that he had to write something fast in order to secure his own priority. [10]

Newton did not accede to Collins’s requests to publish ‘De Analysi’ in print, but despite himself, he almost became a mathematical author in the early 1670s. One project would have shown that Newton was a master of modern algebra while the second would have demonstrated beyond question that he was the greatest mathematician of the modern world. The first was a result of Collins’s invitation to Newton to write an introduction to Gerard Kinckhuysen’s Algebra , which Collins had recently had translated (by Mercator) from Dutch into Latin. Despite initial confusion about his precise role in the business, Newton spent some time composing ‘Observations’ on the work, sending Collins an extensive text in July 1670. Although the level of sophistication Newton brought to his task went far beyond what he found in the object text, the project was never completed — in part because Newton was uncomfortable with features of his authorial role, and in part because he did not believe he had ‘finished’ the work. Having made a swift copy, Collins returned the work at Newton’s request , but despite revising it over the Autumn, Newton was never satisfied with the project. This did not, however, stop the high quality of his performance from becoming known to others such as John Wallis, who recommended its publication. [11]

The second of these projects was much more substantial . Newton completed the ‘Observations’ over the winter of 1670/1 but at some point he considered that his reputation would be better served by revealing the extent of his mathematical accomplishments. In July 1671 he told Collins that on Barrow’s advice he had completely reworked or ‘methodiz’d’ ‘De Analysi’ over the previous winter, working on it continuously until being called back to family business in Lincolnshire in mid-April. Continuing to frame his object of study as a point carving out a curve by moving through a space over time, he extended and systematised his work in the 1666 tract and in ‘de Analysi’. [12]

(v) Principia -related texts

Finally, as part of ‘Windows on Genius’, the Newton Project transcribed and published all the texts relating to the initial publication of the Principia Mathematica in 1687. Famously, Newton sent a small tract entitled ‘De motu corporum in gyrum’ to Edmond Halley some time in November 1684, three months after being prompted to do so by a visit from Halley. At the start of the year Halley had discussed orbital dynamics with Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren. All of them agreed that planets moved in regular conic sections and that the force that kept planets in orbits around the sun was inversely proportional to the square of their distance from it. The problem that Halley brought to Newton was whether and how one could demonstrate that planetary orbits arose from the inverse-square law; Newton claimed that he had such a demonstration but had been unable to give it to Halley at their meeting. [13]

The original ‘De motu’ offered embryonic versions of the first two of what are now known as Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Beyond this, Newton introduced the notion of ‘centripetal force’ and showed that an elliptical orbit implied an inverse-square law. He also noted that the same law implied an elliptical orbit when the velocity of the orbiting body fell between certain parameters. He extended his approach to other heavenly bodies, in that the analysis applied to the Moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the orbits of planets around the sun. It used a combination of techniques that allowed him to investigate centrally directed force (to the focus of an ellipse) in terms of continuously exerted force away from a tangential/ inertial path. Newton made use of the Galilean law for terrestrial acceleration due to gravity, as well as Kepler’s so-called Second Law, which held that with respect to one of two foci, the areas swept out by orbiting bodies were proportional to the time taken. Although the treatise dealt in the main with motion through void spaces, a small part of it did deal with motion in resisting media. This topic would swell to take up the entire second book of the 1687 Principia .

Newton revised the tract in early 1685, and statements that had been ‘hypotheses’ now became ‘laws’. He now dealt more seriously with the conceptual basis of his physics and referred to an immense immovable space that existed as what we would call a privileged frame of reference. Having realised that the issue of whether moving objects were in a state of ‘moving’ or ‘at rest’ depended on the frame of reference, Newton’s invocation of absolute space allowed him to pick out absolute or real motion. This left his treatment consistent with the denunciation of the Cartesian account of real motion he had expressed in his ’ De Gravitatione’ of the previous decade. Further revisions of ‘De motu’ were carried out in the spring of 1685, and Newton strove to define much more clearly key terms in his physics such as ‘inertia’, ‘force’, ‘density’, and the pairs of absolute and relative space and time. These texts contain the dynamic thought processes behind what would become the most important contribution to modern science. [14]

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1685 Newton developed a two book treatise whose second part was entitled De motu Corporum Liber Secundus . By now Newton had realised that there had to be mutual attraction between the heavenly bodies he had analysed in earlier versions of ‘De motu’, and from this he arrived at the momentous conception that all bodies in the cosmos attracted every other body. Elements of ‘body’, which Newton would define as mass, attracted other bodies according to the product of the masses divided by the square of the distance between them (and multiplied by a constant). Now he began to use universal gravitation to explain the phenomena of tides and comets, as well as the complex issue of the motion of the moon. The ‘liber secundus’ was written in a ‘popular style’ (as Newton would later put it), but this, and the analysis of comets within it, proved unsatisfactory. After an altercation with Hooke that occurred in the summer of 1686, Newton transformed the content and presentation of the liber secundus so that the published version (Book Three) in the Principia was far less accessible, and far more technically demanding than what he had produced in the draft. [15]

Funded by two substantial private donations, the Project has worked in cooperation with Cambridge University Library and the Royal Society since 2010 in order to produce high quality encoded transcriptions of Newton’s mathematical and scientific correspondence . By the end of 2013 the Project had completed the transcription of all the pre-1700 correspondence in these collections, comprising virtually all the surviving material relating to the background to and reception of Newton’s seventeenth century work in optics, physics and mathematics. The Project also has an agreement with the Royal Society to reproduce all the existing notes and annotations that can be found in the printed edition of Newton’s correspondence, but by providing the facility to link between correspondence and private notebooks, so that Newton’s processes of selection in releasing material can be discerned, the online edition can of course offer much more for the researcher. Where the print edition usually ignored textual emendations we provide full diplomatic/normalised transcriptions of these texts. As indicated earlier, in collaboration with CUDL we are continuing to make images of the originals available alongside the transcriptions throughout 2014.

The Newton correspondence is without doubt the best known in the history of science, and the Newton Project has made full, diplomatic transcriptions of these materials available to the general public for the first time. A number of these documents are particularly significant. In the earliest, we see Newton making the first announcement of his construction of a reflecting telescope, and the following letters display the close contact that Newton developed with the London mathematical intelligencer John Collins (1625-83). Newton sent Collins a number of letters in the early 1670s and Collins quickly recognised that apart from anything else, Newton’s methods were of great use for colleagues such as Michael Dary who were interested in the application of Newton’s techniques to calculating annuities and other ‘practical’ topics. Collins’s métier was of course, the promotion of mathematics by encouraging the circulation and publication of work, and given Newton’s studied dislike of the printed sphere as a vehicle for disseminating his findings it is remarkable that he and Newton were able to remain in contact for the best part of a decade.

In addition to this, the Newton Project has published all the correspondence that passed between Newton and Henry Oldenburg between 1672 and 1676. Most of this concerned the repercussions of Newton’s famous paper on light and colours, which was originally sent to Oldenburg in February 1672 and which Oldenburg very quickly published in the Philosophical Transactions . The collection does however include the famous pair of letters (the epistola prior and epistola posterior ) that were sent to Oldenburg in 1676 to be passed on to Leibniz, and which would feature in the notorious early eighteenth century priority dispute over the invention of calculus. Many of these letters should be considered major tracts in their own right, such as Newton’s impassioned response to Hooke’s views on his theory, his ’ Hypothesis ’ concerning light and colours that was read at the Royal Society in the winter of 1675-6 (and a draft of which was published for the first time in 2011), the significant ’ Discourse ’ of observations on various aspects of colour that accompanied the ‘Hypothesis’, and the letter to Robert Boyle of February 1679 in which Newton expanded on views on the physical structure of the cosmos that he had detailed in his ‘Hypothesis’. [16]

In addition to the religious and scientific materials, the Newton Project has now released all the documents relating to Newton’s brief foray into politics between 1687 and 1690. Even before he had completed the last of the three books that made up his Principia Mathematica , he became heavily embroiled in the defence of the Protestant character of his university. In early 1687, the Roman Catholic king James II claimed the right to dispense with statutes in Sidney Sussex College Cambridge preventing Catholics from taking degrees, and on 9 February he issued a mandamus compelling the college to grant an MA to the Benedictine monk Father Alban Francis. Newton put himself forward to defend the university against what he took to be unconscionable interference and on 11 April he was elected to represent the university senate in front of the newly re-instituted Ecclesiastical High Commission, headed by the notorious ‘hanging judge’ George Jeffreys. After a preliminary meeting and two delays, the main encounter took place at the Serjeants Inn, Fleet Street, on 7 May. The university vice-chancellor, John Peachell, was dismissed from his position, but the senate deputies heard their fate a few days later. Jeffreys told them that the Commission’s gripe was with Peachell, but that the deputies were by no means blameless , being insolently unwilling to accede to the monarch’s express commands.

Newton knew of the mandamus within days of its arrival at the vice-chancellor’s office and had his amanuensis Humphrey Newton copy out a letter (dated 19 February) that outlined the options facing the university. He was a elected as a non-regent messenger of the senate on 11 March tasked with conveying the sense of the body to the vice-chancellor. In a much later reminiscence , Newton told John Conduitt that following his later election as one of the eight deputies ordered to appear before the High Commission he had been crucial in stiffening the resolve of the senate to resist the mandamus and not to allow it as a fait accompli that would not constitute a precedent. He must have spent most of the spring engrossed in the legality of the issues underlying the case, and had Humphrey copy out a number of papers relevant to the defence. Among these one of the most significant is the draft of a speech , quite possibly the one he remembered in his reminiscence, in which he argued that it would be foolish to give up the laws underpinning the religion of the university in favour of a "bare promise" of a Catholic monarch to respect and safeguard the religion of the university. Other texts show that Newton made copious notes on reports of a recent test case that had confirmed the legality of the king’s dispensing power, and he turned these into a short essay on that same power — whose legality he effectively denied. Finally, Newton played a key role in drafting the response given by the university delegation at their appearance before the Commission on 7 May 1687.

Energised by his defence of the privileges of the university, and of course by the success of the Principia Mathematica , Newton was emboldened to seek a senior administrative post in the summer of 1689. He alighted upon the provostship of King’s College, an institution adjacent to Trinity that had suffered more than its fair share of mandated intruders in the previous half century. Having just lambasted the way in which James II had tried to subvert the Protestant constitutions of colleges in the two universities by claiming that he could dispense with some of their statues, Newton now defended the idea that the statutes of King’s college were technically in the possession of the king. Thus, William III could in practice dispense with the problematic demands that the Provost be in holy orders and also a fellow or graduate of the college. Newton used his contacts in parliament to help him draw up a ’ Case ’ in which he dealt with precedents that were helpful to his cause. Although he had the backing of senior government officials, as well as Christiaan Huygens and his bother Constantijn (the secretary to William III), the college fellows were in no mood to allow an unqualified person, even the author of the Principia , to become their head. Newton’s defeat was the first of many setbacks he experienced over the following years in his quest to obtain a major administrative position. His travails came to an end in the spring of 1696, when he became Warden of the Royal Mint, rising to become Master of the same institution in 1699. He was to retain this position until his death in early 1727, and the Project is currently seeking funding to produce an edition of Newton’s important work in this area.

In the period 2004-7 the Newton Project was able to provide an extensive range of contextual material for understanding Newton’s writings, including encoded transcriptions of all of the substantial Conduitt papers housed at King’s College Cambridge, all of the unpublished writings on Newton composed by his friend William Stukeley, and images of all of the relevant holdings related to Newton in the papers of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes bought up as many of Newton’s alchemical papers as he could from the 1936 Sotheby Sale of Newton’s non-scientific papers, and generously donated these materials to King’s College along with the Conduitt papers.

Since January 2008, the Newton Project has continued to provide additional contextual materials in order to understand how Newton’s core doctrines were taught and popularised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These include the full text of John Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues of 1719, a classical exemplar of ‘polite science’ that shows how knowledge of contemporary natural philosophy — particularly for women — was an essential qualification for participating in genteel society. Although Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis and Voltaire both published popularisations of Newtonian science in the 1730s, the most influential Newtonian text in the middle of the century was Francesco Algarotti’s Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies (and vol. II ) translated into English by Elizabeth Carter in 1739. Another best-selling popularisation of Newtonianism was the wonderful book by the published John Newbury, who made a small boy (‘Tom Telescope’) the author and narrator of a book on basic natural philosophy. Tom lambasted his friends for wasting their time on frivolous pastimes, but pointed out that many of their games (with balls, hoops and lenses) gave insight into serious scientific principles. Finally the Project allows readers to access Benjamin Martin’s printed exposition of his immensely popular course of lectures in natural philosophy.

The Newton Project has also added transcriptions of all the major biographical works published on Newton, so that all of the serious biographies of Newton written in the two centuries after his death are available for researchers. Following the earlier publication of works by Sir David Brewster and John Flamsteed, the Project added the 1833 English language translation of Jean-Baptiste Biot’s famous biography of Newton, in which the great French scientist revealed for the first time that Newton had suffered some sort of ‘derangement of the intellect’ in 1693. In response to these works, Thomas Galloway, the Scottish mathematician and Amicable Life actuary, published two reviews of the products emanating from the embryonic Newton industry; one of Brewster and Biot’s writings, and the other of the extraordinary claims about Newton’s pathological skulduggery made by Flamsteed that were reproduced by Francis Baily in 1836. The mathematician Augustus de Morgan, who doubted many of the claims made by Brewster in his 1831 Life of Newton, published a significant Newton biography of his own in 1846 but in 1855 Brewster attempted to have the last word in his magnificent appreciation of Newton’s life and works. Reviewers such as de Morgan and Baden Powell (Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford) took issue with many of Brewster’s claims — especially about Newton’s religious beliefs. Of all the Victorian biographers of Newton, De Morgan really did have the last word. In a posthumously published book he discoursed at length on one of his favourite subjects, namely Newton’s moral conduct in allegedly countenancing a secret relationship and clandestine marriage between his patron Charles Montagu (the earl of Halifax after 1700) and his half-niece Catherine Conduitt.

Finally, a major resource for historians of Newton’s theology can be found in the translation made by Charles Sumner in 1825 of the lengthy manuscript ’ De Doctrina Christiana ’ completed by John Milton in the early 1660s. Although they differed over specific details, Milton shared Newton’s abhorrence of the doctrine of the Trinity, and over a number of years wrote ‘De Doctrina’ as a long exposition of what he took to be the simple Creed of Jesus Christ and the Apostles. The lengthy text is now made freely available for the first time and its publication allows scholars to compare and contrast the way that these two great figures of early modern England understood the Bible, Christ and the nature of Christian government.

[1] Roughly 40% of the transcribed material is in Latin (with a small amount in Greek), and although the distinction between notes and original writings is often blurred, about 25% of the total number of transcribed words are excerpts from sources. Two major documents, New College Oxford Ms. 361.2 and Newton’s ‘History of the Church’ owned by the Martin Bodmer Library in Geneva remain unpublished as of December 2013. These documents amount to approximately 240,000 words and 420,000 words respectively, and the validating and proofing of these highly complex and in places heavily re-written texts will consume most of the Project’s work in 2014.

[2] Only tiny snippets of his religious writings were published before the first writings appeared on the Newton Project site in 2000, through an expensive microfilm of almost all of Newton’s papers had been released by Chadwyck-Healey in 1991.

[3] For Newton’s work on chronology, see F. Manuel, Isaac Newton, Historian , (Cambridge, 1963), and J. Buchwald and M. Feingold, Newton and the Origins of Civilization , (Princeton, 2013).

[4] Newton’s Fitzwilliam notebook (fols 6r-v) indicates that he bought equipment for lens-grinding after he returned to Cambridge from Lincolnshire in 1667. Four pages from the essay ‘Of Refractions’ were removed from the mathematical notebook; see Whiteside, ‘Mathematical papers’, 1: 572-6.

[5] Shapiro describes the difference between the ‘Lectiones opticae’ and the ‘Optica’ in his introduction to ‘Optical papers’, 1: 16-17. The ‘Optica’ is almost half as large again as the ‘Lectiones’, while about 85% of the latter found its way into the ‘Optica’. This, now CUL Dd.9.67, was deposited in the university library (as per the demands of the Lucasian professorship) as an example of Newton’s Lucasian lectures in October 1674. Deposited lectures were available for inspection by interested parties and a number of copies were made of this text, as also of another version that Newton gave David Gregory in 1701. A translation of part 1 of the ‘Optica’ was published in the summer of 1727, very shortly after Newton’s death, and an edition of the whole Latin text appeared 2 years later. See Shapiro, ‘Optical papers’, 21-2 fn. 69.

[6] John Conduitt re-used de Moivre’s memorandum in a draft of his ‘Life’ of Newton. For a fuller account of Newton’s early reading see Whiteside, ‘Mathematical Papers,’ 1: 19-24.

[7] Whiteside, ‘Mathematical papers’, 1: 213-33, 248-65, 272-96 and 298-367, and Westfall, ‘Never at rest’, 110-12 and 128-32. More broadly, see N. Guicciardini, Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method , (Cambridge, Mass., 2009)

[8] See Whiteside, ‘Mathematical papers’, 1: 91-121, esp. 104-111, and 122-42.

[9] The term ‘fluxion’, which Newton later used to describe his general approach to what we call calculus, does not occur in the October tract. He left Trinity because of the plague in early 1666, and returned to Cambridge in March of the following year. He only stayed for about three months before the situation became precarious once more, and he returned to Lincolnshire until April 1667. If the October 1666 date is correct, he wrote the piece at Woolsthorpe or at the Boothby Pagnell residence (the rectory) of his friend and Trinity colleague, Humphrey Babington. Newton may have added the ‘October 1666’ date much later, in connection with the priority dispute with Leibniz, but in any case it is very likely that he was not in Cambridge when he wrote the piece.

[10] It was published in print only in 1711, just as Newton’s efforts to mobilise support for his priority in the invention of the calculus gained momentum.

[11] See R.S. Westfall, Never at Rest. A Biography of Isaac Newton , (Cambridge, 1980), 224-5 and Whiteside, ‘Mathematical papers’, 2: 277-94 and 364-447.

[12] The treatise, known as ‘De methodis serierum et fluxionum’ is reproduced in Whiteside ed., ‘Mathematical papers’, 32-328.

[13] According to the De Moivre memorandum , Halley asked Newton what orbit was implied by the inverse-square law whereupon Newton replied that it was an ellipse, but the question and answer must have been posed conversely.

[14] Westfall, ‘Never at rest’, 408-26 esp. 420.

[15] Newton deposited copies of sections of the liber secundus as his Lucasian lectures for 1687; these are now designated as CUL Dd.4.18.

[16] The copy of the ‘epistola posterior’ to which there is a link in this paragraph is a copy of the original Newton autograph, now in the British Library.

Professor Rob Iliffe Director, AHRC Newton Papers Project

Scott Mandelbrote, Fellow & Perne librarian, Peterhouse, Cambridge

Faculty of History, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL - [email protected]

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Isaac Newton

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Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is an outstanding English scientist, one of the founders of classical physics – you can explore his extraordinary input into science in your Isaac Newton essay. He made numerous discoveries in the fields of physics, astronomy, mechanics, and mathematics: the law of universal gravitation, the theory of celestial mechanics, 3 laws of mechanics, discoveries in the field of optics and color theory – most Isaac Newton essays mention these and more. Writing essays on Isaac Newton will reveal that the scientific works of this man were often ahead of his time and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. His hypotheses regarding the flattening of the Earth's poles, the phenomenon of polarization, and the deflection of light in a gravitational field still amaze scientists today. View Isaac Newton essay samples below – some of the most informative essay samples are listed for you here.

Debate concerning the nature of nursing There has been debate concerning the nature of nursing over the years. People have been awakened to the actual nature of science and art since the 17th and 18th centuries, when the scientific revolution occurred. This awakening was known as the French Enlightenment (Contreras, 2013). Throughout...

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The most famous physicist of all time is Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a theologian, an astronomer, a mathematician, and, most significantly, he was a physicist. Newton was a major figure in the 17th century's scientific discoveries. The incorporation of white light into the comprehension of colors, the laws of...

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Isaac Newton Writings

Isaac newton’s principia book 2.

In the Principia , Book Two, Lemma II, Newton describes what is essentially the Product Rule for differentiation, applying it to calculate the `moments’ of quantities that are expressed as products of powers of other quantities whose moments are known.

Read the preface of Principia
Full text (English)
Full text (Latin)

One of the most readable of all the great classics of physical science, Opticks presents a comprehensive survey of 18th-century knowledge of light. Newton describes his experiments with spectroscopy, colors, lenses, reflection, refraction, and more, in language lay readers can easily follow.

Read the full text of Opticks

Differences between Principia and Opticks

Other Writings

De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas (1669, published 1711)
Method of Fluxions (1671)
Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation (unpublished, c. 1671–75) [138]
De motu corporum in gyrum (1684)
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Reports as Master of the Mint (1701–25)
Arithmetica Universalis (1707)
The System of the World , Optical Lectures , The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms, (Amended) and De mundi systemate (published posthumously in 1728)
Observations on Daniel and The Apocalypse of St. John (1733)
An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (1754)

The Newton Project Created in 1998, the Newton Project seeks to make facsimiles and transcriptions of Newton’s manuscripts available in electronic form and to display their original connections, along with full documentation relating to Newton’s reading such as written notes and annotations.

Newton’s Three Laws of Motion Sir Isaac Newton: The Universal Law of Gravitation Sir Isaac Newton and the Unification of Physics & Astronomy These three links are all part of the Astronomy Web Syllabus at the University of Tennessee. A clear, accessible and well-illustrated guide to Newton’s laws.

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton (born December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England—died March 20 [March 31], 1727, London) English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated the phenomena of colours into the science of light and laid the ...
Essay on Isaac Newton: The Father of Modern Science
Things to keep in Mind while Writing Essay on Isaac Newton . 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 ...
Isaac Newton, Mathematician and Scientist Essay (Biography)
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".
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.
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 - 20 March 1726/27) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical ...
PDF ISAAC NEWTON: PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
- Isaac Newton1 Newton as natural philosopher Isaac Newton's influence is ubiquitous 300 years after his death. We employ Newtonian mechanics in a wide range of cases, students world-wide learn the calculus that he co-discovered with Leibniz, and the law of universal gravitation characterizes what is still considered a fundamental force.
Isaac Newton
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 ...
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was an English mathematician and physicist who developed influential theories on light, calculus and celestial mechanics. Years of research culminated with the 1687 ...
Isaac Newton Study Guide: Essay Topics
Essay Topics. State Newton's three laws of motion. What was Edmund Halley's role in the publication of the Principia? Discuss the clash between Newton and Gottfried von Leibniz. What were Newton's religious beliefs? What was the role of religion in his intellectual pursuits? What was the Royal Society?
PDF Isaac Newton's Writing Practices in the New College Manuscripts
Isaac Newton's Writing Practices New College Notes 17 (2022), no. 6 ISSN 2517-6935 5 That said, it is the recycled paper which remains the most visually striking feature of these manuscripts. Frank Manuel's 1963 assessment still applies: The chance juxtaposition of ideas is delightfully surrealistic . . . The subjects run into
Isaac Newton: Philosophical Writings
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) left a voluminous legacy of writings. Despite his influence on the early modern period, his correspondence, manuscripts, and publications in natural philosophy remain scattered throughout many disparate editions. In this volume, Newton's principal philosophical writings are for the first time collected in a single ...
Essay About Isaac Newton
Published: 11/15/2019. 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 ...
Introduction
Natural Philosophy consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature, and reducing them, as far as may be, to general Rules or Laws - establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things. - Isaac Newton. Newton as natural philosopher. Newton's scientific influence permeates ...
Isaac Newton: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Pioneer: [Essay
This quote by Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists of his time, underscores the importance of education and collaboration in achieving groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Born in 1643 in England, Newton's contributions to mathematics, physics, and astronomy revolutionized our understanding of the universe.
Sir Isaac Newton
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 ...
Welcome to the Newton Project
The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version.
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 ...
Newton Papers
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 ...
Introduction to the Texts
The approximately 2.2m words of Newton's religious writings published since the start of 2008 show each stage of his creative process, from his note-taking to his idiosyncratic redrafting of various texts, and then finally on to the polished and virtually complete texts, written for a still largely mysterious audience.
Story Life of Sir Isaac Newton: [Essay Example], 1346 words
Story Life of Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was born on January 4, 1642, in Lincolnshire, England. Newton's father, Isaac Newton who was a farmer, died 3 months before Newton was born. Newton was not expected to survive because he was born tiny, weak and feeble, but however he did, when he was 3 years old, his mother, Hannah Ayscough Newton ...
Free Essays on Isaac Newton, Examples, Topics, Outlines
Writing essays on Isaac Newton will reveal that the scientific works of this man were often ahead of his time and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. His hypotheses regarding the flattening of the Earth's poles, the phenomenon of polarization, and the deflection of light in a gravitational field still amaze scientists today. ...
Isaac Newton Essays at WritingBros
Essay Samples on Isaac Newton. Essay Examples. Essay Topics. Great Discoveries Of Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac Newton was a mathematician and astronomer from the 17th century. His work and inventions dedicated a lot to the math and science that we use today. Let's start from the beginning. ... Need writing help? You can always rely on us no ...
Isaac Newton Writings
The Newton Project Created in 1998, the Newton Project seeks to make facsimiles and transcriptions of Newton's manuscripts available in electronic form and to display their original connections, along with full documentation relating to Newton's reading such as written notes and annotations. Newton's Three Laws of Motion Sir Isaac Newton ...
Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nilay Patel
Share full article. April 5, 2024, 3:17 p.m. ET. Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters, like today's episode with Nilay Patel. Listen ...

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Optics and Light

Sir Isaac Newton’s Contribution in Calculus

Law of Universal Gravitation

Newton’s Laws of Motion

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