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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Sunday, May 17, 2026

What did Isaac Newton mean, exactly, when he said "I make no hypotheses"?

Newton wasn't saying he dealt in pure fact, or even pure mathematics. Mathematicians do make hypotheses. I think Newton was saying that intuition is all we really have, and we don't know where it's coming from. It is profoundly ironic that the greatest light of the enlightenment really was an extreme romantic at heart, who didn't even really believe in mathematics, or any scientific method, at all. While Galileo abhorred all theory, believing in pure data, he did have a very high opinion of mathematics, as a means of summarizing data. I think Isaac Newton, although one of the greatest mathematicians in history, actually only saw mathematics as a rather crude way of describing reality, and this view is very far from the Pythatorean view, the view of most mathematicians, that mathematics is actually the language of nature itself.

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