Don’t mess with a genius (2010)

When I first read Quicksilver I assumed that Newton as Warden of the Coin was one of the speculative fiction parts of the story. Nope, he was indeed involved heavily in improving the state of the art in authentic money.

I'm surprised he didn't get more negative attention from counterfeiters. But then once you get one hanged, and drawn and quartered, maybe they realize this cat has claws and they should leave it alone.

calcsam2• 3 years ago

Paging Christopher Nolan.

calcsam2• 3 years ago

And John Madden (Shakespeare in Love).

geophile• 3 years ago

Oh hell no, give the story to a director who can actually create a movie with good dialog and character development.

williamdclt• 3 years ago

After « Abraham Lincoln: vampire hunter », the new thriller « Detective Newton: Warden of the Mint »

n4r9• 3 years ago

I've heard it said that Newton was one of very few (maybe the only?) Wardens to not pardon a single counterfeiter and stay their execution.

mdp20213• 3 years ago

I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men

Many will find this relatable.

beachy• 3 years ago

I particularly enjoyed his modest self-eulogy:

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.

darkerside3• 3 years ago

I wonder what Newton would think of what we've built

hermitcrab4• 3 years ago

I'm not sure Newton was known for his modesty. Even his famous quote:

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

Is interpreted by some as a snide dig at his shorter rival, Hooke.

hammock2• 3 years ago

Except self described economists of course

Izkata• 3 years ago

Sounds like the persona of Sherlock Holmes from the original stories, just with a (slightly) different focus.

galaxyLogic• 3 years ago

Exactly maybe but I don't know Conan Doyle knew about this

thisisauserid2• 3 years ago

Newton's obsession with counterfeiters never made sense to me until I read Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle. He makes a good case for tying it with Newton's prior alemetical pursuits.

fuzzybear3965• 3 years ago

What does "alemetical" mean?

jszymborski• 3 years ago

OP possibly meant alchemical? Can't seem to find anything for almetical.

mdp20213• 3 years ago

alemetical

I'd say, "disparaging against the Germans" or "repulsed by confederations" ('Alemanni' ∩ 'emetic').

If somebody is proficient in Arabic, maybe 'emetic' (after article "Al-") makes sense also outside IE...

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

As far as I can see, it's not_a_word.

thisisauserid2• 3 years ago

*alchemical

emmelaich5• 3 years ago

I don't think it was an obsession. It was personal with Chaloner, because Chaloner called Newton a fraud.

Newton was dutiful, honest and smart.

hermitcrab4• 3 years ago

He was also petty and vindictive. As shown by using his status in a long running attempt to ruin Leibnitz's reputation over the invention of calculus.

Jun8• 3 years ago

So, if someone with Newton’s caliber gets suckered into losing a lot of money in a market bubble (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company, note that it was a slave trading company), what hope is there for the rest of us?

autoexec• 3 years ago

It's like those optical illusions that you can't stop seeing even through you know your eyes are lying to you. Our brains are just wired to leave us vulnerable to certain cognitive biases and errors and while we can try to increase our awareness of those vulnerabilities we can't get rid of them.

To make it worse, scammers and corporations spend massive amounts of time/money researching how to best exploit those weaknesses and so the moment our guard is down any one of us could fall for one of their traps. We're all basically one bad day away from being suckered into losing money on something. Nobody can be hypervigilant all the time and a person like Newton probably had a lot on his mind.

psychoslave3• 3 years ago

There is a great solution for this. Just neither become possessor of any large amount of wealth.

kurthr2• 3 years ago

Well, he was also a lifelong celibate.

dustypotato• 3 years ago

And?

nickkell• 3 years ago

The source of all his power.

darkerside3• 3 years ago

Maybe just because you're smart about some things doesn't mean you know everything?

emmelaich5• 3 years ago

It is notable that Newton had no experience of trading companies.

He was good at things he dealt with personally.

Nullius in verba and all that.

bitwize• 3 years ago

I'm reminded of Michael Larson, the guy who successfully hacked Press Your Luck, racked up over $110,000 while on the show, and then lost it all in bad real estate deals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson

If you find yourself in a lot of money, your best bet is a diversified portfolio of stable, slow-earning assets. Newton was brilliant, but not immune to the tantalizing excitement of "striking it rich" with a big investment. You might say... he pressed his luck.

cultureswitch2• 3 years ago

Success in speculative enterprises is only remotely correlated with intelligence, or even competence.

I like the quote from the "Margin Call" movie. It's about hearing the music stop. That is, mostly just blind luck.

emmelaich5• 3 years ago

This is mostly a copy of Levenson's 2009 article, submitted a day ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37493372

https://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalon...

I found this interesting:

Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty.

svat7• 3 years ago

This is not a copy of Levenson's 2009 article. This is a copy of Levenson's 2009 book (the good parts) (as mentioned in the first sentence), that I wrote as a blog post in 2010 before returning the book to the library, and which someone else submitted to HN today probably after I mentioned it in a comment on another post about another counterfeiter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644

The facts are the same (researched by Levenson), but the words and presentation/storytelling are different, surely? You can see that Levenson and I chose somewhat different parts of his book to emphasize. I wouldn't have been surprised even if we had chosen the same parts, because obviously I think the ones I chose were the good parts :-)

emmelaich5• 3 years ago

OK, apologies. I guess I was a little peeved that Levenson's own article didn't get many upvotes. (Though I wasn't the submitter)

pvg• 3 years ago

the words and presentation/storytelling are different, surely?

I spent a few minutes comparing the two articles because I'm a doofus and hadn't noticed the author of the post (you) had replied. But now that I've done this pointless bit of work, can confirm - the topics are similar but they focus on different facts and even time periods. One is very much not a copy of the other.

benreesman2• 3 years ago

I have a dim notion that Sir Isaac also had quite the feud with Leibniz, is that also a wildly entertaining story like this one? And if so what’s the best telling?

psychoslave3• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Clarke_corresp...

benreesman2• 3 years ago

Awesome thank you for the links.

As an American English-speaker I think my ostensible tribal obligation is to call it a tie at worst and take Sir Isaac’s part by default, but Wikipedia seems to be going out of its way to avoid concluding that Leibniz got there first: I’m curious if Germans have a different view than us in the Empire or it’s former colonies.

It seems a tough case to make that Newton wasn’t the more influential thinker overall, but on Calc I-IV? Lot of claims about stuff that he “decided not to publish”.

3abiton• 3 years ago

Great references!

denton-scratch4• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure I used to own a book called The Newton-Leibniz Correspondence, being a collection of letters. But my search-foo has failed to turn it up.

GreymanTheGrey• 3 years ago

Is it possible you were thinking of this book?https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9780719006692

Not quite the same thing, but has quite a few references to Newton contained within the pages. Perhaps enough to mix it up in your memory.

hirundo• 3 years ago

Newton saw what was happening ... and somehow intimidated and pushed Neale aside in a bloodless coup, and took over the Great Recoinage himself.

Or more charitably, Neale didn't fight too hard for his prerogatives when he saw that one of the most competent men in the history of western civilization was trying to solve his biggest problem.

thsksbd2• 3 years ago

Good management gets out of the way of its star worker.

sirspacey• 3 years ago

Amen

taberiand2• 3 years ago

Especially when getting in their way gets you hung drawn and quartered

AceJohnny2• 3 years ago

when he saw that one of the most competent men in the history of western civilization

The thing, this is only decidable in hindsight. Many a confident person has declared themselves to be "the most competent" and proven to be... not that.

(competence & confidence are perhaps entirely uncorrelated)

zem• 3 years ago

he also invented milled edges, which arguably did even more to preserve the coinage: https://www.perthmint.com/news/collector/coin-collecting/how...

hooloovoo_zoo• 3 years ago

It’s an idea that goes back to at least the Romans, but Newton attracts attribution like Mark Twain. (Referring to Roman serrate-edge coins)

dang3• 3 years ago

attracts attribution like Mark Twain

Well put!

hammock2• 3 years ago

The Warden of the Mint, with a salary of 400-odd pounds a year

$91,000 a year

thedailymail• 3 years ago

Another fascinating thing about the Newton story is its parallels to Archimedes and the "eureka" moment. Both stories involve the most famous physicist of the day being asked to protect the integrity of royal gold. (Archimedes was asked by the king of Syracuse to detect whether a goldsmith had been adding baser metals to an offertory gold crown.) And both involve famous scientists bending the rules of evidence and procedure to catch a thief – in Archimedes' case, the modern consensus is that simple water displacement would not be sufficient to distinguish pure gold from a gold/silver alloy.

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

Wait what? Are you saying that the story (Archimedes invents theory of density, proves the crown is fake) is really Archimedes invents density, but then proves the fakery by ... finding the spare gold in the guys kitchen or something?

I'm flabbergasted. I can of course believe it's true. I just never thought to question it.

bryanrasmussen• 3 years ago

I figured it was Archimedes invents theory of density, then he or someone else invents anecdote to show its use, anecdote actually wouldn't work though but theory of density still good so people use it.

WalterBright• 3 years ago

I always wondered how he measured the displacement accurately enough.

roflmaostc• 3 years ago

You simply should use a vessel which gets narrower to the top. If you put the crown, the water level rises. The smaller the cross section of the vessel the more the height has to increase to amount the volume.

jl27182• 3 years ago

I assume he used a mechanical balance to measure the equal weight of gold. Couldn’t he then just submerge the balance?

If the method from the story doesn’t work, is it possible that it was just a plausible-sounding cover for the actual method that they wouldn’t have wanted to disclose?

hddqsb3• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has a good paragraph on this. It describes a very cool alternative method that has higher accuracy, and according to Galileo it's probable that Archimedes used this method:

The story of the golden crown does not appear anywhere in Archimedes' known works. The practicality of the method described has been called into question due to the extreme accuracy that would be required to measure water displacement. Archimedes may have instead sought a solution that applied the hydrostatics principle known as Archimedes' principle, found in his treatise On Floating Bodies: a body immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.[34] Using this principle, it would have been possible to compare the density of the crown to that of pure gold by balancing it on a scale with a pure gold reference sample of the same weight, then immersing the apparatus in water. The difference in density between the two samples would cause the scale to tip accordingly.[12] Galileo Galilei, who invented a hydrostatic balance in 1586 inspired by Archimedes' work, considered it "probable that this method is the same that Archimedes followed, since, besides being very accurate, it is based on demonstrations found by Archimedes himself."

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Archimedes'_princip...

spacemule2• 3 years ago

then immersing the apparatus in water

I'm having trouble picturing what's going on here. I'm not sure what the apparatus is. The best I can figure, it's two containers of water with the reference gold in one and the crown in the other. However, this wouldn't be any different than just weighing the two pieces of gold (which are already known to be the same mass). I tried searching for "hydrostatic balance," but nothing relevant to this came up. Since you seem to understand this, would you mind explaining (or pointing to an explanation of) Archimedes's probable solution?

dang3• 3 years ago

Related ongoing thread:

The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37490644 - Sept 2023 (26 comments) - (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37499206)

Normally we downweight follow-ups but this is too good. Even the parentheticals are good ("the only thing ever recorded spoken by him [in Parliament] is a request to close the window)".

HansardExpert2• 3 years ago

I wonder where that comes from (is it apocryphal?) as prior to Hansard - which itself is not always verbatim and is the body that records the daily goings-on in the Houses of Parliament - there was very little documented on what was actually said in Parliament - let alone who said it.

It's a nice anecdote if nothing else.

dang3• 3 years ago

Ah good point. As someone with a hair trigger for misattributed quotes I should have been more suspicious.

acyou• 3 years ago

Does this cause anyone else to be more suspicious of Newton's achievements and the history books, given that he at one point had accrued enough power to have his rivals drawn and quartered?

Now, I have less respect for Newton than ever before. That essay repeats the details of the smear job against Newton's rival in earnest, and parrots his praises, with zero sense of irony or context with respect to how history is formed. Reminds me strongly of Thomas Edison, prominent scientist with suspiciously high political standing and personal fortune.

No one can contest this now, the histories are 300 years old. What no one can contest in good faith is that, "The winners write the history books".

atomicnature• 3 years ago

If you study the details of his youth, etc, you will learn that he lived in obscurity for many, many years, toiling alone on the most difficult questions of the time.

His "political standing" was a result purely of his scientific achievements and a general consensus of his high ability within scientific circles. He took great pains to reduce the number of acquaintances he had rather than increase them.

I think Newton was more right than wrong in the beliefs he took seriously (even outside the narrow confines of "science"). He was anything but naive. This doesn't mean he never lied; it just means that he lied way less compared to average standards for humanity.

svat7• 3 years ago

I don't think this is a reasonable understanding of the story. Chaloner cannot be called “Newton's rival” in any usual sense of the word: he was born destitute, turned to various horrifying crimes from a young age, was barely educated, was arrested multiple times even before his story overlapped with Newton's in any way, etc. He died only because his crime was a serious one, falling under the category of “high treason”. And for his part, Newton hardly had accrued enough power despite all his mathematical and scientific achievements — this job was obtained with great effort late in his life, and his (small) fortune came from his job's salary.

Regarding “context with respect to how history is formed”, I think this is best done by reading more primary sources, and not forming a quick opinion (as you seem to be doing, from a blog post). This is what the author of the book has done. From his article at http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/03/22/1699-william-chalone... —

Some historians, notably Frank Manuel, have speculated that Newton pursued this work with implausible eagerness, out of a kind of frustrated blood lust born of his abandoned and unhappy childhood. This seems to me to be nonsense. The specific historical context matters here: Newton did not author the bloody code, nor did he send everyone he could to the gallows. Rather, the record of his depositions shows him to be simply a relentless practical man doing his job. He used little fish to catch big fish, and at least some of those low on the ladder received their escape from the gibbet. What you can see here, surprisingly, is the birth of a modern idea of a civil service. The Warden -– even Isaac Newton — was simply a man in a job doing the functions of that job, which included organizing the investigation and prosecution of counterfeiters.
[…] Newton did not expect as Warden to have to chase crooks; when he found out that was part of the job he wrote a rather whiny letter to the Treasury to see if he could wriggle out of the duty. When he found he could not, he responded as he always had to the job at hand.

varjag• 3 years ago

That "rival" got a whole bunch of innocent people hanged.

jdthedisciple• 3 years ago

If this story makes you lose respect for Newton rather than gain some,

then I'm sorry but I'm not sure your respect means a ton.

Newton was 55 already at this point, and it is but a tiny excerpt from his life.

thealig2• 3 years ago

For that matter no one's respect really means much however you look at this particular excerpt, not sure what you trying to say with this line of argument

KaiserPro• 3 years ago

One should always be suspicious of achievements in history books!

Newton could be an unmitigated shit. He has feuds with lots of people, including Hooke, Leibniz & Flamsteed. Not to mention that he rounded up the poor and convicted them of counterfeiting for possession of coins, rather than making them.

he also had a heretical secret life, properly into alchemy and other (for the time) wildly fantastical beliefs. Ones I suspect, but cant prove, he would have exploited should they have belonged to his rivals.

Mark Steele covers him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQenuI_zsw (its the radio version)

bawolff• 3 years ago

What a weird criticism. This story, well amusing, is a funny footnote at best. It could be 100% a fabrication and it wouldn't really affect newton's story at all.

That's not to say i disagree about history being written by the winners and all the potential pitfalls that entails. This story just isn't relavent to what newton is known for.

cultureswitch2• 3 years ago

Sorry, Foucault was an ignorant quack. Everything is about power, only in the mind of a pathological psychopath. Someone leading a long, prestigious and rich life is evidence of competence.

Besides, the historical record when it comes to Newton is pretty clear. His personal abilities could hardly have been faked, and he had a personality pretty much opposite to a con man.

aifer4• 3 years ago

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered around me.

What a great quote

kromem• 3 years ago

Very sad.

There have been a great many minds that have tortured themselves over pondering the things we don't even blink an eye at today.

We admire and idolize those who found the pretty pebbles that light up the shore today, and yet I'm sure many of them would have eagerly traded places just to see what continued to take shape.

It's sad, though also a reminder of just how much is easily taken for granted.

smeej2• 3 years ago

To me it sounds more like standing in wonder at how vastly much more he could never have lived long enough to understand. It doesn't strike me as sad, but humble, and appropriately so.

more_corn• 3 years ago

This is not sad at all. The sense of childlike wonder and intellectual humility were essential to the great minds of history. If you feel like you’re getting a handle on things remember this quote and who said it. It is as true today as it was then and we could all benefit by remembering it.

ackbar03• 3 years ago

This is almost like a real-life version of Sherlock Holmes and maybe a slightly discount version James Moriarty

vishnugupta• 3 years ago

While appreciating his genius let's also remember that even Newton himself couldn't resist FOMO and lost substantial money when a bubble burst [1]. Goes to show he was a human after all.

[1] https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/73/7/30/800801/Isa...

withinboredom• 3 years ago

Probably thought he could time the market. Everyone makes that mistake...

RugnirViking• 3 years ago

its worse than that. He pulled his money out because he (correctly) thought it would end badly, making a large profit.

But it just kept growing and growing. He eventually bought back in, and that was right at the peak before the crash, so he lost a lot.

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

This is mentioned in the linked story.

langsoul-com• 3 years ago

There was a linked quote on that. "I can predict the movement of stars, but not the madness of men"

Truly a great quote and still so valid today.

mjklin• 3 years ago

ANDROMACHE. Doesn't it ever tire you to see and prophesy only disasters?

CASSANDRA. I see nothing. I prophesy nothing. All I ever do is to take account of two great stupidities: the stupidities of men, and the wild stupidity of the elements.

— Jean Giraudoux, French (1882-1944)

HPsquared• 3 years ago

Reminds me of Einstein's "Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe"

(attributed to him, anyway)

thealig2• 3 years ago

This story is about his anti counterfeiting exploits though, which usually requires skills not necessarily related to intellect. he was dutiful and unforgiving which is why he had some level of success in it. Same reasoning applies to his investments tanking, it's a different skillet and far more unpredictable.

zgiber• 3 years ago

Thanks for the great write up! I’d watch this as a series or movie

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

To avoid issues of jurisdiction he got himself appointed Justice of the Peace for nineteen counties surrounding London.

munro• 3 years ago

the only thing ever recorded spoken by him is a request to close the window

Does anyone know where I can find this?

HansardExpert2• 3 years ago

The Wikipedia entry for Newton mentions this and cites Michael White's book from 1997 - The last sorcerer.

In that he states

"Newton was an MP for almost exactly one year, but he seems to have contributed nothing personally to the proceedings of the new parliament. He reported back to the Vice-Chancellor faithfully and in minute detail, but according to one anecdote, which may or may not be true, he said only one thing during the year-long proceedings. Feeling a draught down his back, he asked a nearby usher to close an open window."

But there is no other reference in that book to where that came from.

Official records of what was and what as not said in Parliament didn't really come into the public until Hansard (circa 1800) there is 'WIlliam COBBETT's parliamentary history of England : from the Norman conquest, in 1066, to the year, 1803' which has been a reference before the 1800's and you can find a copy of that on the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/pp809777_0001/mode/2up

There is one reference to the string 'Newton' in that search but it is just a name of a borough.

svat7• 3 years ago

It's apocryphal, found in Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes etc. Levenson's book (which BTW has a lot more of interest beyond whatever I put in the blog post) cites two sources for this point:

• Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), p. 483

• A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (1992), p. 231

I looked up both those books and both of them call it an anecdote.

Westfall:

There is no way to pretend that Newton played a leading role in its deliberations. According to a story that rests solely on anecdotal authority , he spoke only once; feeling a draft, he asked an usher to close a window . It is not merely anecdotal that none of the surviving accounts of the Parliament contain any record of his participation in its debates. Only to a limited extent do we know where he stood on the great issues the Convention Parliament decided.

Hall:

An anecdote records Newton's only utterance in the House of Commons: feeling a draught, he requested that a window be closed. However, anecdote may be erroneous. Since Newton asked leave to bring in a Bill to confirm the charters and privileges of the University of Cambridge, he must have made some remarks, however terse.

dagaci• 3 years ago

Sounds quite bad. Smells of corruption. At some point Chaloner (correctly) accused the persons running the Royal Mint of Counterfeiting, obviously furious the Mint the Newton suddenly finds witnesses (from other convicts) and evidence that Chaloner is a counterfeiter! and Chaloner end up: “Twitching and writhing, on the hangman’s rope while being disembowelled.”

b800h• 3 years ago

Honestly, this reads like something by Terry Pratchett, and probably inspired him.

earthboundkid• 3 years ago

Locke was really involved in the recoinage. It was an important moment in the history of capitalism in terms of the ideology of money. See https://newtonandthemint.history.ox.ac.uk/great-recoinage/re...

juanre• 3 years ago

Neal Stephenson's great trilogy The Baroque Cycle does a great job at depicting this facet of Newton.

sejtnjir• 3 years ago

A small inaccuracy: the South Sea Bubble was not the first speculation bubble. Tulip Mania took place almost a century earlier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Cilvic• 3 years ago

the world’s first stock market crash

_maelstrom• 3 years ago

It's buried in the wikipedia article, but these stories of tulips being a giant society collapsing bubble "come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay."[1]

“There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar [author of "Tulipmania" and a professor of early modern history at King’s College London] says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”[1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

hermitcrab4• 3 years ago

Newton has a fair claim to be the greatest genius that every lived, with his hugely influential work on gravitation, law of motion, optics, calculcus and more. But he also spent a huge amount of time and energy on bible studies and alchemy. I wonder what other areas of science and maths he might have discovered without those distractions?

nestorD• 3 years ago

Spending time on alchemy is, to me, symptomatic of a curious mind that was open to experimentation where his peers might reject things altogether on presuppositions.

If he had no been that easily distracted by weird things I expect he would have pushed the envelope of knowledge significantly less.

DylanDmitri• 3 years ago

A curious person finds treasures in one of three rooms they searched. Obviously they should have ignored the other two from the get go.

I think Newton was curious about everything around him, and a lot of it paid off.

hyperthesis• 3 years ago

World's greatest detective? Independently wealthy?

roomey• 3 years ago

If you like this I would recommend Neil Stephenson's Baroque cycle series of books.

It is historical fiction, but I very much like the narrative style.

Don’t mess with a genius (2010)

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