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- Airfried@piefed.socialEnglish12 hours
What else should he have done? People of course isolate during a pandemic and this isolation made some people very productive. We’ve seen it during the covid pandemic as well.
8 hoursWish we’d do this to academics more often. Give them enough to live on, no responsibilities, and beat anyone who tries to socialize with them with a big stick.
- gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish13 hours
Newton’s work in optics → refraction and better lenses → the microscope →germ theory →vaccines.
Well, he couldn’t have known that, but fascinating that he was inadvertently helping to solve disease. Just a few centuries ahead of being useful.
This is what you can expect from a mathematician. Always ahead of the curve.
why didn’t he just invent antibiotics instead, was he stupid?
- SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zipEnglish14 hours
He was into Pink Floyd before they were cool (or were born).
- jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish13 hours
First read as Sourdough Newton. Thought maybe that was like a fig newton you made during lockdown.
Or maybe sounds like a classic rock cover band singer who would have opened for Meatloaf in the 1980s.
- Dagobah@lemmy.worldEnglish15 hours
I thought so too so I checked. The plague came in many waves (famously the black death was in the 1300s which may be why we were confused) but there was a major plague outbreak in 1665-1666 which is when Newton was doing his work on optics.
Yep we had Optics, the plague and the great fire of London in one golden year.
Interesting fact that the fire probably helped curtail the spread of the plague and led to more sanitary conditions in London in general.
If I’m not mistaken, he also calculated pi by hand (to several decimal places) during lockdown. So it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows for ol’ Isaac.
They come out due to UV light. It is know as the photoeclectic effect.
