{"id":3003,"date":"2011-04-20T11:48:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T11:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=3003"},"modified":"2011-04-20T11:48:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T11:48:59","slug":"let-newton-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/let-newton-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Newton Be!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belately, I want to record a play seen at the headquarters of The Royal Society in London last month, Let Newton Be<\/a>, written by Craig Baxter, but using only Isaac Newton’s own words.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The play was interesting although the energy of the play sagged at times, particularly in the first half.\u00a0\u00a0 The story only barely mentioned Newton’s interest in alchemy, and seemed to overlook his brutal, deadly campaigns against money forgers later in life (or did I nap through that scene?)
\nThe play comprised three actors, two men and a woman, who played Newton at\u00a0different ages – as a child, as a young-ish Cambridge academic, and as an old man.\u00a0\u00a0As a work of drama, the conceit worked well, although\u00a0it was best when one of the actors was playing another person interacting with Newton (eg, Halley, and later Leibniz, who spoke in an amusing cod-German accent).\u00a0 Perhaps the real Newton was not sufficiently schizoid for three actors to play him, at least not when constrained to only use the man’s written words.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As I have remarked before<\/a>, Newton’s personality\u00a0was all of a piece:\u00a0 it is only modern westerners who cannot imagine a religious motivation for activities such as scientific research, for example, or\u00a0who find alchemy and calculus incoherent.
\nThe performance was followed by a panel discussion by the Great and the Good – two historians and two scientists.\u00a0 One of the scientists was the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, who has subsequently won this year’s Templeton Prize for Science and Religion.\u00a0 The discussion was interesting, so it is a pity it was not recorded for posterity.
\nA review of another\u00a0play about a member of the matherati, Kurt Godel, is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Belately, I want to record a play seen at the headquarters of The Royal Society in London last month, Let Newton Be, written by Craig Baxter, but using only Isaac Newton’s own words.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The play was interesting although the energy of the play sagged at times, particularly in the first half.\u00a0\u00a0 The story only barely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,51,71,74,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-matherati","category-religion","category-science","category-theatre-and-drama","p1","y2011","m04","d20","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}