>>7144124
>People like to scientize his work and pretend like he was some great polymath - he wasn't
Actually he was, pretty much in the same vein as Aristotle. Generalists are a rare bread, especially today, so unless you actually have some expertise in how it works in details, it's easy to misunderstand it.

But you're right definitely right to say people overpraise him in some ways. For example, even if he drafted F=ma, he was still far from pushing it as far and systematically as Newton did.

You also have to understand the context: it's easy retrospectively to judge Newton's work. But if you start with a blank sheet as he did, making the hypothesis that you can wrap many mechanical phenomenons with 3 principles is absolutely non-trivial. It's simple but incredibly difficult.

It probably took Newton many years to come up with that, and he was building on early work (Aristotle, Galileo, and others), and his formulation has been refined later.

I encourage you to read his notebooks with an open mind and to empathize with the mindset, for curiosity's sake.

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What was the historical importance of leonardo da vinci.Reading his biography he was more of a curiosity on a genius, more than someone that…

What was the historical importance of leonardo da vinci.
Reading his biography he was more of a curiosity on a genius, more than someone that…