Quote: There in two years of rustic solitude—from age 22 to 24—his creative genius burst forth in a flood of discoveries unmatched in the history of human thought: the binomial series for negative and fractional exponents; differential and integral calculus; universal gravitation as the key to the mechanism of the solar system; and the resolution of sunlight into the visual spectrum by means of a prism, with its implications for understanding colors of the rainbow and the nature of light in general.
Comment: In two years of his youth, Newton was able to discover an overabundance of scientific and mathematic discoveries. Living in solitude, Newton really had no other resource available than his own mind. This made me think about the availability of knowledge to my own generation. In Newton’s time, networking academic discoveries was mainly through the spoken word and published books, furthermore, most publications were limited to the tightly knit academic community and those who were not part of that community would, for the most part, have trouble comprehending the information. In this generation, all of these discoveries are available to anybody at the click of a button. With this availability, I believe, our generation has the potential to create our own abundance of academic discoveries. If Newton was able to find all of these discoveries without any resources, imagine the possibilities of a modern Newton with modern resources.
Question: Are their any “modern Newtons”?
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