Edit- I recommend actually reading it, especially the second answer.
The earth itself is squashed like that with two bulges, but the water on the surface exhibits a more complex motion.
This explanation is so much better.
If people want to use big words they can say fluid dynamics, but yeah, it's a complex system with a big orbiting body pulling on it regularly, that gives the complex system rhythm but not order.
One related fascinating historical artifact is the special purpose analogue computer designed by Lord Kelvin in the 1860s based on Fourier series, harmonic analysis. Think difference engine in it's cogs and cams glory, but special purpose.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide-predicting_machine
Possibly one of the first examples of Machine learning, with Machine in capital 'M'. It incorporated recent tidal observations to update it's prediction.
Note that sinusoids are universal approximators for a large class of functions, an honour that is by no means restricted to deep neural nets.
George Darwin (Charles Darwin's son) was a significant contributor in the design and upgrade of the machine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Darwin
Other recognizable names who worked on tide prediction problem were Thomas Young (of double slit experiment fame) and Sir George Airy (of Airy disk fame).
Who would have guessed. Well, Laplace maybe.
The Bernoulli principle is one.
You might be thinking the way it's often used to wrongly explain how airplane wings generate lift. Yeah, that's bullshit. I mean, the principle still applies, if applied correctly. The equal transit bullshit that it's often associated with, well yes, that's complete and utter bullshit.
fwiw, Newton was bipolar. High-strung, antisocial, egotistical, domineering, rage-filled. He fought with people often and refused to share his work out of fear of criticism. Most people really didn't like him and he was often severely depressed. Later in life, in part because of the torment of just being himself and having to work with peers, he refused to continue researching science, and instead became obsessed with God and alchemy.
The dude made mostly mistakes throughout his life, he just happened to be brilliant some of the time.
Not only would he have felt abandoned, when his mother quickly remarried after his father's death, he could actually see the distant steeple where her mother had to relocate after her marriage - source of affection and emotional connect just tantalizingly out of reach.
That might explain his behaviour.
I have to email hn@news.ycombinator.com about it. Those Apples are just too freaking expensive to throw around like that, Dang.
Newton just happened to be much more brilliant than most others - and exhaustively documented his scientific thoughts.
I think you are doing the man a disservice summarising him in such a way.
His interest in unorthodox/heretical religion was at least since he was at university. He spent a significant amount of time on alchemy.
Newton was the President of the Royal Society for over two decades, an MP for a similar amount of time which I would think required a lot of interpersonal relationships and socialising.
He seemed to get along well with family who cared with and lived with him and described him as loving.
The traits of holding grudges and raging were probably as common in academia then as they are today (tech is benign in comparison), but are otherwise sociable and genuinely trying to be good, albeit flawed, people.
He made numerous statements of modesty, the most famous being "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." This has, IMHO, been unfairly reinterpreted in recent times as being a insult to a rival rather than taken at face value.
If every comment, action, HN comment, tweet etc. of any person's entire life was interpreted in the least charitable light we would all be recorded in history as being as vile as you describe him.
I think at the end of the day he was just a gifted flawed human.
And what gifts !
Imagine anyone doing Principia at an age of 24 (the book was published much later, but he had the results by then).
He would have been notable even if he had borrowed an established discipline of calculus to elaborate it's Physical consequences. No he had to develop it himself first and double check the results by translating that into geometry, into power series to be sure they are correct.
Einstein and Newton are often spoken of in the same breath, but by sheer body of work it seems a no-contest to me. Einstein had the luxury of being able to borrow tensor calculus, by then well formed. Perhaps the person who comes closest to Newton would be Archimedes, considering the time that Archimedes was doing his thing.
He was also responsible for the execution of a couple of dozen people. These executions were connected to his position as master of the mint.
The mathematics involved in the theory of tides are formidable. Even in homogeneous, tidally locked systems things can get complicated very quickly.
But tides are nevertheless very important. One two objects pass very close to each other, tidal effects are substantial and can actual destroy one of the objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_disruption_event
imurray•6h ago
Retric•5h ago