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arivero
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This comes from a unrelated topic in the TheorPhys forum.
Originally posted by marcus
fascinating story about Isaac Barrow
at Alejandro's website---audacious
and potent high-fantasy style. glad
you posted the link.
John Aubrey (fl. 1626-1697) included
Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) in his
collection of short biographies called
"Aubrey's Brief Lives".
Barrow taught Newton math at Cambridge
and resigned his math professorship in favor of
Newton in 1669, moving up the ladder
to become Master of Trinity in 1672.
Aubrey's two final paragraphs:
[[He was a strong man, but pale as the Candle he studied by.
His pill (an opiate, possibly Matthews his pil) which he was wont
to take in Turkey, which was won't to doe him good, but he
took it preposterously at Mr. Wilson's, the Saddlers, neer
Suffolk House, where he was won't to lye and where he dyed,
and 'twas the cause of his death.
As he laye unravelling in the agonie of death, the Standers-by
could hear him say softly, *I have seen the Glories of the world.*]]
Someone on this forum recently declared that Stephen Hawking should be ejected from the window of a tall building, for reasons which seemed adequate at the time, and I have to point out that Hawking occupies the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge and that Isaac Barrow was the first Lucasian, Newton the second, and so on down to Stephen Hawking. Also that Barrow said Glories of the *world* meaning the universe. And that Aubrey could write better, even in a hurry, than people do now, and used words like unravelling and preposterously.
So here is this story about Barrow by arivero at his website
http://dftuz.unizar.es/~rivero/research/0001033.pdf
In this story it says somewhere that one tries to understand nature out of a sense of honor, so you might want to read it.
It is wacko too and thus deserving of serious attention.
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