Yep, a 100% fraud. Plagiarism and mysticism mixed up with some "old school tie" English public school networking. But he couldn't even do plagiarism properly, while his actual "scholarly passion" was all quackery about alchemy, as revealed when JM Keynes bought Newton's collected personal documents in a large trunk.

It's amazing once you look into it, especially given the establishment's (secular) canonization of the man as drummed into us at school and beyond.

yeah, i guess all that calculus and gravity stuff wasn't great shakes.

Yes, putting it mildly. An apple falling on his head, etc.!

The case of his "study" into optics (refraction, in particular) is perhaps the most shockingly blatant scam against vast medieval monastic and middle eastern precedent. But even in that more straightforward example, Newton still managed to inject preposterous, mystical "theory" (his only original contribution) that would disqualify any scholar assessed on their actual merits.

It's not just the fact of plagiarism, but the shoddy and corrupted expression of it that characterizes the Newton hoax.

But it's quite unlike the mystical and metaphysical business of traditional religious devotion and its typically heavy reliance on the metaphor of dream symbolism, for example. Such "hard science" as the Newton case demonstrates how privileged establishment can profoundly corrupt the very notions of "knowledge", "inquiry" and scholastic accreditation. This still goes on, of course, and I've seen several conspicuous cases first-hand in Australian, US and European tertiary "education".

Just think of a conspicuous, parallel case from Oz's Rum judiciary: Marcus Einfeld.

I think that we can safely say that you are barking mad Mil-observer.

I am hoping that you aren't a religious leader in your community. That would be catastrophic.

Yes, sometimes mil-observer makes sense.

This, however, is not one of those increasingly rare occasions.

More schoolyard antics of a mob - the great western individualists can't assert themselves individually on the terms of the discussion itself. Then the most tired method for dismissing and ridiculing dissent: just quip "yes, quite mad"...

Good though that this digression exposed some anti-scientific, irrationalist superstitions, and the uncritical, conformist ignorance of some of today's brainwashed cultists who would ridicule religion in a wan display of supposed "rationality".

I entered this discussion by challenging such cultish irrationality in statements like: "right to not like a race", "A person is born into a race", and "the physically [sic] reality of race".

So my reference to the Newton's hoax-career merely emphasizes that such actual quackery has a long tradition and many enthusiastic dupes (usually because they're so class-conscious and obedient to the tastes of the Royal Socie-teh).