mil, do you have a reference for the hoaxiness of newton's career? i don't mean the alchemy stuff. i mean the accepted stuff: the physics and the maths.

Mil, Please tell us from whence Newton plagiarised his three laws of motion.
I have just watched a program which demonstrated the importance of freedom of people to criticise the practice of religion. It was the 4 Corners report from the Taliban controlled areas of Pakistan where the Shiah Muslim population are so completely cowed by the brutal and tyrannical Sunni Muslim Taliban that they dare not make any comment at all for fear of being killed.
I am happy that, even with laws restraining aspersions against religion, we in Australia still have sufficient freedom of speech to be able to label religion for what it is: a massive fraud based upon centuries of systematic mendacity designed to provide power and riches to a privileged minority and ensure the obedience of the deluded majority.

[Such fascinating "insights" into South Asian politics there symp. A pity that there's nothing about corrupt Saudi fundies financing terror]

Cases against Newton are not some revelation - more a dirty but "public secret" due to the vast institutional commitment to the man over centuries from the highest authorities of the British Empire. How do you explain, for just two precedent examples, Kepler's detailed (and working) mathematics on gravity and Leibniz's thorough, working explanations of calculus (and their foundational importance to modern mathematics)?

Even today, the Newtonian fraud cannot express consistency on which lie we're meant to accept about his "discovering calculus" i.e., did Newton draft it in 1687, 1693, or some point in the 1670s? Leibniz presented calculus to The Royal Society in 1676, and published it in 1684. That same Royal Society canonized Newton and granted him eternal celestial rank!

Like his absurd Law of Gravity, Newton speed of sound and lunar orbit theories fudges investigative data in order to justify his only original contributions i.e., theories and "laws", those products of his fertile and prolific imagination.

I guess that would be a no bushbasher.

Guess all you like; it is your only remotely conceivable "intellectual" aptitude, after all. Your wild-@55 guessing has so far passed smug, rash, and sweeping judgement on the life-affirming and communally stabilizing faiths of some 4 billion or so people. Ever keen to spot a religious badge from some incident in order to slander a whole faith, again and again.

References exploding the Newton fraud abound. Even as timid and empire-sensitive a reference as Judson's 'The Great Betrayal: fraud in science' (Harcourt, 2004), explains it thus:

"The case against Newton is clear-cut and not denied, although it took a quarter of a millennium to be exposed fully".

Again, that above reference is just a weak one by a very cautious and timid science writer. Regardless, I never serve requests by OLO posters to do their research for them. I will point to issues, discussion points, and argumentative grounds, but to serve up secondary sources would mean sacrificing myself to give them a free education on the one hand, and a means of trying to dismiss and/or stigmatize sources based on the now-fashionable tendency to assess work based solely on considerations of network and oligarchical patronage (and most importantly, lack thereof).

Speaking of fraud, I just found another interesting tie-in on Justice Marcus Einfeld and my initial criticism on this thread (relevant to the article's offensive and misleading claim about "a person is born into a race"):

Einfeld: "Insidiously, through the many pregnancies that result from rapes, it is also a way of diminishing the racial and cultural purity of the East Timorese" [Aubrey, Jim (ed) 'Free East Timor', Vintage, 1998].

What a disgrace: using the memory of the Shoah and East Timorese suffering to preach the irrational and divisive filth of "racial purity" and the "sanctity of Volk".

mil:

>> "The case against Newton is clear-cut and not denied, although it took a quarter of a millennium to be exposed fully"

the case of what exactly? the only paragraph i can find with any substantial accusation is the one you quote from. the accusation seems to be very minor: he fiddled the figures a little so the numbers (on sound, equinoxes and orbits) better fit his theories.

gosh, i'm in shock. from this we get "100% fraud"? honestly, don't you have a substantial reference? as it is, it's minor dodginess, and theory-guiding-analysis stuff of a pretty common and pretty minor variety. details, man!

mil, do you think galileo and kepler didn't fiddle the books? do you think these guys didn't have their nasty sides. if so, why all this special attention to newton? if not, i suggest you get out more.

if you want to claim that newton was a nasty bit of work, that his arrogance meant he wasn't totally honest, that there are disputes about precedence, that's fine. it's hardly groundbreaking, but i agree that we shouldn't pretend mathematical and scientific heroes are paragons of virtue and intellectualism. this is a genuine problem in the history of ideas.

but nothing i've read, here or elsewhere, shakes my belief that newton was an intellectual giant, arguably the greatest mathematician of all time, and certainly in the top five. nothing justifies your bizarre reference to his "absurd law of gravity", your seeming insinuation that he didn't independently come up with the calculus, your weird reference to kepler (was proving kepler's laws just a triviality?), your trivialization of his concept of force.

mil, it's not that what you say doesn't have a grain of truth. the trouble is that you over-egg the omelet. by about a farmsworth.