The golden age

Abstract

The pre-eminent Newton scholar, Richard Westfall, had this to say about his man's calculations of the precession of the equinoxes: “[t]he correction of a faulty lemma in edition one [of the Principia], imposed the necessity of adjustment of more than 50% in the remaining numbers. Without even pretending that he had new data, Newton brazenly manipulated the old figures on precession so that he not only covered the apparent discrepancy but carried the demonstration to a higher degree of accuracy”. Neither was this the only piece of blatant chicanery of which Newton was guilty, and similar practices have been imputed to Galileo, to Dalton and to other giants of the past. Should great geniuses, then, be accorded wider latitude than the foot soldiers of science? Did their improprieties impede progress? One thing at least is certain: no science correspondents were on hand to shower them with obloquy and ridicule inthe public prints.