For the next year and a half, Newton remained at his family’s farm in Lincolnshire, reading, studying, and thinking alone. While the bubonic plague raged elsewhere, Newton embarked on what he would later describe as the most intellectually productive period of his life. That long interval, from the summer of 1665 to the spring of 1667, might be described as the most intellectually productive period of any individual’s life — ever.One subject that had always interested Newton was light and color. Two years earlier, visiting the annual Sturbridge Fair near the university, he had purchased a small glass prism. He had been fascinated by the way the prism seemed to change white light into a spectrum of rainbow-like colors. No one understood where those colors came from; one theory was that the glass somehow added color to otherwise colorless light.Newton decided to use his enforced absence from Cambridge to try and crack the mystery. Setting his prism in different positions as the sun streamed through his south-facing window, he carefully noted where the colors appeared on the wall across the room. He made detailed observations and measurements , and gradually came to understand that the prism was refracting — that is, bending — the sunlight, and in the process revealing its component colors. Newton had discovered that white light is a blend of every color in the rainbow, but that those colors become visible only when light rays are refracted at different angles.All of modern optics builds upon Newton's discovery. It would be another seven years before he communicated his findings to anyone else, and nearly 40 years would elapse before he published his findings in book form. But the groundbreaking insights dated to those months of self-quarantine on a farm in Lincolnshire.That wasn’t all that occupied Newton’s mind. He turned his attention to movement and inertia, and what was then the unsolved problem of how to measure the changing speed and direction of an object in flight. Shoot an arrow or fire a cannonball: They hurtle upward, then gradually slow, then change direction and plunge back down. But what determines their velocity and direction? This was a mystery no one had solved — until Newton focused his attention on the question of motion and how it was governed. Gradually he worked out the three essential laws that make motion comprehensible:
- A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion, unless acted upon by an external force.
- The force acting on an object is equal to the mass of that object times its acceleration — or in mathematical notation, F = ma.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton’s laws laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and upon it generations of physicists would build towering edifices. The mathematics required to derive these laws — which involve multiple variables with continuously changing quantities — did not exist in Newton's day. So he invented an entirely new mathematical discipline. He called it his “method of fluxions,” though eventually it would be known as differential calculus. (Independently, the German scholar Gottfried Leibniz would later develop it as well.) Without calculus, modern mathematics, engineering, and statistics would be impossible.
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in 1665-66.
Any of these achievements would have assured Newton's fame. But the heights he scaled during his months of isolation were greater still.In his garden one day, an apple really did fall (or so he recalled as an old man decades later). The young university student pondered the force that pulled that apple to the earth. It was a force that seemed to operate even at great distances: An apple dropping from the highest tree imaginable would still hit the ground. How far out did this force reach? Perhaps all the way to the moon. Yet the moon didn't fall to the earth, but traveled around it instead. Why?The problem of celestial movement vexed the intellectuals of Newton's day. They could envision a globe being swung on a chain, circling round and round, centripetal force holding it in a steady orbit. Cut the chain, however, and the circling stops — the globe flies off in a straight line. Yet heavenly bodies don't fly off in straight lines. Though untethered by chains, they move in fixed orbits. How could that be?Alone in Lincolnshire, Newton solved the puzzle: Incredibly, he discovered the law of gravity. The same force that pulls an apple to the ground holds distant planets in their paths. That was the chain linking the moon to the earth and the planets to the sun. Gravity couldn't be seen or touched, but it could be proved with mathematics. He filled page after crowded page with his calculations, and eventually derived the formula that, he said, “allows me to explain the system of the world.”For nearly 20 years, Newton told no one of his discovery. When he finally published his great treatise on motion and gravitation — its title wasPhilosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Latin for Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy ) — the effect was seismic. Newton’s discoveries, in the words of Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, amounted to “one of the most extraordinary scientific syntheses in the history of the human mind.”The Principia is generally reckoned the most important book in the history of science. It jolted Western civilization to its core, for it demonstrated, as no prior work ever had, that the universe was lawful, logical, and knowable. To a deeply pious Europe, it meant that mere mortals could perceive the very blueprint of Creation. To study the world empirically, to understand its workings, was to come closer to the mind of God than had ever been thought possible. Newton's insights during the months of plague that kept him at home imposed a mathematical order to the universe that permanently closed the door on the age of magic, and opened the door to something even more wondrous: the triumph of modern science. That astonishingly fruitful period of “social distancing” came to be known as Newton’s annus mirabilis— year of wonders.Unlike so many who perished during the Great Plague of London, Newton lived a very long life. He was 84 when he died in 1727, and was interred with many honors in Westminster Abbey.But his most famous epitaph was the couplet composed by Alexander Pope, the famed English poet:
“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! — and all was light.”
Does history smile on Biden's chances?
Barring the unforeseen, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. But if history is a reliable guide, he is highly unlikely to be elected president.So, at any rate, argues veteran political journalist Byron York in a recent Washington Examiner column . He focuses not on Biden’s specific strengths or weaknesses vis-à-vis Donald Trump, but on the track record of presidential candidates with his political résumé — specifically, his 36 years in the Senate and two terms as vice president. Judging from the experience of other senators and vice presidents who have run for president, writes York, Biden’s odds don’t look good:
[T]he first reason Biden will not become president is that no one who served 36 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 30 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 25 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 20 years in the Senate has ever become president. No one who served 15 years in the Senate has ever become president.
It's not for lack of trying. Bob Dole, who was sworn into the Senate on Jan. 3, 1969, ran for president 27 years later, in 1996. He quit the Senate during the campaign to show his determination to become president. But his long years in the Senate, plus his age — he was 73 at the time and the subject of endless suggestions that he was too old to be president — were a deal-killer for voters.
Others tried, too. In 2008, John McCain ran for president after 21 years in the Senate. It didn't work. In 2004, John Kerry ran for president after 19 years in the Senate. That didn't work, either.
A long career in the Senate is simply not a foundation for a successful run for the White House.
In the past 100 years, only three sitting senators have been elected president: Warren Harding in 1920, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Barack Obama in 2008. Harding had spent just five years in the Senate, Kennedy eight, and Obama four. Biden’s exceptionally long tenure, six full terms, strongly suggests that he is cut out to be a senator, writes York — not a president.
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In the past 100 years, only three sitting senators have been elected president. The two most recent were Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy.
Biden’s eight-year run as Barack Obama’s vice president might seem to give him an advantage in landing the top job; after all, nearly one-third of US presidents formerly served as veep. But there, too, historical precedent cuts against Biden’s chances. Eliminate the vice presidents who ascended to the White House on the death or resignation of the chief executive, and eliminate those who were elected president while they were still serving as vice president, and what remains isn’t encouraging:
Only one president has gone from the vice presidency to private life and then to the presidency. Richard Nixon served as vice president in the 1950s, narrowly lost the 1960 presidential election, and then came back to win the presidency in 1968. That is Biden's hope — that a vice president can leave office and then, after a period outside government, return to win the White House.
Perhaps. But Nixon, who spent less than three years in the Senate, became vice president a few days after turning 40 and was sworn in as president at 56 — more than two decades younger than Biden, who will be 78 on Inauguration Day, 2021.
Finally, there is what York, crediting the respected scholar and journalist Jonathan Rauch, identifies as the “14-Year Rule.” It amounts to a sell-by date for politicians: Anyone who takes longer than 14 years to get from his first statewide victory (governor or senator) to a party’s national ticket will not become president.
Biden didn't even get close. It took him 36 years to get from his first Senate victory to the vice presidency. If he wins the presidency now, it would be 47 years from that first Senate swearing-in until Inauguration Day.
It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway): Such historical “laws” exist to be broken. Until 2016, no one had ever been elected president without previously holding high political office or military rank. Until 2008, no African American had ever been elected president. Before 1980, a divorced president was considered unthinkable. In theory, anything can happen in a presidential campaign. In theory.
As investors are constantly reminded, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The same is true of campaigns for the White House. All the same: If you’re planning to gamble on Biden’s presidential prospect, history would recommend you hedge your bet.
China's worst medical scandal
The coronavirus pandemic would have been dire and scary under any circumstances, but the fact that the first infections appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan made it worse. Some voices in the West have suggested, perversely, that China’s authoritarian harshness was actually a blessing that helped contain the disease — the latest iteration of the “but-he-makes-the-trains-run-on-time” argument that dates back to American admirers of Mussolini in the 1920s.
In fact, China’s tyranny has made everything about coronavirus worse. For weeks, Beijing’s highest priority was to keep word of the public health threat metastasizing on Chinese soil from spreading, particularly among China’s people. The communist government, cracking down with customary ruthlessness, punished doctors who notified online followers about the disease, detained or threatened journalists who tried to report on the outbreak, and initially ordered genetically sequenced samples of the dangerous new virus to be destroyed — and the destruction covered up.
China’s dictatorial impulses (soon exacerbated by similar impulses in Iran) gave the sickness a lethal headstart against efforts to rein it in. “Coronavirus Spreads, and the World Pays for China’s Dictatorship ,” read the apt headline on a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times in January. Tyrannical regimes aren’t only a menace to freedom and civil liberties. They are also a deadly threat to the openness, cooperation, and constructive criticism on which public health, especially at times of crisis, depends.
Yet China’s outrages during the coronavirus epidemic are far — very far — from its worst medical abuses.
In several columns in recent years, I have written about China’s involvement in one of the most depraved of all systematic human-rights atrocities in the modern world: Its industrial-scale harvesting of vital organs from prisoners of conscience, to be transplanted into patients paying exorbitant fees for a heart, kidney, or liver made available on demand.
Here, from a 2016 essay, is a bit of background:
In 1999, Chinese hospitals began performing more than 10,000 organ transplants annually, generating a vast and lucrative traffic in “transplant tourists,” who flocked to China on the assurance that they could obtain lifesaving organs without having to languish on a waiting list. China had no voluntary organ-donation system to speak of, yet suddenly it was providing thousands and thousands of freshly harvested organs to patients with ready cash or high-placed connections. How was that possible?The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists , added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue. Chinese officials [formerly claimed] that organs came from violent criminals on death row. But [researchers’ findings have made] it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.
Since then, the proof of China’s involvement in this literal butchery has continued to accumulate. Yet it all too rarely draws the attention of mainstream news organizations.
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A number of independent researchers have exposed China's organ-harvesting atrocities. One important work is Ethan Gutman's chilling 2014 book, The Slaughter.
Last week, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation — a human rights educational institute created in 1993 by act of Congress — released a detailed new review of the evidence . It draws from internal and public Chinese archives and sources, many unearthed and translated for the first time. Though China has begun insisting in the last few years that it has reformed its organ procurement practices and transplants only organs that come from consenting donors, the new report makes clear how dubious that claim is. As the foundation’s executive director, Marion Smith, writes:
the growth of the voluntary figures is highly questionable — rising from 34 in 2010 to 6,316 in 2016 — and follows a quadratic equation to the 99.9% level. Nor does it make sense that China can provide organs on demand, often within hours or days, from such a small population. Only forced organ harvesting of blood-typed prisoners can meet that timeline.The report also shows that China transplants far more organs than authorities admit. Some 173 Chinese hospitals are currently authorized to do transplants, yet just 10 hospitals account for nearly 14,000 annual procedures. The total number of transplants is likely at least several times larger. Beijing is falsifying both the number and the source of the organs it sells for profit.
Coincidentally, the foundation’s report was released very soon after a similar document emerged from a separate quarter: On March 1, the London-based Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China published its final judgment . The tribunal was headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice, QC, the British barrister who headed the war crimes prosecution of former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague. It spent six months taking testimony from witnesses and studying data; it too concluded that China’s organ donation records have been fraudulently manipulated. The tribunal’s 562-page final report leaves no doubt that the allegations against China’s government — allegations of “acts of cruelty and wickedness that match the cruelty and wickedness of medieval torturers and executioners”— are well-founded:
[T]housands of innocent people have been killed to order, having their bodies – the physical integrity of their beings – cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea, and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale. Those innocents were killed by doctors simply because they believed, for example, in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance and lived lives of healthy exercise and meditation and because the way they lived was seen as dangerous to the interests and objectives of the totalitarian state of the People’s Republic of China.
Given China’s sickening record, it is hard to understand why doctors, scientists, and public-health professionals in the free world should be relying in any way on medical information provided by the Chinese government or the institutions it controls.
This month, it was widely reported that surgeons at the Wuxi People’s Hospital in Jiangsu province had performed the world’s first double-lung transplant for a victim of coronavirus disease. Ordinarily, a patient in need of a lung transplant can wait for years before one becomes available. Yet Wuxi hospital managed to secure two lungs in the space of mere weeks. If, as seems likely, they were forcibly extracted from a Chinese dissident or prisoner of conscience, the transplant was not a medical advance to be hailed but a crime against humanity that ought to be prosecuted.
Cooperating with China’s medical establishment is akin to cooperating with Nazi Germany’s concentration-camp doctors. Whatever genuine medical knowledge may be shared is fatally tainted by the monstrous means by which that knowledge was gained.
The London tribunal concluded its report with these blunt words:
Any person or organization that interacts in any substantial way with the People’s Republic of China, including:
- doctors and medical institutions;
- industry and businesses, most specifically airlines, travel companies, financial services businesses, law firms, and pharmaceutical and insurance companies, together with individual tourists;
- educational establishments; arts establishments
should recognize that, to the extent revealed in this document, they are interacting with a criminal state.
A criminal state.
The virus that has emerged from China is sinister, as the whole world has learned to its sorrow. But it is not nearly as sinister as the government that rules in Beijing. We are properly doing everything we can to isolate and suppress the coronavirus. Why do we do so little to isolate and suppress China’s lethal communist regime? |
The last line“I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:A dreadful plague in London wasIn the year sixty-fiveWhich swept an hundred thousand soulsAway; yet I alive!” — Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
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