The Truth of Newton's Science and the Truth of Science's History: Heroic Science at Its Eighteenth-Century Formulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lecturing on Newtonian mechanics and dynamics around 1800, the natural philosopher John Dalton employed all the standard demonstrations in what had become by then a well-established genre of scientific education. On his tabletop he used oscillating devices, pendulums, balls made of various substances, levers, pulleys, inclined planes, cylinders of wood, lead in water, and pieces of iron on mercury to illustrate phenomena as diverse as gravitation, the “3 laws of motion of Newton,” impulse or the “great law of percussion,” force and inertia, specific gravity, attraction and magnetism. There was nothing extraordinary in what Dalton was doing, first in his Quaker school then at New College in Manchester. The genre of British lecturing focused on Newtonian mechanics had begun in the second decade of the eighteenth century with the travels and publications of Francis Hauksbee, Jean Desaguliers, and Willem s'Gravesande who lectured in the Dutch Republic. Dalton was deeply indebted to their legacy. His terse manuscript notes on his lectures – charred from a fire in 1940 – tell us that in one lecture he used a “machine with mercury, watercork,” and it was intended to illustrate, of all things, the effect on the planets of the “Cartesian Vortices.” In talking about the Cartesian vortices, and in explaining how wrongheaded they had been as a conceptual device for understanding planetary motion, Dalton was repeating an old Newtonian trope. In the process he was flogging a truly dead horse. Indeed, even in French colleges after the 1750s Descartes's horse had survived only in a few places and then by artificial resuscitation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".