Viktor

People don't understand how insanely high IQ Newton was. By age 20, he had no training in math or algebra and in <3ys he studied Euclid, Descartes, Kepler, etc., then laid the groundwork for the laws of motion & gravity, invented calculus, and the theory of colors & light. All while working alone on a little farm outside town. There's a great clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining how there's no contest as to why Newton was the greatest scientific mind ever produced. In art, there is no target or framework to go about creating something. Only da Vinci could've painted The Last Supper, Homer written The Iliad, or Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony. No other human being could've produced those pieces of art. Creative work has no boundaries and can't be pinned down or analyzed. Science is different. In science, you need to know what questions to ask because the work you can do is deterministic, in a sense. You try to fill a piece of the puzzle that already exists, and nature dictates whether something is true or not. In science, which threads you pull is just as important as the work itself, if not more. Someone would've eventually done what Newton did because the pieces are predetermined. However, in 1,000s of years and likely 100s thereafter, only Newton figured it out. And it was because of the questions he was after + his extreme intelligence. For ex, in the 1680s, Halley was trying to understand what motion an inverse-square law would produce. No one had the answer, so he consulted Newton, and Newton said: "An ellipse." Halley asked how he knew that, and Newton's reply was sth like: "Oh, I proved it years ago." The guy had used the math he'd developed to answer it. At the end of Newton's book on Opticks, he includes his unresolved Queries and other topics that interested him. It's astounding because he framed questions in a way that gave away his intuitions. Not only were the questions 100-200 years ahead of his time, but his guesses would prove largely right. He really was someone who thought extremely hard about everything and paired the thinking with rigorous experimentation. “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” - Newton