|
John Conduitt
(baptised 8 Mar 1688 - 23 May 1737)
English Member of Parliament and Master of the Mint who married Isaac Newton's niece. The next year, Newton proposed Conduitt as a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected 1 Dec 1718). He was elected to Parliament in June 1721, and upon Newton's death, succeeded him as Master of the Mint in March 1727. Conduitt (in 1737) and his wife (in 1739) were laid to rest alongside Newton in Westminster Abbey.
|
Science Quotes by John Conduitt (2 quotes)
His genius now began to mount upwards apace & shine out with more strength, & as he told me himself, he excelled particularly in making verses... In everything he undertook he discovered an application equal to the pregnancy of his parts & exceeded the most sanguine expectations his master had conceived of him.
[About Newton's recollection of being a schoolboy at Grantham, written by Conduitt about 65 years after that time.]
[About Newton's recollection of being a schoolboy at Grantham, written by Conduitt about 65 years after that time.]
— John Conduitt
Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), 65. Footnoted Keynes MS 130.2, p. 32-3, in the collection at King's College, Cambridge.
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition but being absent from books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the Earth his computation did not agree with his theory & inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the force of gravity there might be a mixture of that force wch the moon would have if it was carried along in a vortex.
[The earliest account of Newton, gravity and an apple.]
[The earliest account of Newton, gravity and an apple.]
— John Conduitt
Memorandum of a conversation with Newton in August 1726. Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (1980), 154.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
