Copy, Copy, Copy: How to Do Smarter Marketing by Using Other People's Ideas

INTRODUCTION On the Shoulders of Giants

OPTICS, MATHS AND THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

Sir Isaac Newton was undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of mankind. Without Newton, the modern world would be very different. Without Newton, there would be no Einstein, no Microsoft, no iPhone, no internet, no moonshot, no Facebook.

Newton invented the calculus that underpins modern mathematics and all that we do with it (as it turns out simultaneously with Gottfried Leibniz, even though Newton could never bring himself to concede the fact). His theory of light and optics transformed that field, too. His extraordinary synthesis of the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo transformed the physical sciences fundamentally. So, for example, his laws of motion and gravity are still part and parcel of how we think about the physical world (Einstein and Heisenberg notwithstanding). Newton was without doubt the preeminent scientific mind of his day and was voted largely unopposed to the post of President of the Royal Society (the leading scientific community of his day).

For all his talents and achievements he was not a nice man; not an easy person to love; not even very pleasant company. He was widely reported¹:

‘to have been an unsmiling and humorless, puritanical man with a countenance that was ordinarily melancholy and thoughtfull'.

Thomas Hearne, a precise ...