MDMD(4): Equation, p. 134
Matthew P Wiener
weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu
Thu Jul 24 07:56:41 CDT 1997
Andrew Dinn writes:
>Newton too was somewhat mad in his later years, thanks to liberal
>doses of mercury taken as a cure against teh venereal disease he
>imagined he had caught from consorting with prostitutes in his
>youth.
So far as anyone knows, Newton lived and died a virgin. The mercury
poisoning he is believed to have suffered from would have been from
his numerous alchemical experiments.
> From the little I have read about his life this cosmological
>obsession was at the core of his insanity.
Read a little bit more. His insanity took the form of very strange
moods and liberal amounts of paranoia. Having a cosmic vision in
itself, derived from his own astounding scientific successes, is
nowhere close to insanity.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba at sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
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