An Example of a "Learning Process" Journal (using the 2 colored box format)

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Introduction. pp. 3 - 8)

• "He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy." [p. 3]
• He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies. ... He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact." [p. 3]
• "Solitude was the essential part of his genius. ... He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself to the most secret of sciences, alchemy." [p. 3-4]
• born is 1642, died in 1727.
• " '... the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before' ... Creation, Newton saw, unfolds from simple rules, patterns iterated over unlimited distances. ... We deem the universe solvable." [p. 7]
• "By then [midlife] he had written more than a million words and published almost none. He wrote for himself, careless of food and sleeep. He wrote to calculate, laying down numbers in spidery lines and broad columns. ... He wrote to read, copying out books and manuscripts verbatim, sometimes the same text again and again. ... he wrote to reason, to meditate." [p. 7 - 8]

Newton's notebooks were his way of life. The fact that he copied out books again and again is illuminating. That is an excellent way to ensure that one both remembers and understands new material. It also reaffirms my method of notetaking, such as this very web page.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 1. pp. 9 - 19)

• Even as a boy he copied things into his personal notebook. "He copied instructions on drawing. ... He copied recipes for making colors and inks and salves and powders and waters. ... Colors fascinated him. ... He copies techniques for melting metal ... he lerned to grind with a mortar and pestle; he practiced roasting and boiling and mixing; he formed chemicals into pellets, to be dried in the sun. He wrote down cures, remedies and admonitions." [p. 17]
• "He crowded his tiny pages with astronomical tables relatd to sun-dialing, followed by an elaborate computation of the calendar for the next twnty-eight years. He copied lists of words, adding as many of his own as came to mind." [p. 18]

Once again, Gleick emphasizes Newton's practice of copying whatever it was that interested him. This is no longer recommended in our educational systems.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 2. pp. 20 - 31)

• "He felt learning as a form of obsession, a worthy pursuit. ... He taught himself a shorthand of esoteric symbols - this served both to save paper and encrypt his writing." [p. 21]
• "The curriculum [at Cambridge] had grown stagnate. It followed the scholastic tradition laid down in the university's medieval beginnings. ... The single authority in all the realms of secular knowledge was Aristotle. ... The Aristotelian canon enshrined systematization and rigor, categories and rules. It formed an edifice of reason: knowledge about knowledge." [p. 22]
• "To the Christian fathers, this first mover could only be God. ... This all-embracing sense of motion left little place for quantity, measurement, and number. ... philosophers where not ready to make fine distinctions, like the distinction between velocity and acceleration." [p. 24]
• "Newton found his way to new ideas and polemics:from the French philosopher Rene Descartes, and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who had died in the yer of Newton's birth. ... Both men defied Aristotle explicitly." [p. 25]
• "In Newton's second year [at Cambridge], having filled the beginning and end of his notebook with Aristotle, he started a new section deep inside: ... some philosophical questions. He set authority aside. ... He made a new beginning. He set down his knowledge of the world, organized under elemental headings, expressed as questions, based sometimes on his reading, sometimes on speculation." [p. 26]

I continue to like the attention to Newton's notebooks.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 3. pp. 32 - 47)

• In 1664 Newton returned to his farm to escape the plague. "He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. ... He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions." [p. 34]
• With printed books had come a new metaphor for the world's organization. The book was a container for information, designed in orderly patterns, encoding the real in symbols; so, perhaps, was nature itself. The book of nature became a favorite conceit of philosophers oand poets: God has written; now we must read." [p. 35]
• "The study of different languages created an awareness of language: its arbitrariness, its changeability. ... Newton wrote down a scheme for a 'universal' language, based on philosophical principles, to unite the nations of humanity." [p. 35]
• "A methematician , too, is a polyglot. A powerful source of creativity is a facility in translating, seeing how the same thing can be said in seemingly different ways. If one formulation doesn't work, try another. Newton's patience was limitless. Truth, he said much later, was 'the offspring of silence and meditation' ... And he said: 'I keep the subject constantly before me and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." [p. 38]
• "He relished the infinite, as Descartes had not. ... A special aspect of infinity troubled Newton; he returned to it again and again, turning it over, restating it with new definitions and symbols. It was the problem of the infinitesimal - the quantity, impossible and fantastic, smaller than any finite quantity, yet not so small as zero." [p. 40]
• "Repeatedly he started a new page - in November 1665, in May 1966, and in October 1666 - in order to essay a system of propositions needed 'to resolve Problems by motion' " [p. 45-46]

The idea of asking questions, and then trying to answer them, is also a very important part of any appraoch to genuine learning.

I am impressed with his persistence, as illustrated by the last quote. But his notebook is a critical feature. Interestingly he prefers this to sheets of paper which you can throw away when something doesn't work.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 5. pp. 60 - 66)

• "Introspection told him that his imagination could see things as they really were. 'Phantasie is helped,' he noted, 'by good aire fasting moderate wine.' But it also 'spoiled by drunkeness, Gluttony, too much study.' He added: 'from too much study, and from extreme passion, 'cometh madnesse' " [p. 60]
• One can see the interactive influence of Robert Hooke, Francis Bacon, both of whom championed experiment.

Fresh air, a walk in the woods (or even a coulee), and a little red wine all sound like sound advice to me.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 6. pp. 67 - 78)

• "... he also continued his mathematical investigations ... He attacked this subject as a classifier, trying to sort all such curves into species and subspecies. ... He plotted in his notebooks fifty-eight distinct species of cubics.

The depth of his investigations, whether math or natural science is impressive!

I have no desire to continue these notes. The book remains very interesting as it describes Newton's various contributions to math (logarithms, calculus) and science (light, gravity, motion), as well as some of his antagonism toward Hooke and Leibniz.

"Isaac Newton " by James Gleick (Chap. 12. pp. 126 - 140)

• "... the pattern of two high tides per twnety-five hours was clear and global. Newton marshaled the data and made his theoretical claim. The moon and sun both pull the seas; their combined gravity creates the tides by raising a symmetrical pair of bulges on opposite sides of the earth." [p. 138

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