A quest for knowledge - Ep. 6: Part of a growing tree

This week I received correspondence from two of my students, from the times of Paris and Cambridge!

It is from a distance that I keep following their studies, their progress, their explorations and, soon, I am sure, their own discoveries. At a distance and with a delay, sometimes due to the lack of proper time to write and, more often, to the time needed for the letters to reach their destination. My very own quest, leading me to frequent cities or even kingdom changes, makes it even more hard to keep up with.

Maybe a day will come when it will be possible to talk from a distance, as if being in the very same room ...

I like to indulge in the feeling that I can still provide some guidance along the path of knowledge, even if more through mere clues and question raising, than through conveying my acquired knowledge. Just like my master did to me before.

What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in considering the colours of thin plates. If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. But I make no question you have divers very considerable experiments beside those you have published, and some, it’s very probable, the same with some of those in my late papers (*)

Putting aside what may be nothing more than fine irony, typical of the acrimony that I know existed between Newton and Hooke, and the preference they had for private discussions over  public debate, I rather prefer to replace the image of the giants that preceded us, in this way of knowledge, for something more organic, for the image of a growing tree.

A tree that grows, with new branches searching for light, leaves and even flowers, seeds that fly with the wind or reach new heights on the wings of a bird, and which upon getting back down on fertile land will originate brand new trees. There are also branches that die, leaves that turn yellow and fall, becoming part of the sustaining land.

(to be continued)


On a journey, riding with Newton, a game of Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani, Ediciones Mas que Oca (2018) under license of Cranio Creations. 
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(*) Koyré, Alexandre. “An Unpublished Letter of Robert Hooke to Isaac Newton.” Isis, vol. 43, no. 4, 1952, pp. 312–337. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/227384.