Newton and Lichtenberg

I went to the London and South East Region (LASER - we all love acronyms) Newton user group meeting last Friday. I know next to nothing about programming, hardware, or software engineering, but I do know a good design when I see it; that's why I still use an Apple Newton. However, I am very impressed with what people can do with an old, and rather obscure, operating system: the range of tweaks and mods, not to mention the production of new software for the Newton is amazing. I was particularly surprised to see the Newton interface running on a new Apple laptop - quite spooky, like seeing a ghost from the past.
Lichtenberg, being a pre-eminent Enlightenment intellectual, knew Newton's work and was impressed by it. However, unlike Alexander Pope (who wrote this epitaph for Newton: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night; God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."), Lichtenberg places Newton in a wider social and cultural context, and sees Newton's genius as a product of his surroundings as well as being an individual achievement. Here's what he says:
"Let us take Sir Isaac Newton. All discoveries are due to chance, whether towards the end or the beginning of the process, for otherwise reasonable people could sit down and make discoveries as one sits down and writes a letter. The imagination spots a similarity and reason tests it and finds it true: that is discovery. That is how Sir Isaac Newton was. I have not the slightest reason to doubt that there existed before him and after him, in England and without, and that there exists now minds superior to his in ability, just as I have no reason to doubt that the peasant who gazes in admiration at the preacher would preach better than he if he had studied and acquired the knack. Opportunity and occasion are the discoverer and ambition the improver, confidence in one's own strength is strength, in marriage and in the world of learning." From Notebook F: 1776 - 1779