“The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by [the ghost of] Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton’s reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes himself as the king of mental conjurers, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not limited by dramatics but mathematical, and was therefore extremely susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?”
“The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by [the ghost of] Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up. Gravitation, being a reasoned hypothesis which fitted remarkably well into the Copernican version of the observed physical facts of the universe, established Newton’s reputation for extraordinary intelligence, and would have done so no matter how fantastically he arrived at it. Yet his theory of gravitation is not so impressive a mental feat as his astounding chronology, which establishes himself as the king of mental conjurers, but a Bedlamite king whose authority no one now accepts. On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan, because his imagination was not limited by dramatics but mathematical, and was therefore extremely susceptible to numbers: indeed if all his works were lost except his chronology we should say that he was as mad as a hatter. As it is, who dares diagnose Newton as a madman?”
- George Bernard Shaw, preface to Saint Joan