Jed Buchwald: Isaac Newton and the Philosophy of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #214
Lex Fridman (host), Jed Buchwald (guest)
In this episode of Lex Fridman Podcast, featuring Lex Fridman and Jed Buchwald, Jed Buchwald: Isaac Newton and the Philosophy of Science | Lex Fridman Podcast #214 explores jed Buchwald Reexamines Newton, Paradigms, and Limits of Scientific Knowledge Jed Buchwald discusses how science actually develops, challenging Thomas Kuhn’s neat notion of paradigm shifts by emphasizing messy, practice-based progress driven by new tools and techniques. Using historical cases—especially optics, Newton’s mechanics, and 19th‑century physics—he shows that theories often win not because rivals ‘fail’ but because they enable more novel experiments and devices. He explores Newton’s life, personality, religion, alchemy, and extraordinary productivity, contrasting him with later figures like Einstein and reflecting on whether science can ever fully ‘know’ reality. Throughout, Buchwald stresses the mediated, instrument-driven nature of scientific knowledge and the complex role of data, measurement, and human perception in building theories.
Jed Buchwald Reexamines Newton, Paradigms, and Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Jed Buchwald discusses how science actually develops, challenging Thomas Kuhn’s neat notion of paradigm shifts by emphasizing messy, practice-based progress driven by new tools and techniques. Using historical cases—especially optics, Newton’s mechanics, and 19th‑century physics—he shows that theories often win not because rivals ‘fail’ but because they enable more novel experiments and devices. He explores Newton’s life, personality, religion, alchemy, and extraordinary productivity, contrasting him with later figures like Einstein and reflecting on whether science can ever fully ‘know’ reality. Throughout, Buchwald stresses the mediated, instrument-driven nature of scientific knowledge and the complex role of data, measurement, and human perception in building theories.
Key Takeaways
Scientific revolutions are rarely clean breaks; they emerge from new practices and tools.
Buchwald agrees paradigms exist but argues theories often change because new mathematical frameworks and instruments enable novel phenomena and devices, not simply because anomalies ‘falsify’ old theories.
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Competing theories can often both ‘work’ but differ in generativity.
The Newtonian particle theory of light could be patched to explain many effects, but wave optics (e. ...
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Great scientists are embedded in communities and inherit partial solutions.
Buchwald emphasizes that figures like Newton and Einstein build on prior work—correspondence with Hooke influenced Newton’s mechanics, and earlier mathematicians prefigured aspects of calculus—so lone genius is only part of the story.
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Measurement and ‘data’ are historically contingent practices, not timeless givens.
Early modern scientists like Huygens typically chose a single ‘best’ measurement rather than averaging many; statistical methods and the idea of aggregating noisy readings emerged only later, changing what counted as reliable data.
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Our access to reality is always mediated by perception and instruments.
Using examples from vision (human vs dragonfly, screen pixels vs ‘documents’), Buchwald argues against strong realism: science corrals aspects of nature through devices and math, but we cannot be certain we’ve reached the ultimate ‘bottom turtle’ of reality.
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Alchemy helped incubate modern experimental chemistry and material science.
Far from pure mysticism, alchemy involved sophisticated apparatus, repeated manipulations, and coded recipes for amalgams; Newton spent extensive time on such work, which refined ideas about matter and transformation.
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Personalities, egos, and rivalries can accelerate scientific progress.
Stories of Newton vs Hooke and Leibniz, and Arago vs Biot (using Fresnel as a ‘weapon’), illustrate how jealousy and competition push researchers into new domains, even as they distort credit and relationships.
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Notable Quotes
“It’s not so much that the prevailing view can’t crack something as that it doesn’t give you the opportunity to do new stuff.”
— Jed Buchwald
“Our access to the inner workings of nature is inevitably mediated by what we can do with the materials and factors around us.”
— Jed Buchwald
“You are, in fact, a figment of my imagination.”
— Jed Buchwald
“The role of fruit in the history of science has been vastly exaggerated.”
— Simon Schaffer (quoted by Jed Buchwald)
“I think there is little question that his conviction that you can figure things out has a fair bit to do with his profound belief that this rule maker doesn’t do things arbitrarily.”
— Jed Buchwald (on Newton and God)
Questions Answered in This Episode
If both old and new theories often ‘work,’ what criteria should scientists use to decide when a paradigm genuinely deserves to replace its predecessor?
Jed Buchwald discusses how science actually develops, challenging Thomas Kuhn’s neat notion of paradigm shifts by emphasizing messy, practice-based progress driven by new tools and techniques. ...
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How would our picture of scientific progress change if we focused on instruments and practices rather than on big theories and famous names?
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Given Buchwald’s skepticism about strong realism, what does ‘success’ in science really mean—predictive power, technological control, or genuine understanding of reality?
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In what ways might current physics (e.g., string theory, search for a theory of everything) repeat historical patterns where elegant mathematics outpaces experimental testability?
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How should we reassess the reputations of figures like Newton when we factor in their alchemical work, religious beliefs, and personal rivalries alongside their canonical scientific achievements?
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Transcript Preview
The following is a conversation with Jed Buchwald, a professor of history and a philosopher of science at Caltech, interested especially in the development of scientific concepts and the instruments used to create and explore new effects and ideas in science. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Jed Buchwald. Does science progress via paradigm shifts and, uh, revolutions, as philosopher Thomas Kuhn said, or does it progress gradually? What do you think?
Well, I got into this field 'cause I was Tom Kuhn's research assistant 50 years ago-
Wow.
... 52 years ago.
Really?
He pulled me into it out of physics instead, so I know his work pretty well. And in the years when I was at MIT running an institute, he was then in the philosophy department. He used to come over all the time to the talks we held and so on. So what would I say about that? He, of course, developed his ideas a lot over the years.
Yes.
The thing that he's famous for, The (laughs) H- (clears throat) Structure of Scientific Revolutions, came out in '62. And, um, as you just said, it offered, um, an outline for what he called a paradigmatic structure, namely the notion that (clears throat) you have to look at what scientists do is forming a community of investigators, and that they're trying to solve various puzzles, as he would put it, that crop up. Figuring out how this works, how that works, and so on. And of course, they don't do it out of the blue. They do it within a certain framework. The framework can be pretty vague. He called it a paradigm. And his notion was that eventually, they run into troubles or what he called anomalies that kind of cracks things. Somebody new comes along with a different way of doing it, et cetera. Do I think things work that way? No, not really. Tom and I used to have lengthy discussions about that over the years. Um, w- I do think there is a common structure that formulates both theoretical and experimental practices.
Mm-hmm.
And historians nowadays of science like to refer to scientific work as what scientists practice. It's, uh, almost craftsman-like. They can usually adapt in various ways. Uh, and I can give you all kinds of examples of that. I once wrote a book on the origins of wave theory of light, and that is one of the paradigmatic examples that Tom used, only it didn't work that way exactly, because he thought that what happened was that the, um, wave theory ran into trouble with a certain phenomenon which it couldn't crack.
Mm-hmm.
Well, it turned out that, in fact, historically, that phenomenon was actually, um, not relevant later on to the wave theory. And when the wave theory came in, uh, the alternative to it which had prevailed, which was Newton's views, light as particles, that, it seemed, couldn't explain what the wave theory could explain. Again, not true. Not true. Uh, much more complex than that, the wave theory offered the opportunity to deploy novel experimental and mathematical structures which gave younger scientists, mathematicians and others, the opportunity to effect, manufacture, make new sorts of devices. It's not that the alternative couldn't sort of explain these things, but it never was able to generate them de novo, as novelties. In other words, if you think of it as something scientists want to progress in the sense of finding new stuff to solve-
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