What Makes a Genius: From Voltaire to

EdisonChristopher HartneyUniversity of Sydney

Divisions of the Book(as lectures, 1840)

• 1. (5 May) The Hero as Divinity. Odin, Paganism, Scandinavian Mythology. (Euhemerism)

• 2. (8 May) The Hero as Prophet. Muhammad (denies Muhammad divine inspiration, but removes from him also the Western opprobrium that he was mad)

• 3. (12 May) The Hero as Poet. Dante, Shakespeare (but what were their contexts?)

• 4. (15 May) The Hero as Priest. Martin Luther and john Knox

• 5. (19 May) The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns (and we will look at Voltaire today)

• 6. (22 May) The Hero as King. Cromwell. Napoleon, and Modern Revolutionaries.

Voltaire in Englanda genius or a social translator?

• Letters Concerning the English Nation 1733:–Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Anti-Trinitarians.–(including a letter on the paradise established from 1681by the Quaker WilliamPenn)

–On Parliament–On the government–On Commerce–On Francis Bacon–On Locke–On Descartes and Newton–On the System of Attraction–On the Optics of Newton–On Tragedy–On Comedy–On English Men of Letters–On Alexander Pope (and Catholic toleration).–On the Universities

Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727

• Knighthood for managing the Royal Mint

• Searched for the 7 Noarchian principals of governance.

• Restructured the operation of the cosmos in light of his mystical thinking.

• Published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.

• John Maynard Keynes but his religious papers at auction in 1931.

Significant Works by Voltaire

• Letters Concerning the English Nation 1733

• Candide (attacking Leibniz’s optimism) 1759

• Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764• The Calas Affair 1762• Heavily inspired Diderot and Baumarchais

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)Inventor of the light bulb 1878

Thinking or worried?

The bombshell…• Charles Darwin, from a long line of natural scientists (especially his grandfather Erasmus Darwin[1731-1802] who wrote the evolutionary poem Zoonomia). Charles publishes On the Origin of Species in 1859.

• The book is perhaps the most influential work in human history and sits at the heart of the ‘modern’ experience.

• It displaces the ‘Paley’s Watch’ argument for God.• It does not explain the origin of the cosmos, but the continued development of sophisticated life forms within the cosmos.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXq8LZ3b2YQ from “Creation” 2009 dir Jon Amiel (on the Huxley-Wilberforce Debate).

• But…

Alfred Russel Wallace 1823-1913

• Malthus, Lamark etc• Wallace “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type” 1858

• Wallace defended Darwin, and saw their ideas as mutually-supportive but, as a powerfully dedicated Christian, refused to accept that humans were also a part of the evolutionary system.

• “[the] feeling of freedom arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions. The phrase “free will” describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness… thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions” (p.32).

Tesla’s AC Induction Motor

Baker Electric Car 1909

A Gorgeous Woman

Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is a method of transmitting radio signals by rapidly switching a carrier

among many frequency channels, using a pseudorandom sequence known to both transmitter and receiver. It is

used as a multiple access method in the frequency-hopping code division multiple access (FH-CDMA) scheme.