Science Appreciation vs. Science Knowledge
In Science and the Founding Fathers I. Bernard Cohen reports (p. 123) that "John Adams later recalled that one of the benefits which he had gained from studying mathematics and science as a college student was patience, the need for perseverance in following through the stages of a difficult proof or knotty problem." But how well did Adams learn his physics? A graduate of Harvard, Adams "received as good an education in science as was possible in America at that time" (p. 197), under the tutelage of John Winthrop, holder of the Hollis Professorship of mathematics and Natural Philosophy, the "oldest endowed chair in the sciences in the Americas."
From Winthrop's lecture notes, which are preserved in the Harvard University Archives, Cohen reports that "he carefully explained each of Newton's three laws of motion" and that "he spent more time on the third law than on the first two, since he was aware that students might misinterpret it" (pp. 201-202). Little did Winthrop realize that one such student would be the future second President of the United States!
In a subsequent argument to Benjamin Franklin in favor of a bicameral legislature, Adams wrote, "The president of Pennsylvania [Franklin] might . . . have recollected one of Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion, namely, -- 'that reaction must always be equal and contrary to reaction,' or there can never be any rest" (p. 229). To consider the equal active and reactive forces in Newton's Third Law to act on the same object to produce a balance continues to be an error among physics students today as it was in John Adams' day, in spite of the efforts of John Winthrop to counter it. Moreover, Adams also erred in applying Newton's First Law: even if two forces were to be balanced in their action on the same object, they would not necessarily produce a condition of rest, only one of no acceleration.
Adams clearly had an appreciation of science, but in his case was that enough? Is this why he regretted that he had not "'devoted to Newton and his Fellows' the 'time which I fear has been wasted on Plato and Aristotle, Bacon . . .' and 'twenty others,' on 'Subjects which Mankind is determined never to Understand'"? (p. 198)
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