This sentence is actually Newton's reply to Hooke in order to ridicule him: "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." The subtext is "My achievement has nothing to do with you, a hunchbacked dwarf!" This sentence is actually a kind of irony, but it is often used to be modest later.
Extended answer:
Standing on the shoulders of giants is actually a kind of irony.
Newton/Kloc-was admitted to Trinity College of Cambridge University at the age of 0/8. From then on, Newton's life began a brand-new page. However, his miserable childhood and adolescence left an indelible mark on him, and he was extremely lonely all his life.
At that time, students at Cambridge University were divided into three categories: noble students, ordinary students and students who reduced their fees. The tuition of aristocratic students is very expensive, but they also enjoy many privileges, such as only three years of college graduation; Ordinary students pay tuition normally, like college students now, it takes four years to graduate from college; Students who reduce fees hardly pay tuition fees, but they have to work as servants for professors and aristocratic students to maintain a work-study program. Newton was a student who cut tuition. He worked as a servant for three years, and he got a generous scholarship because of his excellent academic performance.
Newton met the greatest enemy of his life at the meeting of the Royal Society. This man is robert hooke, a British physicist.
At the age of 20, Hooke became the assistant of British chemist robert boyle, and gradually established his academic reputation in the near future. At the age of 25, he discovered the law of mechanics which was later called Hooke's law. At the age of 28, he invented the high-resolution microscope, saw the cell wall of plant cells for the first time, and put forward the concept of "cell". Because of these contributions, Hooke was elected as an academician of the Royal Society before he was 30 years old, and was known as "Da Vinci of London".
After becoming famous, Hooke gradually became arrogant and began to suppress newcomers from time to time. 1672, he turned his attention to a new person, that is, Newton, who has become famous.
At the invitation of the Royal Society, Newton went to London and gave a lecture on optics. In this speech, Newton proposed that light is composed of particles. Unexpectedly, as soon as the speech was over, Hooke jumped out and smashed the venue, claiming that the light was actually made of waves. Huygens, a foreign academician of the Royal Society and a Dutch physicist, echoed this voice and criticized Newton's optical theory. This eventually led to a big debate that lasted for a whole year: Is light a particle or a wave?
This argument did great harm to Newton. At one point, he even threatened to quit the Royal Society because he evoked the experience of being bullied as a teenager. Under the mediation of the secretary of the Royal Society, Odenberg, the two sides finally reached a "reconciliation". But from then on, Newton began to "live in seclusion" in Cambridge and no longer published his academic achievements.
But Newton and Hooke's doomed love is not over. 1679, Hook wrote a letter to Newton, saying that he had just been appointed as the secretary of the Royal Society and wanted to know about the recent scientific research of academicians. After a series of discussions about mechanics, Hooke told Newton that he thought there was gravity between any two objects, and this gravity was inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects, which was called inverse square law. But the problem is that Hooke only put forward such a conjecture, but he couldn't prove its correctness at all.
As early as several decades ago, Polish astronomer Kepler discovered the famous Kepler's three laws. According to Kepler's three laws, all the planets in the solar system orbit the sun in elliptical orbits. So some scientists suspect that there should be some connection between inverse square law and Kepler's three laws. But the problem is that in order to prove the causal relationship between them, a mathematical tool that did not exist at that time must be used, that is, calculus.
Newton was the inventor of calculus. In fact, it was to solve this mechanical problem that he invented calculus. In other words, Newton was a truly chosen person; No one in the world has the ability to solve the most famous problem in the history of science except him.
1687, with the support of British astronomer Harley, Newton published the greatest work in the history of human science-mathematical principles of natural philosophy (Philosophi? Naturalis Principia Mathematica), usually referred to as "principle" for short. In this book, Newton put forward the famous Newton's three laws of kinematics and the law of universal gravitation, and proved that Kepler's three laws can be deduced from inverse square law of universal gravitation with his calculus. The publication of this book made Newton famous day by day, or in Harley's words, he became "the closest person to God in the world".
Hook wrote to Newton again, asking Newton to modify the principle and admit that he was the discoverer of inverse square law. This request completely angered Newton. He wrote back to Hooke, saying that this law was not put forward by Hooke at all, but a well-known fact; As early as 1645, the French astronomer Bliaux had put forward this law. So in response to Hooke's request, Newton directly deleted all the words related to Hooke in the Principles.
Not only that, in order to ridicule Hooke, Newton also said in his reply: "If I can see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." The subtext is "My achievement has nothing to do with you, a hunchbacked dwarf!" "Funnily enough, this swear word turned out to be a famous saying to describe Newton's modesty!
Baidu Encyclopedia-the shoulders of giants