[eru]

> But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.

Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.

[philwelch]

The calculus, sure, but not the physics.

[eru]

Newton didn't do everything that Leibniz did, nor did Leibniz do everything Newton did.

Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.

Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.