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If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. I wrote this to Robert Hooke in 1676, during a period of correspondence that was not entirely cordial. Whether the phrase contained some irony — Hooke being a small and physically unremarkable man who nonetheless had enormous intellectual pretensions — I leave to others to judge. The statement itself is true: my work on optics and gravity extended what Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes had established. No man begins from nothing.