- Oct 5, 2017
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Well that's what the saying means, but specifically referring to when Newton said it it's commonly attributed to being a double entendre taking a crack at Robert Hooke. Hooke believed that Newton had stolen his work, and Newton said that if he'd seen further it was by standing on the shoulders of giants, not of little men like Hooke. Newton wasn't well known for being modest.I always thought it was a saying about how the geniuses of any era couldn't have done what they did without the geniuses of the previous eras, in the realm of science. There's no rocket science without the Wright brothers, there's no Wright brothers without Da Vinci, stuff like that.