Isaac Newton: pocket GIANTS

Dr Andrew May, Andrew May

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750962322
• eBook ISBN: 9780750963534
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Isaac Newton had an extraordinary idea. He believed the physical universe and everything in it could be described in exact detail using mathematical relationships. He formulated a law of gravity that explained why objects fall downwards, how the moon causes the tides, and why planets and comets orbit the sun.

While Newton's work has been added to over the years, his basic approach remains at the heart of the scientific worldview. Yet Newton's own had little in common with that of a modern scientist. He believed the universe was created to a precise and rational design – a design that was fully understood by the earliest people. Over time this knowledge was lost, and Newton considered it his life's work to rediscover it, whether through applied mathematics or a painstaking study of the Bible and other ancient texts. In chasing his impossible goal, Newton managed to contribute more to our understanding of the universe than anyone else in history.

1

The Newtonian Universe

‘God said, Let Newton be! – and all was light.’

The world has changed beyond recognition since Isaac Newton’s time. Feats of engineering that we now take for granted would have been unimaginable three centuries ago: skyscrapers half a kilometre high, 100,000-ton ocean liners, supersonic aircraft, artificial satellites, interplanetary space probes … And the methods employed by designers today would have seemed strange and magical to a person of the seventeenth century, for the process starts with the writing down of symbols on a piece of paper (or, these days, on a computer screen) – precise mathematical equations describing the forces, motions and interactions involved. In the realm of modern engineering, everything has a symbolic life before it takes on a real, material existence.

The same principle extends far beyond man-made technology. Bizarre and improbable as it may seem on the face of it, everything in the physical universe obeys strict mathematical rules. At the start of the seventeenth century, no-one would have believed that. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, virtually everyone did so. The man who persuaded the world to change its mind was Isaac Newton.

When Newton started his studies, universities throughout Europe were still teaching Aristotle’s system of natural philosophy as the standard picture of the physical world. Aristotle’s theory had no symbols or equations in it. Some of the pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophers – notably Pythagoras and his followers – did believe in a fundamentally mathematical world, but over time their views had fallen out of favour. More often than not such ideas were dismissed as the musings of crackpots or mystical dreamers. A similar attitude prevailed towards the Hermetic philosophers of mediaeval Europe – a small and secretive minority who believed that, with sufficient diligence, it would be possible to discover a simple set of rules capable of explaining the complexities of the natural world.

The situation in Newton’s time was, in a sense, the mirror image of the present day. What then seemed to be a bizarre and mystical notion – that the universe obeys simple mathematical laws – is now seen as the ‘rational’ view. But in those days, ‘rational’ people tended to assume the exact opposite. The world looked complex, chaotic and unpredictable … so clearly it could have nothing to do with the simplicity of mathematics.

When Newton published his greatest masterpiece in 1687, he called it Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica – ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’. The book was a revolution, and the essence of that revolution is summed up in the title. Before 1687, ‘Mathematical Principles’ and ‘Natural Philosophy’ were two completely different branches of knowledge, poles apart. After Principia they would be tied together by a bond that could never be broken.

Today, as an academic discipline, ‘theoretical physics’ is virtually synonymous with ‘applied mathematics’. You cannot study either subject without seeing Newton’s influence at every turn. He discovered the law of gravity and codified the laws of motion. He developed pioneering methods in mathematics. He invented a new kind of telescope and brought new insights to the analysis of optical phenomena. Science has continued to advance since Newton’s time, but it has done so by building on his work, not by sweeping it aside. For all the scientific revolutions of later centuries, the world continues to obey the basic mathematical laws discovered by Newton. There is no disputing the fact that we live in a Newtonian universe.

Was this the goal that Newton was working towards? Did he have a prophetic vision of modern science which he pursued single-mindedly throughout his life? Was it his intention to transform human understanding?

The answer is almost certainly ‘no’. All the towering accomplishments for which Newton is remembered were made in a few short bursts, dotted among countless other studies – theology, alchemy, ancient history – which are now all but forgotten. On the few occasions Newton could be persuaded to publish his scientific work, he did so with obvious reluctance. Science, in the modern sense of the word, was just one small aspect of what inspired him.

This fact was carefully swept under the carpet for two hundred years. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians focused on Newton’s scientific achievements to the virtual exclusion of everything else. It is only in the last hundred years or so that some people – and still only a minority – have made an effort to understand Newton as something other than a ‘modern’ scientist. A prominent figure in this context was John Maynard Keynes, a man best known as one of the twentieth century’s leading economists. During the 1930s, he became increasingly interested in Newton’s life and purchased a number of his unpublished private papers.

The papers Keynes acquired were ones that did not interest the academic institutions of the day, dealing as they did with ‘unimportant’ subjects such as alchemy and religion. Yet it is these very writings that give the clearest insight into Newton’s personality and motivation. Through them it becomes clear that his scientific and ‘non-scientific’ activities were all part of the same basic quest. As Keynes wrote: ‘He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world.’1

Horrifying as it may sound to modern scientists, Isaac Newton was a Creationist. He believed that God had made the universe according to a precise and rational design. He also believed that the details of this design had been fully revealed to the people of the earliest civilisations. In other words, just like the New Agers of today, Newton was a believer in ancient wisdom – prisca sapientia, as it was known in Latin. He believed that over the course of time this primal knowledge had been lost, and he considered it his life’s work to rediscover it. His study of mathematics and natural philosophy formed part of this quest, but so did his alchemical and biblical researches. To Newton, all these activities were equally important.

Like the mediaeval Hermeticists before him, Newton believed there were ancient secrets hidden in cryptic documents or encoded in the very structure of the universe, waiting to be unlocked. To quote Keynes again:

He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements … but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty.2

One of the most important principles of Hermetic philosophy is enshrined in the maxim, ‘As above, so below.’ In other words, there is a correspondence between the familiar world of human experience and the universe on a cosmic scale. It was a principle Newton took to heart. It infused everything he turned his mind to, from alchemy and the chronology of ancient kingdoms to the mathematical principles of natural philosophy.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Newton’s greatest scientific and mathematical achievement – the foundation stone of modern rational science – was the fruit of a broader project which today would be dismissed as mystical nonsense. To Newton, mathematics was nothing less than the language of God. As confirmation of this, he cited The Wisdom of Solomon 11:20: ‘Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.’ Just like the Christian fundamentalists whom modern scientists consider to be their arch opponents, Newton looked to the Bible as the ultimate authority in all things.

To Newton, science was not about discovery so much as rediscovery. He was convinced the Ancients had known everything there was to know, and that so-called modern insights were simply sweeping away the ignorance and false views that had accumulated in the intervening years. Even the great revolution of Copernicus and Galileo, putting the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre of the planetary system, was – to Newton’s way of thinking – nothing new. In his own words: ‘It was the most ancient opinion that the planets revolved about the Sun; that the Earth, as one of the planets, described an annual course about the Sun, while by a diurnal motion it turned on its axis, and that the Sun remained at rest.’3

Taken in isolation from his accomplishments, it would be easy to dismiss Newton’s world view on the grounds that countless astrologers, alchemists, Hermeticists and New Agers have held similar views before and since. But Newton was unique. He succeeded where so many others have failed. He discovered a symbolic code – applied mathematics – which actually works. He showed that the ancient maxim – as above, so below – was nothing short of the truth. When his mathematical code was superimposed on the real world it turned out to have a predictive power the like of which had never been seen before. Newton’s approach – applying ‘mathematical principles’ to ‘natural philosophy’ – revolutionised how scientists think about the physical universe. It paved the way for the high-tech world in which we live today.

Notes

(All quotations have been rendered in modern English spelling, but retain the original punctuation and word order.)

1    Picknett, L. & Prince, C., The Forbidden Universe (Constable, 2011), p. 166.

2    See Keynes, J.M., ‘Newton, the Man’, lecture, at www.groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html.

3    Picknett & Prince, The Forbidden Universe, p. 171.

2

On the Shoulders of Giants

‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

Newton’s research wasn’t carried out in isolation. He read the work of his predecessors and he corresponded with his contemporaries. Among the latter was Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was destined to become his scientific bête noire. In a letter to Hooke in 1676, Newton wrote, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’4 In other words, Newton was simply building on the work of others who had gone before him. (This is even true of the ‘shoulders of giants’ metaphor itself. Although it is often believed to be Newton’s invention, he was merely paraphrasing a popular saying of the time: ‘a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.’)

For Newton, it was quite an effort to clamber onto the shoulders of the giants who had preceded him. He was born with no great prospects in the winter of 1642 – on Christmas Day, according to the Old Style calendar then in use in England. This was a time of great turmoil: the Civil War between Parliament and Charles I had begun just two months earlier, with the Battle of Edgehill. The war and the interregnum that followed dominated English politics during the first seventeen years of Newton’s life.

Newton’s birthplace was Woolsthorpe Manor (despite its grand-sounding name, the ‘manor’ was nothing more than a modest farmhouse) near Grantham in rural Lincolnshire. Newton’s father died shortly before Isaac was born, and his mother moved out of the house three years later when she married the rector of a neighbouring village. The house and farm, together with Isaac, were left in the care of his paternal grandparents until his mother returned to Woolsthorpe after the death of her second husband in 1653. To the dismay of 11-year-old Isaac, she brought three young children with her – a new half-brother and two half-sisters.

The following year Isaac’s mother sent him to the King’s School in Grantham, some seven or so miles away. This was too far to walk each day, so he lodged in the town with an apothecary named William Clark. For young Isaac, this provided a much more stimulating environment than anything he had known previously. It may have helped to spark his interest in science – it certainly gave him access to a more interesting selection of books than the standard school curriculum of Latin and theology.

There aren’t many anecdotes from Newton’s childhood – and those that survive may be apocryphal since they were written down decades later, after he had become famous. The general picture is of a youngster who was far from being top of his class in school, yet was remarkably inventive outside it. The teenage Isaac spent his leisure hours building mechanical devices such as kites, windmills, water clocks and even toys for his younger siblings. He seems to have enjoyed novelty and hated routine.

According to one of Newton’s early biographers, ‘He invented the trick of a paper lantern with a candle in it, tied to the tail of a kite. This wonderfully affrighted all the neighbouring inhabitants for some time.’5 Presumably such escapades took place at night, when it is easy to imagine the consternation that a flickering light hovering in mid-air might cause. A mischievous teenager wishing to create his own ‘UFO scare’ could scarcely do better today!

Towards the end of 1659, when Newton was approaching 17, his mother decided it was time for him to start running the farm. That was the last thing the restless, imaginative, inventive youth wanted to do. By all accounts, he tried his best to carry out his duties as incompetently as possible. There is even a court record testifying to the fact that young Mr Newton was fined ‘for allowing his swine to trespass and his fences to lie in disrepair’.6

Fortunately, escape was at hand. Newton’s mother had a brother who proved to be more sympathetic towards the budding scientist. The Reverend William Ayscough had studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and could see his nephew’s scholarly promise. With the support of his headmaster, Isaac was sent off to Trinity in June 1661.

Cambridge was one of only two university towns in England at this time. Closer and hence more convenient than Oxford, it was still 60 miles from Woolsthorpe, more than a day’s journey a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• 1 The Newtonian Universe
• 2 On the Shoulders of Giants
• 3 The Most Famous Apple in History
• 4 The Reluctant Scientist
• 5 Applied Mathematics
• 6 Action and Reaction
• 7 From Physics to Metaphysics
• 8 Making Money
• 9 Death and Apotheosis
• Glossary
• Timeline
• Further Reading
• Web Links
• Copyright