Isaac Newton (2 page)

The second Isaac Newton lived to be eighty-four, gouty and rich. He died in London at the end of the winter of 1727, a prolonged and excruciating death from a kidney stone. England for the first time granted a state funeral to a subject whose attainment lay in the realm of the mind. The Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls bore the pall, with most of the Royal Society following behind. The corpse lay in state in Westminster Abbey for eight days and was buried in its nave. Above the grave was carved an ornate monument in gray and white marble: the figure of Newton, recumbent; the celestial globe, marked with the path of a 1680 comet; and angelic boys playing with a prism and weighing the sun and planets. A Latin inscription hailed his “strength of mind almost divine” and “mathematical principles peculiarly his own” and declared: “Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race.” For England, the continent of Europe, and then the rest of the world, Newton’s story was beginning.

The French writer calling himself Voltaire had just reached London. He was amazed by the kingly funeral and
exhilarated by all things Newtonian. “A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different,” he reported. “For us it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides of the sea; for the English it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon, so that when you think that the moon should give us a high tide, these gentlemen think you should have a low one.” It pleased Voltaire to compare Newton with his nation’s late philosophical hero, René Descartes: “For your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation, the cause of which is hardly better known.” The most fundamental conceptions were new and up for grabs in coffee-houses and salons. “In Paris you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides. For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes.” Descartes was a dreamer; Newton a sage. Descartes experienced poetry and love; Newton did not. “In the course of such a long life he had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman. I have had that confirmed by the doctor and the surgeon who were with him when he died.”
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What Newton learned remains the essence of what we know, as if by our own intuition. Newton’s laws are our laws. We are Newtonians, fervent and devout, when we speak of forces and masses, of action and reaction; when we say that a sports team or political candidate has momentum; when we note the inertia of a tradition or bureaucracy; and when we stretch out an arm and feel the force of gravity all around, pulling earthward. Pre-Newtonians did not feel such a force. Before Newton the English word
gravity
denoted a mood—seriousness, solemnity—or an intrinsic
quality. Objects could have heaviness or lightness, and the heavy ones tended downward, where they belonged.
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We have assimilated Newtonianism as knowledge and as faith. We believe our scientists when they compute the past and future tracks of comets and spaceships. What is more, we know they do this not by magic but by mere technique. “The landscape has been so totally changed, the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before,” said the cosmologist and relativist Hermann Bondi. “It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook he produced.”
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Creation, Newton saw, unfolds from simple rules, patterns iterated over unlimited distances. So we seek mathematical laws for economic cycles and human behavior. We deem the universe solvable.

He began with foundation stones of knowledge: time, space, motion.
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all
, he wrote in midlife—then a reclusive professor, recondite theologian and alchemist, seldom leaving his room in Trinity College, Cambridge.
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But he did mean to define these terms. He salvaged them from the haze of everyday language. He standardized them. In defining them, he married them, each to the others.

He dipped his quill in an ink of oak galls and wrote a minuscule Latin script, crowding the words edge to edge:
The common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices.…
By then he had written more than a million words and published almost none. He wrote for himself, careless of food and sleep. He wrote to calculate, laying down numbers in spidery lines and broad
columns. He computed as most people daydream. The flow of his thought slipped back and forth between English and Latin. He wrote to read, copying out books and manuscripts verbatim, sometimes the same text again and again. More determined than joyful, he wrote to reason, to meditate, and to occupy his febrile mind.

His name betokens a system of the world. But for Newton himself there was no completeness, only a questing—dynamic, protean, and unfinished. He never fully detached matter and space from God. He never purged occult, hidden, mystical qualities from his vision of nature. He sought order and believed in order but never averted his eyes from the chaos. He of all people was no Newtonian.

Information flowed faintly and perishably then, through the still small human species, but he created a method and a language that triumphed in his lifetime and gained ascendancy with each passing century. He pushed open a door that led to a new universe: set in absolute time and space, at once measureless and measurable, furnished with science and machines, ruled by industry and natural law. Geometry and motion, motion and geometry: Newton joined them as one. With the coming of Einstein’s relativity, Newtonian science was often said to have been “overthrown” or “replaced,” but that was not so. It had been buttressed and extended.
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“Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science!” said Einstein. “Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.”
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Yet he speaks to us reluctantly and covertly.

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What Imployment Is He Fit For?

M
EDIEVAL, IN SOME DISREPAIR
, the Woolsthorpe farmhouse nestled into a hill near the River Witham. With its short front door and shuttered windows, its working kitchen, and its bare floors of ash and linden laid on reeds, it had belonged to Newton’s forebears for just twenty years. In back stood apple trees. Sheep grazed for acres around.

Isaac was born in a small room at the top of the stairs. By the terms of feudal law this house was a manor and the fatherless boy was its lord, with seigniorial authority over a handful of tenant farmers in nearby cottages. He could not trace his ancestry back past his grandfather, Robert, who lay buried in the churchyard nearly a mile to the east. Still, the boy expected to live managing the farm in the place of the father he had never known. His mother, Hannah Ayscough, had come from gentlefolk. Her brother, the Reverend William Ayscough, studied at Cambridge University on his way to joining the Anglican clergy; now he occupied a village rectory two miles away. When Isaac was three years old and his widowed mother near thirty, she accepted a marriage offer from another nearby rector, Barnabas Smith, a wealthy man twice her age. Smith wanted a wife, not a
stepson; under the negotiated terms of their marriage Hannah abandoned Isaac in the Woolsthorpe house, leaving him to his grandmother’s care.
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War flared in the countryside all through his youth. The decade-long Great Rebellion began in the year of his birth: Parliamentarians fighting Royalists, Puritans recoiling from the idolatry they saw in the Church of England. Motley, mercenary armies skirmished throughout the Midlands. Pikemen and musketeers sometimes passed through the fields near Woolsthorpe.
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Bands of men plundered farms for supplies. England was at war with itself and also, increasingly, aware of itself—its nationhood, its specialness. Divided as it was, convulsed over ecclesiastical forms and beliefs, the nation carried out a true revolution. The triumphant Puritans rejected absolutism and denied the divine right of the monarchy. In 1649, soon after Isaac turned six, Charles Stuart, the king, was beheaded at the wall of his palace.

This rustic country covered a thousandth of the world’s landmass, cut off from the main continent since the warming of the planet and the melting of polar ice 13,000 years before. Plundering, waterborne tribes had settled on its coasts in waves and diffused into its downs and valleys, where they aggregated in villages. What they knew or believed about nature depended in part on the uses of technology. They had learned to employ the power of water and wind to crush, grind, and polish. The furnace, the forge, and the mill had taken their place in an economy that thereby grew more specialized and hierarchical. People in England, as in many human communities, made metal—kettles of copper and brass, rods and nails of iron. They
made glass. These crafts and materials were prerequisites now to a great leap in knowledge. Other prerequisites were lenses, paper and ink, mechanical clocks, numeric systems capable of denoting indefinitely small fractions, and postal services spanning hundreds of miles.

By the time of Newton’s birth, one great city had formed, with about 400,000 people; no other town was even a tenth as large. England was still a country of villages and farms, its seasons ordered by the Christian calendar and the rhythms of agriculture: lambing and calving, haymaking and harvest. Years of harvest failure brought widespread starvation.
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Roving laborers and vagrants made up much of the population. But a class of artisans and merchants was coming into its own: traders, shopkeepers, apothecaries, glaziers, carpenters, and surveyors, all developing a practical, mechanical view of knowledge.
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They used numbers and made tools. The nucleus of a manufacturing economy was taking shape.

When Isaac was old enough, he walked to the village dame school, where he learned to read and studied the Bible and chanted arithmetic tables. He was small for his age, lonely and abandoned. Sometimes he wished his stepfather dead, and his mother, too: in a rage he threatened to burn their house down over them. Sometimes he wished himself dead and knew the wish for a sin.
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On bright days sunlight crept along the wall. Darkness as well as light seemed to fall from the window—or was it from the eye? No one knew. The sun projected slant edges, a dynamic echo of the window frame in light and shadow, sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred, expressing a three-dimensional geometry of intersecting planes. The particulars were hard to visualize, though the sun was the most
regular of heavenly objects, the one whose cycles already defined the measures of time. Isaac scratched crude geometric figures, circles with arcs inscribed, and hammered wooden pegs into the walls and the ground to measure time exactly, to the nearest quarter-hour.
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He cut sun-dials into stone and charted the shadows cast by their gnomons. This meant seeing time as akin to space, duration as length, the length of an arc. He measured small distances with strings and made a translation between inches and minutes of an hour. He had to revise this translation methodically as the seasons changed. Across the day the sun rose and fell; across the year its position in the sky shifted slightly against the fixed stars and traced a slowly twisting figure eight,
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a figure invisible except to the mind’s eye. Isaac grew conscious of this pattern long before he understood it as the product of two oddities, the earth’s elliptical orbit and a tilt in its axis.

At Woolsthorpe anyone who cared to know the hour consulted Isaac’s dials.
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“O God! Methinks it were a happy life,” said Shakespeare’s Henry VI, “to carve out dials quaintly, point by point, thereby to see the minutes how they run.”
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Sun-dials—shadow-clocks—still told most people the time, though at some churches the hour could be read from mechanical clocks. At night the stars turned in the blue vault of the sky; the moon waxed and waned and traced its own path, much like the sun’s, yet not exactly—these great globes, ruling the seasons, lighting the day and night, connected as if by invisible cords.
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Sun-dials embodied practical knowledge that had been refined over millennia. With cruder sun-dials, the hours were unequal and varied with the seasons. Better versions achieved precision
and encouraged an altered sense of time itself: not just as a recurring cycle, or a mystical quality influencing events, but as duration, measurable, a dimension. Still, no one could perfect or even understand sun-dials until all the shifting pieces of a puzzle had been assembled: the shadows, the rhythms, the orbits of planets, the special geometry of the ellipse, the attraction of matter by matter. It was all one problem.