The Clockwork Universe (30 page)

Chapter Fifty-Two
In Search of God

A different feature of Newton's theory of gravitation raised the most troubling question of all: where did God fit into Newton's universe? For seventeenth-century thinkers in general, and for Newton in particular, no question could have been more important. Today, the talk of God may seem misplaced. The
Principia
is not a sacred text but a scientific work that makes specific, quantitative predictions about the world. Those predictions are either true or false, regardless of what your religious views happen to be.
⁵³
But to judge the
Principia
by the accuracy of its predictions is to see only part of it. In a similar sense, you can admire Michelangelo's
Pietà
as a gorgeous work of art even if you have no religious beliefs whatsoever. But to know what Newton thought he was doing, or Michelangelo, you need to take account of their religious motivation.

Newton had ambitions for his discoveries that stretched far beyond science. He believed that his findings were not merely technical observations but insights that could transform men's lives. The transformation he had in mind was not the usual sort. He had little interest in flying machines or labor-saving devices. Nor did he share the view, which would take hold later, that a new era of scientific investigation would put an end to superstition and set men's minds free. Newton's intent in all his work was to make men more pious and devout, more reverent in the face of God's creation. His aim was not that men rise to their feet in freedom but that they fall to their knees in awe.

So for Newton himself, the answer to the question
where does God fit in the universe?
was plain. God sat enthroned at the center of creation. Newton had always known it; he had always seen his work as a hymn to God's glory, though one written in curves and equations rather than notes on a staff. Now his dazzling success in the
Principia
provided still further evidence of the magnificence of God's design.

But the great irony of Newton's life was that many people looked at his work and drew precisely the opposite moral. Newton had not honored God, they insisted, but had made Him irrelevant. The more the universe followed laws that held everywhere and always, the less room God had to exercise his sovereignty. This critique was seldom directed at Newton personally (except by Leibniz). No one questioned the sincerity of his religious faith. Both his major works, the
Principia
and the
Opticks
, concluded with long, heartfelt outpourings of praise for the Creator. “He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient,” Newton wrote in the
Principia.
“That is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things and knows all things that are or can be done.”

Still, the faithful insisted, Newton had inadvertently given aid and comfort to the enemy. He had bolstered the cause of science, and science had shown itself to be an enterprise devoted to demoting God. Everyone knew that the history of religion was filled with miraculous interventions—floods, burning bushes, the sick healed, the dead returned to life. God did not merely watch his creation. On countless occasions He had stepped in and directly altered the course of events. And now, it seemed, science threatened to push God aside.

This made for a debate over gravity that in some ways anticipated the nineteenth-century battle over evolution. Such fights may seem to turn on arcane issues—planets and mathematical laws, fossils and apes—but in intellectual history, giant wars are fought on narrow battlegrounds. The real issue is always man's place in the cosmos.

Like evolution, gravity raised questions that tangled up science, politics, and theology. By hemming in God, religious thinkers railed, science promoted atheism.
Atheist
, in the seventeenth century, was an all-purpose slur that embraced a range of suspicious beliefs, much as
commie
or
pinko
would in Cold War America. But the fear it exposed was real, for to challenge religion was to call the entire social order into question. “Is nothing sacred?” was not an empty bit of rhetoric but a howl of anguish. If religion were undermined, sexual license and political anarchy were sure to follow.

Nor did science aim only at toppling age-old beliefs. Even
worse, in the eyes of its detractors, the new thinkers meant to replace time-honored doctrines with their own dubious substitutes.
“Scientists, like whoring Jerusalem and Babylon, have turned
away from God and have put in His stead their own systems and
explanations,” writes one modern historian, in summarizing the
antiscience case. “And these are the idols they worship: not the world created by God, but the mechanistic representations—like
idols, devoid of spirit—that are the works of their own crazed imaginations.”

If the universe was a machine, as science seemed to teach, then humans were just one more form of matter and there was no such thing as the soul, or choice, or responsibility. In such a world, morality would have no meaning, and, everyone would know, as one appalled writer put it, that “they may do any thing that they have a mind to.”

So Newton and Leibniz squared off one last time, this time in an ideological clash over God and gravity. The battleground was the issue of God's intervention in the world. Each man accused the other of maligning God and attacking Christianity. Newton began by insisting that his theory of gravitation
did
have an explicit role for God. It was not simply that, at creation, God had set the whole solar system in motion. More than that, He had continued ever since to fine-tune His creation. The planets could not be left to run on their own, Newton's calculations showed; their ever-changing pulls on one another meant that their orbits were not quite stable. Left unattended, the solar system would fall out of kilter and, eventually, tumble into chaos.

And so the world had not been left unattended. This was, Newton maintained, still further proof of God's wisdom. If He had designed the universe to run unsupervised, He would have left room for the foolish and skeptical to argue that if God is absent
now
, perhaps He was absent
always.
God had known better.

The question of whether God had neglected his creation was so touchy that Newton's followers produced a second argument to demonstrate His ongoing presence. The miracles recorded in the Bible had taken place long ago. How to show that the age of miracles had not passed?

One way was to update the definition of
miracle
. God continued to intervene in the world, argued the theologian William Whiston, speaking on Newton's behalf, though perhaps He had changed His style. Even as familiar a feature of our lives as gravity “depends entirely on the constant and efficacious and, if you will, the supernatural and miraculous Influence of Almighty God.” There was nothing inherent in the nature of rocks that caused them to fall; they fell because God
made
them fall. If you stopped to think about it, wrote Whiston, it was as miraculous for a stone to drop to the ground as it would be for it to hover in midair.

Leibniz pounced. Newton had committed heresy. Both Leibniz and Newton believed in a clockwork universe, but now Leibniz invoked the familiar image to mock his old enemy. “Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”

Newton fired back in fury.
He
was not the one blaspheming God. To call for a clock that ran forever on its own, as Leibniz had, was to cut God out of the picture. “If God does not concern himself in the Government of the World,” declared Samuel Clarke, another of Newton's allies, “. . . it will follow that he is not an Omnipresent, All-powerful, Intelligent and Wise Being; and consequently, that he Is not at all.”

Newton and Clarke were far from done. This dangerous doctrine of Leibniz's posed a threat not only to Christianity but to political stability as well. To hear Leibniz tell it, the king of the universe was a mere figurehead and not a ruler at all. Think what that meant! “If a king had a kingdom wherein all things would continually go on without his government or interposition,” wrote Clarke, then he would not “deserve at all the title of king or governor.” Who would need such a do-nothing king? Leibniz had allied himself with those scoundrels of whom it “may reasonably be suspected that they would like very well to set the king aside.”

Leibniz did not back down. If the cosmos needed constant tinkering, as Newton would have it, then God had not fully understood a design of His own making. This was to malign God, to charge our perfect Creator with imperfection.

Deeply religious though both Newton and Leibniz were, they managed to talk past one another. The problem was that they focused on different aspects of God's greatness. Newton emphasized God's will, His ability to act however and whenever He chose. Leibniz focused on God's wisdom, His ability to see ahead of time exactly how every conceivable event would play itself out, down the furthest corridors of time.

That left both these brilliant, devout men caught in traps of their own making. Each had, in a sense, explained too much. Newton wanted above all else to portray God as a participant in the world, not a spectator. But Newton's universe seemed to run
by itself, despite his protests to the contrary. That made God a kind of absentee landlord. Leibniz, on the other hand, took as
his
unbreachable principle the notion of God as all-powerful and all-knowing. The catch was that a God with those traits had no choice but to throw a switch that set in motion precisely the world we have.

The problem was that both were guilty as charged, and neither could admit it. Stuck defending indefensible positions, they fought to the death.

Chapter Fifty-Three
Conclusion

In the year 1600, for the crime of asserting that the Earth was one of an infinite number of planets, a man named Giordano Bruno was burned alive. Bruno, an Italian philosopher and mystic, had run afoul of the Inquisition. Charged with heresy, he was yanked from his prison cell, paraded through the streets of Rome, tied to a stake, and set afire. To ensure his silence in his last minutes, a metal spike had been driven through his tongue.

Almost exactly a century later, in 1705, the queen of England bestowed a knighthood on Isaac Newton. Among the achievements that won Newton universal admiration was this: he had convinced the world of the doctrine that had cost Giordano Bruno his life.

Sometime between those two events, at some point in the course of the 1600s, the modern world was born. Even with hindsight, pinning down the birth date is next to impossible. Still, if we who live in the new world somehow found ourselves transported to Newton's London, we would have a chance of navigating our way. In Bruno's Rome we would founder and drown. And since those earliest days, the pace of change has only accelerated. The world has raced ahead, permanently in fast-forward, with science and technology taking an ever more conspicuous spot in the foreground.

In the decades following his death, Newton's reputation continued to soar. Though gravity remained as mysterious as ever, new generations of scientists built on Newton's theories to produce an ever more detailed, ever more accurate picture of the universe. Each step forward provided still more proof that Newton had read God's mind.

Perhaps the most dramatic confirmation came in 1846, when a French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier looked hard at Newton's laws, sat down to calculate, and discovered a new planet. This was Neptune, discovered by deduction. Le Verrier and other astronomers of the day knew that the orbit of the planet Uranus was not exactly what theory predicted. The reason, they proposed, was that some unseen planet was tugging it off course. Using Newton's laws, Le Verrier managed to calculate the vital statistics—the mass, position, and path—of this supposed planet. He sent his results to the German astronomer Joseph Galle. Le Verrier's letter reached Galle on September 23, 1846. On the same evening, Galle directed his telescope to the spot in the sky that Le Verrier had identified. There, just barely visible, he found Neptune.

Long before Le Verrier, the successes racked up by Newton's followers had inspired the hope of similar breakthroughs in
every
field. Just as Newton had discovered the laws of inanimate nature, so would some new thinker find the laws of human nature. A handful of rules would explain all the apparent happenstance of history, psychology, and politics. Better still, once its laws came to be understood, society could be reshaped in a rational way.

America's founding fathers argued explicitly that the success of the scientific approach foretold their own success. Free minds would make the world anew. Rather than defer to tradition and authority, the new thinkers would start from first principles and build on that sturdy foundation. Kings and other accidental tyrants would be overthrown, sensible and self-regulating institutions set in their place. In the portrait of himself that he liked best, Benjamin Franklin sat deep in thought in front of a bust of Newton, who watched his protégé approvingly. Thomas Jefferson installed a portrait of Newton in a place of honor at Monticello.

As they spelled out the design of America's political institutions, the founders clung to the model of a smooth-running, self-regulating universe. In the eyes of the men who made America, the checks and balances that ensured political stability were directly analogous to the natural pushes and pulls that kept the solar system in balance. “The Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian theory,” Woodrow Wilson would later write. If you read the
Federalist
papers, Wilson continued, the evidence jumped out “on every page.” The Constitution was akin to a scientific theory, and the amendments played the role of experiments that helped define and test that theory.

Newton's posthumous influence was overwhelming, but in one respect his triumph proved
too
complete. Newton would have wept with rage to know that his scientific descendants spent their lifetimes proving conclusively that the clockwork universe ran even more smoothly than he had ever believed. It ran so marvelously well, in fact, that a new consensus quickly arose—just as Newton's enemies had claimed, Newton
had
built a universe that had no place within it for God.

The crowning glory of eighteenth-century astronomy was the proof, by the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace, that although the planets did wobble a bit as they circled the sun, those wobbles stayed within a narrow, predictable range. Since the wobbles did not grow larger and larger as time passed, as Newton had believed, they did not require that God step in to smooth things out. Laplace presented his masterpiece, a tome called
Celestial Mechanics
, to Napoleon.

How was it, Napoleon asked, that in all those hundreds of pages, Laplace had made not a single mention of God?

“I had no need of that hypothesis,” Laplace told the emperor.

Newton outlived his longtime enemy Leibniz. “Mr. Leibniz is dead, and the dispute is finished,” a colleague wrote Newton in 1716. It was not finished; even without an enemy, Newton fought on for another six years. For a long while, posterity would treat Leibniz with scarcely more regard. Newton's achievements were celebrated by the likes of Alexander Pope and William Wordsworth, who composed worshipful verses in his honor. Leibniz had the misfortune to stir the wrath of Voltaire, the greatest wit of his age, who caricatured him in a book still read today.

At least in scientific circles, though, Leibniz's reputation has grown through the centuries. In every history of logic or computers, especially, his ahead-of-their-age insights now meet with stunned admiration. Even in physics, where his ideas have long since been abandoned, his ambitious dreams still thrive. Today's physicists toss around such phrases as a “theory of everything.” Leibniz would have felt right at home.

Near the end, Leibniz had received a letter from Caroline, Princess of Wales, his onetime pupil. She sent word that the king might possibly, at last, bring him to England. “Nothing could give me a greater desire to go there than the kindnesses of Your Royal Highness,” Leibniz wrote back, “but as I do not hope to go soon, I do not know if I can hope to go later; for there is not a lot of later to hope for in me.”

Leibniz died in Germany, neglected, nearly alone, and beset by a host of painful ailments. He was buried in an unmarked grave (a marker was eventually added). “You would have thought it was a felon they were burying,” wrote one of the few funeral guests, “instead of a man who had been an ornament to his country.”

Newton's body lies in Westminster Abbey beneath a marble statue. Perhaps it is fitting that Newton was treated as nearly godlike and Leibniz as merely mortal. “The more I got to know Leibniz,” one recent biographer wrote, “the more he seemed to me all-too-human, and I quarreled with him.” No one ever directed the same complaint against Newton. Leibniz was too human, and Newton seemed scarcely human at all.

In the 1980s, as we have seen, the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a scientist of towering reputation, went through the
Principia
line by line in an attempt to probe the mind of his predecessor. “During the past year,” Chandrasekhar told me in a 1987 interview, “I've taken proposition after proposition, written out my own proof, and then compared it with Newton's. In every case, his proofs are incredibly concise; there is not a superfluous word. The style is imperial, just written down as if the insights came from Olympus.”

“If you take great scientists,” Chandrasekhar went on, “even though they made discoveries that one could not have made oneself, one can
imagine
making them—people say, ‘I could have done that, but I was just stupid.' Normal scientists can think of greater men, and it is not difficult to imagine doing what they did. But I don't think it's possible for any scientist to imagine what it would have been like to be Newton.”

Temperamentally, the gulf was nearly as big as it was intellectually. The usual consolations of life, friendship and sex included, appealed to Newton hardly at all. Art, literature, and music had scarcely more allure. He dismissed the classical sculptures in the Earl of Pembroke's renowned collection as “stone dolls.” He waved poetry aside as “a kind of ingenious nonsense.” He rejected opera after a single encounter. “The first Act I heard with pleasure, the 2d stretch'd my patience, at the 3d I ran away.”

“If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress,” Aldous Huxley once remarked, with a mix of wonder and horror. “For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.”

Huxley's notion of a Faustian trade-off smacks a bit of sour grapes, as if to reassure the rest of us that this genius business is not all we imagine it to be. But Huxley was right to emphasize the gulf between Newton and everyone else. Newton's best biographer, Richard Westfall, told me many years ago that, in the course of examining Newton's life, he had lived with the man for twenty years. Westfall's magnum opus,
Never at Rest
, is a model of insight and empathy, but Westfall lamented that he never felt he knew Newton. On the contrary, Newton came to seem ever more mysterious, not only in intellect but in motives and hopes, fears and ambitions. “The more I learned,” Westfall recalled, “the more I realized how far he was from me, in every regard.” Newton was, Westfall declared, “wholly other.”

Newton's contemporaries sensed the same gap. When the
Principia
was new, the Marquis de L'Hôpital, a skilled mathematician, read it with incredulity. L'Hôpital had been pondering a technical question about how streamlined objects move through fluids, and an English mathematician showed him that Newton had worked out a solution in the
Principia
. “He cried out with admiration Good god what a fund of knowledge there is in that book? he then asked the Doctor every particular about Sir Isaac even to the colour of his hair said does he eat & drink & sleep. Is he like other men?”

In all the important ways, he was not like other men. Perhaps we would do better to acknowledge the gulf than to try to bridge it. At Cambridge, Newton could occasionally be seen standing in the courtyard, staring at the ground, drawing diagrams in the gravel with a stick. Eventually he would retreat indoors. His fellow professors did not know what the lines represented, but they stepped carefully around them, in order to avoid hindering the work of the lonely genius struggling to decipher God's codebook.