Isaac Newton (25 page)

Those mighty spheres that gem infinity

Were only specks of tinsel fixed in heaven

To light the midnights of his native town!
¹⁷

He could not acknowledge that it was Newton for whom the stars had grown to mighty spheres. Wordsworth, too, had an image in mind, cold yet majestic. He saw at Trinity College a statue in the moon’s light:

Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
¹⁸

Loathing Newton most profoundly was the myth-maker William Blake, poet, engraver, and visionary. Blake was born to hate Newton. He loathed him and revered him. When he drew Newton he pictured a demigod, naked and muscular, with golden locks and keen hands. But he also saw an enemy of imagination: the lawmaker and repressor—“unknown, abstracted, brooding, secret, the dark Power hid.”
¹⁹
Like Leibniz and the Cartesians he feared Newton’s vacuum; unlike them, he believed in it: “this abominable Void, this soul-shudd’ring Vacuum.” He blamed Newton for perfection and rigidity. He blamed him for his very success as a truthseeker. “God forbid that Truth should be Confined to Mathematical Demonstration.”
²⁰
He blamed him for departing from the particular by abstraction and generalization. He blamed him for the reason that trumps
imagination, and he blamed him for finding knowledge by way of doubt:

(illustration credit 15.1)

Reason says Miracle; Newton says Doubt

Aye thats the way to make all nature out

Doubt Doubt & dont believe without experiment.
²¹

He blamed him for the part he had played—the Romantics began to see this—in the graying of Eden, the industrialization and mechanization; factories dimming the air with smoke. Dark Satanic mills. “The Water-wheels of Newton,” Blake cried:

Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which

Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.”
²²

Newton had given, and he had taken away. He gave a sense of order, security, and lawfulness. The American Declaration of Independence found Newtonianism, via Locke, and threw it back at the British by citing the laws of nature in its opening sentence. He gave infinite space yet took away the plenitude, for with infinity came the void. He took away mystery, and for some that meant godliness. An ad hoc universe had also been a providential universe.

He was made in myth, this Newton of the poets. No one tried reading the vast storehouse of paper that survived him. The manuscripts, fragmentary drafts, scraps of calculation
and speculation, all lay through the generations in the private storerooms of English aristocratic families. The anti-Trinitarian heresies were rumored but still secret. A full century passed before anyone attempted a real biography: the pious David Brewster, who in 1831 honored the nobility of Newton’s genius, emphasized his simplicity, humility, and benevolence, and, though he had seen some of the disturbing manuscripts, declared firmly, “There is no reason to suppose that Sir Isaac Newton was a believer in the doctrines of alchemy.”
²³

Brewster also stayed clear of the apple, though he had heard the story and paid a visit to the surviving tree at Woolsthorpe. It remained for the poets to ensure the apple’s place in the Newton legend. They knew the apple’s ancient pull: sin and knowledge; knowledge and inspiration. “Man fell with apples, and with apples rose,” Byron wrote—

   for we must deem the mode

In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose

Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road,

A thing to counterbalance human woes;

For ever since immortal man hath glowed

With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon

Steam-engines will conduct him to the Moon.
²⁴

Success bred confidence. Law triumphed. Newton’s followers and successors created a more perfect Newtonianism than his own, striving for extremes of rational determinism. In post-Revolutionary France, Pierre Simon de Laplace reexpressed Newton’s mechanics in a form suitable for
modern field theories—rates of change as gradients and potentials—and then reached for another kind of philosopher’s stone. He imagined a supreme intelligence, a perfect computer, armed with data representing the positions and forces of all things at one instant. It need only apply Newton’s laws: “Such an intelligence would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.”

Philosophers no longer claim him as one of their own. Philosophy absorbed him, beginning with Immanuel Kant, who turned the German tide against Leibniz and his chains of reasoning, theistic proofs, circles of words. Kant saw science as specially successful, knowledge that begins with experience. He brought space and time into epistemology; space as magnitude, empty or not; time as another kind of infinitude; both existing outside ourselves, eternal and subsistent. To explore how we know anything, we begin with our knowledge of these absolutes. Yet afterward, Newton became a quaint figure for philosophers. When Edwin Arthur Burtt wrote his 1924
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science
, he first assigned those foundations to Newton and then said, without irony: “In scientific discovery and formulation Newton was a marvelous genius; as a philosopher he was uncritical, sketchy, inconsistent, even second-rate.” He added in passing, “It has, no doubt, been worth the metaphysical barbarism of a few centuries to possess modern science.”
²⁵

The
Principia
marked a fork in the road: thenceforth science and philosophy went separate ways. Newton had removed
from the realm of metaphysics many questions about the nature of things—about what exists—and assigned them to a new realm, physics. “This preparation being made,” he declared, “we argue more safely.”
²⁶
And less safely, too: by mathematizing science, he made it possible for its facts and claims to be proved wrong.
²⁷
This vulnerability was its strength. By the early nineteenth century Georges Cuvier was asking enviously, “Should not natural history also one day have its Newton?” By the early twentieth, social scientists, economists, and biologists, too, were longing for a Newton of their own—or for the unattainable mirage of Newtonian perfection.
²⁸

Then science seemed to reject that same perfection: the absolutes and the determinism. The relativity of Einstein appeared as a revolutionary assault on absolute space and time. Motion distorts the flow of time and the geometry of space, he found. Gravity is not just a force, ineffable, but also a curvature of space-time itself. Mass, too, had to be redefined; it became interchangeable with energy.
²⁹
George Bernard Shaw declared to radio listeners that Newtonianism had been a religion, and now it had “crumpled up and was succeeded by the Einstein universe.”
³⁰
T. S. Kuhn, in asserting his famous theory of scientific revolutions, said that Einstein had returned science to problems and beliefs “more like those of Newton’s predecessors than of his successors.”
³¹
These, too, were myths.

We understand space and time, force and mass, in the Newtonian mode, long before we study them or read about them. Einstein did shake space-time loose from pins to which Newton had bound it, but he lived in Newton’s space-time nonetheless: absolute in its geometrical rigor
and its independence of the world we see and feel. He happily brandished the tools Newton had forged. Einstein’s is no everyday or psychological relativity.
³²
“Let no one suppose,” he said in 1919, “that the mighty work of Newton can really be superseded by this or any other theory. His great and lucid ideas will retain their unique significance for all time as the foundation of our whole modern conceptual structure in the sphere of natural philosophy.”
³³
The observer whom Einstein and his followers returned to science scarcely resembled the observer whom Newton had removed. That medieval observer had been careless and vague; time was an accumulation of yesterdays and tomorrows, slow and fast, nothing to be measured or relied upon. Time and space had first to be rescued—made absolute, true, and mathematical:
The common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects
. Sensible meant crude—wooden measuring sticks and clocks that told only the hour.
And thence arise certain prejudices for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common
. The day, as measured by successive southings of the sun, varied in length; philosophy needed an unqualified measure. It was not only convenient but necessary, in creating physics, to abstract this pure sense of time and space. Even so, Newton left openings for the relativists who followed three centuries behind.
It may be, that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured
, he wrote.
It may be that there is no body really at rest, to which the places and motions of others may be referred
.
³⁴

His insistence on a particle view of light did not lead to
the modern quantum theory, even if, in some sense, it proved correct. It was Einstein who discovered the equivalence of mass and energy; still, Newton suspected their organic unity: “Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?”
³⁵
He never spoke of
fields
of force, but field theories were born in his view of gravitational and magnetic forces distributed about a center: “an endeavor of the whole directed toward a center,… a certain efficacy diffused from the center through each of the surrounding places.”
³⁶
Newton also anticipated the existence of subatomic forces by rejecting alternative explanations for the cohesion of matter: “some have invented hooked Atoms, which is begging the Question.” Let others resort to occult qualities. “I had rather infer from their Cohesion, that their Particles attract one another by some Force, which in immediate Contact is exceeding strong.”
³⁷
He speculated that such a force—another force, independent of gravity, magnetism, and electricity—might prevail only at the smallest distances.

The infinities, the void, the laws must endure—not a fashion, not reversible. We internalize the essence of what he learned. A few general principles give rise to all the myriad properties and actions of things. The universe’s building blocks and laws are everywhere the same.
³⁸

No one feels the burden of Newton’s legacy, looming forward from the past, more than the modern scientist. A worry nags at his descendants: that Newton may have been too successful; that the power of his methods gave them too much authority. His solution to celestial dynamics was so thorough and so precise—scientists cannot help but seek
the same exactness everywhere. “A slightly naughty thought can come to one’s mind here,” said Hermann Bondi. “The tools that he gave us stand at the root of so much that goes on now.… We may not be doing a lot more than following in his footsteps. We may still be so much under the impression of the particular turn he took … we cannot get it out of our system.”
³⁹
We cannot. What Newton learned entered the marrow of what we know without knowing how we know it.

His papers began to appear in the early twentieth century, when cash-poor nobility sold them at auction and they scattered to collectors in Europe and across the Atlantic. In 1936 Viscount Lymington, a descendant of Catherine Barton, sent Sotheby’s a metal trunk containing manuscripts of three million words, to be broken up and offered at auction in 329 lots. Interest was slight,
⁴⁰
but the economist and Cantabrigian John Maynard Keynes, disturbed, as he said, by the impiety, managed to buy some at the auction and then gradually reassembled more than a third of the collection. What he found there amazed him: the alchemist; the heretical theologian; not the cold rationalist Blake had so despised but a genius more peculiar and extraordinary. An “intense and flaming spirit.” With the papers Keynes also bought Newton’s death mask—eyeless, scowling. At least twenty portraits of Newton had been painted, not all from life; they differ extravagantly, one from another.