Isaac Newton (11 page)

And in what language? The society’s work included translation, contending with scores of vernacular dialects in Europe, and even stranger languages were reported to exist in faraway India and Japan. Latin served for standardization, but the society’s founders explicitly worried about the uses of any language. Philosophy had mired itself in its own florid eloquence. They sought “not the Artifice of Words, but a bare knowledge of things.” Now it was time for plain speaking, the most naked expression, and when possible this meant the language of mathematics.
¹⁹

Words were truant things, elusive of authorities, malleable and relative. Philosophers had much work to do merely defining their terms, and words like
think
and
exist
and
word
posed greater challenges than
tree
and
moon
. Thomas Hobbes warned:

The light of humane minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace.
…
And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words are like
ignes fatui
; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities.
²⁰

Galileo, having observed sunspots through his telescope in 1611, could not report the fact without entering a semantic thicket:

So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty; why should we not call it “spotted and not pure”? For names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, since things come first and names afterwards.
²¹

It has always been so—this is the nature of language—but it has not always been equally so. Diction, grammar, and orthography were fluid; they had barely begun to crystallize. Even proper names lacked approved spelling. Weights and measures were a hodgepodge. Travelers and mail made their way without
addresses
, unique names and numbers as coordinates for places. When Newton sent a letter to the Secretary of the Royal Society, he directed it
To
Mr Henry Oldenburge at his house about the middle of the old Palmail in St Jamses Fields in Westminster
.
²²

Oldenburg was an apostle for the cause of collective awareness—born Heinrich Oldenburg in the trading city of Bremen (he was never sure what year), later Henricus, and now Henry. He had come to England during the Civil War as an envoy on a mission to Oliver Cromwell. He began corresponding with learned men such as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, John Milton; Cromwell’s brother-in-law, John Wilkins; the young philosopher Robert Boyle; and others—soon to be the nucleus of the Royal Society. Then, as an acquaintance put it, “this Curious German having well improved himself by his Travels, and … rubbed his Brains against those of other People, was … entertained as a Person of great Merit, and so made Secretary to the Royal Society.”
²³
He was a master of languages and the perfect focal point for the society’s correspondence. He employed both the ordinary post and a network of diplomatic couriers to receive letters from distant capitals, especially Paris and Amsterdam. In 1665 he began printing and distributing this correspondence in the form of a news sheet, which he called the
Philosophical Transactions
. This new creature, a journal of science, remained Oldenburg’s personal enterprise till the end of his life.
²⁴
He found a printer and stationer with carriers who could distribute a few hundred copies across London and even farther.

The news took many forms. Mr. Samuel Colepress, near Plymouth, reported his observations of the height and velocity of the daily tides; from March to September, he asserted, the tides tended to be a foot higher (“
perpendicular
, which is always to be understood”) in the morning than
in the evening.
²⁵
An author in Padua, Italy, claimed to have discovered new arguments against the motion of the earth, and a mathematician there disputed him, citing an experiment by a Swedish gentleman, who fired shots from “a Canon perpendicular to the Horizon” and observed whether the balls fell toward the west or the east. Mr. Hooke saw a spot on the planet Jupiter. A very odd monstrous calf was born in Hampshire. A newly invented instrument of music arrived: a harpsichord, with gut-strings. There were poisonous vipers and drops of poison from Florence. The society examined the weaving of asbestos—a cloth said to endure the fiercest fire—and models of perpetual motion.
²⁶

No sooner had the virtuosi begun to gather than England’s poets satirized their fixations and their questions. Hooke himself made an easy target—his fantastic world of fleas and animalcules. The natural philosopher could easily be portrayed as a preoccupied pedant, and not so easily distinguished from the astrologer and the alchemist. “Which way the dreadful comet went / In sixty-four and what it meant?” asked Samuel Butler (his mockery tinged with wonder).

Whether the Moon be sea or land

Or charcoal, or a quench’d firebrand …

These were their learned speculations

And all their constant occupations,

To measure wind, and weigh the air

And turn a circle to a square.
²⁷

In fact, travel and trade, more than speculation or technology, fueled the society’s business; bits of exotic knowledge came as fellow travelers on ships bearing foreign
goods. Spider webs were seen in faraway Bermuda and 300-foot cabbage trees in the Caribe Islands.
²⁸
A worthy and inquisitive gentleman, Captain Silas Taylor of Virginia, reported that the scent of the wild Penny-royal could kill Ratle-Snakes. A German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, revealed secrets of the subterranean world: for example, that the ocean waters continually pour into the northern pole, run through the bowels of the earth, and regurgitate at the southern pole.

Far away in Cambridge Newton inhaled all this philosophical news. He took fervid notes. Rumors of a fiery mountain: “Batavia one afternone was covered with a black dust heavyer then gold which is thought came from an hill on Java Major supposed to burne.”
²⁹
Rumors of lunar influence: “Oysters & Crabs are fat at the new moone & leane at the full.” Then in 1671 he heard directly from the voice of the Royal Society. “Sr,” Oldenburg wrote, “Your Ingenuity is the occasion of this addresse by a hand unknowne to you.…”

He said he wished to publish an account of Newton’s reflecting telescope. He urged Newton to take public credit. This peculiar historical moment—the manners of scientific publication just being born—was alert to the possibilities of plagiarism. Oldenburg raised the specter of “the usurpation of foreigners” who might already have seen Newton’s instrument in Cambridge, “it being too frequent, the new Inventions and contrivances are snatched away from their true Authors by pretending bystanders.”
³⁰
The philosophers were proposing Newton for election as a fellow of the society. Still, there were questions. Some of the skillful examiners agreed that Newton’s tube magnified more than larger telescopes, but others said this was hard to measure with certainty.
³¹
Some, ill at ease with the technology, complained
that such a powerful telescope made it difficult “to find the Object.” Meanwhile Hooke told the members privately that he himself had earlier made a much more powerful tiny telescope, in 1664, just an inch long, but that he had not bothered to pursue it because of the plague and the fire. Oldenburg chose not to mention Hooke’s claim.

Newton wrote back with conventional false modesty:

I was surprised to see so much care taken about securing an invention to mee, of which I have hitherto had so little value. And therefore since the R. Society is pleased to think it worth the patronizing, I must acknowledg it deserves much more of them for that, then of mee, who, had not the communication of it been desired, might have let it still remained in private as it hath already done some yeares.
³²

A fortnight later he set modesty aside. He wished to attend a meeting, he told Oldenburg dramatically.

I am purposing them, to be considered of & examined, an accompt of a Philosophicall discovery which induced me to the making of the said Telescope, & which I doubt not but will prove much more gratefull then the communication of that instrument, being in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of Nature.
³³

And by the way, what would his duties be, as Fellow of the Royal Society?

7
 
Reluctancy and Reaction

T
HE GREAT COURT
of Trinity College was mostly complete, with a library and stables, central fountain, and fenced-in plots of grass. An avenue of newly planted linden trees lay to the southwest.
¹
Newton occupied a chamber upstairs between the Great Gate and the chapel. To the west stood a four-walled court used for the game of tennis. Sometimes he watched fellows play, and he noticed that the ball could curve, and not just downward. He understood intuitively why this should be so: the ball was struck obliquely and acquired spin. “Its parts on that side, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous Air more violently than on the other, and there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the Air proportionately greater.”
²
He noted this in passing because he had wondered whether rays of light could swerve the same way—if they “should possibly be globular bodies” spinning against the ether. But he had decided against that possibility.

He did not go to London to appear before the Royal Society after all—not for three more years—but he did not wait to send Oldenburg his promised account of a philosophical discovery. He composed a long letter in February
1672, to be read aloud at a meeting. Within a fortnight Oldenburg had it set in type and printed in the
Philosophical Transactions
, along with a description of the East Indian coasts and an essay on music.
³

Newton’s letter presented both an experiment and a “theory.”
⁴
Six years before, he wrote, he had aligned his prism in a sunbeam entering a dark room through a hole in the window shutter. He expected to see all the colors of the rainbow fanned against the wall and, indeed, he did—vivid and intense, a very pleasing divertissement, he reported. This phenomenon of colors was ancient. As soon as people had glass—that is, as soon as they had
broken
glass—they noticed the appearance of colors where two refracting surfaces formed a sharp edge.
⁵
A carefully formed triangular prism manifested colors most perfectly. No one knew where the colors came from, but it had seemed clear enough, almost by definition, that a prism somehow
creates
colors.

(illustration credit 7.1)

Experimentum Crucis:
The sunbeam from the window shutter passes through one prism, separating it into colors; then a beam of colored light passes through a second prism. The second prism has no further separation to perform: the white light is a mixture, but the colored beams are pure
.