Isaac Newton (24 page)

Newton understood the truth full well: that he and Leibniz had created the calculus independently. Leibniz had not been altogether candid about what he had learned from Newton—in fragments, and through proxies—but the essence of the invention was his. Newton had made his discoveries first, and he had discovered more, but Leibniz had done what Newton had not: published his work for the world to use and to judge. It was secrecy that spawned competition and envy. The plagiarism controversy drew its heat from the gaps in the dissemination of knowledge. In a young and suddenly fertile field like the mathematics of the seventeenth century, discoveries had lain waiting to be found again and again by different people in different places.
⁴⁶

The Newton-Leibniz duel continued long after the deaths of the protagonists. It constricted the development of English mathematics, as orthodoxy hardened around Newton’s dot notation.
⁴⁷
The more historians came to understand what happened, the uglier it looked. No one could dispute Lenore Feigenbaum’s simple précis: “Grown men, brilliant and powerful, betrayed their friends, lied shamelessly to their enemies, uttered hateful chauvinistic slurs, and impugned each others’ characters.”
⁴⁸
Newton’s rage, Leibniz’s bitterness—the darkest emotions of these protoscientists almost overshadowed their shared achievement.

Yet the priority dispute contributed to the transition of science from private obsessions to public enterprise. It exposed texts that Newton had meant to keep hidden and concentrated the interest of philosophers in these new methods: their richness, their fungibility, their power. The competition between formalisms—superficially so different—brought into focus the shared underlying core.

The obsessions of Newton’s later years disappointed modernity in some way. Later Newtonians came to find them as troubling as his pursuit of alchemy and biblical prophecy, if not for quite the same reasons. Just when science began to coalesce as an English institution, Newton made himself its autocrat. He purged the Royal Society of all remnants of Hooke. He gained authority over the Observatory and wrested from Flamsteed the astronomer’s own life’s work, a comprehensive catalogue of the stars. (Flamsteed, summoned to appear before Newton, “complained then of my catalogue being printed by Halley, without my knowledge, and that I was robbed of the fruits of my labors. At this he fired, and called me all the ill names, puppy &c. that he could think of.”
⁴⁹
) D. T. Whiteside, who became the twentieth century’s preeminent scholar and shepherd of Newton’s mathematical work, could not but remark:

Only too few have ever possessed the intellectual genius and surpassing capacity to stamp their image upon the thought of their age and that of centuries to follow. Watching over the minting of a nation’s coin, catching a few counterfeiters, increasing an already respectably sized personal fortune, being a political figure, even dictating to one’s fellow scientists: it should all seem a crass and empty ambition once you have written a
Principia
.

Still, it did not seem so to Newton.
⁵⁰
He had been a man on God’s mission, seeking his secrets, interpreting his design, but he had never meant to draw philosophers to his side. He had not meant to lead a cult or a school. Nevertheless he had gathered disciples and enemies as well. Leibniz never stopped hoping for a moral victory.
Adieu
, he wrote. “Adieu the vacuum, the atoms, and the whole Philosophy of M. Newton.”
⁵¹

Leibniz died in 1716, having spent his last years at Hanover as librarian to the Duke. Newton’s death was still to come.

15
 
The Marble Index of a Mind

N
EWS CAME SWIFTLY
from far and exotic lands.
Philosophical Transactions
reported the discovery of “Phillippine-Islands” and “Hottentots.”
¹
Thus inspired, in 1726 a Fleet Street printer produced a volume of
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
, by one Captain Lemuel Gulliver, describing wonderful peoples: Yahoos and Brobdingnagians. At length Gulliver’s travels brought him to Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, where he heard the ancients and the moderns compare their histories.
²
Aristotle appeared, with lank hair and meager visage, confessed his mistakes, noted that Descartes’s vortices were also soon “to be exploded,” and offered up some epistemological relativism:

He predicted the same fate to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, “that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those, who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles, would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.”

The shade of Aristotle might think so. Never had human cosmologies come and gone so rapidly, the new sweeping aside the old in scarcely a lifetime. Jonathan Swift had no reason to know that Newton’s would be the one to endure.

It scarcely mattered, Voltaire said cynically. Hardly anyone knew how to read, and of these few, hardly any read philosophy. “The number of those who think is exceedingly small, and they are not interested in upsetting the world.”
³
Nevertheless, captivated by Newtonianism, he began to spread the word in his own writing—popular science and myth-making. He told the story of the apple, which he had heard from Newton’s niece. “The labyrinth and abyss of infinity is another new journey undertaken by Newton and he has given us the thread with which we can find our way through.” And he defended Newton from the many French accusers, “learned or not,” who complained of his replacing familiar
impulsion
with mysterious
attraction
. He conjured a reply in Newton’s voice:

You no more understand the word impulsion than you do the word attraction, and if you cannot grasp why one body tends towards the centre of another, you cannot imagine any the more by what virtue one body can push another.… I have discovered a new property of matter, one of the secrets of the Creator. I have calculated and demonstrated its effects; should people quibble with me over the name I give it?
⁴

Other memorialists of Newton in England and Europe put on record personal details, of a certain kind. The great man had clear eyesight and all his teeth but one. He had kept
a head of pure white hair. He remained gentle and modest, treasuring quiet and disliking squabbles. He never laughed—except once, when asked what use in life was reading Euclid, “upon which Sir Isaac was very merry.” He had died, from a stone in his bladder, after hours of agony, sweat rolling from his forehead, but he had never cried out or complained.
⁵

In England, where new popular gazettes carried curiosities to the countryside, the death of Newton inspired a decade-long outpouring of verse, patriotic and lyrical. He was after all the philosopher of light. Elegists seemed to give him credit for all the colors he had found in his prism, flaming red, tawny orange, deepened indigo. Richard Lovatt posted a poem to the
Ladies Diary
in 1733:

 … mighty Newton the Foundation laid,

Of his Mysterious Art …

Great Britain’s sons will long his works pursue.

By curious Theorems he the Moon cou’d trace

And her true Motion give in every Place.
⁶

A hero, an English hero, and a new kind of hero, brandishing no sword but “curious theorems.” The connection between knowledge and power had been made. Not all forms of knowledge were equal: the
Gentleman’s Magazine
complained about schools “where the two chief branches of Knowledge inculcated are French and Dancing,” but reported with pleasure that a medal honoring Newton had been struck at the Tower.
⁷
More poetry followed; an enthusiast could bring off a paean in just two lines:

Newton’s no more—By Silence Grief’s exprest:

Lo here he lies; His World proclaim the rest.
⁸

Alexander Pope’s couplet found more readers:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;

God said,
Let Newton be!
And All was
Light
.
⁹

Public lectures and traveling demonstrations went where the written word lacked force. Newton had made claims that could be tested. By computation he pronounced the earth oblate, broader at the equator, in contrast to the egg-shaped Cartesian earth. In 1733 the French Academy of Sciences proposed to settle the matter and dispatched expeditions northward to Lapland and southward to Peru with quadrants, telescopes, and twenty-foot wooden rods. When the voyagers returned—a decade later—they brought measurements supporting Newton’s view. Mastery of the stars and planets empowered the nation’s ships as much as the wind did. Halley showed by example what it meant to believe in Newtonianism. He made dramatic public predictions, computing the path of a certain comet and prophesying its return every seventy-six years; the forecast in itself inspired and disturbed the English long before it proved true. In 1715 Halley anticipated a total solar eclipse by publishing a broadsheet map showing where and when the moon’s shadow would cross England. The Royal Society gathered at the appointed moment in a courtyard and on a rooftop, under a clear sky, where they saw the sudden untimely nightfall, the sun’s corona flaring, and owls, confused, taking to the air. They saw that by predicting celestial prodigies an astronomer tamed them and drained them of their terror.
¹⁰

As it evolved into a new orthodoxy, Newtonianism became a target. It was continually being disproved, in tracts
with titles like
Remarks upon the Newtonian philosophy: wherein the fallacies of the pretended mathematical demonstrations, by which those authors support that philosophy are clearly laid open: and the philosophy itself fully proved to be false and absurd both by mathematical and physical demonstration
.
¹¹
It inspired satires, some deliberate and some ingenuously respectful. One Newtonian convert, the vicar of Gillingham Major, wrote a treatise called
Theologiæ Christianæ Principia Mathematica
, calculating that the probability of counterevidence to the Gospels diminished with time and would reach zero in the year 3144. A Viennese physician, Franz Mesmer, “discovered” animal magnetism or animal gravity, a healing principle based (so he claimed) on Newtonian principles. He named it after himself: Mesmerism.

But Newtonianism was not yet a word, in English.
¹²
In Italy, an instructive little tract appeared with the title
Il Newtonianismo per le Dame
, quickly rendered into French and then English as
Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies
, in six dialogues, vivid and heroic. It employed the inverse-square law to calculate the power of attraction between separated lovers. And the philosopher wielded a sword after all: “Thus Sir Isaac Newton, the avowed Enemy to imaginary Systems, and to whom you are indebted for the true idea of Philosophy, has at one Blow lopped off the two principal Heads of the reviving Cartesian Hydra.”
¹³

That heroic style went out of vogue soon enough. Now poets do not glorify Newton, but they can love him, or his legend. “Maybe he made up the apple, / Maybe not,” ventures Elizabeth Socolow:

I see the way he thirsted all his life

to find the force that seemed not to be there,

but acted, and precisely.
¹⁴

For centuries between, the poets doubted him and even demonized him—his calculating spirit, his icy rationality, his plundering of the mysteries
they
owned. Then Newton was created as much by his enemies as his friends.

Keats and Wordsworth joined the Romantic artist Benjamin Haydon at dinner on a bleak December night in 1817 in his painting-room.
¹⁵
He showed them his broad, unfinished canvas of
Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem
; in the crowd of Christ’s followers he had painted the face of Newton. Keats ragged him for that and proposed a sardonic toast: “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.” Newton had unweaved the rainbow with his prism. He had reduced nature to philosophy; had made knowledge a “dull catalogue of common things”; had tried to “conquer all mysteries by rule and line.”
¹⁶
Shelley complained that, to Newton,