Isaac Newton (3 page)

When Isaac was ten, in 1653, Barnabas Smith died, and Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe, bringing three new children with her. She sent Isaac off to school, eight miles up the Great North Road, to Grantham, a market town of a few hundred families—now a garrison town, too. Grantham had two inns, a church, a guild hall, an apothecary, and two mills for grinding corn and malt.
¹¹
Eight miles was too far to walk each day; Isaac boarded with the apothecary, William Clarke, on High Street. The boy slept in the garret and left signs of his presence, carving his name into the boards and drawing in charcoal on the walls: birds and beasts, men and ships, and pure abstract circles and triangles.
¹²

At the Kings School, one room, with strict Puritan discipline, Henry Stokes, schoolmaster, taught eighty boys Latin, theology, and some Greek and Hebrew. In most English schools that would have been all, but Stokes added some practical arithmetic for his prospective farmers: mostly about measurement of areas and shapes, algorithms for surveying, marking fields by the chain, calculating acres (though the acre still varied from one county to the next, or according to the land’s richness).
¹³
He offered a bit more than a farmer would need: how to inscribe regular polygons
in a circle and compute the length of each side, as Archimedes had done to estimate pi. Isaac scratched Archimedes’ diagrams in the wall. He entered the lowest form at the age of twelve, lonely, anxious, and competitive. He fought with other boys in the churchyard; sometimes noses were bloodied. He filled a Latin exercise book with unselfconscious phrases, some copied, others invented, a grim stream of thought:
A little fellow; My poore help; Hee is paile; There is no room for me to sit; In the top of the house—In the bottom of hell; What imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?
¹⁴
He despaired.
I will make an end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to doe
.

Barely sixty lifetimes had passed since people began to record knowledge as symbols on stone or parchment. England’s first paper mill opened at the end of the sixteenth century, on the Deptford River. Paper was prized, and the written word played a small part in daily life. Most of what people thought remained unrecorded; most of what they recorded was hidden or lost. Yet to some it seemed a time of information surfeit. “I hear new news every day,” wrote the vicar Robert Burton, attuned as he was—virtually living in the Bodleian Library at Oxford—to the transmission and storage of data:

those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions,… and such like, which these tempestuous times afford.… New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion &c.”
¹⁵

Burton was attempting to assemble all previous knowledge into a single rambling, discursive, encyclopedic book of his own. He made no apology for his resolute plagiarism; or, rather, he apologized this way: “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a Giant may see farther than a Giant himself.”
¹⁶
He tried to make sense of rare volumes from abroad, which proposed fantastic and contradictory schemes of the universe—from Tycho, Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus. He tried to reconcile them with ancient wisdom.

Did the earth move? Copernicus had revived that notion, “not as a truth, but a supposition.” Several others agreed. “For if the Earth be the Center of the World, stand still, as most received opinion is,”
¹⁷
and the celestial spheres revolve around it, then the heavens must move with implausible speed. This followed from measurements of the distance of sun and stars. Burton borrowed (and mangled) some arithmetic. “A man could not ride so much ground, going 40 miles a day, in 2,904 years, as the Firmament goes in 24 hours; or so much in 203 years, as the said Firmament in one minute; which seems incredible.” People were looking at the stars through spy-glasses; Burton himself had seen Jupiter through a glass eight feet long and agreed with Galileo that this wanderer had its own moons.

He was forced to consider issues of shifting viewpoint, though there was no ready language for expressing such conundrums: “If a man’s eye were in the Firmament, he should not at all discern that great annual motion of the earth, but it would still appear an indivisible point.” If a
man’s eye could be so far away, why not a man? Imaginations ran free. “If the earth move, it is a Planet, & shines to them in the Moon, & to the other Planetary Inhabitants, as the Moon and they to us upon the earth.”

We may likewise insert … there be infinite Worlds, and infinite earths or systems, in infinite æther,… and so, by consequence, there are infinite habitable worlds: what hinders?… It is a difficult knot to untie.

Especially difficult because so many different authorities threw forth so many hypotheses: our modern divines, those heathen philosophers, heretics, schismatics, the Church of Rome. “Our latter Mathematicians have rolled all the stones that may be stirred: and … fabricated new systems of the World, out of their own Dædalean heads.”
¹⁸
Many races of men have studied the face of the sky throughout history, Burton said, and now the day was coming when God would reveal its hidden mysteries. Tempestuous times, indeed.

But
new books every day
did not find their way to rural Lincolnshire. Newton’s stepfather, Smith, had owned books, on Christian subjects. The apothecary Clarke also owned books. Smith even possessed blank paper, in a large commonplace book that he had kept for forty years. He painstakingly numbered the pages, inscribed theological headings atop the first few, and otherwise left it almost entirely empty. Some time after his death this trove of paper came into Isaac’s possession. Before that, in Grantham, with two and a half pence his mother had given him, Isaac was able to buy a tiny notebook, sewn sheets bound in vellum. He asserted his ownership with an inscription:
Isacus Newton hunc librum possidet
.
¹⁹
Over many months he filled the
pages with meticulous script, the letters and numerals often less than one-sixteenth of an inch high. He began at both ends and worked toward the middle. Mainly he copied a book of secrets and magic printed in London several years earlier: John Bate’s
Mysteryes of Nature and Art
, a scrap book, rambling and yet encyclopedic in its intent.

He copied instructions on drawing. “Let the thing which you intend to draw stand before you, so the light be not hindered from falling upon it.” “If you express the sunn make it riseing or setting behind some hill; but never express the moon or starrs but up on necessity.” He copied recipes for making colors and inks and salves and powders and waters. “A sea colour. Take privet berries when the sun entreth into Libra, about the 13th of September, dry them in the sunn; then bruise them & steep them.” Colors fascinated him. He catalogued several dozen, finely and pragmatically distinguished: purple, crimson, green, another green, a light green, russet, a brown blue, “colours for naked pictures,” “colours for dead corpes,” charcoal black and seacoal black. He copied techniques for melting metal (in a shell), catching birds (“set black wine for them to drink where they come”), engraving on a flint, making pearls of chalk.

Living with Clarke, apothecary and chemist, he learned to grind with mortar and pestle; he practiced roasting and boiling and mixing; he formed chemicals into pellets, to be dried in the sun. He wrote down cures, remedies, and admonitions:

THINGS HURTFULL FOR THE EYES

Garlick Onions & Leeks.… Gooing too suddaine after meals. Hot wines. Cold ayre.… Much blood-letting … dust. ffire. much weeping.…

Bate’s book mixed Aristotelianism and folklore: “sundry Experiments both serviceable and delightfull, which because they are confusedly intermixed, I have entituled them
Extravagants
.” Isaac copied that word atop several pages. Bate described and illustrated many forms of waterworks and fireworks, and Isaac spent hours cutting wood with his knife, building ingenious watermills and windmills. Grantham town was building a new mill; Isaac followed its progress and made a model, internalizing the whirring and pounding of the machine and the principles that govern gears, levers, rollers and pulley wheels. In his garret he constructed a water-clock, four feet high, from a wooden box, with an hour hand on a painted dial. He made paper lanterns. He crafted kites and sent them aloft at night trailing lanterns ablaze—lights in the black sky to frighten the neighbors.
²⁰

Bate offered knowledge as play, but with a nod to system: “the four elements, Fier, Ayer, Water, and Earth, and the
prima Principia
,” he wrote. This venerable four-part scheme—with its corollary powers: dry, cool, warm, and moist—expressed a desire to organize, classify, and name the world’s elements, in the absence of mathematical and technological tools. Simple wisdom covered motion, too. Bate explained: “Their light parts ascend upwards; and those that are more grosse & heavy, do the contrary.”
²¹

Isaac omitted these principles from his copying. He crowded his tiny pages with astronomical tables related to sun-dialing, followed by an elaborate computation of the calendar for the next twenty-eight years. He copied lists of words, adding as many of his own as came to mind.
²²
Across forty-two notebook pages he organized 2,400 nouns in columns under subject headings:

Artes, Trades, & Sciences: … Apothecary … Armourer Astrologer Astronomer.… Diseases:… Gobbertooth … Gout … Gangreene … Gunshott.… Kindred, & Titles: Bridegroome … Brother Bastard Barron … Brawler Babler … Brownist Benjamite … Father Fornicator.…

Thoughts of family were no balm to this troubled soul. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1659, when Isaac was sixteen years old, his mother summoned him home to be a farmer.

2
 
Some Philosophical Questions

H
E DID NOT KNOW
what he wanted to be or do, but it was not tend sheep or follow the plow and the dung cart. He spent more time gathering herbs and lying with a book among the asphodel and moonwort, out of the household’s sight.
¹
He built waterwheels in the stream while his sheep trampled the neighbors’ barley. He watched the flow of water, over wood and around rocks, noting the whorls and eddies and waves, gaining a sense of fluid motion.
²
He defied his mother and scolded his half-sisters.
³
He was fined in the manor court for allowing his swine to trespass and his fences to lie in disrepair.
⁴

His Grantham schoolmaster, Stokes, and his mother’s brother, the rector William Ayscough, finally intervened. Ayscough had prepared for the clergy at the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the greatest of the sixteen colleges at the University of Cambridge, so they arranged for Isaac to be sent there. He made the journey south, three days and two nights, and was admitted in June 1661. Cambridge recognized students in three categories: noblemen, who dined at high table, wore sophisticated gowns, and received degrees with little examination; pensioners, who
paid for tuition and board and aimed, mainly, for the Anglican ministry; and sizars, who earned their keep by menial service to other students, running errands, waiting on them at meals, and eating their leftovers. The widowed Hannah Smith was wealthy now, by the standards of the countryside, but chose to provide her son little money; he entered Trinity College as a subsizar. He had enough for his immediate needs: a chamber pot; a notebook of 140 blank pages, three and a half by five and a half inches, with leather covers; “a quart bottle and ink to fill it”; candles for many long nights, and a lock for his desk.
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For a tutor he was assigned an indifferent scholar of Greek. Otherwise he kept to himself.

He felt learning as a form of obsession, a worthy pursuit, in God’s service, but potentially prideful as well. He taught himself a shorthand of esoteric symbols—this served both to save paper and encrypt his writing—and he used it, at a moment of spiritual crisis, to record a catalogue of his sins. Among them were
neglecting to pray, negligence at the chapel
, and variations on the theme of falling short in piety and devotion. He rebuked himself for a dozen ways of breaching the Sabbath. On one Sunday he had whittled a quill pen and then lied about it. He confessed
uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
. He regretted, or tried to regret,
setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
.
⁶
Money, learning, pleasure: three sirens calling his heart. Of these, neither money nor pleasure came in abundance.