Isaac Newton

Acclaim for James Gleick’s

ISAAC NEWTON

An elegantly written, insightful work that brings Newton to life and does him justice.… Gleick proves to be not only a sound explicator of Newton’s science but also a capable literary stylist, whose understated empathy with his subject lets us almost see through Newton’s eyes.

—Los Angeles Times

The biography of choice for the interested layman.… [Gleick] makes this multifaceted life remarkably accessible.

—The New York Times Book Review

For the casual reader with a serious interest in Newton’s life and work, I recommend Gleick’s biography as an excellent place to start. It has three important virtues. It is accurate, it is readable, and it is short. Gleick has gone back to the original notebooks and brought [Newton] to life.

—Freeman Dyson, The New York Review of Books

The best short life of science’s most perplexing figure.

—New Scientist

Written with enormous enthusiasm and verve and in a style that is often closer to poetry than prose. [Gleick] explains the fundamentals with clarity and grace. His ease with the science is the key to the book’s delight.

—The Economist

[Gleick is] one of the best science writers of our time.… He has exhumed from mountains of historical documents and letters a compelling portrait of a man who held the cards of his genius and near madness close to his chest. Gleick’s book [is] hard to put down.

—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Marvelously rich, elegant and poetic.… [Gleick’s] great talent is the ability to unravel complex ideas without talking down. Books on Newton abound, but Gleick’s fresh, intimate and beautifully composed account succeeds where many fail, in eloquently dramatizing the strange power of his subject’s vision.

—The Times (London)

Gleick … has transformed mainstream academic research into an exciting story. Gleick has done a marvelous job of recreating intellectual life in Britain around the end of the seventeenth century. He excels at translating esoteric discussions into clear, simple explanations that make sense to modern people.

—Science

Brilliant.… The great scientist is brought into sharp focus and made more accessible. Highly recommended.

—The Tucson Citizen

"James Gleick … makes the most of his extraordinary material, providing us with a deftly crafted vision of the great mathematician as a creator, and victim, of his age.… [Isaac Newton] is a perfect antidote to the many vast, bloated scientific biographies that currently flood the market—and also acts as a superb starting point for anyone interested in the life of one of the world’s few undisputed geniuses."

—The Observer

"Gleick … brings to bear on Newton’s life and thought the same clarity of understanding and expression that brought order to chaos in his first volume [Chaos: Making a New Science]."

—The Daily Herald

Moving … [Gleick’s] biography is perhaps the most accessible to date. He is an elegant writer, brisk without being shallow, excellent on the essence of the work, and revealing in his account of Newton’s dealings with the times.

—Financial Times

James Gleick

ISAAC NEWTON

James Gleick is an author, reporter, and essayist. His writing on science and technology—including Chaos, Genius, Faster, and What Just Happened—has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in New York.

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK

Chaos: Making a New Science

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier

Isaac Newton at forty-six, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1689 (illustration credit Frontispiece)

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2004

Copyright © 2003 by James Gleick

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Gleick, James.

Isaac Newton / James Gleick

p. cm.

1. Newton, Isaac, Sir, 1642–1727.

2. Physicists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

QC16.N7 .G55 2003

530’.092—dc21 [B] 2002192696

Vintage eISBN: 978-0-307-42643-7

www.vintagebooks.com

Author’s Web site address: www.around.com

rh_3.1_148355202_c0_r2

To Toby, Caleb, Asher, and Will

I asked him where he had it made, he said he made it himself, & when I asked him where he got his tools said he made them himself & laughing added if I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me, I had never made anything.…

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

    List of Illustrations

Isaac Newton

1. What Imployment Is He Fit For?

2. Some Philosophical Questions

3. To Resolve Problems by Motion

4. Two Great Orbs

5. Bodys & Senses

6. The Oddest If Not the Most Considerable Detection

7. Reluctancy and Reaction

8. In the Midst of a Whirlwind

9. All Things Are Corruptible

10. Heresy, Blasphemy, Idolatry

11. First Principles

12. Every Body Perseveres

13. Is He Like Other Men?

14. No Man Is a Witness in His Own Cause

15. The Marble Index of a Mind

Notes

Acknowledgments and Sources

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece

     Isaac Newton at forty-six, portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1689.

By kind permission of the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estates.

Photographed by Jeremy Whitaker.

2.1 Descartes’ vortices.

Gilbert-Charles le Gendre, Traite de l’opinion ou memoires pour servir à l’histoire de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1733).

2.2 Violent motion.

Newton’s Questiones, Add MS 3996, f. 98r.*

3.1 Drawing of apparatus.

Add MS 3965, f. 35v.*

3.2 Infinite series to square the hyperbola.

Add MS 4004, f. 81v.*

5.1 The bodkin in his eye.

Add MS 3975, f. 15.*

6.1 Newton’s reflecting telescope.

Philosophical Transactions, No. 81, March 25, 1672.

7.1 The Experimentum Crucis.

Correspondence I, p. 107.

7.2 Eye and prism.

Add MS 3996, f. 122r.*

11.1 Dueling diagrams, Newton and Hooke.

Correspondence II, pp. 301, 305, and 307.

11.2 Force toward the focus of an elliptical orbit.

Principia, Book I, Proposition XI.

12.1 Comet of 1680.

Principia, Book III, Proposition XLI.

14.1 Key to the cryptogram.

Add MS 4004, f. 81v.*

15.1 William Blake’s Newton, 1795.

© Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, N.Y.

15.2 Newton’s death mask.

By John Michael Rysbrack. Keynes Collection, King’s College, Cambridge.

* By permission of the syndics of Cambridge University.

ISAAC NEWTON

ISAAC NEWTON SAID he had seen farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but he did not believe it. He was born into a world of darkness, obscurity, and magic; led a strangely pure and obsessive life, lacking parents, lovers, and friends; quarreled bitterly with great men who crossed his path; veered at least once to the brink of madness; cloaked his work in secrecy; and yet discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. He was chief architect of the modern world. He answered the ancient philosophical riddles of light and motion, and he effectively discovered gravity. He showed how to predict the courses of heavenly bodies and so established our place in the cosmos. He made knowledge a thing of substance: quantitative and exact. He established principles, and they are called his laws.

Solitude was the essential part of his genius. As a youth he assimilated or rediscovered most of the mathematics known to humankind and then invented the calculus—the machinery by which the modern world understands change and flow—but kept this treasure to himself. He embraced his isolation through his productive years, devoting himself to the most secret of sciences, alchemy. He feared the light of exposure, shrank from criticism and controversy, and seldom published his work at all. Striving to decipher the riddles of the universe, he emulated the complex secrecy in which he saw them encoded. He stood aloof from other philosophers even after becoming a national icon—Sir Isaac, Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society, his likeness engraved on medals, his discoveries exalted in verse.

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, he said before he died, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.¹ An evocative simile, much quoted in the centuries that followed, but Newton never played at the seashore, boy or man. Born in a remote country village, the son of an illiterate farmer, he lived in an island nation and explained how the moon and sun tug at the seas to create tides, but he probably never set eyes on the ocean. He understood the sea by abstraction and computation.

His life’s path across the earth’s surface covered barely 150 miles: from a hamlet of rural Lincolnshire southward to the university town of Cambridge and thence to London. He was born in the bedchamber of a stone farmhouse on Christmas 1642 (as the calendar was reckoned in England—but the calendar was drifting out of step with the sun). His father, Isaac Newton, yeoman, had married at thirty-five, fallen ill, and died before his son’s birth. English had a word for that: the child was posthumous, thought unlikely to resemble the father.

This first Isaac Newton left little trace: some sheep, barley, and simple furniture. He endorsed his will with his X, for like most of his countrymen he could neither read nor write. He had worked the land of Woolsthorpe, a place of woods, open heaths, brooks, and springs, where underneath the thin soil lay a gray limestone, from which a few dwellings were built to last longer than the common huts of timber and clay. A road of the Roman Empire passed nearby, running south and north, a reminder of ancient technology still unsurpassed. Sometimes children unearthed antique coins or remains of a villa or wall.²

The second Isaac Newton lived to be eighty-four, gouty and rich. He died in London at the end of the winter of 1727, a prolonged and excruciating death from a kidney stone. England for the first time granted a state funeral to a subject whose attainment lay in the realm of the mind. The Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls bore the pall, with most of the Royal Society following behind. The corpse lay in state in Westminster Abbey for eight days and was buried in its nave. Above the grave was carved an ornate monument in gray and white marble: the figure of Newton, recumbent; the celestial globe, marked with the path of a 1680 comet; and angelic boys playing with a prism and weighing the sun and planets. A Latin inscription hailed his strength of mind almost divine and mathematical principles peculiarly his own and declared: Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race. For England, the continent of Europe, and then the rest of the world, Newton’s story was beginning.

The French writer calling himself Voltaire had just reached London. He was amazed by the kingly funeral and exhilarated by all things Newtonian. A Frenchman arriving in London finds things very different, he reported. For us it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides of the sea; for the English it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon, so that when you think that the moon should give us a high tide, these gentlemen think you should have a low one. It pleased Voltaire to compare Newton with his nation’s late philosophical hero, René Descartes: For your Cartesians everything is moved by an impulsion you don’t really understand, for Mr Newton it is by gravitation, the cause of which is hardly better known. The most fundamental conceptions were new and up for grabs in coffee-houses and salons. In Paris you see the earth shaped like a melon, in London it is flattened on two sides. For a Cartesian light exists in the air, for a Newtonian it comes from the sun in six and a half minutes. Descartes was a dreamer; Newton a sage. Descartes experienced poetry and love; Newton did not. In the course of such a long life he had neither passion nor weakness; he never went near any woman. I have had that confirmed by the doctor and the surgeon who were with him when he died.³

What Newton learned remains the essence of what we know, as if by our own intuition. Newton’s laws are our laws. We are Newtonians, fervent and devout, when we speak of forces and masses, of action and reaction; when we say that a sports team or political candidate has momentum; when we note the inertia of a tradition or bureaucracy; and when we stretch out an arm and feel the force of gravity all around, pulling earthward. Pre-Newtonians did not feel such a force. Before Newton the English word gravity denoted a mood—seriousness, solemnity—or an intrinsic quality. Objects could have heaviness or lightness, and the heavy ones tended downward, where they belonged.⁴

We have assimilated Newtonianism as knowledge and as faith. We believe our scientists when they compute the past and future tracks of comets and spaceships. What is more, we know they do this not by magic but by mere technique. The landscape has been so totally changed, the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before, said the cosmologist and relativist Hermann Bondi. It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook he produced.⁵ Creation, Newton saw, unfolds from simple rules, patterns iterated over unlimited distances. So we seek mathematical laws for economic cycles and human behavior. We deem the universe solvable.

He began with foundation stones of knowledge: time, space, motion. I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all, he wrote in midlife—then a reclusive professor, recondite theologian and alchemist, seldom leaving his room in Trinity College, Cambridge.⁶ But he did mean to define these terms. He salvaged them from the haze of everyday language. He standardized them. In defining them, he married them, each to the others.

He dipped his quill in an ink of oak galls and wrote a minuscule Latin script, crowding the words edge to edge: The common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices.… By then he had written more than a million words and published almost none. He wrote for himself, careless of food and sleep. He wrote to calculate, laying down numbers in spidery lines and broad columns. He computed as most people daydream. The flow of his thought slipped back and forth between English and Latin. He wrote to read, copying out books and manuscripts verbatim, sometimes the same text again and again. More determined than joyful, he wrote to reason, to meditate, and to occupy his febrile mind.

His name betokens a system of the world. But for Newton himself there was no completeness, only a questing—dynamic, protean, and unfinished. He never fully detached matter and space from God. He never purged occult, hidden, mystical qualities from his vision of nature. He sought order and believed in order but never averted his eyes from the chaos. He of all people was no Newtonian.

Information flowed faintly and perishably then, through the still small human species, but he created a method and a language that triumphed in his lifetime and gained ascendancy with each passing century. He pushed open a door that led to a new universe: set in absolute time and space, at once measureless and measurable, furnished with science and machines, ruled by industry and natural law. Geometry and motion, motion and geometry: Newton joined them as one. With the coming of Einstein’s relativity, Newtonian science was often said to have been overthrown or replaced, but that was not so. It had been buttressed and extended.⁷

Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science! said Einstein. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.⁸

Yet he speaks to us reluctantly and covertly.

1

What Imployment Is He Fit For?

MEDIEVAL, IN SOME DISREPAIR , the Woolsthorpe farmhouse nestled into a hill near the River Witham. With its short front door and shuttered windows, its working kitchen, and its bare floors of ash and linden laid on reeds, it had belonged to Newton’s forebears for just twenty years. In back stood apple trees. Sheep grazed for acres around.

Isaac was born in a small room at the top of the stairs. By the terms of feudal law this house was a manor and the fatherless boy was its lord, with seigniorial authority over a handful of tenant farmers in nearby cottages. He could not trace his ancestry back past his grandfather, Robert, who lay buried in the churchyard nearly a mile to the east. Still, the boy expected to live managing the farm in the place of the father he had never known. His mother, Hannah Ayscough, had come from gentlefolk. Her brother, the Reverend William Ayscough, studied at Cambridge University on his way to joining the Anglican clergy; now he occupied a village rectory two miles away. When Isaac was three years old and his widowed mother near thirty, she accepted a marriage offer from another nearby rector, Barnabas Smith, a wealthy man twice her age. Smith wanted a wife, not a stepson; under the negotiated terms of their marriage Hannah abandoned Isaac in the Woolsthorpe house, leaving him to his grandmother’s care.¹

War flared in the countryside all through his youth. The decade-long Great Rebellion began in the year of his birth: Parliamentarians fighting Royalists, Puritans recoiling from the idolatry they saw in the Church of England. Motley, mercenary armies skirmished throughout the Midlands. Pikemen and musketeers sometimes passed through the fields near Woolsthorpe.² Bands of men plundered farms for supplies. England was at war with itself and also, increasingly, aware of itself—its nationhood, its specialness. Divided as it was, convulsed over ecclesiastical forms and beliefs, the nation carried out a true revolution. The triumphant Puritans rejected absolutism and denied the divine right of the monarchy. In 1649, soon after Isaac turned six, Charles Stuart, the king, was beheaded at the wall of his palace.

This rustic country covered a thousandth of the world’s landmass, cut off from the main continent since the warming of the planet and the melting of polar ice 13,000 years before. Plundering, waterborne tribes had settled on its coasts in waves and diffused into its downs and valleys, where they aggregated in villages. What they knew or believed about nature depended in part on the uses of technology. They had learned to employ the power of water and wind to crush, grind, and polish. The furnace, the forge, and the mill had taken their place in an economy that thereby grew more specialized and hierarchical. People in England, as in many human communities, made metal—kettles of copper and brass, rods and nails of iron. They made glass. These crafts and materials were prerequisites now to a great leap in knowledge. Other prerequisites were lenses, paper and ink, mechanical clocks, numeric systems capable of denoting indefinitely small fractions, and postal services spanning hundreds of miles.

By the time of Newton’s birth, one great city had formed, with about 400,000 people; no other town was even a tenth as large. England was still a country of villages and farms, its seasons ordered by the Christian calendar and the rhythms of agriculture: lambing and calving, haymaking and harvest. Years of harvest failure brought widespread starvation.³ Roving laborers and vagrants made up much of the population. But a class of artisans and merchants was coming into its own: traders, shopkeepers, apothecaries, glaziers, carpenters, and surveyors, all developing a practical,