Conversations With Isaac Newton Read online

  Such as?

  Do you really not know? Well, to begin with, he is the father of experimental science. He was the first to create a scientific system – the idea that a scientist should make an observation, then formulate a mathematical model to explain it and finally create a general rule that can be applied to a range of observations closely related to the first one. So, for example, he worked out that the speed of a pendulum swing is independent of the length of the arc. He also found that the mass of the bob did not affect the speed of the pendulum at all, but that, crucially, the period of the oscillation did depend on the length of the string. From this, he formulated a mathematical equation which could then be applied to any situation in which a pendulum moves. Beyond this, Galileo was a great polymath. He produced a telescope that was excellent for his time and he studied the Moon and the planets with it. He showed clearly that Copernicus had been correct to declare that the Earth orbits the Sun, not vice versa. He explained how objects experience acceleration when they fall from a higher point to a lower point. He demonstrated how cannonballs fly through a parabolic trajectory. In short, he demolished many of the archaic precepts of Aristotle.

  Yes, I was going to ask you to say more about Aristotle. You mentioned earlier that Archimedes outstripped him, but you alluded to the fact that posterity has honoured Aristotle far too much and not given Archimedes his due.

  I think that is correct. Aristotle is revered as the father of science, or natural philosophy. His ideas have been taught as irrefutable truth for two millennia, but he was wrong about almost everything. He believed that all matter was made of four fundamental elements: fire, earth, air and water. This is clearly a ridiculous over-simplification. He believed an object moved through the air because, as it travelled onward, it displaced air which then flowed behind the object to propel it forward! He believed we see things because particles fired out from our eyes bounce off objects and return to the eye! The man never once conducted a single experiment: he simply deduced his ideas using logic. He thought deeply about things, that cannot be denied, but his conclusions were almost always wrong, and if he had been able to bring himself to test his hypotheses he would have seen the error of his ways. Archimedes avoided this fatal flaw because he worked with both pure mathematical reasoning and a practical ability that came naturally to him.

  INITIATION

  Newton’s education was financed anonymously by Humphrey Babington, a gentleman-scholar and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who had taken the teenager under his wing. Newton never knew that Babington was his benefactor and assumed that the fees were paid from his mother’s estate. Once at university, Newton was freed from any diversions or family responsibilities and he came under the influence of some of the best intellects of the time, men who not only offered their own experience but introduced him to some of the latest ideas of science and philosophy.

  I believe that you weren’t overly impressed with the University of Cambridge when you first arrived there. Is that true?

  It certainly is. I entered Trinity College as a “subsizar”, graduating to a “sizar” after matriculation a month later. Subsizars and sizars were the poorest students at the university, and I was treated little better than a servant. I had to wait on one of the Fellows, emptying his bed pan and serving his food. Meanwhile, the majority of students came from wealthy families and they were lazy good-for-nothings who had few brains between them and were only at the university because their fathers had insisted upon it.

  But ultimately you found the university intellectually satisfying?

  Yes, of course. I was lucky to be accepted early on by two very important members of the university. When I was 17 I was at school in Grantham and I lodged with an apothecary in the town. He had a wonderful collection of books which he had inherited from his deceased brother, Dr Joseph Clark. So, even before going up to Cambridge I had been introduced to all the great thinkers of the past: Aristotle, Plato and many of the occultists, mystics and alchemists of past centuries. I was also introduced to the heretical works of men such as Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and, most importantly, the great master, Galileo, whose books were then still on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Texts. However, as a young man, the most profound influence on me was my tutor at Trinity, Isaac Barrow, who was the Lucasian Professor before me. He had a splendid library of occult literature and had himself conducted some researches in natural philosophy. He also knew many of the most important philosophers and men of science of his time. He was involved in the establishment of the Royal Society in the early 1660s. He introduced me to the notion that no form of knowledge should be considered forbidden and that the Lord’s plan may be found in all learning. Another man who was very important to my early education was a Fellow of Trinity named Humphrey Babington who came from Grantham and was related to the Clarks. Isaac Barrow and Humphrey Babington were friends, and they both helped me enormously. They gave me a superb grounding in the world of the arcane and the intellect.

  Were Babington or Barrow interested in what might be called “exotic knowledge” – the Hermetic tradition and so forth?

  Barrow was a very good mathematician and possessed a sharp intellect. He was a deeply religious man. Indeed, he later became Chaplain to King Charles II. He was never a practising alchemist, if that’s what you really mean, but he did have some exotic titles in his library. I believe Babington was more inclined to dabble in mysticism. Neither man was afraid to read and collect works that many Establishment figures would have considered “dangerous”.

  Such as?

  Both libraries contained radical interpretations of Copernicus, including at least one volume by the arch-heretic Giordano Bruno, along with one or two commentaries on ancient Egyptian occult knowledge.

  And so, would you say that Babington and Barrow were influential in leading you to study arcane subjects and later to begin alchemical experiments?

  They were an influence, yes. Neither man spoke openly about subjects that society would proscribe as anti-orthodox or against traditional theology. And both men had taken holy orders, because it was a condition of their Fellowship. But without doubt, both men cherished the intellectual world and were liberal in their thinking about new, sometimes unconventional, philosophies, and they influenced me to think more laterally and to be as open-minded as possible.

  BITTER FEUDS

  Newton was an egotistical man who considered himself far superior to any other intellectual of his age. He was utterly convinced that he had been chosen by God to possess the most brilliant mind of any mortal and to be nothing less than God’s mouthpiece, a man who was leading humanity to a clearer understanding of the way the universe works. This, along with his dislike for most human beings, his suspicious nature and his aggressive determination to be first to achieve anything, led him into a succession of dramatic conflicts with his contemporaries.

  Sir Isaac, you gained a reputation for engaging in disputes with other scientists and mathematicians. Do you think these clashes had a common cause, and if so, would you care to speculate on it?

  Yes, of course there was a common cause for all the disputes in my career: I was right and the imbeciles I was up against were wrong! Need I say more?

  But do you really think that’s true? After all, Robert Hooke was a great experimenter. Gottfried Leibniz was a world-class mathematician. And John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, with whom you also had a bitter feud, was a very capable astronomer.

  You think so, do you? Well, I dare say each of these men had some qualities, but ultimately, in each battle, I was shown to be right and they were wrong. Let us consider them in turn. Robert Hooke – there, I can barely speak the name without retching. He was a well-known experimenter, but he misunderstood my work entirely. He was Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society when I submitted my first set of optical researches, but you know, he did not even bother to read my paper properly before dismissing it out of hand. That was the start of my f
eud with Hooke. It was not I who began the battle, but I certainly finished it.

  But didn’t Hooke apologize for spending too little time on your paper, and didn’t he then try to make amends?

  He offered an official apology, yes, but he never liked me after that and I never, ever trusted him.

  And for many years after this you rarely attended meetings of the Royal Society.

  That’s correct.

  Is it true that your famous quote, “If I have achieved anything it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” was a direct slur on Hooke, who was a dwarf?

  Well, I have no reason to deny it. I did write this in a letter to Hooke and I did mean it to cut deep. The man was a vile braggart. He never produced one worthwhile piece of original work and he constantly boasted about what he could do, without ever doing anything. A perfect example is Hooke’s claims about the law of universal gravitation. In early 1684 he told Christopher Wren and Edmund Halley – my associates at the Royal Society – that he had devised a law to describe the behaviour of bodies under the influence of gravity. Wren and Halley wanted to see what I had written on the subject but Hooke persuaded them to wait and to give him a chance first. Two months passed and Hooke could come up with nothing. Finally, after another long wait, Wren and Halley grew impatient and Halley came to see me in Cambridge. I showed him what I had written on the subject, a treatise which later grew into my Principia. It turned out Hooke had absolutely no clue about a law of gravity and was just boasting. I find it hard to respect such individuals. Then he tried to damage me. I cannot tolerate such people.

  And what of Gottfried Leibniz? Your feud with him lasted 40 years and you so hated the man that you continued to slander him in your private papers even after he’d died.

  Again, I have no reason to deny these things. Leibniz was a thief, pure and simple. He stole calculus from me and tried to make out he had come up with it first.

  Are you sure? Was it not perhaps a case of each of you independently coming up with the same concept?

  No, it was not. I was the first to devise calculus. Leibniz stole the concept when he visited London in 1673. I had a rough draft of the idea, which I had entrusted to the publisher John Collins. He was either hoodwinked into showing this material to Leibniz or he colluded with the German.

  That’s surely speculation? There’s no proof that Leibniz saw your draft.

  You believe what you like, young man. I know what I believe. Calculus could only have been offered to this world through the mind of one mortal. That mortal is me. God does not waste his energies passing on such treasures to more than one man – what would be the point of that? No, Leibniz stole my calculus and he will rot in hell because of it.

  There was a third great feud wasn’t there? The protracted arguments you had with John Flamsteed? Could you tell me how these came about?

  Yes, I’d be glad to. In 1694 I was completing the second edition of my Principia when I approached Flamsteed for some astronomical data. He was, of course, the Astronomer Royal and master of the Greenwich Observatory. First, he was tardy with his responses, then he deliberately gave me very inferior information. When I challenged him over this, he became obstructive. I was forced in the end to call upon the Queen’s husband, Prince George, to intercede. It was regrettable, but I can assure you the blame lay squarely with the Astronomer Royal.

  A FAITH APART

  Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man. Raised as an orthodox and strict Protestant, by the time he was in his early twenties he had left the conventional path of his faith and become an Arian. Subscribers to this belief refused to accept the idea of the Holy Trinity as prescribed by orthodoxy and claimed that Christ was created by God rather than being an aspect of the Holy Trinity. In 17th-century England Arianism was considered a dissenting branch of Christianity and was outlawed. And so, as with many aspects of his life, Newton had to keep his faith secret.

  When did you adopt Arianism and what led you to it?

  I first became interested in the early Church around 1668, and I was particularly fascinated by the notion of the Holy Trinity. I studied not only the Bible, but also the writings of the Church Fathers. I traced the doctrine of the Holy Trinity back to Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop. I quickly learned that before Athanasius there was no form of trinitarianism as we know it. A contemporary of Athanasius was another bishop called Arius who held the doctrine that the members of the Holy Trinity were not equal to, or the same as, each other. He believed that God the Father had primacy over Christ. In AD325 the Church leaders held a council, since known as the Council of Nicea. At this gathering of theologians and clergy it was decided that the Church would adopt officially the position of Athanasius over the views of Arius and that Arius’s version of theology would be condemned as heretical. So, Athanasius has simply triumphed over Arius in imposing on Christianity the false doctrine of the Trinity.

  And so you believe that the machinations of the early Church over this matter were really a conspiracy?

  That’s correct. I also assert that to fully support Athanasius, the Church elders deliberately altered the text of the Bible by modifying crucial passages. Let me give you an example. The first epistle of John, chapter 5, verse 7 says: “There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” These words did not appear in the Bible before the Council of Nicea. Clearly, the Church Fathers preferred to butcher the Scriptures rather than accept Arius.

  So, put simply, what would be your position on the concept of the Holy Trinity?

  Put simply? Well, it is this: only the Father is supreme. The Son is a separate being, different from the Father both in substance and in nature. Christ is not truly God, but is the so-called Word and Wisdom made flesh – divine to be sure, but only so far as divinity is communicated to the Son by the Father.

  These views were dangerous, were they not?

  Yes, indeed they were. Arianism had been decreed as heresy since the 4th century, and although the English government introduced modern enlightened laws during my lifetime, Arianism was still considered heretical here. In 1689 Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which offered religious freedom to all faiths with the marked exceptions of Catholicism and Arianism. Obviously, such prejudice affected me personally.

  How so?

  When I received my BA in 1665, I was required to attest acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church. This I was happy to do, because at this time I had not yet come to see the truth of Arius. Two years later, when I was awarded my Fellowship, I again agreed to swear allegiance to the faith. Then, in 1669, I attested to the conditions of the Church for a third time. But on this occasion I was made to promise that at some point in the not-too-distant future I would take Holy Orders, because this was a condition of holding the Lucasian Professorship.

  And you could not contemplate this because of your unorthodox views on the Trinity?

  Precisely. I could not in all honesty swear to accept the conventional idea of the Trinity. It was Isaac Barrow who saved my career. By then he was the King’s Chaplain. He managed to convince Charles to make all holders of the Lucasian Chair exempt from the requirement of taking Holy Orders.

  It must have been quite an accomplishment on Barrow’s part because, presumably, you could tell no one of your reasons for not wanting to take Holy Orders.

  Naturally. I couldn’t even tell Barrow. He acted entirely out of a desire not to lose me. If he had failed, I would have resigned my chair and the course of my career would have been very different indeed.

  THE LIGHT IN THE CRUCIBLE

  Although Isaac Newton was a great empirical scientist whose work was guided by mathematical rigour, he had a remarkably versatile imagination. He sincerely believed that devotion to alchemy and an investigation of arcane and mystical principles could bear valuable fruit in his quest for knowledge. Some of his associates (especially Robert Boyle) had a keen interest in the occult, but most scientists of Ne
wton’s time were either afraid to delve too deeply into natural magic or they considered the study of Hermetic knowledge and alchemy to be a waste of time and effort.

  One of the things that often surprises people about your life and work is that you expended so much time in the study of alchemy, exotica and the occult. What set you off on that track?

  This question of surprise is really a matter of perspective. I have always believed that a good natural philosopher, or scientist, should never turn away from any source of knowledge that will increase his understanding of the universe. In fact, I would take it further and say it is the duty of the scientist to seek to understand God’s universe. When I was a young man I came to the conclusion that comprehending the world in which we live is possible only by studying God’s “Word” and God’s “Work”. By this I mean the Holy Scriptures and nature. Nature does not just mean what we readily observe – a study of this would get us only so far. We must delve ever deeper, and if what you call the occult is a path to that understanding, then I have no qualms about following it. I would be a coward to do otherwise, and I would not be serving Our Lord in the best way I could.

  But looking back on it, do you think the great effort you put into your alchemical experiments was worthwhile?

  Absolutely I do. I achieved many great things in my life, but perhaps the most important was the elucidation of the law of universal gravitation. This became the centrepiece to my Principia Mathematica and lies at the very heart of physics. And how do you think I arrived at this law? It was not through mathematical investigations alone, but through combining many facets of my learning. From many years of alchemical experiments, I was able to observe in the crucible forces of attraction and repulsion between small particles. I then concluded that similar (but not identical) forces might be responsible for keeping the planets in orbit.