research in alchemy. • Newton would have kept many of his discoveries to himself had he not been coaxed by colleagues to publish. • As he became older, Newton had many portraits painted and seemed concerned with leaving the image of his face for posterity. • Newton believed that metals could be considered “living opposites” of trees, growing underground rather than above ground. • Many thousands of print and Internet sources suggest that Diamond, Newton’s dog, jumped onto a table and knocked over a candle, setting Newton’s papers on fire and destroying many years worth of work. However, biographer Milo Keynes suggests that Newton never owned a dog and that the story is probably apocryphal. • In the year 628, the Indian astronomer Brahmagupta suggested that gravity was a force of attraction. He used the Sanskrit term “gruhtvaakarshan” for gravity.
Had Newton not been steeped in alchemical and other magical learning, he would never have proposed forces of attraction and repulsion between bodies as the major feature of his physical system.
—John Henry, “Newton, Matter, and Magic,” in John Fauvel et al.’sLet Newton Be!
Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.
—Joseph Louis Lagrange,Oeuvres de Lagrange, 1867 God gave . . . the Prophecies of the Old Testament, not to gratify men’s curiosities by enabling them to foreknow things, but that after they were fulfilled, they might be interpreted by the event, and his own Providence, not the Interpreters, be then manifested thereby to the world.
For the event of things predicted many ages before will then be a convincing argument that the world is governed by Providence.
—Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, 1733
This law [of gravitation] has been called “the greatest generalization achieved by the human mind”. . . . I am interested not so much in the human mind as in the marvel of a nature which can obey such an elegant and simple law as this law of gravitation. Therefore our main concentration will not be on how clever we are to have
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found it all out, but on how clever nature is to pay atten- tion to it.
—Richard Feynman,The Character of Physical Law What water is to a fish or air is to a bird, mathematics was to Newton, the element through which he moved without effort.
—Richard Westfall, “Newton’s Scientific Personality”
Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who invented calculus, proved that white light was a mixture of colors, explained the rainbow, built the first reflecting telescope, discovered the binomial theorem, introduced polar coordinates, and showed the force causing apples to fall is the same as the force that drives planetary motions and produces tides. He was also author of treatises on Biblical subjects such as Biblical prophecies. In fact, he devoted more time to the study of the Bible, theology, and alchemy than to science—and he wrote more on religion than he did on natural science.
Newton spent a major portion of his life analyzing ancient Biblical texts, and his scientific discoveries are even more striking considering the relative amount of time he devoted to them. Economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who studied Newton’s writings on alchemy and authored a biographical essay on Newton, wrote “Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians.”
Perhaps less well known is the fact that Newton was a creationist who wanted to be remembered as much for his theological writings as for his scientific and mathematical texts. Newton believed in a Christian unity as opposed to a trinity. In particular, he believed that Jesus was created by God as a mortal human and not as God incarnate, and he noted, “It is the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.”
Some of Newton’s nontraditional Christian beliefs are echoed in the faiths of America’s founding fathers. None of the first five U.S. presidents was a conventional Christian. For example, John Adams, a Unitarian, did not accept the notion of the trinity or the divinity of Christ. In 1804, Thomas Jefferson used a razor to remove all passages of the King James Version of the New Testament that had supernatural content—such as the virgin birth, resurrection, or turning water into wine. About one-tenth of the bible remained, which he pasted together and published as The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. Apparently, Jefferson admired Jesus as a teacher and prophet but was not always interested in the cloak of divinity.
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Newton respected the Bible and accepted its account of Creation while at the same time looking for various Bible codes and hidden messages.
He also wrote works that criticized various Biblical interpretations, such as An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture. He determined that date of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ to be April 3, 33a.d., a date accepted by some today. Newton developed calculus as a means of describing motion, and perhaps for understanding the nature of God through a clearer understanding of nature and reality.
Before addressing the events of his life, it is intriguing to achieve a wider understanding of his diverse interests. An examination of the 1,752 books in Newton’s personal library after his death has verified his strong interest in occult and religious subjects. The most complete breakdown I have seen comes from John Harrison’sThe Library of Isaac Newton, which focuses on certain categories of his books and is summarized in table 4. Notice that only about 12% of the books in the library deal with the topics for which he is most famous today. He was indeed a biblical fundamentalist, believing in the reality of angels, demons, and Satan. He believed in a literal interpretation of Genesis and that Earth was only a few thousand years old. Newton spent much of his life trying to prove that the Old Testament is accurate history. His book on the Bible suggested that Christianity took a wrong turn in the fourth centurya.d., when the first Council of Nicaea promoted erroneous doctrines on the nature of Jesus.
table 4 Number of Books in Isaac Newton’s Personal Library, by Topic
Topic Number of Books
Theology 477 (27.2%)
Alchemy 169 (9.6%)
Mathematics 126 (7.2%)
Physics 52 (3.0%)
Astronomy 33 (1.9%)
Source: John Harrison,The Library of Isaac Newton(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
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One wonders how many more problems in physics Newton would have solved if he had spent less time on his Biblical studies. Newton appears not to have had the slightest interest in sex, never married, and, according to his contemporaries, almost never laughed (although he sometimes smiled).
Newton suffered a massive mental breakdown, and some have conjec- tured that throughout his life he had manic depression (bipolar disorder), with alternating moods of sadness and happiness. Some recent historians of science have suggested that Newton had Asperger syndrome, a high- functioning form of autism. Milo Keynes writes in “The Personality of Isaac Newton”:
Isaac Newton was a humorless, solitary, anxious, insecure, and pri- vate man with obsessional traits. He was poor at human relation- ships, such as the expression of gratitude, and held unorthodox and heretical religious beliefs. He was clearly puritanical, with feelings of guilt, and had little capacity for enjoyment—his only strong liking appears to have been one for roast beef. . . . He never used the word
“love”. . . .
According to biographer Anthony Storr, “Newton’s preoccupation with place seeking . . . may be traced to his ambition: his fear of being embroiled with women to his almost total suppression of sexuality.”
Bill Bryson inA Short History of Nearly Everythingfocuses on some of Newton’s quirks:
Newton was a decidedly odd figure . . . famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. . . . Once he inserted a bodkin [a long leather sewing needle] into his eye socket just to see what would happen.
Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, England, on Christmas Day in 1642, according to the calendar in use when he was born. Today, we would give the date as January 4, 1643, according to the corrected Gregorian calendar date now in use. Newton never knew his father, also named Isaac Newton, who died three months before his son’s birth. Newton’s father was illiterate and could not even sign his own name.
Richard Westfall writes of the year of Newton’s birth inNever at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton:
Since Galileo, on whose discoveries much of Newton’s own career in science would squarely rest, had died that year, a significance 108 | a r c h i m e d e s t o h a w k i n g
attaches itself to 1642. . . . Born in 1564, Galileo had lived nearly to eighty. Newton would live nearly to eighty-five. Between them, they virtually spanned the entire scientific revolution, the central core of which their combined work constituted.
Newton was so small at birth that the villagers expected him to die. In the first few years of his life, his neck was weak and required a neck brace to give his head additional support.
Newton’s mother remarried when he was two and sent him away to be raised by his grandmother. Newton always hated his mother and stepfather and as a teenager threatened to burn them alive in their house.
While away from his mother’s home, Newton tended to be rather shy and quiet. Michael Guillen notes in Five Equations That Changed the World, “Whenever Newton did socialize, it was with girls; they were tickled by the doll furniture and other toys he made for them using his customized kit of miniature saws, hatchets, and hammers.”
When he went to the local Grantham’s Free Grammar School, his teachers initially called him both idle and inattentive, and he had the next- to-lowest rank in the entire school! However, later he decided to change his standing in his class and made his way to first place. A teacher said of 18-year-old Newton, “His genius now begins to mount upwards apace and shine out with more strength.”
In 1661, Newton entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Although his mother was wealthy at this point in her life, she refused to pay for Newton’s tuition, which forced Newton to earn his keep by emptying chamber pots and grooming the hair of older, richer students. Like other lawgivers in this book, his initial intent was to seek a law degree, but his interest in science soon pushed aside everything else. Although he was shy among people, he was not shy about performing outrageous experiments on himself—such as the time when he wedged probes between his eye and his eye socket
“as near to the backside of his eyes as possible” so that he could better understand the workings of the human visual system.
Newton’s interest in mathematics germinated in 1663 when he pur- chased an astrology book and discovered that he could not understand the mathematics in the book. He then voraciously tackled several geometry and algebra books, and received his Bachelor’s Degree from Cambridge in 1665. His mathematical prowess was not fully apparent at this point in life—all it would take was a plague to release his inner genius.
In 1665, the Great Plague, also known as the Black Death, struck the people of London. The plague germs were carried by fleas, which were carried by rats. At first, authorities ignored the deaths in London, but as summer approached, more people died, and people panicked. The rich left the city for their estates in the country, and the merchants followed soon
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after. By June, the roads were flooded with people fleeing London. By July, more than a thousand people died in London each week. Dogs and cats were suspected to be carriers, so the Lord Mayor had an estimated 40,000 dogs and 200,000 cats killed. Alas, this caused an increase in the rat population, so the germs spread more rapidly. An estimated 100,000 people died in London and its vicinities.
Without the Great Plague, Newton may never have discovered his great laws. Cambridge closed the university in the summer of 1665, and during this time Newton went home to Woolsthorpe. Here, in relative isolation, he cogitated upon what he had learned at Cambridge. Newton returned to Cambridge in March of 1666 when the school reopened after the plague subsided over the winter. The plague reappeared, so Cambridge was closed again in June of 1666 until April of 1667, when Newton again returned to Trinity College.
Today, Newton’s biographers sometimes refer to the 1666 date as his famous “annus mirabilis,” or year of miracles. During that year, according to Newton’s later writings, he discovered the chromatic composition of light and discovered the inverse-square principle of his Law of Universal Gravitation. He established the foundations of differential and integral calculus, several years before its independent discovery by German math- ematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). However, upon critical analysis, it is likely that 1666 may be a little early to anchor some of his great ideas, and it was in Newton’s own self-interest to place his discoveries as early as possible. It is more likely that some of his ideas on mechanics did not fully gel until around 1685–1687, when he was actually composing his book thePrincipia.
Nevertheless, Newton did indeed devote much of his time during the plague to the intense study of mathematics and physics, and the seeds of many of his greatest ideas started to take form. In a period of less than two years, while Newton was still younger than 25, he began his important advances in mathematics, optics, and astronomy.
Following his death, Newton’s draft letter to the biographer and journalist Pierre Des Maizeaux (1673–1745) was found, and it describes Newton’s recollections of his accomplishments during the plague years.
His letter first describes the year 1665, during which he says he invented calculus and discovered methods for approximating mathematical series.
In 1666, he says he developed his theories of colors. He explains further about his discovery of his Law of Universal Gravitation:
[In 1666] I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and (having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere) from Kepler’s rule [Kepler’s Third Law] . . . , I deduced that the 110 | a r c h i m e d e s t o h a w k i n g
forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666. For in those days, I was in the prime of my age of invention, and minded Mathematics and Philosophy more than at any time since.
In other words, in 1666, Newton began to consider that Earth’s gravity influenced the Moon, counterbalancing its centripetal force. From these thoughts on centripetal force and Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion, Newton deduced the inverse-square principle.
In the field of mathematics, Newton is generally credited with the discovery of the binomial theorem, an important formula giving the expan- sion of powers of sums. Newton discovered what we now refer to as New- ton’s identities (which describe the roots of a polynomial) and Newton’s method (a procedure for finding approximations to the roots of a function).
In 1666, Newton also determined π to sixteen places using twenty-two terms of this series:
π= 3√ 3 4 +24
1
12− 1 5·25 − 1
28·27 − 1 72·29 −. . .
Regarding this queer formula, in 1666 he wrote, “I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.”
In 1687, Newton finally published thePhilosophiae naturalis principia mathematica(Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), now called thePrincipiafor brevity. During his writing of thePrincipia, Newton is said to have spent eighteen months in which he often neglected to eat or sleep and in which he sometimes remained motionless for hours lost in thought, never leaving his room. Although Newton had thought about the behavior of moving bodies and gravitation in 1666, his complete mathematical the- ory was set down in these eighteen months of writing. According to Abers and Kennel inMatter in Motion, from Newton’s pen suddenly burst forth
definitions, laws, theorems, the law of universal gravitation, the explanation of Kepler’s three laws, the theory of motion in a vac- uum, the theory of motions in fluids (a forerunner of modern aero- dynamics), the theory of waves in fluids, the study of the tides and of comets, a theory describing the small deviations of the earth’s shape from a perfect sphere, an exact calculation of the precession of the
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equinoxes. . . . Single-handedly, Newton demonstrated that science need not be qualitative, as it was for Aristotle, or mathematically precise only about ideal situations, as it was for Galileo, but that it could describe God’s real universe with great precision.
Book I of the Principia discusses the motions of objects in a vacuum, subject to various forces. In this book, Newton states his three laws of motion. Book II discusses the motion of fluids and the motions of objects in resistive media, discussing, for example, how air resistance slows the fall of a ball as it plummets to Earth. Newton discovered that the faster the ball falls from a great height, the larger the force of air resistance. At some point during the descent of the ball, the force of air resistance balances the force of gravity and the ball stops accelerating. We are lucky to have this effect, which prevents raindrops from hitting our skulls at hundreds of miles per hour even though they have fallen for several miles.
Book III of thePrincipiadiscuses the force of gravity and how a mutual attraction is exerted between any two masses, regardless of their sizes.
In Book III, Newton never explained how gravity propagated between objects. According to Abers and Kennel,
Newton would guess the laws of physics, and then check his guess by proving that the laws explain everything to which they are to apply. Newton’s method does not penetrate to “ultimate” reality:
it merely strives to put the observed phenomena of nature into a logically consistent order.
ThePrincipiaconcludes with a prose hymn to God, because Newton envi- sioned that thePrincipiawas a testament both to science and to God, and as much a contribution to science as to theology.
In his later letters to Minister Bentley, Newton explained why he believed that an intelligent being created the cosmos. Newton marveled at the fact that most of the objects that orbit the Sun are contained with an “ecliptic” plane. Most planets are contained in the same plane as Earth’s orbital plane, offset by just a few degrees. He reasoned that natural processes could not create such behavior. This, he argued, was evidence of design by a benevolent and artistic creator. Today, scientists believe that the formation process of the Solar System naturally produced a disk of material out of which formed the Sun and the planets.
Newton also suggested that God was responsible for giving the planets their initial velocities in orbit, without which the planets would have fallen into the Sun. What else could have given the planets just the right push to ensure that they assumed concentric orbits? When he looked at the Solar System and the stars in the sky, he simply saw too much order to neglect 112 | a r c h i m e d e s t o h a w k i n g