The Clockwork Universe

by Edward Dolnick

  295 “Pick a flower on Earth”: Dirac may have had in mind a line from Francis Thompson’s poem “The Mistress of Vision,” where Thompson writes that “thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.” The same thought had moved Edgar Allan Poe to shake his head at the audacity of Newton’s theory of cosmic connectedness. “If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger,” Poe marveled in his essay “Eureka,” “ . . . I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.”

  295 The Principia made its first appearance: Samuel Pepys was president of the Royal Society in 1687, and his name appears on the title page just below Newton’s.

  296 “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 437.

  296 the French astronomer Lagrange declared: Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture, p. 209.

  296 It began paying Halley: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 453.

  Chapter 50. Only Three People

  297 “There goes the man that writt a book”: Ibid., p. 468.

  297 The first print run was tiny: Ackroyd, Newton, p. 89.

  297 “It is doubtful,” wrote the historian: Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity, p. 140.

  297 Perhaps half a dozen scientists: Hall, Philosophers at War, p. 52.

  298 “A Book for 12 Wise Men”: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” New York Times, November 9, 1919, p. 17. See http://tinyurl.com/ygpam73.

  298 “I’m trying to think who”: Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1998), p. 85.

  298 But he rarely mentions calculus: I. Bernard Cohen discusses in detail Newton’s use of calculus in the “Introduction” to his translation of the Principia, pp. 122–27.

  298 “Newton’s geometry seems to shriek”: Roche, “Newton’s Principia,” in Fauvel et al., eds., Let Newton Be!, p. 50.

  299 “By the help of the new Analysis”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 424.

  299 “There is no letter”: Cohen, “Introduction,” p. 123.

  300 “As we read the Principia”: Chandrasekhar, “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven.”

  Chapter 51. Just Crazy Enough

  301 Molière long ago made fun: Thomas Kuhn famously cited Molière in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 104.

  302 “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy”: Bohr made the remark to Wolfgang Pauli and added, “My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” Dael Wolfle, ed., Symposium on Basic Research (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1959), p. 66.

  302fn In time, this bewilderment: J. J. MacIntosh, “Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God’s Existence,” p. 196.

  303 “He claims that a body attracts”: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 273.

  303 “Mysterious though it was”: John Henry, “Pray do not Ascribe that Notion to me: God and Newton’s Gravity,” in Force and Popkin, eds., The Books of Nature and Scripture, p. 141.

  303 “even if an angel”: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 291.

  304 If the sun suddenly exploded: Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 56.

  305 “so great an absurdity”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 505.

  305 “To tell us that every Species”: From the end of Opticks, quoted in Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, p. 259.

  306 “as if it were a Crime”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 779.

  306 “Ye cause of gravity”: Ibid., p. 505.

  306 “I have not been able to discover”: Cohen’s translation of the Principia, p. 428.

  Chapter 52. In Search of God

  307fn The debate over whether: “Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Change Dispute,” New York Times, November 21, 2009.

  308 “He is eternal and infinite”: Cohen’s translation of the Principia, p. 427.

  309 “Scientists, like whoring Jerusalem”: Dennis Todd, “Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science,” Studies in Philology 75, no. 1 (Winter 1978), p. 113.

  310 “they may do any thing”: Quoted in a brilliant, far-ranging essay by Steven Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings: Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Leibniz-Clarke Disputes,” p. 211.

  311 If you stopped to think about it, wrote Whiston: Todd, “Laputa, the Whore of Babylon, and the Idols of Science,” p. 108.

  311 “Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 778.

  311 “If God does not concern himself”: Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings,” p. 193.

  312 “If a king had a kingdom”: I owe this observation about Leibniz and politics to Martin Tamny, “Newton, Creation, and Perception,” p. 54.

  312 Newton emphasized God’s will: Shapin, “Of Gods and Kings,” p. 194.

  Conclusion

  315 a French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier: Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, pp. 62–63, and Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture, p. 210.

  316 Benjamin Franklin sat deep in thought: Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 71–73.

  316 “The Constitution of the United States”: I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, p. 90.

  317 “I had no need of that hypothesis”: Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture, p. 210.

  317 “Mr. Leibniz is dead”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 779.

  317 “Nothing could give me a greater”: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 285.

  318 “You would have thought it was a felon”: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 306.

  318 “The more I got to know Leibniz”: Ibid., p. 117, quoting Eike Hirsch.

  319 “stone dolls”: Milo Keynes discusses Newton’s views on art and literature in “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” pp. 26–27.

  319 “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons”: from an interview with Huxley in J. W. N. Sullivan, Contemporary Mind (London: Toulmin, 1934), p. 143.

  319 “The more I learned”: I interviewed Westfall in connection with an article marking the three hundredth anniversary of the Principia. See Edward Dolnick, “Sir Isaac Newton,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1987. Westfall used the same “wholly other” phrase in the preface to Never at Rest, p. x, where he discussed Newton’s uniqueness in a bit more detail.

  320 “He cried out with admiration”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 473.

  320 His fellow professors did not know: Ibid., p. 194.

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