The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  For several years, William Whiston rode high. He lectured on mathematics and religion; he wrote voluminously; he preached piously; he fathered children (there would be nine in all).

  But the eccentricities of this entirely good man were taking their toll. Whiston was a compulsive talker who could keep nothing to himself and could not tell a lie. Despite the warnings of his friends and even of his enemies, he began to speak out about his adherence to the heretical sect of Anglicanism known as Arianism. In 1710, he was summoned before a board at Cambridge, accused of blasphemy, tried, convicted, and fired.

  Whiston reacted with his usual fortitudinous buoyancy. He moved his family down to London and plunged into a frenetically productive career of teaching, preaching, writing articles and books, and touring the countryside to give talks. He produced a distinguished translation of The Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus the Jewish Historian (1737); his translation is still in print and still widely read.

  Newton had quickly broken with Whiston; perhaps he was afraid Whiston would “out” his own, clandestine, Arianism. The great mathematician’s antagonism hardened; in 1716, he blocked Whiston from membership in the Royal Society. The relationship deteriorated to the extent that Whiston would ultimately write (although he waited until after his mentor’s death) perhaps the most damaging, if accurate, critique of Newton’s The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended ever to be published.

  The Scientific Revolution was chewing up the scenery, and the Age of Enlightenment was waiting in the wings. Whiston’s A New Theory was looking more and more like a huge, gorgeous sandcastle that is crumbling on the beach as a whole new tide comes up around it. Whiston became an increasingly isolated figure, a one-man School of Unified Theology and Science heroically striving to hold the sacred and the scientific together. A letter of recommendation written for him in 1714 cautioned prospective employers to “be pleas’d to conjure him Silence upon all Topicks foreign to the Mathematick in his Lectures at the Coffee-house. He has an Itch to be venting his Notions about Baptism & the Arian Doctrine.”39 Believing God would call the Jews back to Jerusalem no later than 1766, Whiston tried to locate the lost tribes of Israel himself. He regularly toured seaside spas with scale models of the Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon to back up his talks on the imminent conversion of the Jews.

  Whiston’s eccentricities were never more strongly in evidence, nor his earliest beliefs ever more stubbornly held, than when he preached to the people of London on the subject of two minor earthquakes that had occurred on February 8 and March 8, 1750. He thundered from coffeehouses that these tremors were God’s wrath, evoked by the sin and folly of mankind, and that on account of the “horrid Wickedness of the Present Age” a far more devastating earthquake was in the making for April 8. It could be averted only if mankind instantly changed its ways. Whiston trumpeted to one and all that these earthquakes had been predicted in Isaiah 5:18–20; 2 Esdras 9:3; and Revelation 11:13.

  The eccentric, leonine seer, now a very old man, still knew how to roar. His warnings were heeded. On April 7, 100,000 Londoners took refuge in Hyde Park as 730 packed coaches rattled past on the way to safety in the countryside. But nothing happened on April 8. Others, of lesser ability, had predicted the disaster; a wrathful public saw to it that one was incarcerated in an insane asylum. Whiston escaped with only a storm of ridicule and a lampooning in a pamphlet.40

  It didn’t bother him; he was used to it. William Whiston died two years later, aged eighty-four—ridiculed, venerated, scoffed at, and beloved. His books were still selling well. Whiston’s superb translation of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews still sells well today; his New Theory of the Earth stands out as a little-known monument to the splendor and misery of a humankind that, because of its insecurities, must cling to its old beliefs even as it is brilliantly transcending them.

  Edmund Halley, the great English astronomer who is renowned today for having predicted the year of the return of the comet that bears his name, in 1692 tried and failed to obtain the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University.

  It was long thought that Halley’s suspected atheism was the reason he didn’t get the job; after all, hadn’t Halley, in the course of the interviews, made a number of cavalier and even provocative remarks about Christianity, such as that “he believed [in] a God and that was all,” and, “I declare myself a Christian and hope to be treated as such”?

  It has become clear only in the past few years that Halley failed to get the job not because of his religious beliefs or lack of them, but simply on a technicality; he had received his M.A. from Oxford not because he’d done the traditional course work (the completion of which was essential if you wanted to work there), but because of an achievement of his own.

  Halley was a college dropout centuries before there were many college dropouts at all. He left Oxford at the age of twenty to sail to the island of St. Helena in the South Pacific (where Napoleon would later be imprisoned) in time to observe the 1676 transit of Mercury across the sun. During his fifteen-month stay, he set up an observatory and mapped the southern skies; not long after his return to Oxford he published an atlas of 341 stars of the Southern Hemisphere. This remarkable achievement earned him an M.A. from Oxford, but in 1691 he learned that to become a professor at Oxford you needed to have taken the degree in the ordinary way. (However, eleven years later, in 1703, when it had become impossible to ignore Halley’s extraordinary accomplishments, he was named Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford.)

  It has also recently emerged that, contrary to what historians thought for three centuries, Halley didn’t believe that the world was eternal, which belief would have put him not on the side of those who fought, like Newton and Whiston, to reconcile Newtonian science and biblical scripture, but in the camp of those who contributed to the destabilization of that relationship. Halley even seemed to believe in the truth of the Mosaic account of Creation, adding, however, an important qualification: the first five days of creation weren’t just five years long; they were extremely long, providing time for what would come to be called geological epochs. In a paper on the salinity of the oceans, Halley wrote that

  ’tis no where revealed in Scripture how long the Earth had existed before this last Creation, nor how long those five Days that preceded it may be to be accounted; since we are elsewhere told, that in respect to the Almighty a thousand Years is as one Day, being Equally no part of Eternity; Nor can it well be conceived how those Days should be to be understood of natural Days, since they are mentioned as Measures of Time before the Creation of the Sun, which was not till the Fourth Day.41

  So we should not be surprised to learn that, on December 12, 1694—two years before Whiston published his New Theory of the Earth—Halley read a paper titled “About the Cause of the Universal Deluge” to a meeting of the Royal Society. In this paper, Halley put forward a theory of periodic catastrophism, specifically suggesting that the Noachic Flood was caused by a comet and trying to explain the mechanisms involved (see below).

  The son of a wealthy London soap manufacturer, Edmund Halley (1656–1742) was doing professional work in astronomy by the time he was ten. The young Londoner went up to Oxford—and then, as has been explained, made the kind of zigzag turn often ascribed to genius, leaving Oxford, traveling to the South Atlantic, mapping the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, and, because of that achievement, not long after receiving his M.A. from Oxford “by order of the king.”

  Halley was diplomatic, friendly, outgoing, and blessed with a swash-buckling zest for life. While on St. Helena he had strapped a barometer on his back and toiled up a mountainside to measure the relationship between altitude and atmospheric pressure. Back in England, he invented a diving bell and stayed in it sixty feet underwater for five hours. At the king’s behest, he went pub crawling with Peter the Great when the Russian czar visited London. Halley calculated how high bullets can be shot and how much the wind weighs. He wrote the first annuity tables for l
ife-insurance payments. And he learned Arabic so he could translate into Latin and English an ancient text on mathematics whose Greek original had been lost.

  In 1698, captain of the ship this time, he sailed on a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic. En route he had to face down a first mate and quell a mutiny. Halley sailed back to London and brought charges against the officers. In 1699 he once more set sail on the same expedition, voyaging deep into Antarctic waters and mapping both the prevailing ocean winds and variations in the Earth’s magnetic field.*39 Halley was gone for a year on this severely scientific and yet wildly romantic voyage; Voltaire wrote that, compared to this expedition, “the voyage of the Argonauts was but the crossing of a bark from one side of a river to the other.”42

  All of Halley’s scientific brilliance, all of his exquisite tact, all of his keenness for living, were to be put to the test, and over a long time, as the wholly unexpected consequence of a single night’s conversation in London’s Grecian Coffeehouse in January 1684.

  A scrounger of garbage behind the coffeehouse the next morning would have been bewildered to find a pile of crumpled napkins on which were sketched out in coffee grounds the curving lines of planetary orbits. These were the worksheets of a heated conversation, whose brilliance must have made the angels listen rapturously, among Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren, and Robert Hooke. Wren (1632–1723) was an astronomer and mathematician as well as the architect who rebuilt Saint Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London. Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was a hyperactive, volatile genius the number of whose mistresses (including his niece, Grace, a ward) was exceeded only by the number of scientific fields—physics, optics, biology, astronomy, and more—in which he had made a significant advance.

  These three exceptional men accepted, as did their peers, Kepler’s description of the orbital motions of the planets. But they didn’t know, any more than had Kepler, what kept the planets in those orbits. In trying to understand this, Hooke had actually come up with a kind of proto-theory of gravitation. (This was three years before Newton’s Principia Mathematica.) All three were playing with the notion that, if gravity were a fact, then the force of a planet’s attraction toward the sun was reciprocal to the square of its distance from the sun. The question they were asking themselves that evening was: If all that is so, what is the shape of planet’s orbit?

  They scribbled down equations but couldn’t really decide. Wren asked Halley what Isaac Newton, up in Cambridge, might have to say about this? Newton was already famous for his stunning explanation of the nature of light, and he had acquired a reputation for high genius. Before the evening was out it was decided that Halley, the only one of them who had met Newton even once, would put the question to the already-renowned mathematician the next time he was in Cambridge. On that note, the evening ended.

  It was not until August 1684—seven months later—that Halley, on a visit to Cambridge, presented himself at Newton’s lodgings and, after the usual exchange of amenities, put the question to him of the shape of a planet’s orbit.

  Newton answered immediately: “An ellipsis.”

  “How do you know?” asked a surprised Halley.

  “I’ve written a paper about it,” said Newton. He told him he didn’t know where the paper was but would send a copy to Halley as soon as he found it.

  Six months later, at his home in London, Halley received from Newton a nine-page treatise called De Motu (“Of Motion”). The young astronomer read it with growing astonishment. He saw that it was “a step forward in celestial mechanics so immense as to constitute a revolution.”43 Halley rushed back to Cambridge and implored Newton to elaborate on De Motu. The Royal Society, he said, would be honored to publish anything Newton might care to send them on the subject, or on any other.

  Halley returned to his busy life in London. Newton dropped out of sight for two years. All alone, as he had been when he invented calculus and laid the foundations of gravitation theory while on his mother’s farm—all alone, he developed a colossal work that would completely change the way mankind sees the universe.

  All alone—except that Edmund Halley watched from the sidelines and intervened whenever he thought Newton needed help or a push. Newton was preparing the work for publication. The Royal Society would publish it. Halley was the editor. With great tact and diplomacy he pushed, prompted, probed, pleaded with, cajoled, and outrageously flattered Newton (though this flattery wasn’t really outrageous; it was perfectly justified in light of the magnificent work that Newton was producing). In 1686, the first volume was completed. While it was in the press Newton completed the second and then the final volume. Halley edited every word and supervised the printer (and paid all the expenses). In 1687, the Principia Mathematica appeared, delighting, astounding, and confounding (it was very hard to read) the scientific universe.

  Would there have been a Principia without Edmund Halley? The jury is still out. (See chapter 18, “Son of Archimedes.”) Richard Westfall writes: “Halley did not extract the Principia from a reluctant Newton. He merely raised a question at a time when Newton was receptive to it. It grasped Newton as nothing had before, and he was powerless in its grip.”44

  One of the last sections Newton completed was on comets and their periodicities. Poring over Newton’s groundbreaking text, Halley became fascinated by comets. He had seen the Great Comet of 1680 when, aged twenty-four, he was galloping on horseback to Calais from Paris on a night filled with stars; perhaps, as he looked up at the sky, the still-fresh memories of his amorous conquests on the Continent made the comet seem even brighter than it was. Halley was equally impressed by the mysterious comet that streaked across the sky in 1682—at about the same time, as it happened, that Halley married Mary Tooke, who would bear him three children; here too we can speculate that the gleam in the sky might have been accentuated by the gleam in Halley’s eye.

  This comet of 1682 traveled in the opposite direction from most other comets. So Halley did not forget it as, working hard on the Principia with Newton, his attention was taken up with Newton’s work on the Great Comet of 1680. Once the Principia was published, Halley began to to ruminate again on the odd, backward-moving comet he’d observed in 1682. He learned of three other backward-traveling comets, those seen by Peter Apion, in Ingoldstadt, Germany, in 1531 and by Johannes Kepler and Danish astronomer Christian Longomontanus in 1607. Halley theorized that the comet of 1682, and these three comets, might be the same. It seemed that the periodicity of this one comet was seventy-six years. Halley set about to demonstrate this mathematically. Newton had demonstrated in the Principia that gravity was a property of every celestial body in the universe, huge or small. This meant that the comet of 1682 as it sped along had to thread its way through an invisible jungle of interweaving gravitational fields, not only those of Jupiter and perhaps Saturn but also those of their satellites, of nearby asteroids, and of any celestial object within tens of millions of miles. On top of that, each gravitational field interacted with all the others. Only in 1707 did Halley emerge from beneath his tremendous pile of calculations to publish mathematical proof that the periodicity of the comet of 1682 was indeed seventy-six years. He predicted the comet would return to Earth’s skies in 1758.

  In the paper on comets and the Flood that he read at the Royal Society in 1694, Halley scarcely mentioned God at all. He was nervous about this, given his reputation for being contemptuous of religion, and asked that the Royal Society not publish his talk; the paper didn’t appear in the society’s Philosophical Transactions until 1723.

  Researching years of rainfall records in an English county, he decided it couldn’t rain enough in forty days and nights (presumably from a comet’s tail) to cover the Earth’s surface entirely. Halley thought the gravitational pull of a comet passing nearby could have made the Earth wobble on its axis, so much so that the oceans would slosh up over the continents. This would have constituted a global flood—in fact, a Noah’s Deluge. When the oceans flowed back to their original
places, they left bodies of water in the larger land cavities, creating, for example, the Caspian Sea.45

  Halley thus became the first scientist to hypothesize that comets and meteorites (at the time thought to be the same) had impacted the Earth throughout the ages and were responsible for many geographical formations.

  On January 14, 1742, Edmund Halley, named Britain’s second Astronomer Royal upon the death of John Flamsteed in 1719 and now eighty-five years old, sat behind his desk at Greenwich Observatory, poured himself a tall glass of wine, took a long sip, and expired.

  Sixteen years later, in 1758, the comet of 1682 reappeared in the skies. Jubilant Englishmen named it after Edmund Halley, and, ever since, his name has been inseparably linked to the very idea of a comet.

  It’s likely that Halley died without a prayer on his lips. He had never believed in the sacramental nature of the universe, and he certainly did not feel that it was desperately important, or even important at all, for mankind to hold on to this concept.

  Isaac Newton felt very differently.

  The Great Comet of 1680 never ceased to haunt Newton’s imagination. In the Principia Mathematica, he describes it for us.

  The comet which appeared in the year 1680 was, in its perihelion [closest approach to the sun], less distant from the sun than by a sixth part [144,167 miles] of the sun’s diameter; and because of its extreme velocity in that proximity to the sun, and some density of the sun’s atmosphere, it must have suffered some resistance and retardation; and therefore, being attracted somewhat nearer to the sun in every revolution, will at last fall down upon the body of the sun.46

  Newton observes that in its perihelion the Great Comet must have been 2,000 times hotter than a red-hot iron. If it was the same size as the Earth, and cooled like other terrestrial bodies, it would take 50,000 years to cool down.47 If its periodicity were 575 years, as Newton believed, it would have to circle the sun almost 100 times before its temperature returned to normal—except that its temperature would never return to normal, because each time the comet approached the sun it would become hotter than red-hot again.