The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton

by John Chambers

  Newton says nothing in the Principia about what grim consequences might ensue if the Great Comet crashed into the sun. He was silent on this subject until a day in March 1724, when he privately made statements about the Great Comet, the sun, and the end of the world that were so uncanny and unsettling that we can be forgiven for asking ourselves what strange alchemical fumes the great man must have been inhaling on that late winter day at the very end of his life.

  Perhaps Newton didn’t mean to say what he said on March 7, 1724. Perhaps he let these indiscreet words slip merely because he was an old man and subject to such lapses; Newton had turned eighty-one that past Christmas Day. But he was still vigorous: he had all his teeth, his eyesight was undimmed, and later that year he would catch Edmund Halley out in a mathematical error the younger man made while correcting the third edition of the Principia. And Newton was still president of the Royal Society and master of the London Mint.

  Perhaps he let his guard down simply because of the physical comforts he now enjoyed: his own large luxurious house in an upscale district of London, with its large soft armchairs upholstered in scarlet, the sitting in of which would deprive anyone of all resistance, and a fire blazing in a fireplace whose steady heat could easily lull the most alert into a state of torpor.

  Perhaps what disarmed him that day was the loving presence of all that he could call his family in London. That afternoon his step-nephew-in-law, John Conduitt, wealthy, newly elected to Parliament, had come around to see how he was faring in the aftermath of a lengthy attack of the gout. And there may have hovered, behind Newton’s arm-chair, a radiant forty-four-year-old woman to whom all the clichés applied: the beautiful, brilliant, and witty Catherine Barton Conduitt, Newton’s niece by his half-sister Hannah Smith and John Conduitt’s wife of seven years.

  This statuesque, worldly woman was the only one in Newton’s family to begin to match him in talent. For twenty years she had lived on and off under her stepuncle’s roof. “La Bartica,” as the magnificoes called her, had been the toast of London society; great men exchanged witticisms with her, found her irresistible, fell in love with her—were rebuffed by her (though not all of them) with exquisite grace. The French mathematician Rémond de Montmort, visiting London for induction into the Royal Society, met her and afterward wrote, “I am deeply stirred by the honor she does me in remembering me. I have preserved the most magnificent memory of her wit and beauty.”48

  A rumor still circulated in London that Catherine had been secretly married to the powerful Whig politician Charles Montague, First Earl of Halifax, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and patron to Isaac Newton—secretly married and, though it seemed unbelievable, with the passive connivance of the prim and puritanical Newton. The rumor persisted because the public knew that Montague, when he died in 1715, had left her £25,000 ($2 million today), a park, a palace, a mansion, and his jewelry.

  That was all in the past now. This afternoon, as Isaac Newton unexpectedly turned the conversation to the subject of the Great Comet of 1680, Catherine Barton Conduitt pricked up her ears, and not only because she was fascinated by astronomy. One of her great friends, when she was the on-again, off-again mistress of a literary salon in her uncle’s house and others, had been the great satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift hated science and feared its effects on humankind. Not infrequently he had spoken to her derisively about the obsession of scientists with remote and unknowable objects, like the sun and comets. He’d sworn to her that one day he would steal a paragraph on the Great Comet out of her uncle’s Principia and lampoon it—but gently, for her sake.

  And so Catherine listened intently as Newton remarked soberly to her husband that, “after a certain number of revolutions, a comet, by coming nearer and nearer to the sun, has all its volatile parts condensed and becomes material ready to be drawn into the sun, which has become needy of replenishment because of the constant heat and light that it emits. The comet will be drawn in like this—” He bent forward suddenly and tossed a fagot into the fire. It blazed up with a roar as he continued, “The Great Comet of 1680 has perhaps five or six revolutions left in it. Its size is such, and its temperature will be such, and it will be moving so swiftly, that when it strikes the sun the sun will blaze up just as this fire has done.”

  He paused, then went on: “And that will so much increase the heat of the sun, that this earth will be burnt, and no animals on it will live. And so sooner or later that will probably be the effect of the Comet of 1680. And perhaps sooner—in 500 years—the next time the comet approaches the sun.”49

  Catherine, beguiled and alarmed and amused, remembered that Jonathan Swift had told her that one day, in a great satiric work, he would pack all the scientists in the world into a floating city where, cut off from normal conversation, they could talk fearfully and exclusively about the sun and sunspots and comets and the upcoming horrible end of the world. Catherine, with her own irrepressible urge to mock, understood why her brilliant friend would want to do this, and she understood all the more when her uncle now observed, with an unnerving sobriety, that there were already “marks of ruin” on the Earth’s surface that could not be explained by Noah’s Flood and that this implied that the Earth’s surface had been incinerated once before.

  Catherine knew that, perhaps at that very moment, a thousand miles away in Dublin, Jonathan Swift was putting the finishing touches to book three of his great lampoon Gulliver’s Travels, in which—as he had told her only a month before, in the correspondence they maintained—he had finally created that floating city, and called it Laputa, and filled it with all those scientists in the world who were so blinded by the sun and other celestial bodies that when they met an acquaintance in the morning the first question they asked was about, not the friend’s, but the sun’s health, whether it looked well at its rising and setting, and what were their chances of avoiding the stroke of an approaching comet.50

  Now her husband was calmly asking her uncle how, given that such a catastrophe would not possibly leave survivors—how could the Earth be repeopled? Isaac Newton seemed not to hear. Then he replied brusquely that that would “require the power of a creator.” He added: “I have always maintained that all of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies are by the direction of the Supreme Being.”

  John Conduitt leaned forward. “But exactly how might the Supreme Being use His powers, given the urgency of a case like this?”

  Isaac Newton replied: “All this might be superintended by superior ‘intelligent beings’ under God’s direction. It may be that God keeps in reserve superior beings, say on a moon of Jupiter, to step in and do what is required in a case like this.”51

  John Conduitt was silent. And Catherine Barton Conduitt, hearing this, found it easy to repress her amazement and her laughter and even to expel from her mind the mocking image of Jonathan Swift. For she had learned not to dismiss a single word her illustrious uncle uttered, even when it was a matter of such extravagant words as she had just now heard.

  So she stored away, under advisement, what Isaac Newton had said about superior beings on a moon of Jupiter. And very quickly the subject changed though the conversation went on, and that evening she and her husband left her uncle’s house with the usual fond good-byes.

  We don’t know what conclusions Catherine Barton Conduitt eventually reached regarding aliens on a satellite of Jupiter prepared to help the world at the time of the ultimate crisis. But we can speculate about the careful thinking that lay behind everything Isaac Newton said, and about how it might have applied in this case: that, given Jupiter’s immense distance from the sun (467 million miles, five times farther from Earth), and its huge size (a diameter of 86,000 miles, four times greater than that of Earth); given that any one of its moons, provided it happened to be on the far side of Jupiter from the sun, would be amply protected from harm in the event of a solar catastrophe—given these circumstances, a Jovian satellite might be spared so that its inhabitants might succor our world. Newton must have concluded t
hat this was the nearest point from which help could come to help the planet Earth in the throes of incineration.

  We might expect God to have positioned Jupiter at its closest approach to Earth at the time of the Great Comet of 1680-triggered eruption of the sun. And, in fact, twenty-six years after Newton’s eerie conversation with John Conduitt, in 1750, when the earthquake predicted by Whiston and others failed to eventuate, there were, writes James Force, “even reports circulating that Newton had himself scientifically predicted the earthquakes on the basis of the close approach of Jupiter.”52

  But, in a letter to London’s Daily Advertiser of March 14, 1750, William Whiston wrote irately that he did not “in the least believe that Sir Isaac Newton foretold any Earthquake; and is sure that Jupiter, at the Beginning of of this Year 1750, was, and is 400,000,000 Miles off the Earth, and so could not possibly have any Influence on Earthquakes here below.”53

  So Newton’s strange comments about Jupiter and the destruction of the world seem to have acquired a life of their own and continued to vibrate up through the temporal ether. Though Whiston got it backward: Newton did not suggest that the planet Jupiter would cause destruction; he essayed, rather, that strange beings from one of its satellites would come to our ailing planet and somehow secure it.*40

  Now that we’ve seen the importance of comets in the scientific and the religious life of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, it’s time to return to Mount Ararat and watch Noah and his family as they make their way down the slopes of the sacred mountain and begin to repopulate the Earth. Before that, though, we’ll take a look at how Newton fought to revise the chronology of the ancient world so that he could better understand just how it was that the post-Flood remnant of mankind grew into the mighty nations of the world.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DECONSTRUCTING TIME

  In the early 1970s, a group of Soviet mathematicians at Moscow State University made an astonishing announcement: All the dates in history are wrong. The recorded history of mankind started no earlier than AD 900, and most historical events took place after AD 1300.

  The leader of this group of time iconoclasts was a professor named A. T. Fomenko. He and his fellow researchers were building on the work of the Russian mathematician and topologist Nicolai Aleksandrovich Morozov (1854–1946), who in 1924 challenged traditional chronology with his book Christ: A History of Human Culture from the Standpoint of the Natural Sciences. Claiming to utilize cutting-edge techniques in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, philology, and geology, Morozov had reworked the chronologies of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and China and come up with the conclusion that no recorded events took place in the ancient world before the third century AD.1

  Fomenko spells out his group’s assertions in a four-volume work, History: Fiction or Science? published between 2005 and 2008. To most of us, these claims seem preposterous, and almost no modern historian takes them seriously (although former world chess champion and Russian opposition leader Gary Kasparov has shown a keen interest). How could all the dates in all the history books be wrong?

  Fomenko says the answer lies in rapacious Western capitalism. He asserts that in the West the facts of history have long been up for sale to the highest bidder. In Europe, “the court historians knew only too well how to please their masters,” who were, to cite one example, “condottieri [mercenary soldier-captain] upstarts who were seeking legitimacy in days of yore in order to become popes, cardinals or to found regal dynasties such as the Medici. They paid exceedingly well for a glorious but fictitious past.”2

  Lambasting European capitalism with a vehemence that threatens to heat up the cold war, Fomenko fulminates that

  The corporations of Petrarch and Dante, Bracciolini and Machiavelli, Giotto, Bernini, Da Vinci and Michelangelo not only created immortal masterpieces [that were] exceedingly well-paid for by Roman popes et al and Medici princes of Florence, but they also mass-produced “ancient” manuscripts, frescoes, statues [that were] very much in demand by wealthy customers from England, France, Germany and Russia. . . . Oxbridge scholars earned their daily bread and butter by cooking very ancient Greek and Roman Empire history, mostly from Italian ingredients.3

  Fomenko’s assault on history may seem to be politically motivated and to derive mainly from conspiracy theory. But it serves to remind us that the dates we learned in school (“1066 and all that”) and thought were set in stone are far more the creation of human desire, error, and malfeasance than we would like to think.

  It was Isaac Newton who by and large devised the tools the Russian mathematicians used to draconically shorten the chronology of the world. When it came to stripping centuries from history, Sir Isaac literally wrote the book: in his landmark work The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published posthumously in 1728, he hacked five hundred years out of the chronology of the ancient world.

  Newton begins his book in about 1100 BC with the “first memory of things in Europe” and goes on to minutely trace the chronologies of the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Medes and Persians up to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia in 334 to 331 BC. There is no chapter on the Israelites, because Newton believed the chronology of the Jews in the Old Testament was without error; in place of a chapter on ancient Israel and Judaea he substitutes a five-page diagram of the Temple of Solomon.

  The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended is one of the strangest books ever written. Newton toiled over it all through the second half of his life and was still working on it when he died; clearly, it was of the greatest importance to him. Newton scholar Richard Westfall, who wrote the definitive biography of Sir Isaac, thought it was one of the most excruciatingly boring books ever written: “A work of colossal tedium, it excited for a brief time the interest and opposition of the handful able to get excited over the date of the Argonauts before it sank into oblivion. It is read today only by the tiniest remnant who for their sins must pass through its purgatory.”4

  The chronologists of France, who happened to see a pirated abridgment of the book twelve years before it was actually published, found it infuriating and pigheaded, because Newton had drastically abbreviated some of the time periods most cherished by French historians. They hurled insults across the Channel at the English mathematical giant; Newton howled back, and this seemingly harmless little volume, which made Richard Westfall numb with boredom, provoked a literary scandal ten years before it was published.*41

  Three centuries later, another Frenchman, Bernard Chazelle,†5 declared that the book must have made many Europeans of a romantic turn of mind happy when it was published, because, in cutting 500 years out of history, Newton brought the mythological lovers Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, future founder of Rome, within thirty-two years of each another. In the Aeneid, Virgil tells the story of their passionate love affair; but traditional chronology had put three hundred years between the two. Chazelle believed that Newton, though no romantic, must have delighted European lovers of romance by (quite unintentionally) proving that Dido and Aeneas lived at virtually the same time—close enough, at any rate, to have had a love affair.5 Possibly; but only a few hundred scholars and clerics read The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended when it was first published.

  In the 1980s, maverick Newton scholar David Castillejo (who later became an actor and drama historian) declared that Newton’s Chronology must be a whole new art form. He explained that on the surface the Chronology is “so thick and boring as to be almost impenetrable” but that, since Newton was a towering genius and “working at the height of his cunning and subtlety” when he began the Chronology, it surely must contain hidden depths of esoteric meaning.6

  Castillejo pointed out mysterious number patterns in the book and linked them to similar patterns in Newton’s writings on alchemy and his interpretation of Saint John’s Revelation. The scholar-actor speculated that the Chronology was a skein of hieroglyphs encoding original information about gravity and an unknown force o
pposing gravity. The trouble was that Newton’s book was such an “incredibly difficult work to decipher that it will probably have to be passed one day through a computer” to yield up its hidden treasure.

  Castillejo begins his discussion of the Chronology by stating that it consists of “lists of names, names, almost nothing but names. Names of princes, names of heroes, names of kings. Names following names, multiplying names, transformed into other names—all intertwined together in a tight mesh.”7

  This gives us fair warning of the thick jungles of weird nomenclature we are about to enter. Newton’s book is like a gigantic telephone directory; it brims over with names of kings, queens, generals, villains, gods, heroes, explorers, and inventors, not connecting them to telephone numbers but locking their lives with specific events in the Bible. Newton’s sentences are as terse and spare as quadratic equations. They avoid adjectives or adverbs at any cost. Sometimes a paragraph springs into being that looks like a simple statement of historical fact but then blossoms out into a description of a crucial turning point in cultural history, such as the invention of music;*42 almost always, Newton cites a breakthrough in technology as the cause of a particular cultural leap forward.

  The reaction of modern-day readers to The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended seems to be a function of how seriously they take it. James Joyce said he wanted the ideal reader with ideal insomnia to devote his life to reading Finnegan’s Wake;8 some believe the Chronology requires the same degree of commitment. Others, though, seem able to immerse themselves in this incredibly rich farrago of ancient history with a certain zestfulness. L. Cress writes: