Conversations With Isaac Newton

by Michael White

  Newton’s breakthrough in alchemy came when he observed materials in his crucible and realized that they were acting under the influence of forces. He could see that some particles were attracted to each other while others were repelled by their neighbours without there being any physical contact or tangible link between them. In other words, he observed action-at-a-distance within the alchemist’s crucible. He then began to realize that this might also be how gravity worked, that what he saw happening in the microcosm of the crucible and the alchemist’s fire could perhaps also happen in the macrocosm – the world of planets and suns.

  But there were other occult influences at work. From the mid-1670s, when he was in his early thirties, until the day he died in 1727, Newton was obsessed with religion and spent years studying comparative theology. He believed that the Hermetic philosophers of pre-Christian civilizations possessed a wealth of secret knowledge, which, if interpreted by modern thinkers, could offer clues to explain the most fundamental mechanisms of the universe. He spent many years studying original sources of biblical accounts as well as the works of earlier magi who had been inspired by the Hermetic tradition.

  Newton was a difficult man, who according to contemporaries had very little sense of humour. According to one story, a student who was taught by the Lucasian professor for 18 months saw him laugh only once – when the boy asked him what possible use could be made of Euclid’s mathematics. He was taciturn and relished his own company. From 1661 until he left Cambridge and academia in 1696, he lived the life of a recluse, rarely engaging in college activities and leaving his laboratory only when necessary.

  For more than 20 years, Newton shared rooms with a theologian named John Wickins whom he had met soon after going up to university. Wickins may have acted as Newton’s amanuensis, at least in the early days of their relationship. For the historian and the biographer, he is a frustratingly enigmatic character. He was probably the person who knew Newton the best, but sadly, he left almost no record of their years together and nothing at all concerning their personal relationship. In 1683 Wickins left Cambridge to accept an appointment as a clergyman in a village near Monmouth. It appears that there may have been an acrimonious split, because the two men never spoke to each other again. Mystery surrounds the reason for this fracture and for Wickins’s rather sudden departure.

  Newton clashed at one time or another with almost all of his contemporaries, and there were few he could have called “friends”. Many people were acquainted with Newton and appreciated his amazing talents, but no one really knew him. He was secretive and quick to anger, and he guarded jealously his position as one of the most important scientists of the age.

  Soon after becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society, Newton clashed with Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was then the Curator of Experiments at the Society. He had an even more bitter and longer-lasting feud with another great mathematician of his generation, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), a man sometimes referred to as the “German Newton”. Both men had independently created a system of calculus, but Newton believed that the younger Leibniz had stolen the idea from him. It is perhaps telling that the mathematical notation Newton developed for calculus was rather cumbersome and far less user-friendly than Leibniz’s. There is evidence to show that Newton actually made no attempt to make his method easy to understand and use. He often referred to those he perceived as amateur mathematicians as “smatterers” who should not try to understand the intricacies of the subject. It is probable that he made his version of the calculus deliberately exclusive.

  In 1693 Newton experienced a nervous breakdown. Evidence for this comes from a collection of very odd letters he wrote to colleagues and comments he made to associates. The cause of this short-lived mental illness has never been determined for sure. It has been suggested that he became ill through ingesting too much mercury during his alchemical experiments, or that he simply placed too much of a burden on himself and suffered mental and physical exhaustion.

  Another possibility is that by 1693 he perceived a great flaw in his alchemical explorations. These had been crucial in his elucidation of the theory of universal gravitation, but he had always yearned to discover a theory to describe forces that operated on the atomic scale – a companion theory to his explanation of gravitation. It may finally have dawned on him that he would never achieve his goal of obtaining the Philosophers’ Stone which he believed was essential to an understanding of the structure of the microcosm in the same way that his law of universal gravitation described one of the key aspects of the macrocosmic world.

  Soon after his breakdown, Newton abandoned experimental science altogether. He left Cambridge and became first the warden, then the master, of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. This marked the beginning of an entirely new phase in his life. He remained a private man, but he also started to become something of a social climber and ingratiated himself with the most powerful figures in the country, including the Royal Family. He made a great deal of money from shrewd and sometimes lucky financial dealings and became one of the most respected and powerful figures within the Establishment of the early 18th century. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

  At the Royal Mint, Newton was merciless toward any criminals who tried to steal from the state. He persecuted with obsessive zeal “clippers” (men and women who clipped pieces of gold and silver from coins), and he is said to have attended every hanging of a clipper during his time as master of the Royal Mint, even though it was not a requirement of his job.

  After leaving Cambridge, Newton never returned to alchemy nor to any form of experiment, although his expert scientific opinion was sought by many and he presided over the Royal Society for more than 23 years from 1703 until his death in 1727. In his later years he split his time between administrative duties at the Mint, his role as president of the Royal Society and his very active participation in the whirlwind of London high society. He established friendly relations with many important figures of the day, including Jonathan Swift, Christopher Wren and Edmund Halley.

  Isaac Newton saw eight different monarchs on the throne of England; he lived through the Commonwealth and bore witness to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, after which he served briefly as a Member of Parliament for Cambridge University. When he died, he was given a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey, where an elaborate tomb bears a Latin inscription, which translates as:

  Here lies Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and movements of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the Holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God Almighty, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on December 25th, 1642 and died on March 20th, 1727.

  On the tomb sits a huge marble statue of Newton, and at his feet cherubs play. He leans regally on a pile of four books entitled: “Divinity”, “Chronology”, “Optica” and “Phil Princ. Math”. A similar tome entitled “Alchemy” is conspicuous by its absence.

  Not everyone has appreciated the great work that Isaac Newton produced. He was disliked by a generation of Romantics in the early 19th century, who saw his legacy as a brutish thing, and believed that, somehow, the knowledge Newton provided destroyed the mystique and majesty of the human perception of nature. William Blake and Lord Byron were particularly anti-Newtonian in their outlook.

  Yet it is impossible to overestimate the contribution to human advancement made by Isaac Newton. Einstein said of him: “His clear and wide-ranging ideas will retain their unique significance for all time as the foundation of our whole modern conceptual structure in the sphere of natural philosophy.” But beyond even this, Newton�
��s work is the very cornerstone of modern technology: his work gave substance to the Enlightenment, and a little later, the Industrial Revolution. Without his three laws of motion, the dawn of the technological age would have been delayed considerably and all our lives would be very different.

  Although Einstein refined the ideas of Newton, his special and general theories of relativity are only important in extreme situations, such as when we consider the behaviour of matter travelling at close to the speed of light. For almost all everyday purposes, Newton’s laws created in the 17th century serve us perfectly well, and his theories are as relevant to our lives today as they have ever been. It is a sobering thought that the mathematics used by space engineers to guide spacecraft to the Moon and beyond is entirely Newtonian.

  NOW LET’S START TALKING …

  Over the following pages, Isaac Newton engages in an imaginary conversation covering 14 themes, responding freely to searching questions.

  The questions are in bold type;

  Newton’s answers are in normal type.

  THE WOUNDS OF CHILDHOOD

  Newton never knew his father, and when he was three years old his mother Hannah remarried. For some unknown reason his stepfather, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, did not want his new wife to have any further contact with Isaac. As a result, she was moved to a neighbouring village but did occasionally visit her son while the boy was being raised by his ageing grandparents. This disruptive experience almost certainly damaged Isaac Newton and was influential in making him the person he was.

  Good morning, Sir Isaac, thank you for agreeing to this conversation. There are so many aspects to your extraordinary life, I hardly know where to begin. But perhaps a good place to start might be to ask what it was that made you so combative with your contemporaries?

  I like the word “combative”, young man. I am just that, and I don’t consider it a fault.

  I wasn’t implying it was a fault as such, Sir Isaac. But I can’t help wondering what the root of this could be. Forgive me if you feel I’m being too personal, but it’s well known that you went through a childhood trauma when your mother remarried. Do you think this may have had a dramatic effect on the moulding of your character?

  It is indeed a very personal question, and I find it very difficult to talk of such things, but then I have nothing to hide. My life story is well documented, and as you say, my mother did leave me to grow up with my grandparents. They were very kind to me and gave me their love. And I did still see my mother from time to time. I never blamed her – she did the logical thing by remarrying. What woman in her position could refuse? But I admit I did detest my stepfather, the Reverend Barnabas Smith.

  And do you think this trauma in your childhood influenced your character? For example, you never married. Did you ever contemplate family life?

  No, to be honest, I never did. My mind has been filled with other things. I don’t believe there would have been room in my life for a family, for marriage. I’m very fond of my niece Catherine and she lived with me in London for a time before she married and had a family of her own. There was a girl I liked very much in Woolsthorpe, Catherine Storer, but that relationship came to nothing. I went to Cambridge and soon I was “married” to learning.

  Do you have any regrets about that?

  Not at all. If I had the chance to change the past, I would alter nothing. The pursuit of knowledge has fulfilled me entirely. Besides, I followed my calling. I don’t believe I had any choice in the matter.

  And you did eventually enjoy a more regular relationship with your mother, didn’t you?

  Reverend Smith died in 1653 when I was 11. My mother had three children by the man and then returned with them to the house in Woolsthorpe. I imagine she hoped we would just continue where we had left off, but it was very difficult for me. I did, though, eventually warm to my three half-siblings, and my mother and I forged new bonds. However, my mother was never supportive of my interest in learning. She wanted me to take on the running of our small estate in Woolsthorpe and she did not appreciate the value of education. This created bad feeling between us and I went through a rebellious phase. My mother insisted I leave school and work on the land. Instead, I paid a farm hand to do my chores for me while I escaped to read.

  And later, when you were at university, you maintained a close relationship with your family?

  To an extent. I travelled home to Woolsthorpe when I could. I spent some months there in 1665 during the worst of the plague – Lincolnshire was something of a safe haven, far from the cities where the disease was most rampant. And then, in May 1679, I spent several weeks nursing my mother on her death bed. She had been prescribed some quack medicine by the local doctor. I formulated another treatment, but she died in early June that year. We talked long into the night during her last days, just the two of us alone in the house. We resolved any remaining differences and we made our peace with each other.

  INSPIRATIONS

  Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died, and to many historians of science he is seen as the Italian’s natural heir. Indeed, while exceptionally brilliant people like Newton and Galileo have appeared at different points in history and have precipitated massive shifts in human understanding, they all found inspiration and guidance from their predecessors. Newton was, of course, no exception to this rule, for he built his own models upon a rich heritage of philosophical reasoning – from the work of Archimedes and Aristotle to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo himself.

  So, just to put your work into perspective, where was scientific knowledge around the time you entered Cambridge?

  That’s a very difficult question to answer, but in summary it’s as follows: Galileo had shown that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, but orbited the Sun just like any other planet. Kepler had shown that these orbits were elliptical. Six planets were observable, along with the satellites of Jupiter. Craters had been observed on the Moon. Many of Galileo’s discoveries had dispensed with the ideas of Aristotle, which had percolated down to us as accepted wisdom for two millennia. Galileo had shown there was a force acting on falling objects which drew them to the Earth at a certain speed, but even he had no notion of a law to describe this observation. So I was born into an age ripe for discovery, and with the good fortune to have the foundations laid by some remarkable men who preceded me.

  Actually, that’s what I was going to ask you next. Who are the thinkers of the past who’ve most inspired you?

  There have been many great minds who have each contributed a piece here and a piece there. Human knowledge is like an endless road: one outstanding person lays a stretch of the road, another the next section. Each road builder lays stretches of different sizes.

  But who would you say are the most inspiring of the masters?

  If I were forced to offer an opinion on this, I should have to place Archimedes at the pinnacle of human achievement in pure mathematics and natural philosophy. I would name Galileo Galilei as the most brilliant of recent times.

  Why Archimedes?

  Archimedes was a unique talent. So much is made of Aristotle and his so-called great contributions, but Archimedes outstrips him in every way. Archimedes had an innate, natural, effortless understanding of the way the universe operates, and most crucially, he could interpret this method of operation in the form of pure mathematics. He was like a cipher between God and Man. He could take an observation, such as the way water rises in a tank when an object is immersed in it, and from this create a mathematical law. He created a form of calculus (what he called “the method of exhaustion”) some two thousand years before I was born and he applied it to a range of problems. I can claim to have produced a much more versatile version of this and to have put the concept into a modern mathematical idiom, but Archimedes was the first to even imagine that such a thing as calculus was possible. Archimedes also calculated an accurate approximation to pi. He created a method of determining accurate values for square roots of large integers and an original system
for expressing large numbers. He was probably most famous for what has become known as Archimedes’ Principle, a theorem that allows us to calculate the weight of any body that is immersed in a liquid.

  Do you identify with Archimedes in some ways?

  Actually, I like to think of myself as unique – I don’t really understand the concept of identifying myself with another human being. However, if you’re wondering if I see any comparisons between myself and Archimedes, there are two obvious points of connection. First, Archimedes was multi-talented in that he had a deep appreciation of theory, but he was also a practical man: he was not only a great mathematician, he devised machines to lift heavy weights, he built accurate balances and he even won a prize in Syracuse for a war machine that he’d invented. I too have the ability to work on a practical as well as a theoretical level. Second, Archimedes would often lose himself in his own world of pure intellect. It is said that he met his death at the hands of a soldier from an army invading his homeland. Apparently he was lost in thought, writing geometric shapes in the sand. The soldier had asked him to stop what he was doing and Archimedes had either not heard him or decided to ignore him. I also travel into this almost dreamlike state in which the outside world fades and dissolves, and the single focus of my mind is the thing I’m studying.

  And Galileo?

  Well, everything we think about Galileo is, of course, overshadowed by his trial before the Roman Inquisition. You understand that I abhor the Catholic Church and consider the pope to be the Antichrist, but also as an empirical philosopher I am greatly angered by the destructiveness of the Vatican. If we look at Galileo’s body of work objectively, it is clear that he was far ahead of his time and offered the world an enormous amount.