The eventual pull, like gravity, of Newton’s ideas
Isaac NEWTON almost always appeared near the top of the “stars of the millennium” lists of the late 1990s -- the embodiment of the often-incomprehensible world of science that helped create the modern age. His discovery of the laws of gravity and motion is recalled whenever an astronaut goes into orbit, and although 20th century scientific achievements may have superseded many of his insights, the renown of the “Principia,” the 1687 masterpiece that capped the advances in physics and astronomy of the previous 150 years, ensures Newton’s place at the highest level in the pantheon of human achievement.
But how did Newton get there? What induced poet Alexander Pope to claim that nature’s laws had been hid in night until God said, “Let Newton be” and all was light? This is the basic question that “The Newtonian Moment,” which accompanies and expands upon a New York Public Library exhibition (open through Feb. 6), seeks to answer. The author and curator, Mordechai Feingold, makes it clear that despite the retrospective reverence for the “Principia,” Newton’s work faced three formidable obstacles before it could reign supreme in European thought.
The first was the incomprehensibility of the “Principia.” Not only was it the last major scientific treatise to be written in Latin -- a help to scholars, though not to a wider public -- but its exposition was also deliberately difficult. Newton said he wanted to put off mere “smatterers” in mathematics and offered neither an explanation of gravity nor an overall metaphysical scheme to give context to his findings. The second was the antagonism of the followers of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German scientist with whom Newton had a nasty fight when both men claimed to have invented calculus. The third was the hostility of the disciples of French scientist Rene Descartes, who were influential in much of Europe and resented Newton’s dismissal of the Cartesian deductive approach to truth with the famous phrase “hypotheses non fingo” -- “I do not posit hypotheses.” Induction, observation and experiment were to be the new watchwords of the scientist; not surprisingly, the adherents of deduction and the power of clear thought resisted the rise of this alternative view of the scientist’s metier.
Competition never troubled Newton. Feingold punctures the myth of the reclusive genius and shows him enjoying his tussles with rivals, as when he deflated Robert Hooke’s claims to have understood gravity by pointing to the latter’s inadequate command of mathematics. Polemic could even make him cruel: His famous comment, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” was addressed to the hunchbacked Hooke. But eventually, a major propaganda effort by his friend Edmund Halley; Newton’s arguments with Leibniz and the Cartesians; and ingenious illustrations, instruments and popular distillations of his work that made his discoveries accessible to a broad audience swept doubters aside. Newton’s revelations about the nature of light, demonstrated with prisms in his 1704 book “Opticks,” added to his reputation. But not until the French philosopher Voltaire took up the cause after his two-year stay in England in the late 1720s did the slow diffusion of Newtonian ideas finally accelerate into idolization by the mid-18th century.
Feingold shows how this process unfolded through stories about supporters and opponents; books by Newton, his popularizers and his antagonists; and the many manuscripts, instruments, engravings, paintings and diagrams that illuminate the reaction of contemporaries and successors to the issues raised by the “Principia” and “Opticks.” An etching published in 1728, the year after Newton’s death, for instance, shows the ingenious instruments that were designed to demonstrate the new laws of motion: A pendulum in a bathtub full of water measures the effects of resistance/friction, and an elongated pyramid resembling an enormous metronome, with two weights hanging from the top, calculates the effects of two bodies colliding.
His acolytes included even the Jesuits, who depicted Newton in the stunning decorations of the Klementinum, their college in Prague, despite the admiration he inspired among the anti-religious materialist thinkers of the Enlightenment. Luckily for him, the Jesuits never knew about the anti-Trinitarian beliefs and the dabbling in prophecy, numerology and alchemy that Newton kept to himself. Yet the triumph of the Newtonian vision did not prevent new doubts arising during the age of Romanticism. Thus poet William Blake could both admire the ingenuity and denounce the spiritual emptiness of a mechanical cosmos, an ambivalence about the achievements of science that has intensified in our day.
Within Feingold’s array of images and ideas describing these shifts, two sections are especially appealing. A segment on science for children includes a charming publication by “Tom Telescope” of Newtonian ideas that are “Adapted to the Capacities of young Gentlemen and Ladies.” Presented as a series of lectures read to “the Lilliputian Society,” with a frontispiece of a boy demonstrating inertia with a spinning top and elegant illustrations of such phenomena as eclipses, this book reflects the broad appeal that Newton’s fame brought to science.
More significant -- and lavishly documented here -- were the “Newtonian Women.” As Feingold shows, the struggle of Cartesians and Leibnizians against Newtonians extended to the increasingly sophisticated “salonieres,” readers, muses, teachers and scientists such as professor Laura Bassi of the University of Bologna. Despite male resentment -- before meeting the learned science lecturer Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a fearful Frenchman complained, “She knows too much for me,” though he finally admitted, “I have never heard anything that gave me greater pleasure” -- a series of female lecturers, patrons and literati proved to be significant advocates, once won over, for Newtonian ideas. Perhaps the most famous, the Marquise du Chatelet, a friend of Voltaire, not only published her own treatise on physics but also translated the “Principia” into French.
Thus Newton’s ultimate ascendancy is not a story of irresistible victory but a colorful saga of national prejudice, simple jealousy, ingenious technology and intellectual debate. Feingold’s lucid and cogent account proves that even where one of its chief heroes is concerned, science involves far more than a disinterested pursuit of certainty and truth. *
