The Scientist as Rebel (25 page)

The Yahuda collection gives us an intimate view of Newton’s religious thinking, which was as intense and idiosyncratic as his thinking about alchemy and mathematical physics. He saw clearly that there is no firm basis in scripture for the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity. He was a Unitarian, deducing from the evidence of scripture that God the Father reigns alone. There is one God and not three. Jesus is his son and the Holy Spirit is his mouthpiece, but neither of them is his equal. All through his life, Newton was searching for truth in ancient writings as well as in the study of nature. He considered his Unitarian theology to be as firmly based as his mathematical physics.

But there was a practical difference between physics and theology. He was free to say whatever he liked about physics, but not about theology. Cambridge University and Trinity College were religious foundations with strict standards of orthodoxy. Newton could not have held his positions as professor at the university and fellow of the college if his heretical views had been publicly known. Fortunately, King Charles II, a man of liberal temperament, signed a special dispensation that excused Newton from the usual rule that university professors must be priests of the Anglican Church. To become a priest, Newton would have had to affirm his belief in the orthodox Trinitarian doctrine of the Church, and this he could never have done. In effect, the King was adopting a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Newton carried out his side of the bargain by keeping his theological writings hidden in the big metal box.

Gleick describes Newton’s theology in an excellent short chapter with the title “Heresy, Blasphemy, Idolatry,” but he does not share Newton’s enthusiasm for the fine points of biblical scholarship. He quotes with approval Westfall’s judgment that
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended
, a book written by Newton in his old age and published after his death, is “a work of colossal tedium.” Anyone who would like a more sympathetic and more detailed account of Newton’s religious studies, based on the Yahuda papers in Jerusalem, should read the book
The Religion of Isaac Newton
by Frank Manuel.
⁴
Manuel’s book is, so far as I know, the only important work about Newton that does not appear in Gleick’s bibliography.

For several years after the publication of the
Principia
in 1687, Newton was deeply involved in national politics. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was a turning point in English constitutional history, as important for England as the revolution of 1776 was for America. In 1688 the country rose in rebellion against King James II, who stood for the divine right of kings, and drove him into exile. King William III was invited to come over from Holland to take his place. The essential part of the deal was that William would be a constitutional monarch, subject to the law of the land as determined by the English Parliament.

When James II provoked the constitutional crisis of 1687, Newton was a member of Parliament representing Cambridge University. The independence of the university was directly threatened by the King, who took action to remove Protestants and install Catholics in the university administration. Newton took a firm line against the King. “Be courageous therefore and steady to the laws,” he wrote in a memorandum to the university. “If one P[apist] be a Master you may have a hundred.… An honest Courage in these matters will secure
all, having Law on our sides.” After successfully resisting King James, Newton urged the university to accept allegiance to King William so long as King William upheld the law of the land. In a letter to a friend in 1689, Newton described the agreement that the leaders of the university had accepted. In this letter he expressed, with his usual clarity, the fundamental principles of constitutional government:

Sarah Jones Nelson, a colleague of mine in Princeton, recently discovered in the archives of Magdalen College, Oxford, another document either in Newton’s hand or in that of a scribe (who was hired for the purpose of working quickly). It was put into the archive by the philologist R. W. Chapman, who had bought it in the auction at Sotheby’s in 1936, but nobody else seems to have been aware of its existence. Internal evidence shows that it was written in 1687 or 1688. It outlines the legal case against King James II, and also suggests the relationships between scientific knowledge, law, and morality.

It appears that at that time Newton was searching for a common foundation for physical law and moral law, seeing both kinds of law as manifestations of the same divine wisdom. While he was attending the sessions of Parliament in London, he met the philosopher John Locke, the great protagonist of government by consent of the governed. Locke shared his interests, in theology as well as in politics. He was, like Newton, a closet Unitarian. In a letter to another friend, Locke remarks, “Mr. Newton is really a very valuable man, not only
for his wonderful skill in mathematics, but in divinity too, and his great knowledge in the Scriptures, wherein I know few his equals.” According to Sarah Jones Nelson, the Magdalen manuscript contains ideas concerning the moral and legal theory of civil disobedience, which reappear in Locke’s
Second Treatise of Government
. Locke’s treatise, which was published in 1690, is one of the classic texts of constitutional law. Here we see that the man who became, in Keynes’s words, “Sage and Monarch of the Age of Reason … the eighteenth-century Sir Isaac, so remote from the child magician born in the first half of the seventeenth century,” was also one of the architects of our civil liberties. And for Newton, the struggle for political freedom was never separated from the struggle for a true understanding of God.

The best and most original part of Gleick’s book is the description of the young Newton in his first five chapters. Gleick’s account is based on a detailed study of the manuscript notebooks that Newton kept as a student in Cambridge, recording his many false starts and digressions as he groped his way toward an understanding of the laws of nature. In these notebooks we see him, not yet possessing words to express the concepts such as force and momentum that would allow him to formulate the laws precisely, and not yet possessing the mathematical tools of differential and integral calculus that would allow him to deduce the consequences of the laws. To reach his fundamental insight that the laws of nature can be expressed as differential equations, he had to simultaneously guess the laws and invent the mathematical language of calculus in which to express them. The notebooks record his successes and failures as they happened, not reinterpreted in the light of later discoveries.

It is lucky for us that Newton was working alone, without friends or collaborators, sharing his intellectual adventures with nobody. Instead of telling his thoughts to friends, he told them to his notebooks. In the notebooks we see the slow dawning of his understanding, and then the rapid succession of discoveries leading up to the
breakthrough of 1665 and 1666, the plague years, when Newton left Cambridge to escape the plague and stayed at his home in Woolsthorpe. At Woolsthorpe, at the age of twenty-four, he put together the pieces and assembled his new vision of the universe. The story of these five years, from Newton’s arrival at Cambridge as a student in 1661 to his solitary triumph at Woolsthorpe in 1666, is told more clearly by Gleick than by Westfall. Gleick has gone back to the original notebooks and brought them to life.

In 1667 Newton became a fellow of Trinity College and resumed his solitary existence in Cambridge. He bought apparatus and materials for the alchemical experiments that occupied much of his time for the next twenty years. He spoke to nobody about his alchemical studies, and to almost nobody about his discoveries in physics. For him, alchemy and physics and theology were parts of a single enterprise, three aspects of a single search for knowledge that God had placed within his grasp. Since he was not free to talk about his theology, he saw no reason why he should talk about his alchemy or his physics. He might never have talked about his physics, if his friend Halley had not come to Cambridge in 1684 begging him to publish what he knew. Then, once he had started writing down his physical discoveries in logical sequence, he did not stop until he had finished the three volumes of the
Principia
.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the birth of modern science had been proclaimed by two great philosophers, Francis Bacon in England and René Descartes in France. Bacon and Descartes had very different visions of how science should be pursued. According to Bacon, scientists should experiment freely and collect facts about everything in the world, until in due time the accumulation of facts would make clear the way nature behaves. From the storehouse of accumulated facts, scientists would induce the laws of nature. According to Descartes, scientists should deduce the laws of nature by pure reason, starting from the axioms of mathematics and our
knowledge of the existence of God. Experiments needed to be done only to verify that the logical deduction of the laws of nature was correct. During the seventeenth century, science in England tended to follow the Baconian path, with the Royal Society in London collecting facts about everything from two-headed calves to rainstorms of frogs and fish. Science in France followed the Cartesian path, and was dominated by Descartes’s theory of vortices. The Cartesian vortices were supposed to fill space on Earth and in the heavens, pushing celestial objects along their orbits in the sky. At the time when Newton made his discoveries, the learned men of England were mostly doing science in the empirical style of Bacon, but most of them believed in the Cartesian theory of vortices because it was the only theory available.

Newton himself was at heart a Cartesian, reaching his insights into the nature of things by pure thought as Descartes intended. When he came to write the
Principia
, he wrote it in Cartesian style, stating his conclusions in the form of propositions and theorems, and using the methods of pure geometry to prove them. But unlike Descartes, he was himself an experimenter and understood the importance of precise experiments for testing theories. So, in the
Principia
, he brilliantly succeeded in using the Cartesian method to demolish the Cartesian theory. In the first two volumes he built a grand edifice of mathematics, more coherent than anything Descartes had to offer, and then in the third volume he delivered the coup de grâce, demonstrating with an abundance of observational facts that nature danced to his tune. As soon as the
Principia
was published and widely circulated, the Cartesian vortices were dead.

Newton was a skillful fighter and always played to win. He enjoyed his victories over Descartes and King James. He also enjoyed victories over Robert Hooke, who claimed to have anticipated him in the discovery of the law of universal gravitation, and over Gottfried Leibniz, who claimed to have anticipated him in the discovery of calculus. As Master of the Mint, he zealously prosecuted counterfeiters
of the coinage, rejected their pleas for clemency, and made sure they were hanged. He went out of his way not only to defeat his opponents but to crush and humiliate them. I imagine him now, wherever he may be in the spiritual realms of heaven or hell, enjoying his final victory over Lord Lymington. Lord Lymington attempted to profit at Newton’s expense, scattering his papers to the winds for a paltry £9,000. The final result of Lord Lymington’s impiety is that he is remembered as a Judas who betrayed his master, while Newton’s papers are preserved and studied by a multitude of scholars as never before.

In response to this review, I received a number of informative letters from Newton scholars who know more about Newton than I do. I have corrected the review where they found mistakes. Robert Iliffe, director of the Newton Manuscript Project at Imperial College in London, informs me that the Babson papers are now on a semi-permanent loan to the Dibner Institute at
MIT
, where they are conveniently accessible. I am grateful to Sarah Jones Nelson for showing me the manuscript “Magdalen
MW
432” which she discovered in the Magdalen College archives in Oxford. She published a brief description of the manuscript in the
Magdalen College Record
, 2001, pages 102–104.

TODAY THE NAME
of Albert Einstein is known to almost everybody, the name of Henri Poincaré to almost nobody. A hundred years ago the opposite was true. Then, Einstein was a newly appointed technical expert, third class, examining patent applications in the Swiss patent office in Bern, having failed in his efforts to find an academic job, while Poincaré was one of the leading figures of the French scientific establishment, famous not only as a great scientist but as the author of popular books that were translated into many languages and kept the public informed about the dramatic progress of science during the early years of the twentieth century. In 1903, Einstein and Poincaré were both working hard at one of the central problems of science, trying to find a correct theory to describe how fast particles behave in electric and magnetic fields. Poincaré had published several papers on the subject which Einstein may or may not have read. Einstein had published nothing.