The Books: Isaac Newton, by James Gleick

Daily Book Excerpt: Biography

Next biography on the biography shelf is Isaac Newton, by James Gleick

Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

— William Wordsworth

— William Blake’s “Isaac Newton”, 1795

One of the reader reviews on Amazon page says, “I found myself reading this book as I walked to the busstop – it was that good.” I experienced the same thing. I read it everywhere. On the bus, waiting in line, sitting in the movie theatre waiting for the previews to start. I enjoyed it so much that I slowed down my reading pace for the last 20 pages because I didn’t want the book to end. It’s a short little book, too. Vast in scope but short in length.

This book doesn’t really dwell on Newton’s personal life (perhaps because he barely had one). It briefly mentions his mental collapse near the end of his life, an event that people are still arguing about. It mentions his problems with maintaining celibacy and the diary entries he wrote about his dreams of “woemen”, etc. But it’s mainly a scientific biography. It focuses on Newton the scientist and the surrounding Scientific Revolution that was going on at that time. There are long descriptions of his arguments with other scientists – Leibniz, primarly, but also Robert Hooke. I found it so interesting how Newton pretty much hid in plain sight. There he was, a semi-public figure, sitting on all of this information, on the calculus … and there are excerpts from letters from scientists begging him to divulge, publish, let them in, stop being so secretive.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this book (and what I enjoy about biographies, in general) is the amount of first-hand textual information that is included. We get his letters, his papers, how HE described things (oh, and the endnotes are indispensable: Gleick elaborates on his points in the text in the endnotes, we get fuller quotes from Newton’s letters, to give context – we get diary entries from Samuel Pepys. The endnotes are fantastic – almost like other additional chapters).

A couple things I found enormously fascinating:

— Newton’s thing with the color crimson. Gleick doesn’t dwell on it like other more Freudian biographers do, but still, it’s a fact that cannot be denied. Richard deVillamil wrote in 1931 (he had analyzed the inventory of Newton’s house at the time of Newton’s death): “crimson mohairs nearly everywhere. Newton’s own bed was a ‘crimson mohair bed,’ with ‘crimson Harrateen’ bed-curtains” … There is no other colour referred to in the “Inventary” but crimson. This living in what I may call an ‘atmosphere of crimson’ is probably one of the reasons why Newton became rather irritable toward the end of his life.” An entirely red room. Fascinating! Redrum!

— the descriptions of Newton’s long solitary years of standing in his room (not sitting), calculating, experimenting, scribbling

— the whole alchemy subplot. I have this image of Newton hovering over these boiling smelting pots. Alchemy is so discredited now, there are those who don’t want to deal with just how deeply into it Newton was.

— his heretical ruminations on scripture, documents that were kept secret for centuries

— also the sense (described very well in the book) of how much was not known at that time, and how Newton changed everything, a total paradigm shift in understanding

I loved the stories about the first scientific journal published by the Royal Society, and how scientists from all over Europe would send in accounts of their experiments. Measuring the tides in a certain town in Norway. A thirst for knowledge. An explosion of interest and energy, but so much still not known, the pieces of the puzzle not put together. It’s so validating: the human mind – the curious inquisitive courageous human mind.

Excerpt from the book:

Of the Principia itself, fewer than a thousand copies had been printed. These were almost impossible to find on the Continent, but anonymous reviews appeared in three young journals in the spring and summer of 1688, and the book’s reputation spread. When the Marquis de l’Hopital wondered why no one knew what shape let an object pass through a fluid with the least resistance, the Scottish mathematician John Arbuthnot told him that this, too, was answered in Newton’s masterwork: “He cried out with admiration Good god what a fund of knowledge there is in that book? … Does he eat & drink & sleep? Is he like other men?”

Here’s an anecdote. I was reading the book in a bar. I was going to a movie across the street and had an hour to kill. I sat at the bar and read this book and had a drink. The bartender was a big rough guy with a pockmarked face and a long ponytail. He noticed what I was reading. He didn’t mention it, or ask to see what I was reading, but he obviously took note of the title, and suddenly started listing names at me in a thick Bronx accent: “Copernicus. Kepler. Galileo. Einstein. Newton. You know. These guys are like the smartest guys who have ever lived. Right? Want another beer?” I just wanted to hug him. Hearing “Copernicus. Kepler. Galileo” in a dark Irish pub. Hysterical.

I don’t have a science background, obviously, but I love biographies of scientists and have many on my shelves. They’re one of my pet obsessions, but it’s important (for me) to find the right TYPE of biography. If this stuff can be explained in language that I can understand, where even if I don’t get the math, I get the IMPORTANCE of the vision, and the context that tells me why it was important, then that’s the kind of book I want. Thankfully, there seems to be a glut of those types of biographies being published right now.

Here’s an excerpt from Isaac Newton. The prose is open and clear, and frequently gave me goosebumps.

No one understands the mental faculty we call mathematical intuition; much less, genius. People’s brains do not differ much, from one to the next, but numerical facility seems rarer, more special, than other talents. It has a threshold quality. In no other intellectual realmdoes the genius find so much common ground with the idiot savant. A mind turning inward from the world can see numbers as lustrous creatures; can find order in them, and magic; can know numbers as if personally. A mathematician, too, is a polyglot. A powerful source of creativity is a facility in translating, seeing how the same thing can be said in seemingly different ways. If one formulation doesn’t work, try another.

Newton’s patience was limitless. Truth, he said much later, was “the offspring of silence and meditation.”

And he said: “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ’till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”

Marvelous. I love that: “I keep the subject constantly before me.”

Another excerpt:

When he observed the world it was as if he had an extra sense organ for peering into the frame or skeleton or wheels hidden beneath the surface of things. He sensed the understructure. His sight was enhanced, that is, by the geometry and calculus he had internalized. He made associations between seemingly disparate physical phenomena and across vast differences in scale. When he saw a tennis ball veer across the court at Cambridge, he also glimpsed invisible eddies in the air and linked them to eddies he had watched as a child in the rock-filled stream at Woolsthorpe. When one day he observed an air-pump at Christ’s College, creating a near vacuum in a jar of glass, he also saw what could not be seen, an invisible negative: that the reflection on the inside of the glass did not appear to change in any way. No one’s eyes are that sharp. Lonely and dissocial as his worlld was, it was not altogether uninhabited; he communed night and day with forms, forces, and spirits, some real and some imagined.

William Blake despised Isaac Newton and Newton comes up constantly in his poems. The book ends with a chapter about the centuries after Newton’s death, how he was interpreted, how the message traveled, those who loved him, those who hated him, those who resented his “mechanical” view of the universe, those who embraced it.

I always loved this quote from Albert Einstein in 1919:

“Let no one suppose that the mighty work of Newton can really be superseded by this or any other theory. His great and lucid ideas will retain their unique significance for all time as the foundations of our whole modern conceptual structure in the sphere of natural philosophy.”

Speaking of the scientists who begged Newton to give up the goods, to share what he had been working on: He seemed to be the gatekeeper of the greatest secret of all. Here’s a letter to Newton from mathematician John Wallis:

You say, you dare not yet publish it. And why not yet? Or, if not now, when then? You adde, lest I create you some trouble. What trouble now, more then at another time? … Mean while, you loose the Reputation of it, and we the Benefit.

Excerpt about Newton’s activity during “the plague year”:

Newton returned home. He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this). The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world’s paramount mathematician.

Most of the numerical truths and methods that people had discovered, they had forgotten and rediscovered, again and again, in cultures far removed from one another. Mathematics was evergreen. One scion of Homo sapiens could still comprehend virtually all that the species knew collectively. Only recently had this form of knowledge begun to build upon itself. Greek mathematics had almost vanished; for centuries, only Islamic mathematicians had kept it alive, meanwhile inventing abstract methods of problem solving called algebra. Now Europe became a special case: a region where people were using books and mail and a single language, Latin, to span tribal divisions across hundreds of miles; and where they were, self-consciously, receiving communications from a culture that had flourished and then disintegrated more than a thousand years before. The idea of knowledge as cumulative – a ladder, or a tower of stones, rising higher and higher – existed only as one possibility among many. For several hundred years, scholars of scholarship had considered that they might be like dwarves seeing farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, but they tended to believe more in rediscovery than in progress. Even now, when for the first time Western mathematics surpassed what had been known in Greece, many philosophers presumed they were merely uncovering ancient secrets, found in sunnier times and then lost or hidden.

Newton, during the plague year, broke past the barrier of what was known, forging ahead:

Descartes opened the cage doors, freeing new bestiaries of curves, far more varied than the elegant conic sections studied by the Greeks. Newton immediately began expanding the possibilities, adding dimensions, generalizing, mapping one plane to another with new coordinates. He taught himself to find real and complex roots of equations and to factor expressions of many terms – polynomials. When the infinite number of points in a curve correspond to the infinite solutions of its equation, then all the solutions can be seen at once, as a unity. Then equations have not just solutions but other properties: maxima and minima, tangents and areas. These were visualized, and they were named.

It’s a wonderful book and I didn’t want it to end. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in Newton, or the history of science in general.

Great excerpt from the book about the publishing of the Principia in 1687:

Excerpt from Isaac Newton, by James Gleick

Without further ado, having defined his terms, Newton announced the laws of motion.

Law 1. Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by forces impressed. A cannonball would fly in a straight line forever, were it not for air resistance and the downward force of gravity. The first law stated, without naming, the principle of inertia, Galileo’s principle, refined. Two states – being at rest and moving uniformly – are to be treated as the same. If a flying cannonball embodies a force, so does the cannonball at rest.

Law 2. A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed. Force generates motion, and these are quantities, to be added and multiplied according to mathematical rules.

Law 3. To any action there is always an opposite and equal reaction; in other words, the actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal and always opposite in direction. If a finger presses a stone, the stone presses back against the finger. If a horse pulls a stone, the stone pulls the horse. Actions are interactions – no preference of vantage point to be assigned. If the earth tugs at the moon, the moon tugs back.

He presented these as axioms, to serve as the foundation for an edifice of reasoning and proof. “Law” – lex – was a strong and peculiar choice of words. Bacon had spoken of laws, fundamental and universal. It was no coincidence that Descartes, in his own book called Principles of Philosophy, had attempted a set of three laws, regulae quaedam sive leges naturae, specifically concerning motion, including a law of inertia. For Newton, the laws forming the bedrock on which a whole system would lie.

A law is not a cause, yet it is more than a description. A law is a rule of conduct: here, God’s law, for every piece of creation. A law is to be obeyed, by inanimate particles as well as sentient creatures. Newton chose to speak not so much of God as of nature: “Nature is exceedingly simple and conformable to herself. Whatever reasoning holds for greater motions, should hold for lesser ones as well.”

Newton formed his argument in classic Greek geometrical style: axioms, lemmas, corollaries; Q.E.D. As the best model available for perfection in knowledge, it gave his physical program the stamp of certainty. He proved facts about triangles and tangents, chords and parallelograms, and from there, by a long chain of argument, proved facts about the moon and the tides. On his own path to these discoveries, he had invented a new mathematics, the integral and differential calculus. The calculus and the discoveries were of a piece. But he severed the connection now. Rather than offer his readers an esoteric new mathematics as the basis for his claims, he grounded them in orthodox geometry – orthodox, yet still new, because he had to incorporate infinities and infinitesimals. Static though his diagrams looked, they depicted processes of dynamic change. His lemmas spoke of quantities that constantly tend to equality or diminish indefinitely; of areas that simultaneously approach and ultimately vanish; of momentary increments and ultimate ratios and curvilinear limits. He drew lines and triangles that looked finite but were meant to be on the point of vanishing. He cloaked modern analysis in antique disguise. He tried to prepare his readers for paradoxes.

It may be objected that there is no such thing as an ultimate proportion of vanishing quantities, inasmuch as before vanishing the proportion is not ultimate, and after vanishing it does not exist at all … But the answer is easy … the ultimate ratio of vanishing quantities is to be understood not as the ratio of quantities before they vanish or after they have vanished, but the ratio with which they vanish.

The diagrams appeared to represent space, but time kept creeping in: “Let the time be divided into equal parts … If the areas are very nearly proportional to the times …”

When he and Hooke and debated the paths of comets and falling objects, they had dodged one crucial problem. All the earth’s substance is not concentrated at its center but spread across the volume of a great sphere – countless parts, all responsible for the earth’s attractive power. If the earth as a whole exerts a gravitational force, that force must be calculated as the sum of all the forces exerted by those parts. For an object near the earth’s surface, some of that mass would be down below and some would be off to the side. In later terms this would be a problem of integral calculus; in the Principia he solved it geometrically, proving that a perfect spherical shell would attract objects outside it exactly as by a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the center.

Meanwhile, he had to solve the path of a projectile attracted to this center, not with constant force, but with a force that varies continually because it depends on the distance. He had to create a dynamics for velocities changing from moment to moment, both in magnitude and in direction, in three dimensions. No philosopher had ever conceived such a thing, much less produced it.

A handful of mathematicians and astronomers on earth could hope to follow the argument. The Principia‘s reputation for unreadability spread faster than the book itself. A Cambridge student was said to have remarked, as the figure of its author passed by, “There goes the man that writt a book that neither he nor anybody else understands.” Newton himself said that he had considered composing a “popular” version but chose instead to narrow his readership, to avoid disputations – or, as he put it privately, “to avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematicks.”

Yet as the chain of proof proceeded, it shifted subtly toward the practical. The propositions took on a quality of how to. Given a focus, find the elliptical orbit. Given three points, draw three slanted straight lines to a fourth point. Find the velocity of waves. Find the resistance of a sphere moving through a fluid. Find orbits when neither focus is given. Q.E.D. gave way to Q.E.E. and Q.E.I.: that which was to be done and that which was to be found out. Given a parabolic trajectory, find a body’s position at an assigned time.

There was meat for observant astronomers.

On the way, Newton paused to obliterate the Cartesian cosmology, with its celestial vortices. Descartes, with his own Principia Philosophiae, was his chief forebear; Descartes had given him the essential principle of inertia; it was Descartes, more than any other, whom he now wished to bury. Newton banished the vortices by taking them seriously: he did the mathematics. He created methods to compute the rotation of bodies in a fluid medium; he calculated relentlessly and imaginatively, until he demonstrated that such vortices could not persist. The motion would be lost; the rotation would cease. The observed orbits of Mars and Venus could not be reconciled with the motion of the earth. “The hypothesis of vortices … serves less to clarify the celestial motions than to obscure them,” he concluded. It was enough to say that the moon and planets and comets glide in free space, obeying the laws of motion, under the influence of gravity.