Ancaster - Isaac Newton and the great Ocean of Truth

In my quest to do some research before the Grantham-Ancaster-Sleaford walk, I decided to learn more about Isaac Newton, who was born in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, just a few miles south of Grantham and a stone's thrown from the ancient Roman road, known as Ermine Street.  It's amazing really that this son of an illiterate farmer from Lincolnshire, could become one of the most influential thinkers in human history. 

Early life in Woolsthorpe and Grantham

Newton was what is known as a posthumous child, meaning his father died before he was born.  The consequences for Newton were severe, in that his mother was forced to remarry and, as part of her marriage contract, to abandon the young Isaac, leaving him in the care of his grandmother.  Newton hated his mother's new husband and I have no doubt that the experiences of his childhood would go some way to explain his antagonism towards society in later life and his desire to live in a world of numbers and equations. 

Newton had a wide variety of interests throughout his life and, although we usually associate him with the sciences of physics and optics, he was also interested in subjects like Linguistics (he wished to design a common, global language that would be based on mathematical principles) and History (towards the end of his life, he spent weeks and months calculating the reigns of Kings and Pharoahs and trying to predict the end of the world.)

Cambridge and the Lucasian professorship

Newton's mother had always intended that he would go into farming and continue the familty tradition at Woolsthorpe, but Newton was so phenomenally bad at sheep rearing that money was found to send him to Cambridge, albeit in a very lowly position as sizar, ie. a kind of servant to the richer boys.  He managed to make a name for himself and did so well at Cambridge that, aged 26, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, currently one of the most prestigious academic titles in the world, having been held recently by people like Stephen Hawking. 

Newton was only the second person to hold this post, mathematics being a new arrival on the academic scene and somewhat derided for being the science of merchants and traders.  In the historical context of the Interregnum, the Age of Exploration and the new politics of Cromwell and the Puritans, mathematics was becoming increasingly important as a subject matter.  By all accounts, Newton was a great academic, but a poor lecturer.

Light, Space and Colour

During his time at Cambridge, Newton continued his research into the nature of light, space and colours.  He's famous for inventing the reflecting telescope, which increased the ability of astromers to explore the sun, solar system and far-away planets.  Late 17th-century Europe was a bit obsessed with space and the solar-system.  Early scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo had exploded the myths about the Earth being flat and the solar system revolving around the Earth.  Much of Newton's time was devoted to understanding the relationship of the solar system to the sun.  He was amongst the first to posit magnetic fields of attraction, that held the sun and the planets in orbit and meant that the movement of planets and comets could be predicted.  The 1690's saw an unusal number of comets pass through the Earth's atmosphere, no doubt leading to a sense of panic and a feeling that the end of the world was nigh.  Newton wasn't an astronomer, but he was able to apply mathematical principles to rationalise the orbit of celestial bodies.  One of his biggest fans was a young astronomer called Edmund Halley, well-known to us in modern times because of Halley's comet.

Alchemist or Scientist

Newton's era saw a revolution in attitudes towards the older science of Alchemy and the new sciences being explored by the newly-founded Royal Society.  Because he believed in invisible fields of attraction or magnetism, Newton was accused of being an Alchemist.  Alchemistry was starting to get a bad name, as science moved into the Age of Enlightenment.  There was a real desire among the new scientists to rid science of all quasi-religious or supernatural associations.  To his credit, Newton spent all his energy rationalising that which seemed irrational, but he still allowed for an element of magic or the unknown.  Later critics of Newton, like the poet William Blake criticised Newton for taking modern science down the road of mechanisation and away from the very obvious spirituality of the Earth.  In many ways, I think it was inevitable that Newton's rationalising would consign Alchemistry to the footnotes of modern Science, although I'm not sure that this is what Newton had intended.

Rivalries and the Royal Society

My work is all about helping teachers collaborate online, across borders and with teachers in other parts of Europe and the world, so I'm really interested in the history of global collaboration.  In many ways, the Royal Society was the very beginning of this.  Not only did the Royal Society, which was founded in 1660, seek to bring science into the realm of experiment and away from the endless theorising of previous generations, but it was also the first time an international review of scientific developments was published, mostly organised by Henry Oldenburg, a German diplomat and first Secretary of the Royal Society.  For me, it was exciting to learn about this early example of international collaboration and how, by building on and developing the ideas of their counterparts on the Continent, British scientists and mathematicians were able to leap forward and add a new element to the debates that were raging across Europe at the time.

I would love to say that Newton embraced this collaboration whole-heartedly but, in fact, the opposite was true.  Having been stung early on by the criticism of his arch-rival Robert Hooke, Newton became obsessively secretive about his work, refusing to share his research with others and refusing to listen to any criticism or questioning of his theories.  In many ways he was right!  It seems as though Newton was ahead of his time, which would explain why he found the endless questioning and doubt of his contemporaries frustrating.  Time has proved Newton correct on many points, most notably the existence of magnetic forces and also atoms, which he struggled to conceptualise or define.  His rivalry with Hooke and later with Leibniz reminds me of children squabbling over a favourite toy.  It certainly wasn't the best example of scientists collaborating.

Principia - Newton in a nutshell

What Newton is most remembered for is his publication Principia, reputedly one of the most boring books ever written.  I have an abhorrence of maths and physics, so a lot of Newton's discoveries have gone right over my head, as no doubt is the case with many of us.  Nevertheless, I'll try to summarise Newton's Laws of Motion, so apologies to the real scientists out there!

Law 1 - Everything will stay in its original place, unless compelled to move by force (especially important to know this one if you have to get a teenager to school in the morning)

Law 2 - There is a relationship between the rate of change and the force applied and this can be calculated mathematically (although I wouldn't even know where to begin)

Law 3 - probably the most famous one:  every action has an opposite and equal reaction, eg. when a horse pulls a cart, the cart (although seemingly inanimate) also pulls against the horse. 

Whew!  Back to Newton's biography.

Working-class boy makes good

I don't know whether or not it was to do with his poor upbringing, but when Newton was offered the chance to become warden of the Royal Mint, under the patronage of Charles Montagu, the first Earl of Halifax (who was boning Newton's niece), he jumped at it!  It might seem like a strange profession for one of Britain's most eminent scientists to pursue (by all accounts he was ruthless in his pursuit of counterfeiters), but it kind of makes sense, given his background in alchemistry (manipulating metals) and mathematics.  Also it made him fabulously wealthy, which he celebrated in true rags-to-riches style by decorating his new London home in a gaudy crimson and by dying intestate. 

Newton and the apple

His resounding legacy for those of us who are not scientists is, of course, the apple.  I remember as a child, reading about Newton discovering gravity by sitting under an apple tree and having an apple fall on his head.  I tried the same experiment a few times, but you have to wait an awful long time for an apple to fall - better to give it a bit of encouragement with a stick (see the First Law of Motion). 

Of course, the story of the apple didn't really happen.  Newton had a fair idea about gravity already and didn't need an apple to prove it.  However, he did have apple trees in his garden at Woolsthorpe and he did speculate about the amount of gravity it takes to bring an apple crashing to the Earth, as opposed to the Moon, which has never been drawn in by the Earth's gravity in this way.  I guess this was the birth of the Second Law of Motion and the relationship between force and rate of change.  Newton realised that the Earth's gravitational pull on the apple must be a lot stronger than its pull on the Moon and was able to calculate the difference in a way that made absolute sense to him and his mathematical buddies (I guess the rest of us just need to trust them!). 

It's no surprise really that the story of Newton and the apple caught the imagination of 18th-century Europe, when Voltaire started retelling the story, as though it had actually happened.  Of course, in Christian mythology, the apple is associated with Eve and the Garden of Eden.  It's about sharing divine knowledge and breaking the last taboos of man's dependence on God.  I guess, like Adam, Newton also tasted the apple of Eden and moved science in a direction it would never again return from. 

I want to leave you with one of Newton's most famous quotes, which sums up his assessment of his life's work.

I don't know what I may seem to the world but, as to myself, I seem

to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting

myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell

than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered

before me.

Credits:

The image of the sign at Grantham station was taken by me.

The portrait of Newton is one he commissioned in 1689 and was painted by one of London's most fashionable portrait artists, Godfrey Kneller.  This image is in the public domain and copyright-free.

The drawing of Newton with the graph is by the poet William Blake and it's an image I absolutely love.  It depicts Newton as a semi-Godlike being, rippling with muscles and animal energy.  This is also in the public domain.

The image of the statue of Newton is one I took on Grantham High Street last weekend.

Most of the information in this blog is from a book I've just read called Isaac Newton by James Gleick, the third edition published by Harper Perennial in 2004.