Isaac Newton (27 page)

17
. Burton,
Anatomy of Melancholy
, p.423.

18
. Ibid., p. 427.

19
. This notebook was mentioned soon after his death by his niece’s husband, John Conduitt; then it disappeared for several centuries; then it reappeared in the 1920s in the possession of the Pierpont Morgan Library, where it remains (MA 318). Cf. David Eugene Smith, “Two Unpublished Documents of Sir Isaac Newton,” in Greenstreet,
Isaac Newton
, pp. 16–34; Andrade, “Newton’s Early Notebook”; and the original Bate,
Mysteryes
.

20
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, p. 42.

21
. Bate,
Mysteryes
, p. 81.

22
. Dictionaries and encyclopedias (“circles” of knowledge) barely existed, but he might have seen John Withals,
A Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners
(1556), which arranges words under subject headings; Robert Cawdry,
Table Alphabeticall Contayning and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usuall English Words
(1604); Francis Gregory,
Nomenclatura Brevis Anglo-Latinum
.

2: SOME PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS

1
. Stukeley,
Memoirs
, pp. 46–49.

2
. A few years later, as a new undergraduate at Cambridge, he drew diagrams from memory that illustrate classic fluid mechanics—or rather, what would have been fluid mechanics, had this science yet been invented. He guessed to associate air and water resistance: “… for you may observe in water that a thing moved in it doth carry the same water behind it … or at least the water is moved from behind it with but a small force as you may observe by the motes in the water … the like must hapen in aire.…”
Questiones
, “Of Violent Motion,” Add MS 3996, p. 21.

3
. From a list of sins he set down three years later: “Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command”; “Punching my sister”; “Peevishness with my mother”; “With my sister.” Westfall, “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience,” pp. 13f.

4
. Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 53.

5
. Trinity College Note Book, MS R4.48. His tutor was Benjamin Pulleyn. He had chamber fellows but formed no friendships.

6
. Notebook in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, as transcribed by Westfall, “Short-writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience.” Westfall comments: “We are forced to conclude either that Newton’s young manhood had been remarkably pure or that his power of self-examination was remarkably under-developed. Probably we should reach both conclusions.”

7
. Edward Ward,
A Step to Stir-Bitch-Fair
(London: J. How, 1700); Daniel Defoe,
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724). Stourbridge Fair was the model for Vanity Fair in John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
.

8
. Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics
, II: 1.

9
. And “becoming hot or sweet or thick or dry or white.” Aristotle,
Physics
, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, VII: 2.

10
. Ibid., VIII: 4.

11
. Ibid., VII: 1.

12
. Cf. ibid., III: 1: “It is the fulfillment of what is potential when it is already fully real and operates not as itself but as movable, that is motion. What I mean by ‘as’ is this: Bronze is potentially a statue.”

13
. Exception:
Sidereus Nuncius
, published in Venice in 1610. Newton acquired a version of this when he was in his forties (Harrison,
The Library of Isaac Newton
, p. 147). It was first translated into English in 1880.

14
. Some biographers have suggested that Newton invented this phrase, but Aristotle expresses the sentiment in
Nicomachean Ethics
I: 6, and the Latin motto is attributed to him in Diogenes Laërtius,
De vitis dogmatibus et apophtegmatibus clarorum philosophorum
, a copy of which Newton owned. For more exhaustive detective work on the slogan see Guerlac, “Amicus Plato and Other Friends,” in
Newton on the Continent
.
   As he wrote, Newton was reading closely—and sometimes disputing—Walter Charleton (
Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana
), Descartes (a partial collected works, in Latin), the Platonist Henry More (The
Immortality of the Soul
) and the contemporary experimenter Robert Boyle. The definitive analysis of the
Questiones
, including a careful transcription, is McGuire and Tamny,
Certain Philosophical Questions
.
   The notebook is in the Cambridge University Libraries as Add MS 3996. My citations use Newton’s page numbers.

15
.
Questiones
, p. 1.

16
. Ibid., p. 6.

17
. Ibid., p. 32.

18
. Ibid., p. 21.

19
. Ibid., p. 19.

20
. “Siccity”: dryness.

21
. Coastal-dwelling people in every part of the world had noticed coincidences in timing between the flow of tides and the changing of the moon, as well as the sun. Near shores and harbors of the North Atlantic, in particular, monks had been saving data—though not disseminating it—for hundreds of years.

3: TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS BY MOTION

1
. Conduitt, “Memorandum relating to Sr Isaac Newton given me by Mr Demoivre in Novr 1727”:

In 63 being at Stourbridge fair bought a book of Astrology … Read in it till he came to a figure of the heavens which he could not understand for want of being acquainted with Trigonometry. Bought a book of Trigonometry, but was not able to understand the Demonstrations. Got Euclid to fit himself for understanding the ground of Trigonometry. Read only the titles of the propositions, which he found so easy to understand that he wondered how any body would amuse themselves to write any demonstrations of them. Began to change his mind when he read that Parallelograms upon the same base & between the same Parallels are equal, & that other proposition that in a right angled Triangle the square of the Hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides.

Cf. Keynes MS 130.4; and
Math
I: 15.

2
. Thus Whiteside: “We are, too, perhaps a little disappointed that Newton read so little of standard contemporary mathematical works, or if he did has left no hint—nowhere in his early autograph papers do we find the names of Napier, Briggs, Desargue, Fermat, Pascal, Kepler, Torricelli, or even Archimedes and Barrow.” “Sources and Strengths of Newton’s Early Mathematical Thought,” in Palter,
Annus Mirabilis
, p. 75. Apart from Newton’s notes, his second- and third-hand recollections of his reading, including the “book of Astrology,” survive in an account by Abraham DeMoivre (Add MS 4007); also
Corres
VII: 394.

3
. Some survived infection, but not many. In Cambridge the final “Plague Bill” reported a total of 758 deaths from June 5 to January 1, all but nine from the plague. About half that number were infected and recovered. Leedham-Green,
Concise History
, p. 74.

4
. This is the only surviving letter either to or from Newton’s mother (or, for that matter, any close relative). The edges are torn and some words are missing.
Corres
I: 2.

5
. Add MS 4004.

6
. The “year”—traditionally seen by Newtonians as the
annus mirabilis
—covered eighteen or twenty or twenty-five months. Sophisticated Newtonians sometimes prefer to speak of the “myth” of the
annus mirabilis
. For example, Derek Gjertsen debunks the myth sternly: “The description is clearly misleading, for … no special priority can be given to either 1665 or 1666.… It remains true, none the less, and without too much exaggeration, that in a remarkably short period the twenty-four-year-old student created modern mathematics, mechanics, and optics. There is nothing remotely like it in the history of thought.” Gjertsen,
Newton Handbook
, p. 24. Cf. Whiteside (“Newton the Mathematician,” in Bechler,
Contemporary Newtonian Research
, p. 115): “Never did seventeenth-century man build up so great a store of mathematical expertise, much of his own discovery, in so short a time.”
   Anyway, Newton’s stay in Woolsthorpe extended over about twenty months, broken by a temporary return to Cambridge in the spring of 1666.

7
. Alfred North Whitehead noted that Europe knew less mathematics in 1500 than Greece knew in the time of Archimedes. Davis and Hersh,
Mathematical Experience
, p. 18.

8
. “Thrice happy he, who, not mistook, / Hath read in nature’s mystic book!” Andrew Marvell, “Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax.”

9
. Galileo,
Il Saggiatore
(1623), in
The Controversy on the Comets of 1618
, pp.183–84.

10
. Elliott, “Isaac Newton’s ‘Of an Universall Language,’ ” p. 7.

11
. Whiteside, “Newton the Mathematician,” in Bechler,
Contemporary Newtonian Research
, pp. 112–13. Newton’s annotated student copy of the
Elements
, Trinity College Library, NQ.16.201.

12
. John Conduitt’s romanticized account (Keynes MS 130.4, in
Math
I: 15–19):

He then young as he was took in hand Des-Cartes’s Geometry (that book which Descartes in his Epistles with a sort of defiance says is so difficult to understand). He began with the most crabbed studies & books, like a high spirited horse who must be first broke in crabbed grounds & the roughest & steepest ways, or could otherwise be kept within no bounds. When he had read two or three pages & could understand no farther he being too reserved and modest to trouble any person to instruct him begain again & got over three or four more till he came to another difficult place, & then began again & advanced farther & continued so doing till he not only made himself master of the whole without having the least light or instruction from any body, but discovered the errors of Descartes.…

He read it in Schooten’s Latin translation in the summer of 1664. Newton’s own reminiscences of his mathematical development tended to minimize the role of Descartes, but Whiteside’s scholarship is conclusive: that “the thick wad of Newton’s research papers surviving from the later months of 1664 stand firm witness that it was indeed from the hundred or so pages of the
Géométrie
that his mathematical spirit took fire.… Above all, I would assert, the
Géométrie
gave him his first true vision of the universalizing power of the algebraic free variable, of its capacity to generalize the particular and lay bare its inner structure.” “Newton the Mathematician,” in Bechler,
Contemporary Newtonian Research
, p. 114.

But he also filled it with critical marginalia; e.g.,
“Error, Error, non est Geom”
and
“Imperf.”
Trinity College Library, NQ.16.203.

13
. “It seems to be nothing other than that art which they call by the barbarous name of ‘algebra,’ if only it could be disentangled from the multiple numbers and inexplicable figures that overwhelm it …” Descartes,
Regulæ ad directionem ingenii
, Regula IV: 5.

14
. This new-found truth had to be stated explicitly. Mahoney (“The Beginnings of Algebraic Thought”) quotes Descartes: “Those things that do not require the present attention of the mind, but which are necessary to the conclusion, it is better to designate by the briefest symbols than by whole figures: in this way the memory cannot fail, nor will thought in the meantime be distracted by these things which are to be retained.”

15
. Keynes MS 130(7), quoted by Christianson,
In the Presence of the Creator
, p. 66.

16
.
Biographia Britannica
(London, 1760), V: 3241; quoted by Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 174.

17
. The recognition of infinite series had begun with algebraic attempts to express pi; Newton’s immediate predecessors, James Gregory and especially John Wallis, were the first to develop their possibilities. In the simplest sense, infinite series are implied immediately by decimal notation; in one of his earliest jotted fragments Newton wrote: “if the fraction 10/3 bee reduced to decimall it will be 3,33333333 &c infinitely. & what doth every figure signifie but a pte of the fraction 10/3 which therefore is divisible into infinite pts.”
Questiones
, p. 65.

18
.
Math
I: 134–41; Westfall,
Never at Rest
, pp. 119–21. This was, he saw, another problem in disguise, the calculation of a logarithm. Years later he recalled: “I am ashamed to tell to how many places I carried these computations, having no other business at that time: for then I took really too much delight in these inventions.” Newton to Oldenburg, October 24, 1676,
Corres
II: 188.

19
. Descartes,
Principles of Philosophy
, in
Philosophical Writings
, I: 201.