The Forbidden Universe (23 page)

Despite being from a humble background, Newton managed to rise to fame and fortune. He was the only child of a Lincolnshire farmer who had died by the time he was born on the farm at Woolsthorpe near Grantham, in the first year of the Civil War, on Christmas day 1642. He was a sickly child, and for his whole life he would be a solitary soul. From the age of three Newton was brought up by his grandmother, his mother having married the rector of a nearby parish. He hated her and his stepfather for
abandoning
him and went so far as to threaten to set fire to their house with both of them in it, but the rector’s relative wealth would in the end prove useful to him.

From the beginning, Newton was fascinated by mechanics and delighted in making machines such as a mini mouse-powered windmill. He was entranced by how things worked. A life-changing moment came at the county fair when he bought a prism from an itinerant salesman, which stimulated his obsession with the phenomena of optics. Naturally, he was expected to be a farmer like his father, but when he was twelve an understanding uncle – a Cambridge graduate – realized that was not his destiny and secured him a place in a school
at Grantham, where he also had to work as a servant to wealthier students.

John Gribbin describes one of Newton’s early practical jokes:

Newton was also not afraid of experimenting on himself. On one occasion he stuck a bodkin behind his eye to test its effect on his eyesight. On another he stared at the sun until he almost went blind – mercifully the effects were only temporary. Some might think he carried being a genius to a ludicrous degree.

Newton won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661, where he seemed merely an average student. Little from his time at Cambridge suggested the historic genius he would become. In 1665, just after he graduated, the college closed because of the plague that was sweeping the country, and he returned to Woolsthorpe for two years. What was a disaster for so many actually ended up being the making of Newton. It was at Woolsthorpe that he experimented with the prism, unravelling the secrets of light. It was also there that he devised the calculus, which he termed ‘fluxions’.

And momentously, it was also at Woolsthorpe that he first began to think about the problem of gravity. The story of the falling apple stimulating his thinking of about gravity was Newton’s own. The apple tree is still there – the original was cut down long ago but a new one grew from the stump. He realized that whatever caused apples to fall also kept the Moon in its place and determined and governed the motions of the other planets, and therefore
the Earth. It would take him twenty years and a radical shift in his thinking to refine and build on his original intuition.

Once the plague was over, Newton returned to Cambridge as a Fellow, and became professor of
mathematics
in 1669, at the age of twenty-seven. Immediately this caused a problem. At that time newly elected Fellows had to be ordained priests (Anglican, of course) although Newton argued – ultimately to Charles II, who had to approve the appointment – that he should be exempt from this rule.

Although Newton was deeply spiritual, he kept his beliefs so private that even today no one is certain what they were. But the very fact he was so circumspect – and had challenged the ordination rule – suggests that his beliefs were at odds with the dogma of the Church of England. Newton certainly seems to have been a Christian but of a heretical kind, although there is no consensus about its exact nature. Ironically for a Fellow of Trinity College, he definitely doubted the doctrine of the Trinity, as he wrote a book about it that he wisely decided not to publish. He seems to have doubted that God and Christ were ‘of one substance’, and may even have regarded Jesus as
non-divine
. He refused the sacrament on his deathbed.

Newton first attracted the attention of his peers through his pioneering work on optics and light, for example inventing the first practical reflecting telescope, using a mirror instead of a lens. As a result, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1671. It was at the end of the decade that he returned in earnest to his research into gravity, prompted by a dispute with Robert Hooke.

Newton poured all his thoughts and the results of his experimental work into his monumental achievement, the
Principia
, begun in 1684 and published three years later. The full title of the
Principia
was itself revolutionary, since it
declared that natural philosophy was explicable and expressible in mathematical form. Astronomers such as Copernicus and Kepler had used mathematics and geometry, and Galileo had taken their application a step further, but to Newton mathematics was at the very heart of science.

One consequence of the
Principia
was the final proof of Copernicus’ theory. Newton demonstrated that his theory of universal gravity accounted for Kepler’s laws of
planetary
motion, which was in turn derived from Copernicus’ heliocentric model. This was the great watershed in the history of cosmology: after the
Principia
was published, it was impossible to doubt the heliocentric theory. To Bruno, of course, this would have represented only a partial success. Global acceptance of heliocentricity was due to usher in a golden age of universal Hermeticism, after all. But things had changed since Bruno’s day …

The
Principia
was an immediate sensation, although rather like Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time
, it was ‘one of the least-read bestsellers of the age’.
³¹
After it was published Newton moved to London, where he became a celebrity, albeit a rather reclusive and
curmudgeonly
one. He was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne – the first ‘scientist’ to be honoured in this way. Both she and her successor George I would heap great honours on him. Newton became Warden of the Mint in 1696, then Master of the Bank of England, and was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, a position he retained until his death. He was a Member of Parliament for two short periods. When he died in 1727 it was a cause for national mourning. In honour of the occasion of his state funeral in Westminster Abbey, the poet Alexander Pope penned the famous lines:

However, Newton was anything but the sort of
materialist-rationalist
so prevalent today among the ranks of scientists, who believe all spirituality is a form of superstition. It is now well known that Newton’s major preoccupation was not gravity or the laws of motion or optics, but alchemy. The first biography that mentioned this was in 1855 but even after that it was a subject that was glossed over fleetingly and apologetically. More recently, however, historians of science have begun to acknowledge that Newton’s esoteric interests did not only play a vital part in his thought processes, but also actively assisted him in making his great discoveries.

Richard S. Westfall, Professor of the History of Science at Indiana University and author of a major biography of Isaac Newton, wrote in 1972:

One of the first to realize the importance of Newton’s esoteric side was John Maynard Keynes, the leading twentieth-century economist and great collector of Newton’s alchemical writings, who in a paper read to the Royal Society in 1946 commented that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians …’
³³
He went on (his emphasis):

On Newton’s death, 169 books on alchemy were found in his personal library – making up one-third of his collection. In fact, it transpires from all his writings that his main esoteric preoccupation was the quest for the philosopher’s stone, and he was particularly fascinated by the work of the French alchemist Nicolas Flamel (
c
. 1330–1418).

Most of Newton’s alchemical papers – of which he produced a vast number, over a million words – collected by Keynes and others, are now in Jerusalem, in the Jewish National Library. As befits the work of a genius with a need to be secretive, they are written in elaborate codes, and many of them have yet to be deciphered.

Alchemy was against the law, and could even attract the death penalty (although in a curious excess of official spite, alchemists were to be hanged on gilded scaffolds adorned with tinsel, so at least their demise was pretty in a trashy sort of way). Legal disapproval existed not for reasons of religious intolerance, or because alchemy was considered fraudulent, but because of the fear that alchemists might succeed in making gold, and thereby undermine the economy. So it is an exquisite irony that the Establishment saw nothing wrong in putting Newton – an alchemist to his gilded fingertips – in charge of the Bank of England and of the Royal Mint, even entrusting him with the re-minting of the entire currency in the 1690s.

Like many esotericists before and after him, Newton was a great believer that the earliest civilizations, such as Egypt, knew more than people in his own day – that they possessed the
prisca sapientia
, or ‘ancient wisdom’. He was in no doubt that the Greeks had learned everything they knew from the Egyptians. He also believed that the Bible was one of the sources of the ancient wisdom, and that it
contained prophecies relevant to his own time, particularly in the Book of Revelation. Besides studying many other ancient temples and buildings, he was fascinated by the Temple of Solomon, and devoted considerable energy to the study of its design, dimensions and proportions, which he believed incorporated ancient truths.

Like many thinking people of the post-Renaissance world, Newton was also particularly interested in Rosicrucianism, possessing copies of the English translation of the manifestos and Michael Maier’s works, which he annotated heavily. In his copy of the English translation – now held in Yale University Library – he wrote a lengthy note on the purported history of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross. Referencing Maier in particular, the note ends, ‘This was the history of that imposture.’
³⁵
This quote is often cited as evidence that Newton rejected Rosicrucianism. However, it actually refers only to the Christian Rosenkreutz legend in the
Fama
, which Newton recognized as an allegory or
ludibrium
.

The source of Newton’s obsession with the esoteric is particularly illuminating. He undoubtedly started out as a mechanist, pure and simple, reserving a special admiration for Descartes. However, in the mid-1670s he changed radically, embracing a far more arcane worldview. The reason for this can be traced back to the influence of the Cambridge Platonists, especially that of Henry More, who – nearly thirty years Newton’s senior – was an old boy of the same school in Grantham. As we saw earlier, this woefully misnamed group were fundamentally Hermeticists, part of an unbroken line of a spiritual brotherhood stretching back to Marsilio Ficino, who rediscovered the works of Hermes Trismegistus. At least one member of the Cambridge Platonists, John Worthington, was also part of Hartlib’s Invisible College, itself a direct continuation of the Rosicrucian Antilia, which
was intimately connected to Bruno’s reforming campaign and the Giordanisti.

One of the first papers to recognize the importance of Newton’s Hermeticism was by J. Edward McGuire and Piyo M. Rattansi, both lecturers in the history and
philosophy
of science at Leeds University. Published in the
Notes and Records of the Royal Society
in December 1966, the paper, ‘Newton and the “Pipes of Pan”’, was based on a study of Newton’s draft of rewritten sections of the
Principia
, which he wrote in the 1690s for a proposed new edition that was to have included more on the esoteric. McGuire and Rattansi explore the influence of the Cambridge Platonists on Newton’s thinking, concluding that:

But which ‘certain intellectual tradition’? They go on to identify it as the ‘most elaborately developed Renaissance
prisca
doctrine’ found in the works of Ficino and Pico, which were derived from the
Corpus Hermeticum
.
³⁷
McGuire and Rattansi add that ‘Newton, and the Cambridge Platonists, saw their task as the unification and restoration of this philosophy.’
³⁸
In the words of Richard Westfall, as a result of Newton’s association with the Cambridge Platonists, ‘the Hermetic influence bade fair to dominate his picture of nature at the expense of the mechanical.’
³⁹