Three Scientific Revolutions: How They Transformed Our Conceptions of Reality (11 page)

As in Volume I, the rest of the book contains numerous geometrical diagrams, charts, and explanations presenting and supporting his “System of the World,” which is too long and complex to be summarized here. And though I have tried to bring out the striking similarities between Galileo's contributions and those of Newton's, as I said previously, my intent is not to minimize the extraordinary achievements of Newton that guided scientific research during the following two centuries and whose formula F = ma is still used for most ordinary calculations in our familiar world and that stands with Einstein's
E
=
m
c
²
as the two most famous scientific formulas.

As an indication of the intense esteem the book aroused, the French mathematician of international repute, Marquis de l'Hôpital, after he had been shown a copy of Newton's
Principia,

cried out with admiration Good god what a fund of knowledge there is in that book? he then asked the D
^r
every particular about S
^r
I. even to the colour of his hair [asked] does he eat & drink & sleep. [I]s he like other men? & was surprised when the D
^r
told him he conversed cheerfully with his friends assumed nothing & put himself upon a level with all mankind.
³⁶

Before concluding the discussion of Newton something should be said of his later life and the publication of his final work, the
Opticks
. There were two incidents in this period that especially reveal his courageous character and integrity. The first involves the attempt by King James II, a Catholic who ascended the throne in 1685, to replace the Anglican religion with Catholicism. Hoping to accomplish this by enabling Catholics to acquire positions of authority at the universities, which was then prevented by their having to take “the oath of supremacy, in effect an oath to uphold the established Anglican religion,” he decided to eliminate this obstacle by using the traditional “letter mandate” to confer higher degrees on Catholics thereby exempting them from taking the oath (p. 474).

The situation came to a climax when the King proposed Alban Francis, a Benedictine Monk, to the degree of Masters of Arts at Cambridge. When John Peachell, the Vice Chancellor, decided to resist, Newton drafted a supporting letter urging “‘an honest Courage' which would ‘save y
^e
University'” (p. 475). The King on receiving the letter summoned Peachell, along with a faculty delegation to which Newton was elected as well as eight others, to appear before the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission headed by Lord Jeffreys. In a compromise the King proposed that Father Francis could be awarded the degree with the understanding that this would not be considered a precedent. Strongly objecting, Newton persuaded the delegation that this would be a dishonorable capitulation that could set a precedent.

However, when Peachell and the faculty delegation met with Lord Jeffreys and the Commission, Lord Jeffreys so intimidated Peachell that the latter failed to present a strong case for the delegation's objections and as a result resigned from the university. Thus it fell to the delegation to defend the objection with Newton forcefully advocating that they should not concede, drafting five letters preparatory to the final written response, including in one that a “mixture of Papist & Protestants in y
^e
same University can neither subsist happily nor long together” which, however, was not included (p. 479).

Not knowing whether they would face the same fate as poor Peachell, the delegation met with Lord Jeffreys and the Commission, but this time it was the latter who yielded but warned that in the future the King's commands must be obeyed. Fortunately, the threat proved futile because eighteen months later James II was deposed by William of Orange and fled to France. But the fortitude and wise council that Newton had shown during this very threatening period did not go unnoticed or unrewarded, for when it came time for two delegates to be elected to represent the university at the convention to ratify the Glorious Revolution that deposed James II, Newton was elected as one. Then an act of Parliament led to his being one of the regular commissioners “to oversee the collection in Cambridge of aids voted to the government” (p. 480), a lucrative appointment commending his new standing.

Not only did it increase his income, but it changed his life by requiring him to move to London for a year when the convention was reconvened as Parliament. Owing to his move to London he met Christiaan Huygens and the philosopher John Locke with whom he formed a close friendship. Reading Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
one can find many indications of what must have been their mutual influence due to their preferences for a more empirical conception of knowledge, in contrast to Descartes's rationalistic philosophy which they opposed.

As his final scholarly achievement, Newton decided to present the results of his earlier optical experiments in book form. When completed in 1694 and shown to his friend David Gregory, the latter was so impressed that he declared it “would rival the
Principia
.” The Royal Society was eager to publish it but was detained owing to Newton's reluctance to have it published while Hooke was still president of the society; but when Hooke died in March 1703 and Newton was elected president the following November, he agreed to its publication by the Royal Society in 1704.

Though it did not rival the
Principia
, it was more accessible and widely read because it made less mathematical demands on the reader, had fewer geometrical diagrams, and was originally published in English rather than Latin. Nonetheless, because the questions it raised, especially the thirty-one Queries in Book III at the end of the book, were so original and far reaching that they generated much of the experimental research during the ensuing eighteenth century. As I. Bernard Cohen, professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, states, contrasting the
Opticks
with the
Principia
in his outstanding book
Franklin and Newton
:

Not primarily in the
Principia
, then, but in the
Opticks
could the eighteenth-century experimentalists find Newton's methods for studying the properties or behavior of bodies that are due to their special composition. Hence, we need not be surprised to find that in the age of Newton—which the eighteenth century certainly was!—the experimental natural philosophers should be drawn to the
Opticks
rather than to the
Principia.
Furthermore, the
Opticks
was more than an account of mere optical phenomena, but contained an atomic theory of matter, ideas about electricity and magnetism, heat, fluidity, volatility, sensation, chemistry, and so on, and a theory (or hypothesis) of the actual cause of gravitation.
³⁷

The
Opticks
consists of three Books plus the thirty-one Queries.
³⁸
As the first three books contain a recapitulation of his optical experiments performed thirty years earlier along with some of his theories presented in the
Principia
, I shall confine my discussion to the Queries, especially as they represent Newton's genius in forecasting the scientific research of the future according to his specified methodology.

For example, in Queries 6 and 8 he remarkably anticipates the early twentieth century investigations and explanations of blackbody radiation by Max Planck in 1900 and Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905 in stating that the reflection of light from black bodies is due to the increased intensity of the internal vibrations of the heated particles. Having indicated in Query 6 that “Black bodies conceive heat more easily from light than those of other colours,” in Query 8 he asks “Do not all fix'd Bodies, when heated beyond a certain degree, emit Light and shine; and is not this Emission perform'd by
the vibrating motion of their parts
?” (p. 340; italics added). The similarity to Einstein's explanation is especially apparent since Newton's adoption of the corpuscular over the wave theory of light would conform to Einstein's interpretation in terms of discrete units of energy, called photons, rather than waves. But what was most striking was his attribution of the increased heat of the black body and ejection of the light to the intensified movement of the internal particles!

In Query 12 he presents his conclusions based on what appear to be his own experiments on the physiological nature of vision. As he states: “Do not the Rays of Light in falling upon the bottom of the Eye excite Vibrations in the
Tunica Retina
[a retinal membrane]? Which vibrations, being propagated along the solid Fibres of the optick Nerves into the Brain, cause the Sense of seeing” (p. 345; brackets added). He goes on to describe how the various magnitudes of the vibrations of the different rays of light produce in the brain the different colors, though he was mistaken in thinking that each of the optic nerves terminate in the same hemisphere of the brain as the location of the eyes, rather than crossing over to the opposite hemisphere.

In Query 28 he rejects metaphysical explanations as “feigning hypotheses,” affirming that “the main Business of natural Philosophy is to argue from Phænomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very first Cause” which “certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the mechanism of the world, but to resolve these and such like Questions” (p. 369). As an indication of how difficult it is for someone even as brilliant as Newton to break completely with tradition, although having insisted on his opposition to metaphysical explanations and “feigned hypotheses,” he again resorts to a transcendental explanation: “an exceedingly rare Æthereal Medium” lighter than air pervading the universe, along with God apparently as “the very first cause,” to account for all the inexplicable interactions producing natural phenomena. However, now rejecting his earlier interpretation of the ether as “spiritual,” he refers to it as an ethereal medium, though admitting that “I do not know what this
Æther
is” (p. 352). Despite the glaring inconsistency, the theory of a luminiferous ether filling all unoccupied space to explain the transmission of radiation such as light was generally accepted until disproved by Einstein in the early twentieth century.

In Query 31, Book III, Part I, he reaffirms the theory of particle physics consisting of the interactions of minute particles due to attractive and repulsive forces.

Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues, or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of light for reflecting, refracting, and inflecting them, but also upon one another for producing a great part of the Phænomena of Nature? For it's well known, that Bodies act one upon another by the Attractions of Gravity, Magnetism, and Electricity; and these Instances shew the Tenor and Course of nature, and make it not improbable but that there may be more attractive Powers than these. (pp. 375–76)

Except for Kepler and Galileo, he was almost alone in forecasting the role of forces such as gravity, magnetism, and electricity, since most natural philosophers at the time were opposed to such so called “occult forces” acting at a distance. But this ironically was mainly due to his lifelong interest in and study of the pseudoscience of alchemy, having acquired an extensive library on the subject and secretly obtained many instruments for performing alchemical experiments. As quoted by Westfall:

For alchemy . . . is not of that kind w
^ch
tendeth to vanity & deceit but rather to profit & to edification inducing first y
^e
knowledge of God & secondly y
^e
way to find out true medicines in y
^e
creatures . . . .so y
^t
y
^e
scope is to glorify God in his wonderful works, to teach man how to live well, & to be charitably affected helping o
^r
neighbors. (p. 298)

Not only does he condone alchemy as a sound method of inquiry, he also attributes the origin of the mechanistic worldview to an “Intelligent Agent.” Returning to the
Opticks
, he states:

Now by the help of these Principles, all material Things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid Particles above-mention'd, variously associated in the first Creation by the Counsel of an Intelligent Agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order. And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature; though being once form'd, it may continue by the those Laws for many Ages. (p. 402)

Rejecting Anaximander's theory that the universe arose from an original Chaos, the last statement is an affirmation of deism, the belief that though God created the universe it could then operate according to the laws he used in creating it. How Newton could combine his rigorous conception of scientific inquiry and the corpuscular-mechanistic worldview with an ardent belief in alchemy and in God as the original creator is bewildering. Though it could be argued that deducing an “Intelligent Agent” as cause of the rational laws of nature was not incoherent, a precursor of the “argument from Intelligent Design,” it does not provide much of an explanation, resembling more a “feigned hypothesis.” Moreover, since no particular law or causal explanation has ever been deduced from this conception nor could be subjected to any experimental test, it is arbitrary to declare “that it is unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World” or that the corpuscular-mechanistic state could not have been the original state as is now believed by most astrophysicists.

Though necessarily limited, I hope this was sufficient to convey an authentic portrayal of Newton's genius as well as his idiosyncrasies. Returning to the account of his final years, after publishing the
Opticks
he decided to leave the scholarly life he had preferred for thirty-five years at Trinity College to move to London permanently. However, even his recently increased income was not sufficient to support living in London, so he had to seek a more profitable employment. Encountering the usual initial disappointments, with the aide of his friend Charles Montague he succeeded in obtaining the lucrative position of Warden of the Mint in March 1696. Three and a half years later, thanks to his skillful management, he was promoted to Master of the Mint, a position he held until his death. This settled his financial problems because he received the considerable sum of “a set profit on every pound weight troy that was coined,” along with his salary of 500 pounds per annum (Westfall, p. 604). Thus he resigned his fellowship and the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge the following year.