The remarkable world of Isaac Newton

Empire of the Mind

Isaac Newton towers over all others in the history of science, his contribution immeasurable, his influence inescapable; and his masterpiece The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or simply the Principia, the foundation of classical mechanics. First published in 1687 in three volumes in Latin, the Principia expounded Newton’s laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation; and marked a great revolution in Physics. Nothing like it had been produced before the 17th century. From the Principia, a science emerged that was to set the agenda for research for the next 300 years, while at once spurring advances in Mathematical Physics. Even as physicists search for the unified theory that would explain the properties of matter and energy in all their manifestations, the terms of the search by now familiar are Newton’s terms, and before Newton, the search would have made little sense.

Newton was born in the Hamlet of Wolingsthorpe in 1642, in the year that Galileo died. After attending a local grammar school, Newton entered Trinity College at Cambridge University in the summer of 1661. During a cold wet winter at Cambridge, Newton read Rene Descartes’ Geometrie, and the book inflamed his imagination. While in Euclidean geometry, the plane lies flat, Descartes laid the cross of a coordinate system and so made possible for the first time the invigoration of space by means of number -- two perpendicular lines marking distances in four directions. Soon, with a Bachelor’s degree in hand, Newton retreated to the countryside, and over the next 16 months, in 1665-66, immersed himself in mathematical passion, knowing his powers were bound only by his imagination. And these remarkable mathematical powers resolved themselves in his discovery of the Calculus. It is in Newton’s hands that Calculus became a special instrument to understand the ‘book’ of nature. Like Einstein, his spiritual heir and only equal, Newton viewed mathematics as an instrument. In thinking about Calculus, Newton was already thinking beyond it -- planets in motion and falling objects occupying the vast expanse of his mind.

Time and Space make up the world within which change occurs. The day is lit by cheerful bright sunlight, the skies are blue and white clouds pass gently by; then the sun sets and the night sky is lit by moonlight, trees sway, birds shriek, in the opalescent light. Something has changed because some things have changed. This is the now familiar, continuous world that Newton represented mathematically by means of a series of pioneering correlations. His great vision of what he described as “the system of the world”, brilliantly articulated in the Principia. Motion is change in place. Something was there, now it is here. The difference between here and there is simply a measure of distance. A simple question, “how far?” finds its answer in a simple number, “this far!” It is beautiful in its simplicity as a correlation now appears between distance and time, “how far” juxtaposed with “how long”.

Newton created a mathematical system that embraced terrestrial and celestial phenomena alike. In doing so, he established a physical basis for the Copernican universe. The self-assurance and precision with which he accomplished this task was such that, even today, when Newtonian dynamics is viewed as but a part of the broader scheme of Einstein’s relativity, most scientists continue to think in Newtonian terms, and Newton’s laws work well enough to guide spacecraft to the moon and the planets.

Yet for all this, Newton was himself a reclusive and strange man. When John Maynard Keynes bought a trunk full of Newton’s papers at an auction, he was startled to find that it was full of notes on alchemy, biblical prophecy, and the reconstruction from Hebraic texts of the floor plan of the temple of Jerusalem, which the young Newton had taken to be an emblem of the system of the world.

“Newton was not the first of the age of reason,” a shaken Keynes told a gathering at the Royal Society, “He was the last of the magicians.” Newton was isolated, by the singular power of his intellect. Richard Westfall in his biography of Newton writes “Newton...one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings.”

As for the apocryphal story of the apple falling on his head, actually, one sunny afternoon, over tea, he did notice the apple fall and wondered why it fell downwards, and not in any other direction. Explore the remarkable world of Isaac Newton; read Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton by Richard S Westfall.

Why the universe is what it is remains a metaphysical question, and the eternal human quest continues.

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