Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Newton's greatest discoveries concerned the movement of objects. His three laws on motion and the mathematics that described them set the foundation for all the physics that followed. Today these may seem elementary, perhaps even intuitive: A body at rest will remain at rest. A body in motion carries a force, a measurable quantity. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. But before Newton the movement of things, from comets to cannonballs, was mystical; after him, if everything was not known, it was at least knowable. Newton set down the rules for scientific determinism, for the idea that the universe observed certain rules, and that once man discovered the rules, he might describe, predict and control nature. It was a radical idea, but it created the modern world.
Gleick has a particular interest in the nexus between the earthly and the ethereal, that place where physics -- cannonballs falling and planets rotating and tides undulating -- seems to point to more mystical forces behind a curtain somewhere, running the show. Non-scientists often assume that science is an eternal opponent of religion. But in "Chaos" and "Genius" and now in this book, Gleick suggests that scientists have, at the very least, an abiding interest in God, and that they more often question the received certainties of this or that religion rather than the existence of the divine. By the standards of the Anglican church, Newton was a heretic (he "denied the divinity of Jesus and of the Holy Ghost"), but nothing in Newton's research caused him to falter in his belief in God. In fact, Newton's science only confirmed his piety. "He believed in God as immovable," Gleick writes, "and this belief fused with his vision, still not quite defined, of absolute space. Newton's God had established the rules by which the universe operates, a handiwork that humans must strive to know."
I'm not sure if physics proves the existence of God (or of gods, or of some other divine force) -- plenty of atheists will tell you that it doesn't. But one comes away from "Isaac Newton" with a sense that if it's not godly, it's very spooky that mathematics, a creation of man, should so perfectly describe the ways of nature. Why does everything in the universe behave according to Newton's three laws? Why can everything that moves be mapped and measured and, stranger still, predicted? How do we know, when we launch a rocket to the moon Monday morning, that it'll be there, precisely, by happy hour Friday afternoon? We know it because the universe follows a few basic rules, everywhere and always. And is this not proof of some intelligence in the works?
To tell how Newton came to his findings, Gleick pores over Newton's private writing, his published works, and his correspondence. There are thrilling accounts of invention, of the times Newton neared great discovery: "As he wrote, computed, and wrote more, he felt the pins of a cosmic lock tumbling into place, one by one," Gleick writes of the birth of Newton's major work, the "Principia." "A fever possessed him, like none since the plague years. He ate mainly in his room, a few bites standing up. When he did venture outside, he would seem lost, walk erratically, turn and stop for no apparent reason, and disappear inside once again. He had never written like this: with a great purpose, and meaning his words to be read." Gleick also writes of Newton's professional squabbles, his constant jeering of other philosophers' ideas, his later self-importance and how, at times, he teetered on the "brink of madness."
But there seems much that Gleick can't access -- all of Newton's solitary musings, his ideas continually refined as he sat alone, thinking, thinking, thinking. After one finishes "Isaac Newton," there remains a certain enigma to the man, a mystery that runs especially deep when you ask not what he discovered but how he did it. This is, of course, the closest-kept secret of genius -- what constitutes it, what fraction of it is ordinary hard work and happenstance (being there to spot the apple falling from the tree) and what part is otherworldly insight (seeing a new science in the falling apple)? The question, in Gleick's book, is left mostly unanswered, though the author has his ideas.
"When he observed the world it was as if he had an extra sense organ for peering into the frame or skeleton or wheels hidden beneath the surface of things," Gleick writes. At times, one gets the sense that what set Newton apart from his contemporaries was nothing less than a supernatural, superhuman intuition. Newton famously wrote that "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," but "he did not believe it," Gleick says. His discoveries were not incremental, not the logical conclusion to centuries of study; what's most fascinating about him, and what makes Gleick's biography so intriguing, is that Newton just sort of came up with things by himself, as if out of the blue. He wondered how the world worked. He pondered the problem for some time. And incredibly, he got the right answers.
