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Newton and his non-Newtonian mind

03 Dec 2003

Isaac Newton
James Gleick
2003 Pantheon Books 288pp £15.00/$22.95hb

Attracted by alchemy

Within the small world that is the history of science, biographies are about the only type of book that appeals to a wider readership. Books on the giants of science – especially Newton, Darwin and Einstein – are published in such numbers that they have almost become entire industries in their own right. Here, then, is another output of the Newton industry, but the product is not like most others.

Physicists will know James Gleick from his insightful books on chaos theory (Chaos) and Richard Feynman (Genius), and they will expect his portrait of Newton to be no less interesting. They will not be disappointed. The slim volume – a mere 190 pages of text – combines in a remarkable way a beautifully composed description of Newton and his time with a precise account of his pioneering contributions to natural philosophy.

It goes without saying that Gleick includes the essential moments of Newton’s life and career. He tells us about Newton’s fatherless upbringing, his early studies in Cambridge, and how he came to hit upon the idea of a force of gravity extending indefinitely from the Earth. (And, yes, the legend of the falling apple is there, too, only to be dismissed as vulgar and unnecessary.)

Gleick describes Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope, his protracted controversies with Hooke, how Halley persuaded him to write Principia, and his nervous breakdown in 1692-93. Interesting chapters are devoted to Newton’s life after he went to London to become Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, and when he became involved, if only off the record, in the famous dispute with Leibniz over the invention of calculus.

Although Gleick does provide an intimate portrait of Newton’s life and personality, this is not where I see the focus and originality of his book. What distinguishes it from so many other popular works on Newton is its emphasis on his science and philosophy of nature. It is no easy matter to explain to non-scientists in an engaging way what Newton thought about optical phenomena, how he arrived at his law of universal gravitation, or why he felt alchemy to be so attractive. And it is an even more difficult task if the explanations are grounded in contemporary texts and avoid anachronisms and easy rationalizations. It is an art that Gleick masters admirably.

The reader is brought to understand, or at least to glimpse, the technical and conceptual problems that Newton wrestled with and how he, in most cases, solved them. As Gleick repeatedly points out, Newton’s thinking was – indeed had to be – constrained by a language that was inappropriate to express what he wanted to convey. Terms such as “force”, “mass” and “quantity of motion” (or what we now call momentum) did not exist, and so Newton had to construct them himself. Although “space” and “time” did exist, Newton gave them radically new meanings; in the process he created a vocabulary with a special meaning to natural philosophers. Of course, not all of Newton’s words and concepts were easily accepted. “Force” in particular was considered an occult, non-scientific quantity by both Cartesians and Leibnizians alike. So although the Cartesian philosopher and theologian Nicolas Malebranche found Opticks to be interesting, he thought that “Mr Newton is no physicist”.

During the Romantic era, Newton and the Newtonian conception of the universe came under attack from poets and artists such as Keats, Wordsworth and Blake. To them, and to like minds in German-speaking Europe (such as Goethe), Newton’s science was cold, deterministic and reductionistic. It had, they claimed, done away with the mysteries and spiritual dimensions of nature, turning it into a machine to be understood only by abstract mathematics.

Yet, as Gleick makes it clear, Newton was by no means a “Newtonian”. His universe had little similarity to a perfect machine, a fact for which Leibniz criticized him: would God have created something that was less than perfect? As Newton realized that there were chaotic, non-repeatable elements in the motion of the planets, so he denied that the world system could operate without the constant intervention of God.

The non- or pre-Newtonian elements in Newton’s philosophical project are even more pronounced in his works in optics and alchemy. Here, spirits, souls and powers abounded in a vision of nature that was more vitalistic than mechanistic. Had Blake and his fellow Romantics known about Newton’s obsession with chymistry, they might have evaluated him differently. They did not, but they did know about Opticks, where spirits and active, life-generating principles occur too, so their view of him was even more misguided.

Newton even suggested what later generations of physicists would call “anti-entropic processes” – active principles of a non-mechanical nature that would secure an eternal and vital universe. Without such principles, he wrote, “the Earth, Planets, Comets, Sun, and all things in them, would grow cold and freeze, and become inactive Masses; and all Putrefaction, Generation, Vegetation and Life would cease”.

Although Gleick’s account of Newton is at times critical, it is generally sympathetic. He stresses, for example, how enormously successful Newton was in establishing a physical world picture that we still share, more or less. However, on this point I think Gleick exaggerates. Whatever the genius of Newton, he had no idea of the two key concepts that would complete the classical world picture in the 19th century – the field concept and the notion of energy as a conserved quantity. It seems to me that Gleick goes too far when he suggests that the field concept can be traced back to Newton, and also that Newton “suspected” a unity between light and matter – something like an anticipation of Einstein’s equivalence of energy and mass.

Gleick’s Isaac Newton succeeds admirably in uniting readability with scholarship. It is intellectually stimulating and written in a formidable style that instantly carries the reader back to Newton’s time. Although the book is presumably aimed at general readers, in places it is quite demanding. It also has much to offer to readers who already possess a knowledge of physical science and its history.

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