Madhukar Shukla
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a smoother shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
- Sir Isaac Newton
from his private diary)
Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642 - the only child born three months posthumously to an illiterate yeoman. His was a premature birth, and he was not expected to survive. At birth, he was so small and frail when born that according to his mother, Hannah (Newton Smith), he "could fit in a quart bottle."
Being the only child of a lonely widow, he received undivided attention of his mother in his early years. But his mother soon realised that she could not manage the farm all alone. Shortly after Isaac's third birthday, she got married to Reverend Barnabus Smith. In the new arrangement, the boy was sent off to his maternal grandmother, who raised him for next eight years. While he lived just about a mile and a half from his mother - and could visit her often - the boy felt betrayed and resented his affections being usurped by his stepfather. From his diaries it is clear that he harbored a sense of betrayal most of his growing years. In fact, at the age of twenty, he compiled a confessional list of his youthful sins. These included "threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and house over them", "peevishness with my mother", "striking many", and "wishing death and hoping it to some."
At the age of eleven, Isaac's is stepfather died, and he came back to live with his mother (and two stepsisters and one step brother) at Woolsthorpe. In spite of what he considered her "betrayal", Isaac's emotional ties with his mother remained quite strong throughout his life. He remained devoted to his mother, and nursed her personally till her death in 1679. John Conduit, who wrote Isaac's memoirs noted:
"He attended her with a true filial piety, sat up whole nights with her, gave her all her Physic himself, dressed all her blisters with his own hands, and made use of that manual dexterity for which he was so remarkable to lessen the pain which always attends the dressing."
As a boy, he grew up into a solitary, secretive, brooding person, sensitive to the mechanical rhythms of nature but indifferent to his fellow beings. He spent little time playing with his fellows, preferring to spend more time making mechanical things. He was a dreamy lonely boy, who would often forget to turn up for meals, a trait which persisted throughout his life. He was too frail to be of much help at the farm. Once, when sent to gather the livestock, he was found an hour later standing on the bridge leading to the pasture, gazing fixedly into a flowing stream.
As a student also, his teachers did not see anything remarkable in him. He seldom studied, and would often fall behind in the grammar school (though he would make it up by studying by himself at the end of each term). But his brilliance with mechanical things was remarkable. As a child he built sundials and clocks, and could tell time by the sun. Once he alarmed the Lincolnshire populace by launching a hot-air flying saucer (constructed by attaching candles to a wooden frame beneath a wax paper canopy) on a summer night.
As Isaac grew up, he turned into a youth with a rigid, Puritanical punishing conscience. He was an isolate, sullen and quick to anger. According to one account, when Newton left for Cambridge, the servants at Woolsthorpe Manor (his home) "rejoiced at parting with him, declaring that he was fit for nothing but the Versity."
At college, he lived a lonely life with books. In one of his notebooks he wrote: "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth." He made only one acquaintance, John Wickins, at the college, who found him walking in the gardens "solitary and dejected", and took pity on him. Isaac's interests were eclectic, ranging from universal languages to perpetual motion machines. His life seemed to be focused on only one goal - to understand how Nature worked. And whatever he pursued, he did it with intensity. For matters of intellectual interest, it was normal for Isaac to neglect personal creature comforts. Once, for instance, to understand the nature of light - and eye - he stared at sun for so long that it took days of recuperation in a dark room before his vision returned to normal.
During this period, in his twenties, Isaac was much influenced by Descartes (of cogito ergo sum - "I think therefore I am" - fame). The Cartesian assumption that intellect and logic (as opposed to physical sensations and emotions) are the key to all understanding (and salvation) also suited Isaac's temperament and lifestyle, in which the duality of body and mind were quite clear. In fact, for Isaac logic and rationality was something of a dogma. Throughout his life, he was indifferent to music, dismissed great works of sculptures as "stone dolls", and viewed poetry as an "ingenious kind of nonsense."
In contrast, he also found fascination in the works of the great intellects of the era, Kepler and Galelio. These works both stimulated , as well as challenged him. While he incorporated the Cartesian logic in his work, he also challenged many of his Descartes' assertions: Descartes disapproved of atomism, Isaac embraced it; Descartes explained planetary motion through his vortex theory, Isaac disagreed with it... and so on. And although, Isaac, throughout his life harbored a fear of influence of others' ideas on his work (and often failed or forgot to acknowledge his predecessors) he did accept:
"If I have been able to see farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants."
It was during these University years that Isaac hit upon what was to become his major weapon and tool for digging into Nature's secrets: mathematics. He worked alone and learnt through his own solitary efforts. His notebooks show that he was not taught well (or perhaps did not show any inclination to be taught by others). But he learned most of the mathematics by working alone and deriving proofs of things all by himself. As an alternative to depicting motion algebraically, as was the standard method of that time (and was proposed by Descartes), Isaac he invented a method which put "geometry in motion". He called it fluxions, now commonly known as Calculus (and which became a bone of contention between Isaac and Leibnitz later - Leibnitz had apparently invented the system independently and working separately).
Isaac had completed this work by the time he received his bachelor's degree in 1965. Had he published it, it would have established him as the greatest mathematician in Europe. But he did not (in fact, his work on calculus was published twenty seven years later, and that too anonymously). While he used calculus for making his discoveries, he presented them using the conventional mathematics. It was almost as if calculus was his sacred and secret route to the inner sanctums of Mother Nature, and he didn't want to share it with anyone. For him publication meant fame, which meant loss of his privacy. In a letter in 1670 he wrote:
"I see not what there is desirable in public esteem, were I able to acquire and maintain it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline."
This reluctance to get involved with other human beings (except perhaps his mother) remained a pervasive feature of Isaac's life and career. One biographer, Brodetsky noted:
"He was always somewhat unwilling to face publicity and criticism, and had on more than one occasion declined to have his name associated with published accounts of some his work. He... feared that publicity would lead to his being harassed by personal relationships - whereas he wished to be free of such entanglements... Apparently Newton hardly ever published a discovery without being urged to do so by others: Even when he arrived at the solution of the greatest problem that astronomy had ever had to face he said nothing about it to anybody."
Most of Isaac's ideas were developed during the two years of The Plague, 1665-66. The University was closed, and Isaac was back in Woolsthorpe. He was alone and in peace, and this allowed him to make some of his greatest discoveries. Later he wrote about those day: "I was in the prime of my age for inventions." One day he hit upon the idea of a grand theory, which could provide a comprehensive account of gravitational forces dictating the motion of moon and planets (near the end of his life, Isaac recalled how the inspiration had come to him when he saw an apple falling from the tree in front of his mother's house. His work was based on Kepler's earlier work on the laws of planetary motion, but the key to the whole theory - the three-dimensional nature law of "inverse square" - had escaped Kepler's attention. Kepler thought that the law operates only in two dimensions).
Characteristically, having made one of the greatest discovery in the history of science, Isaac silently put it aside, and moved on to his other areas of interests, among them the nature of color, binomial series - and alchemy.
Many of Isaac's discoveries came because of his unconventional, but penetrating, ways of perceiving the problems. For instance, in 1666 he became concerned about the aberrations which come at the fringes of the lenses (telescope was a newly invented gadgetry of the time, used by many scientists). The telescopes used at that time were refracting telescopes, which used large lenses at the front end to gather light. However, these kind of telescopes introduced spurious colors on the fringes (due to the prismatic effect). While this phenomenon was known to all who used telescopes, it was generally explained away as a function of thickness of the glass. Isaac, on the other hand, found this phenomenon intriguing, and tried to simulate it by using prism. People had been using prisms for thousands of years, but it required a mind like Isaac's to point out the obvious - that sun enters the prism as a circular disc, but comes out in seven colors in an elongated shape. The conclusion was obvious: the prism modified the light; it separated the light physically!
This observation led to the foundation of his book on Optics. The other outcome was his invention of the reflecting telescope, which used a mirror instead of a lens to collect light. This "Newtonian Reflector" - which was to become most popular telescope in the world - brought his name to the attention of the Royal Society of London. By this time Isaac had returned to Cambridge in 1667, and he was made a Fellow of his college, Trinity (Two year later, when his professor of mathematics resigned, at the age of 26, Isaac was appointed in his place.)The Society elected him as a member, and also persuaded him to publish a paper which he had written on the nature of light.
Isaac, however, later regretted the publication of that paper. The paper drew twelve letters, some of them critical of Isaac's ideas. His fundamentally new approach to explaining facts was quite incomprehensible to his contemporaries. Astronomer and physicist, Robert Hooke (who discovered rotation of Jupiter and was quite an influential figure then) did not accept Isaac's conclusion, and argued with him. Isaac was so upset with these arguments that he wrote to Leibnitz:
I was so persecuted with discussions arising from the publication of my theory of light that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet to run after a shadow."
In fact, Isaac waited till 1704 - when Hooke had died in 1703, and Isaac had become the President of the Royal Society - to get Opticka, published.
Similarly, but for a young astronomer, Edmond Halley (who later discovered a comet to be named after him), Isaac's mammoth work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World - the Principia - would never have got published. At least not in Isaac's lifetime.
As it happened, on one afternoon of January 1684, three members of the Royal Society - Edmond Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke - were discussing Kepler's work and the law of inverse square (i.e., the force of gravitation diminishes by the square of the distance between the two bodies). They came to an agreement that this law could explain Kepler's discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits, each sweeping out an equal area within its orbit in equal time. The trouble was that while intuitively this made sense, they could find no way of demonstrating it mathematically. Christopher Wren, who was the president of the Royal Society at that time, challenged Hooke and Alley to come up with a mathematical proof within two months, in return for a prize of a book worth forty shillings - an expensive book.
After two months of fruitless efforts, Halley recalled his meeting with Isaac four years back, when the two had gotten on well together. Halley realised that if anyone could have the proof, it was Isaac Newton (Isaac had, of course, worked out the solution years back - helped by a simple insight that the earth's gravitational force could be treated as if it was concentrated as a point at its center). Halley dropped in at Cambridge to meet Isaac. When asked, Isaac told him that yes, he had worked out the proof, but at the moment he was "unable to find it". Three months later, Isaac sent a paper to Halley which successfully derived all three of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion from the law of inverse square.
Realizing the importance of Isaac's accomplishment, Halley rushed to Cambridge, and urged and persuaded Isaac to write a book on gravitation and dynamics of the solar system. Halley was persistent, and Isaac finally finished the manuscript in April 1686. Since the Royal Society was cash-starved, Halley had to pay for the publication of the Principia, which came out in a book form in 1687.
As a person, Isaac did not change throughout his life. He remained a recluse - the very archetype of the absent-minded, solitary scholar. He was notorious for his neglect of his physical needs: he forgot to eat, slept little, sometimes forgot to dress himself up properly, and never took exercise. According to his manservant, Humphrey Newton (no relation), his mastered laughed only once in five years. He also noted:
"...he ate sparingly, nay, ofttimes he has forget(sic) to eat at all, so that going into his Chamber, I have found his Mess untouched of which when I reminded him, (he) would reply, Have I; and then making to the Table, would eat a bit or two standing..."
Another account describes him as:
"Gaunt and disheveled, his wig askew, he dressed in run-down shoes and soiled linen, seldom stopped working, and frequently forgot to sleep. Once, puzzling over why he seemed to be losing his mental agility while working on a problem, he reflected on the matter, realized he had not slept for days, and reluctantly went to bed... His rare efforts at conviviality fared poorly; one night while entertaining a few acquaintances he went to his room to fetch a bottle of wine, failed to return, and was found at his desk, hunched over his papers, wine and guests forgotten."
Isaac was almost compulsive in his work. The surviving drafts of his work show a constant, indefatigable effort. It was normal for him to forget to sleep and eat when involved in his work. Humphrey Newton noted how his master, Isaac, would often rush back from his walks, struck by an insight, and "fall to write on his desk standing, without giving himself the leisure to draw a chair to sit down in." Once when he was asked how he discovered his laws of celestial dynamics, he replied: "By thinking of them without ceasing." Even during his walks in the gardens, it was normal for him to suddenly stand still and start drawing geometric diagrams on the gravel with his walking stick. He lived and worked as if possessed. As one of his biographer noted:
To force everything in the heavens and on earth into a rigid, tight frame, from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random, was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man."
A somewhat lesser known aspect of Isaac's life is the influence of his unorthodox religious beliefs on his life and works. On the one hand, he was a Unitarian - he did not accept the doctrine of Trinity. Since allegiance to Church doctrines was required during his time to become the Master of a College, Isaac could never become the Master at Trinity (though, at his request, Charles II did issue a letter decreeing that the Lucasian professorship, to which Isaac had succeeded in 1669, need not take the orders from the Church).
On the other hand, he was deeply religious and actually believed that the world was created in 404 BC - and that the fact that all planets were on the same plane was a proof of the existence of God, who not only created the universe, but also corrected, from time to time, the anomalies which crept in the motion of heavenly bodies. In answering a query from Reverend Richard Bentley, he wrote:
"When I wrote my treatise upon our System, I had an eye upon Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity & nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose."
Similarly, at the end of Principia he asserted that:
"...this most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being."
Isaac's religious speculations, however, went far beyond just admiring the creation of the Supreme Being. Throughout his life, he was deeply preoccupied with the theological issues, and like a prophet, seemed to be convinced that he had a direct personal relationship with God who inspired him. Perhaps, it was this sense of being related to the Divine, which made it difficult for him to relate to ordinary human beings.
Besides his work on physics and astronomy, Isaac spent much of his time in studying and practicing alchemy and in biblical studies. In secret, he wrote immense tomes about the book of Revelation. It was only a couple of centuries later, when the economist, John Maynard Keynes, purchased a trunk full of Isaac's personal papers at the auction, he, and the world, were startled to find that it was full of notes on alchemy, biblical prophesy, writings on church history and doctrine, a treatise showing that the prophets of Old Testament knew that universe is centered around sun - and even the reconstruction from the Hebraic texts of the floor plan of the temple of Jerusalem, which Isaac took to be "an emblem of the system of the world." A somewhat shaken Keynes told a gathering at the Royal Society:
"Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of Babylonians and Sumerians."
Isaac's rational Cartesian intellect, and the religious humility found in his private writings, were countered by the paranoia and pettiness which dominated his public life. All his life, Isaac remained extremely sensitive to criticism of his work - whether justified or not - and feared that others would steal his ideas. This tendency became even more heightened in 1693, when Isaac suffered a full-scale mental breakdown, resulting in insomnia and paranoia. This could have been due to a number of reasons: his compulsive lifestyle which overtaxed his mental and physical resources, an accusation from Robert Hookes that he had stolen Hooke's ideas in Principia, or perhaps even his experiments with alchemy (some of his symptoms at that time were consistent with those of mercury toxemia). It could also have been because the publication of Principia had drawn sharp criticisms from other scholars. Leibnitz had branded the concept of gravity (that two bodies across the space could attract each other) as "occult", and Huygens had called it "absurd." All that Isaac could say to these criticisms was that "the cause of Gravity is what I do not pretend to know."
Whatever be the reasons, Isaac - even otherwise a distant and somewhat forbidding personality - went to extremes. He alarmed his friend - and he had few of them - by writing them strange, paranoid letter. He accused Samuel Pepys, an earlier friend and the president of Royal Society (who had supported publication of Principia), of being a Papist. He accused John Locke, with whom he had studied the Epistle of Saint Paul, of "embroiling me with women."
Perhaps the worst evidence of his paranoia comes from his bitter fight with Gottfreid Wilhelm Leibnitz about the invention of Calculus. Leibnitz had independently arrived at the same method of putting "geometry into action" as Isaac, which he called Differential Calculus. He had, in fact, published his method in 1675. Isaac, however, could never accept that Leibnitz, a reputed and talented mathematician in his own right, could have discovered a technique identical to Isaac's own fluxion.
Isaac accused Leibnitz of steeling his ideas, and, asked the Royal Society to set up a committee to look into the matter. As the former president of the Society, Isaac did everything to influence the decision in his favor. The committee gave decision in Isaac's favor, but the much-corrected draft of the Society's verdict was written in Isaac's own handwriting.
From the point of view of scientific achievements, Isaac's later life remained uneventful. The Royal Society in the early eighteenth century, had started losing its lustre. It was becoming fashionable for writers and artists to poke fun at the scientists. In 1696, he shifted to Mint in London, and in time became the Master of the Mint. He accepted the Presidency of Royal Society in 1703, after Hooke's death. In 1705 he was knighted by the Queen. As an intellectual, Isaac remained a giant on the landscape of London till his death, but his age of discoveries was past. As the Master of the Mint, however, he was a terror for the counterfeiters of London. He enjoyed interrogating them, and sent many to gallows.
Isaac never married, and died a virgin in 1726 (perhaps he realised that a life-long relationship would be too taxing on him, or perhaps it was his attachment to his mother which never let him contemplate a relationship with another woman). His discoveries changed the course of history of mankind, and kept enthralling generations of scientists. As a person, his life remained an enigma, to be summed up by Aldous Huxley some two centuries later:
"As a man he was a failure, as a monster he was superb."
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