Isaac Newton: The Last Lone Genius?

The Friday before last, with much advanced publicity, the BBC broadcast a new documentary film biography of Isaac Newton with the title The Last Magician. This phrase is part of a famous quote by John Maynard Keynes, “not the first scientist but the last magician”, describing his feeling upon reading the Newtonian alchemical manuscripts that he acquired at the auction of the Portsmouth family Newton papers in 1936.  This of course together with the advanced advertising for the programme signalled that we were due for a fresh dose of “did you know that Newton was a secret alchemist?” A phenomenon that Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt has blogged on informatively in the past.

Based on quotes from Newton’s own writings and correspondence as well of those of his contemporaries the programme was in its basics factually correct. As usual for BBC historical documentaries it was well-produced and excellently filmed and thus pleasant to watch. The basic structure was the direct quotes being spoken by actors in costume and commented upon by five more or less experts. These were the historians of science Rob Iliffe head of the Newton Papers editing project and a genuine Newton expert, Patricia Fara author of an excellent book on the changing image of Newton down the centuries and Lisa Jardine expert on Renaissance history of science, as well as popular science writer James Gleick author of a competent popular Newton biography and astrophysicist turned novelist Stuart Clark.

Given all of these preconditions it should have been an excellent hours entertainment for a historian of science like myself, unfortunately it turned out to be a major disappointment for two reasons. The programme deliberately created two principle impressions that were and are fundamentally wrong.

The first of these turned up in the pre-programme publicity but also featured prominently fairly early in the documentary in what seems at first glance to be a fairly harmless statement:

By the age of 21, he had rejected 2,000 years of scientific orthodoxy…

This brief phrase contains two claims one implicit and one explicit. The implicit claim is how wonderful Newton was to take such a bold step when he was only 21 years old. Anyone who has spent anytime at all looking at the history of mathematics knows that mathematicians tend to be very precocious. Pascal wrote the paper that gained him entry to the top flight of seventeenth century mathematics at the age of sixteen. In the nineteenth century the teenage William Rowan Hamilton was trotted out in public like a circus pony to display his brilliance. The stories are legion and there is absolutely nothing unusual in Newton intellectual development it’s par for the course for a highly talented mathematician.

As Becky put it very succinctly in a tweet what they are actually saying here is that there had been no science since Aristotle, which is of course complete rubbish. The scientific orthodoxy of the day, which was by the way on the verge of disappearing, of which more shortly, came into being in the thirteenth century when Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas created a synthesis of Catholic theology and Aristotle’s philosophy with the addition of Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy. This synthesis is known as Scholastic or Aristotelian physics or natural philosophy. However as Edward Grant, one of the leading experts on medieval science, points out Aristotelian philosophy is not Aristotle’s philosophy. It is also important to note that Aristotelian philosophy was never carved in stone but in fact changed and developed continuously over the next four hundred years. Examples of major changes are the work of the Oxford Calculatores and the Paris Physicists in the fourteenth century. The Aristotelian physics of the fifteenth century is a very different beast to that of the thirteenth century. The geocentric astronomy produced in the middle of the fifteenth century by Peuerbach and Regiomontanus differed substantially from that of the first Ptolemaic translations of the twelfth century.

Added to all this change and development the first seeds of what would become modern science began to poke their slender stems out of the substrate of scientific innovation around the beginning of the fifteenth century. By 1661 when Newton went up to university Keplerian heliocentric astronomy had become the new orthodoxy and Aristotelian physics was being pushed out by the new physics developed by mathematicians such as Tartaglia and Benedetti in the sixteenth century and Stevin, Galileo, Borelli, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens and others in the seventeenth. One should bear in mind that the Leopoldina, the Accademia del Cimento, the Royal Society and the Acadédemie des Sciences all institutions dedicated to the propagation and development of the new science were founded in 1652, 1657, 1660 and 1666 respectively. The young Newton did not like some Carrollian hero draw his Vorpal Blade to slay the Jabberwock of ancient Greek science but like any bright young academic would do jumped on the band wagon of modern science that was speeding full speed ahead into the future.

We now turn to what I see as the most serious failing of the documentary expressed in the question posed in the title of this post. For the best part of an hour the documentary banged on about Newton’s solitude, his isolation his lone path to the secrets of nature. We were presented with the ultimate lone genius of the history of science. It went so far that the only other contemporary researchers mentioned by name were Descartes in passing and Hooke purely in a negative light. The way that the programme was structured created a totally false impression of Newton’s scientific endeavours.

We actually know very little about Newton’s time as a student though it is safe to say that he was more the type to curl up in front of the fire with a good book on a Friday evening than to go to the latest rave at which ever student hostelry was in that term. As a fellow we know that he communicated and worked together with other scholars such as Isaac Barrow so to talk of total solitude as the documentary did is wrong. After he emerged from obscurity at the beginning of the 1670s with his reflecting telescope and his famous paper on the phenomenon of colours he was in no way isolated. Even if Cambridge was somewhat off the beaten track in those days Newton corresponded with other scholars in Britain and also abroad as can easily be seen in his voluminous correspondence as edited by Turnbull. He was also often visited by other mathematical scholars such as Halley or John Collins. When he left Cambridge to go to London he became positively gregarious. Maintaining a town house with his niece Catherine Barton, a renowned social beauty, as his housekeeper where he received and entertained visitors. At the Royal Mint, which he attended daily, he was surrounded by a large staff. After 1703 he presided over the weekly meetings of the Royal Society and on other evenings surrounded by his acolytes he held court in one or other of the then fashionable London coffee bars.

More important for me was the totally false impression created by the documentary of Newton’s mathematical and scientific work. Anyone being introduced to Newton for the first time would come away with the impression that he revolutionised mathematics, physics and astronomy in a superhuman solo endeavour completely isolated from the rest of the late seventeenth century intellectual world.

We got presented with Newton in 1666 creating a completely new branch of mathematics, he only actually started it then and it took a number of years to develop. At no point was any other mathematician mentioned. The fact that Newton either, directly or indirectly, knew of and built on the previous work in this field of Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Pascal, Descartes, van Schooten, Barrow and others was quietly swept under the carpet. Even worse no mention what so ever of Leibniz who independently developed the same mathematics almost at the same time from the same sources. This of course led eventually to the most notorious priority dispute in the history of science involving many of the leading mathematicians of Europe.

The same thing occurred with the presentation of his work in optics, no mention of Kepler, Schiener, Descartes, Grimaldi, Gregory, Hooke, Huygens or anybody for that matter. Isaac apparently did it all alone in isolation.

This form of presentation continued with his greatest work the Principia. We got each of the famous laws of motion presented individually but no hint of the fact that the first was taken from Beeckman by way of Descartes, the second from Huygens and the third from his readings in alchemy. We were told that he derived the law of gravity from his three laws but no mention was made of the fact that the concept of the law of gravity was common, much discussed intellectual property in academic circles at the time. No mention of the contributions made to the substance of the Principia by the work of Kepler, Galileo, Cassini, Halley and above all Flamsteed. We had the strange spectacle of Hooke famous accusation of Newton having stolen his law of gravity and plagiarised him delivered in a passionate speech to the Royal Society in 1660 but no mention what so ever that Hooke’s accusation had more than a little substance. Hooke and Newton had corresponded on the subject in the early 1680s and Hooke had already formulated a concept of universal gravity before Newton. This correspondence was with certainty one of the spurs that led Newton to write the Principia although Hook’s claims as to the extent of his contribution are wildly exaggerated.

Isaac Newton did not live and work in an intellectual vacuum as was very strongly implied either deliberately or accidently through bad scripting by this documentary. He was part of a strong multi-faceted scientific community who supplied both the scaffolding and a significant part of substance of Newton’s life work in mathematics, physics and astronomy. He was in no way a lone genius but a highly significant cog in a large intellectual endeavour.

There was a time some decades back when some historians of science went so far as to decry the Principia as purely a work of synthesis with only a very small original contribution from Newton. This view was shown to be exaggerated and invalid and has been dropped but the opposite point of view implied by this documentary of the Principia as being alone the work of Newton’s genius is even more false.

Before I close there are a couple of small points from the film that I think should be mentioned. As is all too often the case we had the tired old statement that after Newton became President of the Royal Society he produced no more original scientific work. This was as always made without explicit comment but with a strong implicit negative aura. Dear people, when Isaac Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1703 he was already sixty years old. He had written and published two of the most important major scientific works in the history of mankind, his Principia and his Optics, as well as vast quantities of, largely unpublished, absolutely world-class mathematics, which he did however circulate in manuscript amongst his acolytes. What more did you expect him to do (FFS)?

I noted four major scientific/historical errors during the film, a fairly low quota; there may have been others. We of course get introduced to Newton’s reflecting telescope, the invention that first made him known to the world at large, but then we get informed that this instrument played a major role in marine navigation in the eighteenth century. Now whilst it is true that the reflecting telescope, mostly Gregorian’s and not Newtonian’s, had become the instrument of choice for astronomers by the middle of the eighteenth century they were for several good reasons not used for navigation on ships. Firstly reflecting telescopes whilst in principle smaller than refracting ones don’t telescope and so are more massive and cumbersome than the classical marine telescope. Secondly until the nineteenth century reflecting telescopes had metal mirrors made of so-called speculum metal an alloy that unfortunately was very susceptible to corrosion necessitating regular re-polishing. The salt-water atmosphere of sea voyages would have been very adverse for such mirrors requiring almost daily re-polishing and thus completely impractical.

The next error I spotted was a real howler. A voice over informed the viewer that, “for centuries light was considered the purest form of energy in the universe.” Really? Although etymologically derived from an ancient Greek word the physics concept of energy was first appeared in the nineteenth century, as did the recognition that light is a form of energy. Nuff said.

Moving along the historical time scale in the opposite direction voice over informed us the Newton’s Principia made possible the accurate prediction of comets and eclipses. Now the former is indeed true although the credit should properly go to Halley who first showed that some comets were periodical and obeyed Newton’s law of gravity. The latter is however again a real history of science howler. The Babylonians could accurately predict lunar eclipses in about the fifth century BCE and the ability to accurately predict solar eclipses was also developed in antiquity. No need to wait for Newton.

My final error is the one that as a historian of science causes me the most concern. Whilst discussing Newton’s alchemy voice over stated correctly Newton’s alchemical belief that light and matter are both products of some as yet undiscovered primal alchemical substance. The claim was immediately made that Newton had anticipated Einstein’s famous E = MC²! This claim being, to my surprise, repeated by Rob Iliffe an excellent historian of science. Now I’m not a big fan of the Kuhn/Feyerabend principle of the incommensurability of scientific theories. This says that one can’t compare scientific theories because the definitions of the concepts that they contain differ and are thus not comparable. Newton’s concept of force is not Maxwell’s concept of force for example. However I think that here we have a genuine case of incommensurability. The metaphysical concepts behind Newton’s alchemical theory and the metaphysical concepts behind Einstein’ theory of relativity are in no way comparable. It is not even comparing apples with oranges; it’s comparing apples with bicycles!

On the whole I think what was superficially a very good and certainly an excellently produced documentary failed miserably as a piece of history of science for the reasons that I have outlined above. Maybe I’m being too harsh but on the whole I don’t think so. For me the very strong emphasis of the biography of Newton as some sort of lone genius whether intended or an accidental product of ill considered scripting made this documentary next to worthless as a contribution to popular history of science.

 

 

A Fine Purple Light

On 19^th December 1705 the demonstrator of experiments at the Royal Society turned the crank on the apparatus, that he had constructed especially for this demonstration, setting an evacuated glass globe in rotation against which he pressed a woollen cloth. There was “quickly produced a beautiful Phaenomenon, viz, a fine purple light and vivid to that degree, that all the included Apparatus was easily and distinctly discernable by the help of it.”[1]

With this, at the time, spectacular experiment the demonstrator, Francis Hauksbee, set a series of scientific discoveries in motion that, in the year 2000, would lead  an author  to accuse Isaac Newton of being a tyrant.

To find out why this accusation was raised and whether it was true come and read this year’s Christmas Day post at the Renaissance Mathematicus.  Did Isaac victimise Stephen?

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[1] Francis Hauksbee, Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects, 2^nd ed., London,

1719

Another feminist Newtonian: Bologna’s Minerva

Given that Newton boasted on his deathbed that he had never known a woman and that many modern historians are fairly convinced that he was homosexual it is somewhat ironic that his theories were defended against other competing systems of natural philosophy by two women in the first half of the eighteenth century; particularly at a time when women in natural philosophy was effectively an oxymoron. In France Newton’s primary torchbearer was Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet about whom I have blogged in an earlier post. In Italy Newton’s theories were championed for several decades by Laura Bassi.

Bologna’s Minerva

Laura Maria Caterina Bassi the only daughter of the Bolognese lawyer Giuseppe Bassi and his wife Rosa Cesarei was born on 29^th October 1711. A relative, Lorenzo Stegani, recognised her intellectual gifts when she was still a child and taught her French, Latin and mathematics. At the age of twelve the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi a professor of medicine at the University of Bologna, was impressed as she recorded his instructions for the treatment and care of her ill mother in both perfect French and Latin. For the next seven years Tacconi instructed the young lady in logic, metaphysics and physics. Up till 1732 Bassi’s education remained a family secret but that year saw an outbreak of what can only be described as Bassi fever.

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in Europe and at the beginning of the eighteenth century students were still examined by public disputation, i.e. the candidate was expected to orally defend a series of academic theses. At the beginning of 1732 Bassi took part in a private disputation in her home with members of the university faculty in the presence of many leading members of Bolognese intellectual society. As a result of her performance during this disputation she was elected a member of the prestigious Bologna Academy of Science on 20^th March. Rumours of this extraordinary young lady quickly spread and on 17^th April she defended forty-nine theses in a highly spectacular public disputation. On 12^th May following a public outcry she was awarded a doctorate from the university in a grand ceremony in the city hall of Bologna.  Following a further public disputation the City Senate appointed her professor of philosophy at the university, making her the first ever female professor at a European university.

One would be mistaken if one thought that this was a sign of a major step forward in women’s rights or female equality; what we have here is what is now known as a publicity stunt. Although Bologna was Europe’s oldest university and had been highly prestigious in the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance both it and the much younger Academy of Science were in serious decline in the early eighteenth century. The Senate and the Academy thought that by appointing Bassi as a sort of wonder of nature they could improve the public standing of both institutions. Their calculations paid off and many notable foreign visitors came to Bologna to witness the female wonder. However Bassi was at the beginning not taken seriously as a scholar.

Within four months of her election the members of the Academy changed their statutes to prevent further women from becoming members. Although she was a fully paid member of faculty she was, as a women, not allowed to teach at the all male university and was only required to take part in disputations three times a year at major university public ceremonies. Her status in the city of Bologna is best illustrated by the reactions to her marriage. In 1738 she married the physician Giovanni Giuseppe Veratti; the public reactions was largely very negative. Part of the population thought Veratti, who lacked both fame and fortune, was beneath “their” Bassi and that she should not have married him. Another more vocal section of the public thought she should not marry at all and that the Bolognese “Minerva” should remain a virgin.

Bassi, however, was a genuine scholar and was not content to be just an ornament and fought to obtain recognition for her intellectual abilities. Already in her initial disputations she had demonstrated a command of the theories of Descartes, which she rejected, and Newton, which she embraced. During the 1730s she had taken lessons in mathematics from Gabriele Manfredi one of the universities leading mathematicians. Following her marriage she started teaching courses in natural philosophy in her own house. She also petitioned the Senate to loosen the restrictions on teaching at the university and from 1739 onwards she also taught courses there.

In 1745 she received another academic honour. Pope Benedict XIV who as a cardinal and Archbishop of Bologna had been present at Bassi’s first private disputation and remained her principle patron throughout his life, appointed her one of twenty-five Benedictinni, Bolognese scholars granted a Papal scholarship in recognition of their eminence. This was also a publicity stunt to raise the standing of the Bolognese Academy of Science.

Starting in about 1749 Bassi and her husband set up a laboratory in their home and started teaching courses in experimental natural philosophy specialising in Newtonian physics and Franklinian electrical theory. This work continued until Bassi’s death in 1778.

Two years before she died Bassi was appointed, after four years of procrastination after all she was still only a woman, to the chair of physics at the Institute of Science the experimental sister institution to the Academy of Science; she was succeeded in this post on her death by her husband and he in turn by their son. The much-disputed marriage appears to have been harmonious with Bassi and Veratti working very successfully together throughout the years. Alongside her scientific work Bassi bore eight children, five of whom survived into adulthood.

Bassi was known and respected throughout Europe and corresponded with many of the leading intellectuals of the day. She was for example instrumental in getting Voltaire elected a member of the Bolognese Academy of Science and exercised together with her husband a strong influence on the young Alessandro Volta who followed the path that they had hewed in experimental studies of electricity.

Bassi only published four papers in her lifetime and a fifth paper appeared posthumously however as a teacher she played an important and significant role in establishing Newtonian physics in Italy. Europe’s first female professor became much more than the ornamental figurehead as which she was appointed.

This is my post for Ada Lovelace Day 2012.

Time travelling philosophers

Reading Paul Murdin’s Full Meridian of Glory, which I thought was quite reasonable then I came across this:

Since he [René Descartes] was philosophically unconvinced by the notion of “action at a distance,” or the Newtonian concept of the force of gravity, [my emphasis] he developed a theory of vortices in the Universe and this theory carried the planets on their motions around the Sun.

Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica containing his “concept of the force of gravity” in 1687. René Descartes died 1650. Enough said!

P.S. I think it was the vortices rather than the theory, which carried the planets but we don’t want to be too picky do we?

AAARRRRRRRRGGGGGHHH!!!!!

The title of this post is the sound of me screaming in a state of total frustration and despair. Who or what has reduced me to this state of mental despondency? You might well ask and the answer is America’s flag ship daily newspaper The New York Times. Somebody, who shall remain nameless, linked on Twitter to an edition of the NY Times from 2002 because of an article entitled Here They Are, Science’s 10 Most Beautiful Experiments. This list is the result of Robert P. Crease polling physicists on their favourite historical experiments. It should be pointed out that Crease is an acknowledged historian of modern physics. So what was it in this article that so enraged me? In second place in the polls greatest experimental historical hits we find the following:

Galileo’s experiment on falling objects

In the late 1500′s, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages.

Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge. The story has become part of the folklore of science: he is reputed to have dropped two different weights from the town’s Leaning Tower showing that they landed at the same time. His challenges to Aristotle may have cost Galileo his job, but he had demonstrated the importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in matters of science. (Ranking: 2)

So what’s wrong with these paragraphs? It would be simpler to ask what’s right with them, nothing! We’ll just go through statement for statement, claim for claim. In the late 1500s many people knew that Aristotle’s laws of fall were anything but correct. They had been questioned by scholars since at least the sixth century CE when the Greek scholar John Philoponus subjected Aristotle’s theory of motion to a penetrating critique. A critique that was known to and even quoted by Galileo. In the fourteenth century CE the Oxford Calculatores had already proved the mean speed theory the corner stone of the so-called Galilean laws of fall. Work that was distributed and read throughout Europe and was also known to Galileo. In terms of the laws of motion Aristotle’s authority had been questioned and rejected by European scholars for more than one thousand years before Galileo considered the subject. Work of which Galileo was totally aware.

Galileo’s work on the laws of motion was in no way impudent but a continuation of work already done in the sixteenth century by leading mathematical researchers such as Tartaglia and Giambattista Benedetti. The latter having already published the so-called Galilean laws of fall in the 1550s, work of which Galileo was well aware.

That Galileo dropped balls from the Tower of Pisa is a complete myth and all the more embarrassing for the claim here that it is the second most beautiful experiment is the fact that the experiment was actually carried out, as is well documented, by both Philoponus in the sixth century and by Simon Stevin from the church tower in Delft in 1586!

Far from costing Galileo his job, his work in Pisa led to his being appointed to the much better paid chair of mathematics in Padua a much more renowned university.

Not for the first time I have to ask why a publication as esteemed as the NY Times could publish such a steaming heap of festering dodo dung, something they would never allow their journalist to do in an article on politics or economics for example. Or why a historian as respected as Robert P Crease could sanction its being published in his name?