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.

 

 

If it hadn’t been for X there wouldn’t be a Y.

I’m writing this post with some reluctance. Normally I’m a strong supporter of investigating the role of homosexuals in the history of science in order to further the cause of homosexual equality but a recent article, The secret gay history of the Royal Society, in Gay Star News on just this topic was so abysmal that I can’t just ignore it and feel obliged to shred it in my usual charming manner. The article, which purports to show that the founding of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century was the result of gay activism, offends my historical sensibilities in two different ways.

Firstly the author of the article claims that various historical figures associated with the early Royal society were gay without giving any evidence or justification for his claims. I’m not saying that the gentlemen in question were not gay but if one is making such a strong claim concerning well-known historical figures then, as a historian, one is obligated to substantiate those claims. Although I have studied the history of seventeenth century science most of my life I have only come across a serious suggestion of homosexuality for one of the savants discussed in the piece, Isaac Newton. In Newton’s case there is a certain amount of circumstantial evidence that he might have been homosexual but something like a definite proof doesn’t exist. I personally think that the evidence suffices to make the claim that Newton was probably homosexual but I can understand other historians who say that this is not the case. If the author is going to label, as he does, Francis Bacon, John Wilkins, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and others gay then he need to provide more evidence to support his claim than just his own say so.

My second objection to the argumentation of the article has nothing to do with homosexuality per se but with a particular historical trope that the author uses and that I think should, along with other tropes that I have pilloried in the past, be banned completely from all historical discourses. The author writes:

Before he [Francis Bacon[1]] died in 1626, he wrote ‘A New Atlantis’, a utopian novella describing an ideal society run by a government-funded academy of science. These writings became the inspiration behind the formation of the Royal Society. Had there been no Francis Bacon, it is questionable whether there would have been a Royal Society. [my emphasis]

Also:

Next, we move to the 1640s, and meet Dr John Wilkins. He was a gay preacher, a promoter of science who founded an important scientific club in London. In 1648 he moved to Oxford University to become warden of a college, and started a new scientific club, the Philosophical Society of Oxford. This performed an important scientific role – until return of Charles II.

[…]

He attended the famous meeting in London in November 1660, which saw the start of what became the Royal Society. Before he died in 1672, he played a vital role in the organization’s formation, sitting on its governing council, raising money and so on. Had there been no John Wilkins, there would have never been an Oxford Philosophical Society, let alone a Royal Society. [my emphasis]

Both of the emphasised phrases are of the type used in the title of this post, “if it hadn’t been for X there wouldn’t be a Y”. This is unfortunately a construction that occurs often when people write about the history of science and is to put it mildly total rubbish. It is of course a variation on the great scientists or lone heroes form of history of science and like them should never raise it ugly head. This particular trope is easily shown to be nonsense by the frequent occurrence of multiple discovery or invention in the history of science and technology as well as the not infrequent occurrence of things being discovered, becoming lost and then being rediscovered by somebody else at a later date. No scientist in the history of science has ever been unique or indispensible; it only seems like that with blinkered hindsight.

A classic example of this error concerns Galileo and the telescope. One can find in many, many accounts something along the lines of, it took Galileo’s single genius to recognise that the telescope could be used for astronomical observation and his technical genius to turn this child’s plaything into a scientific instrument.

There were in fact at least twelve other astronomers who acquired or constructed telescopes as astronomical instruments independently of Galileo and who were making observations at the same time as he was. Thomas Harriot, certainly, and Simon Marius, probably, even before Galileo himself. All of Galileo’s observational discoveries where made independently by others, often by more than one other observer. Galileo was admittedly the best of these early observers but his single genius lay in recognising that if he published his discoveries first he could cash in on the ensuing fame, which as we all know he did.

Returning to the founding of the Royal Society let us examine more closely the claims made above. Bacon’s New Atlantis was indeed an inspiration for many of the initial enthusiasts who came together in the early years of the Royal Society, a fact that led to tension between the Baconian and non-Baconian fractions on a number of occasions particularly during the Presidency of Isaac Newton, a decidedly non-Baconian. However to claim that without New Atlantis there would have been no Royal Society is a major historical misrepresentation.

New Atlantis was one of three widely read contemporary utopias integrating elements of the new scientific ethos in the early 17^th century; the other two were Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun and Johannes Valentinus Andeae Description of the Republic of Christianopolis. Andreae was, like Kepler, a student of Michael Maestlin. Campanella belonged in his youth to the circle of Giambattista della Porta where he also met Galileo whom he would defend in writing, probably to his detriment in 1616. Campanella was like Bacon strongly influenced by the Renaissance empirical philosopher Bernadino Telesio.

The three early seventeenth century works of Campanella, Andeae and Bacon are often treated together as a utopia sub-genre. If a utopia was necessary to the foundation of the Royal Society there were alternatives to Bacon.

Utopian literature wasn’t the only source of inspiration however. The epistemological and pedagogical theories of the Czech educational reformer Comenius who was strongly represented in England by his disciple, the German, Samuel Hartlib were also a significant influence in seventeenth century. The so-called Hartlib Circle played a central role in the foundation of the Royal Society.

Lastly it should not be forgotten that academic and scientific societies were very much en vogue in the early seventeenth century throughout Europe.  In Italy, della Porta founded the Accademia dei Segreti, which included at sometime both Galileo and Campenella amongst its members, around 1580.  Prince Cesi established the Accademia dei Licei in 1603, which would later take up both Galileo and della Porta in its ranks. The Accademia del Cimento was founded by Borelli and Viviani in 1657. In Germany the Leopoldina, which still exists today, was founded in 1652. Also one should not forget that the French Académie des Sciences was establish in 1666, almost at the same time as the Royal Society. In fact there was a bit of a dispute between the two august bodies, as to who had stolen the idea from the other.

I think one can very safely say that something resembling the Royal Society would have been established in London in the seventeenth century with or without the inspiration of Bacon’s New Atlantis.

Turning to the other example of “if it hadn’t been for X there wouldn’t be a Y” we have John Wilkins and The Oxford Philosophical Society. In fact in the period preceding the establishment of the Royal Society there were various groups of like-minded investigators of nature meeting on a regular or semi-regular basis in London and Oxford who are variously credited with being the foundation stones on which the Royal Society was built. The Hartlib Circle I mentioned above was one of them. There is much discussion amongst historians as to which was the most influential. There is even a very interesting paper by Francis R. Johnson, Gresham College: Precursor of the Royal Society published in 1940 that outlines the history of all such groups that used Gresham College as a meeting place going back to its foundations in the late sixteenth century. There was nothing special about the Oxford Philosophical Society it was just one of the bunch.

I’m a big fan of John Wilkins and yes he certainly played a central role in the early Royal Society but it would be a gross exaggeration to claim that without him there would have been no Royal Society. He was one of the two original secretaries but it was his fellow secretary Henry Oldenburg who together with the demonstrator Robert Hooke who formed the machine room of the early Society and kept it running. Even these two cannot be considered indispensible as there were other active members such as Christopher Wren who also made substantial contributions.

I shall close this already over long post with one last criticism of the article. In the section on Newton’s Presidency our intrepid gay historian makes the following quite extraordinary claim:

…Newton is the only single gay man to have held the position of president of the Royal Society. The monarchy only resumed its patronage of the organization after Newton died, [my emphasis] when he was replaced by Sir Hans Sloane, a married man.

Newton was president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death in 1727; from 1703 till 1714 England was ruled by Queen Anne and from 1714 till 1727 by King George I. Neither of them withdrew royal patronage from the Royal Society at anytime. Both of them respected and revered Newton. Queen Anne knighted Newton in 1705. George famously left Leibniz, his librarian, to stew in Hanover when he became King of England so as not to offend the great Newton with whom Leibniz was at loggerheads. Newton was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey when he died. To suggest that he was discriminated against by the monarchy because he was gay is complete rubbish.

I’m sure that my friend Felicity Henderson (@felicityhen) who is a historian of science in residence at the Royal Society will turn up in the comments to correct all the errors I have made in the early history of the Royal Society but that’s how real historians learn. The author of the piece, I have criticised here, has a lot to learn.

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[1] I started writing this post several days ago but by a strange coincidence Francis Bacon died 9 April 1626.

Grumpy old astronomers behaving badly or don’t just blame Isaac!

People who consider themselves well informed about the general history of science know that Isaac Newton, who died on 20^th March 1727 (OS), was a cantankerous, argumentative, self-opinionated, unforgiving old ghoul who did his best to ruin the reputations and careers of several of his contemporary natural philosophers, most notably Robert Hooke, John Flamsteed and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

This supposed knowledge led David and Stephen Clarke to make their highly erroneous claims concerning Newton’s alleged persecution of the early pioneer in electrical research, Stephen Gray, that I dealt with in my annual Christmas Newton post.

I was reminded of this highly negative view of Newton by a recent post by Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt on historical over-identification in the case of the recent Richard III kerfuffle. Becky wrote:

Exposing injustice is a key element for generating interest and enthusiasm beyond the academy. If someone usually held in high regard (Tudor monarchs, Shakespeare) is thought responsible for the oppression of a rediscovered, wronged hero, then identification with and emotional attachment to the story can become particularly intense. This is true of the mission to rescue Richard, and history of science examples are Robert Hooke and Nikolai Telsa, seen as victims of Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison respectively.

The “Robert Hooke was robbed” fan club being convinced that their hero would long ago have been recognised as the greatest thing since sliced bread if it hadn’t been for the evil Isaac.

I was reminded again last Sunday by Lisa Jardine on BBC Radio 4’s A point of View, who discussing the actual science communication hot topic, open access, in terms of the cooperation between astronomers in the 17^th century actual gave a very 18^th century and historically highly inaccurate version of the dispute between Newton and Flamsteed. Putting the blame highly unfairly totally on Flamsteed’s shoulders as if Francis Bailey’s 19^th century Flamsteed biography and everything that has followed since in the history of Early Modern astronomy had never taken place. Given that Ms Jardine is fêted as an expert on the history of science of the period she ought to know better.

Having had my interest in the topic reawakened I thought I would take the opportunity on the 286^th anniversary of Newton’s passing to do a bit of adjusting to what is supposedly known about Isaac and his grumpy personality.

In the 18^th century Newton was regarded as a saint and the hagiographical biographies painted him as if he could do no wrong. Flamsteed was an evil nobody who hindered the great genius from realising his aims. Hooke had largely ceased to exist in the popular memory; an unfair fate that actually had very little to do with Newton or the disputes between the two of them. Finally Leibniz was, for the English at least, a dastardly foreign blaggard, who had tried to steal Newton’s crowing achievement, the calculus.

In the 19^th century the picture began to change and Newton’s feet of clay started to be exposed in a new biographical debate excellently described by Rebekah Higgitt in her book Recreating Newton. At the latest Frank Manuel’s psychological study of Newton A Portrait of Isaac Newton, published in 1968, exposed the revenge-obsessed monster that people now take to be the true face of Isaac. However it is not that simple. People’s over-interpretation of Manuel’s excellent study have led to a vision of Isaac that is just as much a myth as the 18^th century saint of science, as the saying goes it takes two to argue and Newton’s supposed victims all gave as good as they got and in one of the three notorious cases mentioned in the first paragraph it was Newton who was the victim and not the villain.

At the beginning of the 1670’s Newton who was already approaching thirty was a nobody. A few people in the know had heard about this man in Cambridge who was a bit of a whizz at maths but that was about it. Then he presented his reflecting telescope to the Royal Society and became almost literally overnight a star of the then scientific community. However it was anything but plain sailing. He got accused of plagiarising the telescopes of both the Scottish optical physicist, James Gregory, and the rather mysterious French inventor Laurent Cassegrain. A situation that was saved by Gregory graciously acknowledging Newton’s superiority and the chauvinistic Royal Society dismissing the French case out of hand. Encouraged by the success of his telescope Newton then submitted his legendary paper on the nature of light a true milestone in the history of optics. Instead of being hailed for the masterpiece that it undoubtedly is this paper met an avalanche of criticism that I have dealt with in some detail here. Leading the pack was Robert Hooke who considered himself the leading authority on all matters optical. Hooke dismissed Newton’s first venture into scientific publishing with scorn. His attacks on Newton and his theories were so vitriolic that in the end Newton withdrew from publication the extensive paper that he had written in reply to his critics, especially Hooke, and famously only published it thirty years later, after Hooke’s death, as the first part of his justifiably famous Optics.

Time past and the quarrel was put aside, if not forgotten, and at end of the 1670s and the beginning of the 1680s the two corresponded quite cordially on the subject of gravity and falling bodies; a correspondence that was certainly one of the stimuli that led to Newton composing his Principia. Unfortunately as this work was approaching completion and publication by the Royal Society Hooke piped up again claiming that Newton was plagiarising him and that he alone deserved credit for the discovery of the laws of gravity. Newton went ballistic and threatened to withdraw his masterwork from publication a situation that required all of Edmond Halley’s skill of persuasion to smooth over. However any relations that Newton and Hooke might have had were now once and for all dead and Newton, who had been previously prepared to acknowledge Hooke’s contributions to his work, removed all mention of him from the Principia.

I know that it’s a hard pill for the “Robert Hooke was robbed” fan club to swallow but there is no doubt that the villain of the peace in this private war of words was Hooke and not Newton. There are stories of Newton extracting his revenge after Hooke’s death when he became President of the Royal Society but there is no evidence to back them up and I personally think they can be considered myths.

It might be claimed that for some reason Hooke was just allergic to Newton, an unfortunate twist of history, but Hooke was notorious for his high-octane disputes with anybody and everybody in the scientific community. He had spectacular rows Christian Huygens, Henry Oldenburg the secretary of the Royal Society and with John Flamsteed as well as a boat load of other minor figures. Hooke was definitely not a happy man and not an easy one to get on with.

The dispute with Flamsteed was more of a two sided affair with the two very stubborn astronomers butting heads for a couple of decades before their mutual dislike exploded into open warfare. I have already written twice about this dispute here and here and won’t go into details here but as I already said in the past both of the antagonist gave as good as they got and although Newton was probably more to blame than Flamsteed, England’s first Astronomer Royal was no angel.

Like Hooke Newton was by no means the only person with whom Flamsteed, who was notoriously grumpy, clashed horns. As already mentioned Flamsteed and Hooke couldn’t stand each other but Flamsteed’s special wrath was saved for Edmond Halley. Halley and Flamsteed had originally worked together and how and why the fell out is not really known and a topic of much speculation. Flamsteed’s hatred of Halley grew to the point where he refused to use Halley’s name referring to him only as Reymers after Nicolai Reymers Baer the German astronomer whom Flamsteed believed had plagiarised his great hero and role model Tycho Brahe, Baer being for Flamsteed the most despicable person who had ever lived.

Leibniz was probably the least belligerent of all the disputants discussed here and he became the victim of Newton’s most vindictive actions in their notorious calculus dispute; however even Leibniz was not entirely blameless. When they initial got to know each other Newton and Leibniz treated each other with respect and as the accusation of plagiarism of the calculus was first made against Leibniz in the 1690s it was Newton who stomped it down and even apologised to his German colleague.  So what had changed when the accusations were raised again at the end of the 1710s? In the meantime Leibniz had launched his attack on Newton’s theory of gravity.

Now criticism is the lifeblood of scientific progress so it was, of course, fully legitimate for Leibniz to criticise Newton but he did so by hitting below the belt. Unable to fault the mathematics of Newton’s theory Leibniz criticised his religion. He pointed out that if Newton’s theory was correct it would inevitably lead to deism at best and atheism at worst. Newton was deeply religious and even believed that God had chosen him personally to uncover the secrets of His creation. He was well aware of the possible danger to religious belief of his theory and having his nose rubbed in it did not make him a happy boy. Even worse Leibniz did not restrict his criticism to philosophical subtleties but mocked and ridiculed Newton for his rather pathetic attempts to recuse his theory from the accusations. This was more than the, in the meantime, almost seventy year old Newton could take and so when the chance opened up to take revenge on his adversary in the calculus dispute he took it in spades pursuing his enemy even beyond the grave. If Leibniz had not been so keen to tread on Newton’s sensibilities on the religious questions then the calculus dispute would probably have taken a less vitriolic route.

I certainly don’t want to explain away or even excuse Newton’s incontestable bad behaviour but in all of the legendary disputes of his life he had to deal with opponents whose behaviour was often not better than his own and in the case of Robert Hooke definitively worse. The late 17^th century scientific community was full of grumpy old men behaving badly.

 

 

Christmas Trilogy 2012 Part I: Did Isaac really victimise Stephen?

Isaac Newton was not a nice man. When he was holding court in a London coffee house dispensing wisdom and his mathematical manuscripts to his acolytes he was probably friendly and magnanimous. Also, when he was chatting over breakfast with his housekeeper niece the society beauty, Catherine Barton, of whom he was very fond he was probably very charming. However when it came to defending his mathematical and philosophical theories against his scientific rivals he had the manners of a rabid wolverine on steroids. His intellectual wars with Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz and John Flamsteed have become the stuff of history of science legends known, at least in outline, even to those only mildly interested in the subject. Frank Manuel in his psychological study of Newton described it thus. Newton regarded the natural world as his garden and it was his privilege and God given duty to uncover its secrets. Others who dared to do so were poachers infringing on his private property. However was Stephen Gray really one of his victims? David H. Clarke and Stephen P. H. Clarke (henceforth referred to as C²) thought so and wrote a whole book about it with the provocative title Newton’s Tyranny: The Suppressed Scientific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed. The average reader at this point is probably thinking who the hell is Stephen Gray? Stephen Gray is one of the little people in the history of science; an apparently self-taught amateur investigator of nature who made a highly significant contribution to the history of electricity in the early eighteenth century. Before I go into more detail I want to take a look at C² and their general abilities as historians.

David H. Clarke was apparently a director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Stephen P. H. Clarke his son was, in 2000 when the book first appeared, a Cambridge University student. The book was written in a style that is readable contains a large number of simple historical errors which make at least this reader wary of the historical qualifications of the authors. At one point C² list those who ruled England during Newton’s lifetime. After dealing with the expulsion of James II and the succeeding reigns of William and Mary and Anne they come to George I who is described as, “a very distant relative of the former Stuart monarchs”.  Given that George, like both Mary and Anne, was a direct great grand child of James I, I find this statement rather strange and possibly indicative of laziness in research. Having failed on English royal history C² try their hand at university history without much more success. They tell the reader that, “Cambridge and Oxford were the two great English medieval universities, and they have remained at the forefront of intellectual achievements ever since”. The fortunes of all universities go up and down over the years and in fact Cambridge University was at a deep point in its fortunes when Newton was Lucasian Professor. Central to Newton’s dispute with Flamsteed was Flamsteed’s star catalogue so one could assume that C² would get the history of star catalogues right however on the subject of Tycho’s star catalogue they display serious deficits. They write, “Tycho died before the publication of his results, but his pupil Johannes Kepler published them in 1627”.  Ignoring for a moment the fact that Kepler was not a pupil of Tycho it should be noted that whereas he calculated and published the planetary tables based on Tycho’s star catalogue, the catalogue itself was published by Tycho while he was still alive. On the same theme we discover that, “In Volume III Flamsteed wanted to present the actual catalogue, giving the positions of three thousand stars with accuracy dramatically better than had been reported in any previous catalogue. Since the catalogue of Tycho Brahe had contained just three hundred stars, Flamsteed’s catalogue would represent a major advance in human understanding”. I think the noble Dane might be a little piqued by C²’s description of his life’s work. Tycho’s catalogue contained the position of one thousand stars, 777 of which were the result of his own observations and the rest fudged together out of Ptolemaeus’ catalogue shortly before publication.

As well as getting things wrong C² actually stoop to making things up. During Newton’s Presidency the Royal Society moved out of Gresham College into their own premises in Crane Court. C² attribute the move to Newton’s hatred of Robert Hooke:

Such was Newton’s hatred of Hooke that within weeks of taking over the presidency, Newton started making plans to move the society away from Hooke’s beloved Gresham College to new premises. […] He wanted to remove any obvious association of the society with the memory of his late enemy.

This is complete rubbish. Gresham College, established in the fifteenth century, was an old building and no longer in the best condition. The Council of the College wished to demolish the premises and to build a new modern building. Given the constitution of Gresham College this would require a parliamentary bill. The Council drafted such a bill in 1701 but Hooke who was still alive and lived in the college managed to block its passage. The Gresham Council then issued the Royal Society with an eviction order and Newton and Sloane fought a rear-guard action until the Society could finally move into their own building in 1710. I could go on but I think that it should be clear by now that C² are rather sloppy historians. Let’s return to Stephen Gray.

Born in 1666 in Canterbury, baptised on the 26^th December, Stephen Gray was the son of a dyer who in his turn also became a dyer. Nothing is known about his education or how or why he became interested in investigating nature. His early interests were fairly diverse and at some point he took up contact with the Royal Society through Henry Hunt a minor functionary who also came from Canterbury. At some point he began to correspond directly with Hans Sloane the Secretary of the Society who published some of Gray’s communications in the Philosophical Transactions. Gray also developed an interest in astronomy and began to correspond with John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, about 1696; a correspondence that continued with interruptions up till Flamsteed’s death in 1719. In 1707 Gray became involved as an assistant in Roger Cotes’ ill fated plans to build an observatory at Trinity College Cambridge. Whilst in Cambridge Gray read in the Philosophical Transactions reports of Francis Hauksbee’s electrical experiments demonstrated at the Royal Society, a series of experiments kicked off by the demonstration I described in my post last week. These are experiments on static electricity generated by rubbing a glass tube, the more sophisticated version of charging up a nylon comb by rubbing it and picking up bits of paper. Fascinated by the reports Gray began to copy and extend the experiments. In 1708 he sent a letter to Hans Sloane describing his efforts and reporting his discoveries. For some reason Sloane did not publish this communication and Gray’s new results appeared in later publications of Hauksbee’s without attribution. Enter C² and their accusation against Isaac Newton.

C² claim that Newton personally blocked the publication of Gray’s missive and construct a chain of evidence to support their claim. Are they right? I really don’t think so. The chain of evidence starts with Newton’s appointment as President of the Royal Society in 1704 and proceeds over his feud with Flamsteed over the publication of his star catalogue that broke out shortly thereafter. C² claim is rather simple, Newton was the all-powerful President of the Royal Society who hated John Flamsteed. Stephen Gray was an associate of Flamsteed’s and the mean spirited and evil Newton stopped Gray’s missive from being published. Really? C² offer little or no evidence for their claim, no smoking gun and a closer examination of the facts lead to the conclusion that they are almost certainly wrong.

C² claim that Newton was all-powerful as Royal Society President, which however was far from true at the beginning of his presidency. The presidency had from the founding of the society up to Newton’s first term had been a figurehead position with the real power residing with the secretary. Newton was the first hands-on president but Sloane did not role over and surrender his power overnight. In fact it wasn’t until 1713 that Newton finally managed to remove Sloane and become the absolute monarch, as which he is often portrayed. Secondly the Philosophical Transactions were the province of the secretary not the president and any questions on editorial policy were the province of the society’s council and not the president. Newton by no means dominated the council in the period between 1704 and 1710. This is simply illustrated by the case of Francis Hauksbee.

It is not very clear where Hauksbee came from when he started to demonstrate experiments at the Royal Society. It is assumed that he was a protégé of Newton’s as he gave his first demonstration at the first meeting presided over by Newton. However when he applied for a permanent position as demonstrator a year later, whilst the Council praised him for his efforts to date they refused him the appointment. In fact although Hauksbee continued to demonstrate the experiments at the Society until his death in 1713 he was never official appointed to the post.

If anybody suppressed Gray’s early electrical missive then the most likely candidate was Sloane and not Newton. Why Sloane should choose to do so is not clear. John Heilbron, a leading historian of electricity, thinks Sloane passed the letter on to Hauksbee for evaluation and that he chose to suppress the efforts of a rival. We’ll probably never know.

There is more circumstantial evidence, which suggests that a Newtonian campaign against Gray is rubbish. Around 1711 Gray’s health had degenerated to a point where he could no longer work as a dyer and he turned to his Royal Society friends for assistance. We have a letter from Brook Taylor to John Keill concerning their attempts to persuade Gray to accept Henry Hunt’s position as assistant demonstrator at the Royal Society after the latters death. Gray turned down the offer on grounds of humility but what is of interest here is that both Keill and Taylor are hard-core Newtonian acolytes. If Isaac was conducting an anti-Gray campaign they would never have tried to persuade Gray to accept a position at the Society. Following this incidence it appears that Gray spent several years in London living in the house of John Desagulier and working as his assistant during experimental demonstrations. Again Desagulier was a hard-core Newtonian appointed as Royal Society demonstrator as successor to Hauksbee. Far from persecuting Gray the Newtonians did everything in their power to help him.

Gray’s claim to fame came late in life after the death of Newton. In 1731, having taken up his electrical investigations again he discovered electrical conductivity. C²,in their usual style, claim that histories of electricity do not give credit to Gray for his achievements. Again this is not true. Already in the eighteenth century Joseph Priestley in his The History and Present State of Electricity from 1776 gives a complete description of Gray’s contributions. I haven’t consulted all the modern sources but John Heilbron’s Elements of Early Modern Physics, the standard work on the subject, gives Gray all the credit he deserves.

As far as I can see the Clarks’ book is a cheap sensationalist attempt to sell their very poor historical research by defaming Newton.

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

Humanity’s interest in the so-called pseudo-sciences has not always been bad for science.

In a recent piece on her excellent Guardian Science blog, The H Word, my #histsci soul sister Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt asked, “Is there a rising tide of irrationality?” summarising her opinion with the following subtitle:

Despite claims that pseudoscientific views are on the rise, history shows that belief in things like astrology or the paranormal have always been with us and are likely to remain

Being my usual provocative self I thought I would take the time to point out that not only has the belief in things like astrology and the paranormal always been with us but that this belief has over the centuries made a not insubstantial contribution to the evolution of the so-called legitimate sciences. What follows is not intended to be an exhaustive survey of the subject but an indicator that humanity’s interest in the apparently non-rational has not necessarily been so disastrous as the members of the so-called Skeptical Community would have us believe.

As Ms Higgitt specifically mentions astrology I thought it would make for a convenient starting point. Some form of astrology or more generally a belief in celestial influence was the main driving force behind the development of astronomy from its beginnings in the prehistoric mists of time up to the beginning of the eighteenth century CE. Most if not all astronomers in antiquity were also astrologers a fact best illustrated by the fact that the author, Ptolemaeus, of the definitive account of technical astronomy in antiquity, his Syntaxis Mathematiké, was also the author of the definitive technical account of astrology, his Tetrabiblos.

We find this connection flowering in the Early Modern Period where the principle founders of the new astronomy – Gmunden, Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, Apian, Rheticus, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo et al. – were all practicing astrologers. (The first person in the comments, who claims they only did it for the money gets to clean my bike for the next twelve months) In fact we know that the principle motivation for the majority of them in improving astronomy was to provide a more accurate apparatus for delivering the raw data for astrology. It is first the generation of astronomers active in the latter part of the seventeenth century – Cassini, Newton, Flamsteed, Halley et al. – who abandoned astrology for astronomy qua astronomy, although both Cassini and Newton were motivated to take up the subject by an early interest in astrology.

During the Humanist Renaissance the strong interest in astro-medicine or, as it was know, iatro-mathematics led to the establishment, for the first time, of dedicated chairs for the study of the mathematical sciences at the mediaeval universities.

During the Early Modern Period attempts to establish astrology as an empirical science led to the emergence of the science of meteorology and also made major contributions to a modern fact based approach to history. All in all not a bad record for the most ridiculed of pseudo-sciences.

Sticking with the “A”s we move on to alchemy. Often ridiculed as complete nonsense in reality alchemy made some major contribution, along side astrology, to the evolution of the sciences in the Early Modern Period.

Most difficult to determine is alchemy’s contribution to the development of its first cousin chemistry as the two disciplines were entwined in a close embrace well into the eighteenth century. What is certain is that most of the equipment and the methodology that became standard fare in the chemistry laboratory were developed over the centuries by alchemists.

Paracelsus has been called the father of pharmacy, a term, that regular readers of this blog will know, I detest. However it is a historical fact that the science of pharmacy as we know it has its origins in the activities of the Paracelsian iatro-chemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose activities were based on a modified alchemy developed by their guru Theophrastus.

Alchemy also played a surprising role in the history of physics in the work of the seventeenth century’s most infamous alchemist, Isaac Newton. To quote I. Bernard Cohen probably the greatest of all Newtonian scholars:

Thus Newton’s acceptance of forces [and also action at a distance] as fundamental entities was conditioned to a significant degree by his studies of alchemy.[1]

In fact Newton’s rejection of the then dominant mechanical philosophy for an alchemy inspired physics of invisible forces acting at a distance led to the Principia being rejected by both the Cartesian and the Leibnizian physicists as occult (read pseudo) science.

Staying with old Isaac for a brief moment, as I have blogged in the past, he and other Bible chronologists, millennialists to the core (and you can’t get more pseudo than that!), in their endeavours to establish the date of the apocalypse made significant contributions to the development of modern historical methodology.

Should anybody jump to the conclusion that with the successful completion of the so-called scientific revolution this unholy alliance between the one pure doctrine of science and its distinctly unsavoury sister the occult had finally come to an end they would be mightily mistaken.

For example in the nineteenth century Vitalism, Naturphilosphie and Mesmerism, all three of which would be decried as pseudo-scientific today, all played important and significant roles in the scientific debates of the period pushing forward the development of various scientific disciplines.

Even the twentieth century was far from immune from the influence of highly dubious subjects within the evolution of the sciences. When he died the scientist, science communicator and novelist, Arthur Koestler left money in his will for the establishment of a chair for the investigation of the paranormal, an act that caused a major outcry within the scientific community. However throughout the twentieth century investigations of supposed paranormal phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis, out of body experiences etc. have contributed to experiment design and evaluation, the development of statistical evaluation of experiments and made general contributions to the development of the cognitive sciences.

Should anyone believe that twentieth century physics is immune from woo they should read up on the history of the heuristics employed by those who developed the standard model, rational is something else.

Of course I’m not advocating the pursuit of pseudo-science or in anyway supporting those who try to sneak pseudo-science into the school curriculum but as a historian of science I do have problems with the often almost hysterical attitude of the Skeptical Community towards what they see as the demonic forces of woo. On one occasion when discussing the role that astrology played in the evolution of modern astronomy I was told by a leading German Skeptic, who was at that time a physics post doc at my local university and is still deeply involved in science communication, that I should not say such things in public because I would give people a false impression of science. As a historian of science I can only say that it is the supporters of Dawkins, Mayer et al who with their gospel of scientism who give people a false impression of science. Science has evolved over the centuries along a strange and convoluted path and will almost certainly continue to do despite the best efforts of the Hordes of Pharyngula and their ilk to place it in a straightjacket.

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[1] Isaac Newton The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, A new translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman assisted by Julia Badenz Preceded by A Guide to Newton’s Principia by I. Bernard Cohen pp. 57 – 58

Monday morning smack-down: Sherlock Holmes rather than Dirty Harry.

Science writer Judith Dutton at mental _floss blogged about Isaac Newton’s activities at the Royal Mint last Friday. She chose to retell the story of Newton’s pursuit of the coiner William Chaloner. The main part of her piece is OK when somewhat sensationalist but the first and last paragraphs are so false that they are painful to read for anybody who knows their way around Newton’s biography so I have decided to treat them to a little touch of RM Monday morning smack-down. It also gives me an excuse to recommend Thomas Levenson’s excellent Newton and the Counterfeiter[1], which tells the whole story and which I reviewed here and here when it was first published.

Ms Dutton opens her article with the following:

Back in 1695, England’s Royal Mint discovered a serious problem: A massive portion of the circulating currency was phony. As counterfeiting methods grew increasingly clever, the Mint turned to England’s brightest mind for a solution. Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, a one-man army who waded through London’s underbelly to restore the currency’s integrity. Most counterfeiters were easy prey for Newton, but William Chaloner, a shadowy kingpin, kept eluding his grasp. 

There is so much that is factually false in this paragraph that it is difficult to decide where to start. Isaac Newton was not recruited by the Royal Mint to combat an epidemic of counterfeiting. Newton had been petitioning his friends in London to find him a suitable official position in the capitol for most of the 1690s. His reasons for doing so seem to have been twofold. On the one hand it appears that Newton now found Cambridge boring. The students were not interested in his lectures as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The lectures often didn’t take place because of lack of attendees and in his years as professor only two students are known to have studied maths with him and neither of them to become mathematicians. He was now over fifty years old and had already produced his two masterpieces the Principia and the Optics, although the latter was first published in 1704. On the other hand Newton desired a government position that reflected and honoured his undeniable status as Europe’s leading mathematician and natural philosopher. In 1696 Newton’s campaign bore fruit as Charles Montagu, Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered Newton the position of Warden of the Mint. Montagu had been friends with Newton since his time as undergraduate at Cambridge and now, in a position of power, was more than willing to do his old mentor a favour. Later Montagu would have a much talked about affair with Newton’s niece and housekeeper Catherine Barton, a notable society beauty. The Montagu Barton dalliance led Voltaire to claim that Newton’s appointment to the Mint was a consequence of the affair but Barton first came to London to work as Newton’s housekeeper after his preferment. The position of Warden of the Mint was a sinecure, as Montagu wrote to Newton when offering him the position, “and has not too much bu’nesse to require more attendance then you may spare.” Newton was not expected to do very much for his salary and none of his predecessors had done so but Newton was not a man to rest on his laurels and plunged into the work at the Mint as he earlier plunged into the secrets of the universe.

At the beginning of his appointment this work consisted of overseeing the total re-coining of Britain a mammoth project initiated by Montagu in order to restore a badly debased currency and begun under Newton’s predecessor. So why the engagement as detective? In 17^th century Britain there was no central judicial authority and no police force. Many institutions were there own judicial authority. For example the Church and both Oxford and Cambridge Universities were their own judicial authorities administering justice (or injustice) on issue concerned with their own activities. Similarly the Royal Mint was its own judicial authority. The Royal Mint was responsible for the investigation, pursuit, arrest and bringing to trial of coiners and clippers and any others indulging in crimes against the coin of the realm. This judicial responsibility fell under the remit of the Warden and would normally be delegated to agents acting in his name, quite why Newton decided to pursue this activity so vehemently remains one of the puzzles of his complex personality.

On the whole Ms Dutton’s account of Newton’s struggle to bring Chaloner to justice is OK if somewhat over the top. There are however a couple of minor points that should be mentioned. She writes, “Chaloner had trained as a nail maker’s apprentice, but he found a more lucrative application for molten metals: coining 30,000 guineas“.  As someone has already pointed out in the comments in the 17^th century nails were forged and not cast so a nail makers apprentice would not work with molten metal. Just for the record today wire nails are drawn and not cast so still no molten metal. As part of her sensationalist approach Ms Dutton then claims that, “he [Newton] became the Dirty Harry of 17th-century London”. Given that Newton’s methods included visiting London’s dens of iniquity in disguise to question informers and did not involve him in brutally killing large numbers of people whilst uttering clichéd phrases I somehow feel Sherlock Holmes might have been a better comparison than Mr East wood’s most notorious psychopath creation.

Unfortunately Ms Dutton manages to go completely off the rails again in her closing remarks. She writes:

With Chaloner dispatched, Newton torched the records of his investigation, likely to cover up the murky steps he took to help save the pound. In 1703, he gave up crime fighting and returned to academia as president of the Royal Society. England’s currency was once again safe from scoundrels like Chaloner, and criminals and thinkers alike had learned a valuable lesson: You don’t mess with Isaac Newton.

If Newton “torched the records of his investigation” I have to ask myself how Tom Levenson was able to write his excellent book that Ms Dutton appears to have plagiarised without acknowledging her source. Although after succeeding in finally bringing Chaloner to the gallows Newton did indeed reduce his activities as detective he by no means returned to academia, in fact he did exactly the opposite. In 1702 he finally resigned from the Lucasian Chair for Mathematics at Cambridge severing his formal connections with academia for ever. Newton had taken the unusual step of changing his position from Warden to Master of the Mint, the only person ever to do so, in 1699. This move was almost certainly motivated by the facts that the real power at the Mint was in the hands of the Master who was responsible for actually producing the coins and because the Master receiving a percental commission on the coins that he minted was much better paid than the Warden. He continued to rule the roost at the Royal Mint until his death in 1727, when he as succeeded by John Conduit his nephew in law and Catherine Barton’s husband. Coining and clipping certainly did not end with the Hanging of William Chaloner and many generations of Wardens would continue to fight the problem long after Isaac had been laid to rest in his monumental tomb in Westminster Abbey.

The story of Newton’s fight against the coiners and in particular his struggles with William Chaloner is a fascinating piece of English history and if anyone really wants to know what really happened I recommend that they ignore Ms Dutton’s piece and instead read Tom Levenson’s excellent account of the whole affair.

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[1] Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of he World’s Greatest Scientist, Houghton, Mifflin & Harcourt, Boston and New York, 2009.

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.

Oh Boy! I done screwed up real bad and nobody noticed!

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that when it comes to the history of science I have a pedantic streak about as wide as a six lane highway, which I subtly wield like a fifty ton steam roller gone rampant. Well today the person I have to dish out some of my notorious HistSci Hulk arse kicking to is myself! I ought to find the situation embarrassing but somehow I find it really funny. Before I started this blog I wrote a couple of guest blogs that John Wilkins, The Albino Aussie Anthropoid^TM, was kind enough to post on his excellent blog, Evolving Thoughts, thus lowering the tone by several degrees, and one guest blog which Will Thomas was equally kind in posting on his just as excellent blog Ether Wave Propaganda. In the latter I dropped a clangour and a real big one at that.

What is funny about this situation is that I posted my piece on 8^th December 2008 and since then it has been read by several thousand people and nobody noticed the glaring error until Kirsten Walsh of the also excellent Early Modern Experimental Philosophy Research Project blog read it two days ago! My post told the story of Isaac Newton’s first scientific paper, on optics, and its reception. Right at the beginning of the post I quoted the full title of the paper as it appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society for 1672 or at least that’s what I intended to do and thought I had done. However as Kirsten quite correctly pointed out I had by mistake posted the title of Newton’s second article:

A Serie’s of Quere’s Propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be Determin’d by Experiments, Positively and Directly Concluding His New Theory of Light and Colours; and Here Recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they Were Generously Imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the Said Mr. Newtons of July 8.1672 

and not the first one:

A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light andColors: Sent by the Author to the Publisheefrom Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; In Order to be Communicated to the R. Society

What can I say apart from “shit happens” even to the best intentioned of us and apologies to all those thousand of readers who were misled by me as to the true title of Newton’s first paper.  I won’t do it again gov’, ‘onest!

It’s silly questions time again: “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?

Back in May the Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones asked, “Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?” making, as I pointed out at the time, a serious category mistake. Something must be in the drinking water at the Guardian because now Stuart Clark on the Guardians Science Blogs is asking “Was Newton a scientist or a sorcerer?” making, you guessed it, a serious category mistake. As my Internet friend Tom Levenson, who is himself something of a Newton expert, pointed out on twitter Gotta stop with “Scientist and/or sorcerer” nonsense. Newton never saw himself in those terms… In fact Tom’s tweet says it all but for those not in the know, who might want to learn more, I will elaborate.

For all those at the back who haven’t been paying attention Newton cannot have been a scientist because the term was first coined by William Whewell in 1833 and did not come into common usage until around 1870. There are those who will immediately say that Newton thought like a modern scientist so it doesn’t matter if the term is anachronistic he was one, so there. The problem with this claim is that it’s based on a very limited knowledge of Newton, his life, his work and the way he thought. Put very simply Newton did not think like a modern scientist, which brings us to the second prong of Stuart Clark’s dichotomy.

Clark calls Newton a sorcerer because he was a practicing alchemist, which displays an immense ignorance of the world of seventeenth century thought on his part. A sorcerer is a practitioner of magic in fact a practitioner of black magic and that is a very, very different thing from an alchemist. What follows is a brief outline as to why Clark’s appellation is so inappropriate (with apologies to all serious historians of alchemy, astrology and natural magic for a totally inadequate explanation of these disciplines in the early modern period).

In the early modern period there are three so-called occult (occult just means hidden or concealed) sciences: astrology, natural magic and alchemy all of which found their legitimacy in the micro-cosmos macro-cosmos philosophy. This cosmology says as above so below or the world we live in is a reflection of the heavens. Astrology investigates the connections between the heavens and the earth and tries to define the heavenly or celestial influences. Both natural magic and alchemy are methods that try or at least hope to directly influence or manipulate those influences. Practitioners of all three disciplines distance themselves clearly from demonic or black magic that tries to manipulate nature through demonic powers. A sorcerer is a user of demonic magic.

Newton rejected both astrology and natural magic and is also on record as not believing in witches or ghost so I think we can safely say he also rejected demonic magic, so he definitely wasn’t a sorcerer. He was however a convinced alchemist. This was not a mild side-line or passing fantasy as some commentators on Clark’s post would like to believe, the study of alchemy was his main occupation six months of the year for about thirty years. Also this was not after he ceased doing scientific work as many sources would have you believe but parallel to his main period of scientific activity between 1666 and 1696 when he gave up academia to move to London and the Royal Mint. It is important to understand that for Newton and his fellow alchemists, which included Robert Boyle and John Locke, alchemy was an epistemic discipline that is a branch of knowledge like optics or mechanics.

So Newton was neither a scientist nor a sorcerer so what was he? We have already seen he was a committed alchemist, what else?

Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge so it is safe to call him a mathematician. To find out what he was we can look at his two principle publications The Optics and Principia. The Optics is basically a book on geometrical optics, which was then still a sub-discipline of mathematics, in fact Newton in his roll as professor lectured on optics, so this can safely be subsumed under his roll as mathematician. The Principia is actually titled Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or in English The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, all of which tells us that Newton was a natural philosopher. So we have mathematician and natural philosopher. However the title of his main work tells us that he was a representative of a fairly new breed of academic the mathematical natural philosopher. Newton wasn’t the first of this genus, which had slowly evolved since sometime in the High Middle Ages, Galileo, Kepler, Borelli and Huygens being other examples from the seventeenth century.

Maybe we could restate Clarks question as “Was Newton a mathematical natural philosopher or an alchemist?” but should we do so we would be again doing Newton an injustice. We are back to the reason that Newton did not think like a modern scientist. For Newton his theological studies (that I haven’t dealt with here) and his alchemical studies were an integral part of his natural philosophical investigations, in fact they were at the very heart of those investigations so to present these two aspects of his work as a dichotomy would be totally false.

In his blog post Clark quotes a footnote from Richard Westfall one of the deans of Newton studies:

“My modes of thought are so far removed from those of alchemy that I am constantly uneasy in writing on the subject … [Nevertheless] my personal preferences cannot make more than a million words he wrote in the study of alchemy disappear.”

He then goes on to quote novelist Rebecca Stott:

“Westfall admitted to wishing that he could make those million words disappear.”

This is a complete misrepresentation. It was one of Westfall’s doctoral students Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs who wrote the definitive account of Newton’s alchemical studies The Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy, or the Hunting of the Green Lyon and also the definitive account of how his alchemy fitted into his approach to knowledge The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Both books are highly recommended for anybody who wishes to know more about Isaac the Alchemist.

For an excellent short account of the misrepresentation of Newton’s alchemical activities I recommend this post from last year by Rebekah “Becky” Higgitt at he blog Teleskopos: Newton and alchemy: a constant surprise?

Addendum: As Ian Hopkinson correctly pointed out on Twitter Newton is of course a Fig Roll.