Isaac Newton, God and the new science
Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer
By Michael White
Fourth Estate, 1997. 402 pp., $45 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Once upon a time, way back in the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton saw an apple fall and in a flash of inspiration discovered gravity. Scientific genius that he was, he also invented the calculus. These two breakthroughs from the brain of one man brought the world out from the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason, and science lived happily ever after.
So the fairy tale used to go about Isaac Newton. But, as Michael White shows in this new biography, Newton was neither the unsullied essence of modern science nor the genius who, in the liberal version of the "great man" theory of social change, set science and society on a new course through his brilliant intellect alone.
Born to the property-owning class in 1642 in Lincolnshire, the young Newton itched to escape the narrow confines of curriculum and home.
Cambridge University, to which Newton went in 1661 was, however, not the ticket to enlightenment. An elite institution rooted in narrow scholastic tradition, it was a vehicle for social prestige and connections for the spoilt sons of the wealthy. Cambridge was an intellectual defender of church and king, re-righting the world that had been turned upside down during the English Revolution, when the rule of kings, armies, priests and property had been challenged.
Cambridge taught a physics based on Christian dogma and the 13th century "natural philosophy" of Aristotle. God was in hands-on control, supervising all motion, and theories of the atomic structure of matter were taboo.
Newton, with tenacious resolve, and standing on the shoulders of Descartes and Galileo, soon took to paradigm-busting ways.
Developing the modern scientific method — observation, experiment and hypothesis-testing — he proposed the basic laws of modern mechanical physics, unifying Galileo's terrestrial mechanics and Kepler's planetary model through the unifying concept of gravity, the universal force of attraction acting at a distance between all matter.
No inquisition tortured Newton, as happened to Galileo 30 years earlier for relegating God from front-seat driver to remote head office boss who simply set the whole works going.
Newton was quick to disavow the atheistic implications of the new physics — God the watchmaker was still essential to get the universe ticking in the first place. The new laws of dynamics and mechanics allowed increased understanding, and therefore control, of nature by human intervention, both of which were much to the ideological and material liking of the growing merchant and industrialist class which had emerged strengthened from the English Revolution. Newton's universe made room for both God and the new science.
Newtonian physics was essential to the technological spadework necessary for the coming industrial revolution, especially in shipping, mining and ballistics.
Social, political and economic conditions in England were the compost for Newton's flourishing new science. The needs of English mercantile/industrial capitalism could not be met by an Aristotelian physics and an interventionist God holding the world together by miracles and blue-tac. That is why at this time, the late 17th century, in England, a man of Newton's qualities (a creative thinker and slogging experimenter) could make a scientific revolution rather than suffer inquisition and ridicule.
Newton was accepted by the ruling class of his day. He was put in charge of the mint in 1693 to solve a currency crisis by overseeing a mass re-coinage and stamping out of forgery and counterfeiting. When not conducting time-and-motion studies of mint workers, Newton was interviewing informers and witnesses in taverns and brothels in order to send counterfeiters to the gallows.
Although having to keep some of his socially unacceptable beliefs secret (he denied the equivalence of the Holy Trinity), he was knighted in 1705.
Newton was a member of the ruling elite. Principia Mathematica, his major work, which explained the mechanistic workings of the universe through simple laws of motion, was published in Latin! This "scholar and a gentleman", with a comfortable income from property, did not want his mechanical philosophy to get into the hands and heads of "rude mechanicals" who might draw atheistic conclusions and become subversives.
That Newton was a man of his time and not some free-floating genius is further supported by White's revelations, not new but documented in more detail, that Newton was not so much the first of the modern scientists as the "last of the magicians" (as J.M. Keynes called him).
In an age when science, religion and magic all coexisted, Newton devoted as much time to biblical prophecy and the mystical practice of alchemy (elixirs with magical powers, turning base metals into gold) as he did to calculus and the laws of motion. His alchemical affairs were part of his search for a unified theory of the principles of the universe including the micro-structure of matter, although the age of magic and religion was not done with yet.
White's biography could have made much more of the links between the economic, scientific and personal in this contradictory age of change and continuity.
But as this smacks too much of Marxist class analysis, we instead are served up lots on Newton's psychology (he was obsessive, neurotic, self-opinionated, emotionally impotent and possessed of an excessively rosy self-image) and his social style. (Newton's manipulative control of the Royal Society, the peak scientific body, would put your average ALP machine to shame, and his bitchiness towards von Leibnitz, who independently developed the calculus after Newton, would put an actor from Melrose Place in the shade.)
The Romantic poet William Blake saw Newton's new intellectual world as bleak, mechanical and inhuman, a world of "dismal steel", "iron scourges", "cruel works" and "cogs tyrannic".
It was not so much Newton's science, however, as what capitalist class society, which called it forth, was to do with it in the 270 years since Newton's death that was to give Blake's fears credence.