Over the next twenty years, Newton refined his idea of gravitation into a comprehensive system including the three great Laws of Motion. The first law was the idea of inertia or momentum. It basically means that things stay still or keep moving at the same speed in a straight line unless something pushes or pulls on them, that is, a force. He applied this to the Moon – showing that the Moon tries to carry on in a straight line, but gravity pulls it into an orbit. The second is the idea that the rate and direction of any change – an object’s acceleration – depends entirely on the strength of the force, and how heavy the affected object is. If the Moon were closer to the Earth, the pull of gravity between them would be so strong that the Moon would be dragged down to crash into the Earth. If it were further away, gravity would be so weak that the Moon would fly off into space. The third law showed that every action and reaction is equal and opposite – so when two things crash together they bounce off with equal force.
The key, perhaps, to Newton’s success was that he did not attempt to explain gravity; he simply presented a mathematical description, writing: ‘I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses … it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.’ He was criticised for this lack of explanation at the time, but it was gradually realised that this was actually his greatest insight – to simply describe with mathematical precision rather than attempt to lift the veil and, as he put it, try to read God’s mind.[2]
We take Newton’s view of the ways things move so much for granted nowadays, that it is hard to imagine just what an extraordinary breakthrough it was. Before Newton, there had been no notion that the movement of the fish in the sea or papers disturbed by a breeze had anything in common whatsoever with the movement of the heavens, let alone that they were predictable in any way. They were at best seen to be controlled by unique, local factors; at worst by the whim of the gods. The universe was, essentially, a mysterious, capricious place.
With his law of gravity and his three Laws of Motion, Newton showed that every movement, large or small, on the ground or in the furthest reaches of space, behaved according to the same simple, universal laws. In his book Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), or simply Principia, probably the greatest science book ever written, he suddenly blew away the universe’s chaotic mystery and showed that everything, everywhere behaved in an orderly, entirely understandable way. It was as if the whole universe had been revealed at last as some great, incredibly complex clockwork machine, and Newton’s laws were the key to its working. Incredibly, it showed that the laws we work out with experiments here in labs on the ground can be applied right across the universe.
Even more significantly, it showed how every single movement in the universe can be analysed mathematically, and Newton provided the mathematical tools to do it, with the two entirely new branches of mathematics that he created – differential and integral calculus. Armed with Newton’s laws and Newton’s maths, it became possible, in theory, to predict the movement of everything in the universe from the greatest star to the tiniest molecule, for ever into the future.
No wonder then that as Newton’s ideas began to sink in, he came to be regarded with awe in the eighteenth century. His revelation that the universe behaves according to predictable, universal laws ushered in a whole new, optimistic age, the age of Enlightenment, in which people believed we humans can, by our efforts alone, learn to understand and improve the world. As the poet Alexander Pope said, in his famous satirical verse, ‘Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;/God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.’
If this optimism seems clouded today, it is only by the doubts that we will do the right thing – not that things are ultimately beyond our understanding in the way Newton initiated. And if Einstein’s insights have shown a subtler, deeper conception of how universal laws work at extremes, Newton’s laws underpin our basic understanding of how everything works on a day-to-day scale.
[1]No one knows quite what dark matter is, but it’s not just invisible; it hasn’t even enough substance to cluster into stars. It’s a bit like an incredibly thin gas that we can walk through without noticing. The sun and stars are probably racing through a mist of dark matter all the time. Indeed, dark matter particles may be so tiny that a billion particles may be slipping straight through you right now.
[2] This mathematical view of the universe seemed to some so cold and abstract and clockwork that a century later many Romantics turned against it. At a famous literary dinner on 28 December 1817, which included the poets Wordsworth and Keats, the artist Benjamin Haydon reported that Charles Lamb, ‘in a strain of humour beyond description, abused me for putting Newton’s head into my [Haydon’s] picture; “a fellow,” said he, “who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle.” And then he and Keats agreed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. It was impossible to resist him, and we all drank “Newton’s health and confusion to mathematics”.’ Two years later, Keats was to memorably describe the process in his poem ‘Lamia’ as ‘unweaving the rainbow’.
#30 Universities
The word university comes from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which means, essentially, a community of teachers and scholars. It is a wonderfully simple and apt description, which sums up the spirit of universities right from the earliest days. They are not schools where pupils simply go to take instruction. They are communities, where learning is exchanged. Teachers impart their knowledge not only to students, but also to each other, and there is the sense that they are places where ideas are shared and cherished.
Of course, universities don’t always live up to this ideal, and as universities have multiplied in number in recent years across the world, standards and approaches have inevitably varied, with some quite clearly being education factories, or worse, while others foster an outdated elitism. Nonetheless, the word university has a powerful aura that still inspires both administrators and students to regard them with just a little more reverence, just a little more sense of something rather special, than they would a college.
The first three universities, Bologna, Paris and Oxford, all date back to the eleventh century when the monastic tradition in Europe was at its height, and you can see the monastic links in the cloisters of many of the older universities. It’s partly this that gives them their special quality. But the aura runs deeper than that. Universities had an urgent mission of learning. They were set up by the Church, the medieval historian Sir Richard Southern asserted, to save humanity with their learning. The perfect knowledge of the world that might have been mankind’s was lost by the Fall. It was the scholars’ task to recover some of what was lost and bring redemption to mankind before the imminent end of the world. So it was not surprising that these early universities had a deep commitment to learning, and if the original purpose has been lost, some of the passion for knowledge lingers on in universities today.
Although they were endowed by the Church, the learning the medieval universities undertook was essentially secular. The tone was set by the influential and scholarly canon of the Abbey of St Victor in Paris in the early twelfth century, Hugh of Saint Victor. Although firmly in the monastic tradition, Hugh argued that secular learning and study of the natural world were a necessary foundation for proper religious contemplation. In other words, you needed to know about God’s world before you contemplated the heavens. ‘Learn everything,’ Hugh insisted, ‘later you will see that nothing is superfluous.’
Students at the medieval universities did not study theological matters as in the monasteries, but the liberal arts[1] – that is, the general knowledge meant to train a student’s capacity for rational thought, rather than professional or voca
tional training. The idea of liberal arts dates back to Roman times, when it was the education right for a free man, hence ‘liberal’ arts. In the medieval arts, there were seven liberal arts to be studied, divided into the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy). According to Hugh, learning these would help ‘to restore God’s image in us’. It was this higher purpose that inspired university scholars to write Summae, which were intended as encyclopaedias of the whole of reality.
The medieval universities taught entirely in Latin, and students were expected to chat in Latin even outside classes, on pain of a fine. This served to emphasise the town/gown divide, and students attending university were often given phrase books to help them converse with the locals. But it made the universities entirely international. It was easy for an English student to go to Bologna or a German student to go to Salamanca in Spain and know they would have no language problems. So students did indeed study right across Europe. Europe was united intellectually as never since, yet while it helped the exchange of learning, it created a sense of elevation and remoteness from the ordinary people that has clung on to the universities ever since in the image of ‘ivory towers’[2] of learning.
There is another fascinating strand to the origins of universities that is often forgotten. Visitors from the Middle East cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the quadrangles of the old European universities and the ancient Islamic schools set up in places like Baghdad, Cairo and Fez in Morocco in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Islamic school of Qayrawan (al Karaouine) in Fez, established in 859 AD, might, indeed, be called the world’s first university.
It seems likely that, before the divisive wars of the Crusades, the cultural interchange between Islam and the West was significant. Certainly, Arab learning translated into Latin, with the authors given Latin names such as Avicenna, Geber, Averroes and Alhazen, played a key role in the early universities – along with the classical texts reintroduced to the West from Islam. Moreover, the whole teaching set-up of the early European universities seems to owe a lot to the early Muslim schools with their study groups or halaqas, their special master/student relationships and so on. Even today, university professors occupy academic ‘chairs’ – a 1,000-year hangover from the Muslim schools where only the professor sat on a chair or kursi, and all his students squatted around him on the floor.
As the divide between East and West deepened, these connections were forgotten; and in time, too, the Christian religious overtones faded and universities became entirely secular institutions. Many traditions lingered on, though, and so too did the heightened sense of purpose. And maybe also the idea that students leave home and throw their lives entirely into being at university owes a great deal to the monastic retreat to focus on higher things. Although religion is taught now only on specialist minority courses, and the teaching is rational, not revelatory, it’s this quality of retreat that makes universities special. They are otherworldly, and meant to be – indeed need to be, to free teachers and students from everyday distractions to learn about life and the world in a very different way, which could be anything from long drunken nights chatting about the meaning of life to solitary hours poring over dense books in the university library.
The contribution of universities to our intellectual and cultural life over the centuries has been immense. Nearly all the greatest minds in science and philosophy, for instance, found their first inspiration and made their first bold explorations in their field at university.[3] Scientists like Newton, Darwin, Maxwell and Dirac, philosophers such as Erasmus and Wittgenstein, and poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge all began their careers at Cambridge University, for instance.
The universities continue to play a pivotal role in our society. For all the vacuous discussions and social flutter, many of them are major hubs of research and academic advancement. They may not always provide the hands-on, practical work that specialist research institutes give, but they provide the new ideas and the theoretical underpinnings without which the specialist institutes could never start. While much of the research on genetics, for instance, is in the labs of biotech companies and government research establishments, the breakthrough discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 that made it all possible took place at universities in Cambridge and London.
For the students who study at them, the best of universities provide a unique chance for learning, not just about the details of their subjects, but how to think for themselves. They are oases, too, where students can explore their ideas, investigate their hopes and dreams and learn about themselves in a way that they can at no other kind of educational establishment. They meet intelligent people and can exchange ideas both profound and trivial, share pivotal moments in their lives and pointless drunken nights, and make friends and love. Most, though by no means all, people who have been to university agree that it was a defining moment in their lives.
[1] This is why universities such as Cambridge still award all their graduates the title Bachelor of Arts, no matter what subject they studied. The term bachelor, incidentally, comes from the Latin baccalaureus, which of course is also the origin of the French baccalauréat. It was the Latin name for a knight’s squire, and there was a sense that university students were being apprenticed to do battle with the world of learning, just as the squire was being prepared for warfare. A degree was called a degree, because it was meant to be just a step, or degree, on the path to becoming a fully qualified master. The term graduate comes from the Latin gradus, which means ‘step’.
[2] The phrase apparently comes from the Biblical ‘Song of Solomon’, where it is used to describe a woman’s neck and suggest an aloof nobility.
[3] Often, the brightest, most original minds didn’t learn directly from the tutors, but sought things out for themselves. While at Cambridge, the young Isaac Newton was so concerned to follow up his own research that he barely bothered with the coursework and was almost failed. Unknown to his tutors, though, he was already going far beyond them, developing the latest revolutionary mathematical and scientific ideas of the French genius René Descartes, which were only just beginning to filter into England.
#29 Simplified Chinese
Writing is one of the hottest and most politically charged debates in China. The People’s Republic is backing a much simplified version of Chinese writing; Taiwan is currently seeking World Heritage status for Traditional Chinese writing to stop it being eradicated. Of course, it’s not just a battle about letters, but over the very future of China and its culture.
Over 90 per cent of Chinese people speak Chinese, the language of the Han people (the dominant ethnic group in China), which makes it the most widely spoken language on Earth (845 million native speakers, compared with 329 million Spanish and 328 million English). But Han comes in various dialects, and those dialects are so different that in the past, people speaking the Beijing dialect would find it as hard to understand someone from Guangzhou as a Portuguese would find it to understand someone from Romania.[1] The words are often the same in the various Chinese dialects but the tone with which they are spoken, and the word order, can be so different that they are mutually unintelligible. In the northern Chinese dialect (Mandarin), for instance, there are four different tones or pitches that distinguish words that would otherwise sound the same. Southern Chinese has nine of these tones.
There are seven major dialects of Han Chinese. Six of them are spoken by less than 20 per cent of people in China, including the Wu dialect of Shanghai (about 8 per cent), the Kejia or Hakka Fujianese dialect of Fujian (4 per cent), and the Yue (Cantonese) dialect of Hong Kong and Guangzhou (5 per cent). Many of the vast diaspora of Chinese people around the world, especially in South-east Asia, also speak Cantonese or Fujianese. However, by far the most widely spoken dialect in mainland China now is Mandarin, spoken by some 70 per cent of Chinese people.
In the past, Mandarin was the language of officialdom and got
its name from the Portuguese, who used the word to describe the dialect of the ‘mandarins’ (governors) of Beijing. Its use spread as government officials moved around the country and it paid people wherever they went to learn Mandarin to get on. In the 1950s, the government decided to promote its use as a common, national language and called it Putonghua (which means ‘common speech’), rather than the foreign name Mandarin. Putonghua is the form of Chinese taught to foreigners and is the language Chinese children are taught in at school, the language of government and the language of the media. In the major cities, almost every young person can read Putonghua because they learned it at school. Not everyone who reads it, though, can necessarily speak it, and in rural areas knowledge of Putonghua is much patchier.
Interestingly, many of the vast differences between the various Chinese dialects vanish when they are written down. The dialects may sound very, very different, but the words are written down with many of the same Chinese characters, so the sentence will mean the same whether the reader is from Beijing or Shenzhen. Because of the way Chinese characters work, they mean the same regardless of the way they are sounded – just as the written figure 4 means exactly the same whether you are French or German. All the same, most written Chinese is in the form of Putonghua anyway. It is very rare to try to write any of the dialects down, except for Cantonese.
Traditional Chinese is the world’s most complex written language. Whereas in most Western alphabets there are fewer than 33 letters to cope with, plus a few accent marks, Chinese has 50,000 or so characters. Highly educated Chinese people will probably be familiar with 10,000 of these, and anyone who is literate will know at least 2,500, which is what you need to know to read a newspaper.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 13
