Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist

by Thomas Levenson

  He wrote on through the fall and winter of 1685, stating propositions and theorems, presenting proofs, extracting corollaries from concepts already established, page after page, proof after proof, until the sheer mass overwhelmed all challenges. Throughout that time, Newton's always impressive appetite for work became total. "He very rarely went to Bed till 2 or 3 of the clock, sometimes not till 5 or 6, lying about 4 or 5 hours," observed Humphrey Newton. On rising, "his earnest & indefatigable Studyes retain'd Him, so that He scarcely knewe the Hour of Prayer."

  It took Newton almost two years to finish Book Two. Its last theorem completes his demolition of Descartes' vortices—those whirlpools in some strange medium that were supposed to drive the motion of the planets and stars. Newton showed no pity, concluding dismissively that his predecessor's work served "less to clarify the celestial motions than to obscure them."

  With that bit of old business settled, Newton turned to his ultimate aim. In the preface to the Principia, Newton wrote, "The whole difficulty of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces." Books One and Two had covered only the first half of that territory, presenting "the laws and conditions of motions"; but as Newton wrote, those laws were "not, however, philosophical but strictly mathematical." Now, he declared, it was time to put such abstraction to the test of experience. "It still remains for us," he wrote, "to exhibit the system of the world from these same principles."

  At first reading, Book Three, which he in fact titled "The System of the World," falls short. No mere forty-two propositions could possibly comprehend all of experience. But, as usual, Newton said what he meant. In a mere hundred pages or so of mathematical reasoning, he did not promise to capture all that moved in the observable universe. Rather, he offered a system with which to do so—the method that, as it has turned out, his successors have employed to explore all of material reality through the enterprise we call science.

  As Book Three opens, gravity at last takes over the entire narrative. Once again, Newton begins with the foundational claims of his investigation. Most important, he states what can be seen as the fundamental axiom of science: that the properties of objects that can be observed on earth must be assumed to be properties of bodies anywhere in the cosmos. Here he demonstrates that gravity behaves the same way whether it pulls a cannonball back to the ground or tugs on the most distant object in the heavens. He shows that the satellites of Jupiter obey his inverse square law of gravitation, then runs through the same reasoning for the major planets and for the moon.

  Next he proves that the center of the planetary system must be the sun, and explores how the mutual gravitational attraction between Saturn and Jupiter pulls both planets' orbits away from the perfect ellipse of a geometer's dream. Mathematics, Newton here affirms, is essential for the analysis of the physical world, but nature itself is more complex than any purely mathematical idealization of it.

  Newton races on—so many phenomena, only so much time and energy with which to explore them. Closer to home, he analyzes the track of the moon and the implications of the observed fact that the earth is not a perfect sphere. (He proved that the gravitational pull of a spheroid would not be the same everywhere, and hence one's weight would vary slightly depending on where one stands on the earth's surface.) And, seemingly at the end of a journey from the outermost known planets to the surface of the earth, he examines the influence of moon and sun on the earth's tides. Twenty years after he looked at gravity as a purely local phenomenon, Newton here presents gravity as the engine of the system of all creation—one that binds the rise and fall of the Thames or the Gulf of Tonkin to all the observed motions of the solar system.

  But Newton does not choose to end Book Three here, and his decision reveals how much the work as a whole acts to persuade and not merely to demonstrate. To be sure, no one thinks of Newton as a novelist, or of the Principia as a galloping read. But Book Three—and the volume in its entirety—can be experienced as a kind of epic of gravity, and to bring that tale to its heroic close, Newton spins his account outward once again, into the realm of the comets.

  The passage begins slowly, with a detailed, tedious series of observations of the path of the Great Comet of 1680, the product of Newton's relentless attempts to distinguish good data from bad. From that base of unassailable evidence, Newton plots an orbit. Then he derives the same path by calculation, extracting the comet's course from just three observed positions. The two tracks—the one observed and the one predicted—match almost exactly, tracing the curve called a parabola. It does not take a huge change in trajectory to place a comet on a parabolic path instead of an elliptical one, but the distinction is crucial. Comets in elliptical orbit, like that of 1682, which we now call Halley's, return again and again. A comet on a parabolic journey passes near the earth just once. It swings by the sun and then keeps going, traveling on a path that can, in principle, carry it to the farthest extremes of the heavens.

  With this, the Principia reaches its true climax. Nothing in Newton's science depends on the shape of this narrative. In any order, his proofs would be just as valid. But to take the reader on an odyssey that begins with the orbits of the planets and extends to bring the entire cosmos into view allows the larger implications of the Newtonian idea to emerge. At the end of the discussion of the comet of 1680, he writes, "The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true" (italics added).

  Truth, omnipresent and omnipotent: the Principia reveals laws of motion and gravity that do not merely describe how cannonballs fly or apples fall; they do not simply hold the earth in its orbit around the sun or regulate the dance of Saturn's moons around the ringed planet. Instead, as promised, Newton offered his world an idea that encompasses all matter, all motion, to the deepest reaches of the imaginable universe, a cosmos mapped by the paths of comets tracing out their elegant curves in journeys that end at infinity.

  And then Newton rested. Edmond Halley received Book Three of the Principia on April 4, 1687. He spent the next three months in publisher's hell. He split the printing job between two shops, whose work had to be coordinated and supervised. Between the mathematical formulas and the woodcut illustrations, some of the sheets were so complicated that Halley found himself consumed by the demands of the book. He confided to a friend that "Mr. Newton's book ... has made me forget my duty in regard of the Societies correspondents," and that "the correction of the press costs me a great deal of time and pains." He never complained openly to Newton himself, however, writing instead of "your divine treatise" and "your excellent work."

  Halley ordered a run of between two hundred fifty and four hundred copies from the printers. The finished books arrived on July 5, 1687. Halley sent twenty copies to Newton. Most of the rest went on sale. At seven shillings apiece unbound, two shillings more for a leather binding, the edition sold out almost immediately. Newton's life was about to be transformed.

  4. "The Incomparable Mr. Newton"

  FOR JOHN LOCKE, 1691 had been a busy year. He had left London for an open-ended stay at a friend's country house in Essex, and he had completed another book, one of his first since A Letter Concerning Toleration, his famous argument for freedom of conscience and belief. The new work took on a completely different though equally contentious topic: what to do about England's growing financial crisis, brought on by the plague of bad coins. After sending friends copies of the new manuscript in early December, he found himself free of immediate duties. So, at leisure at last, he resumed one of the hobbies of his youth.

  Just before nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday, December 13, he left his rooms upstairs, overlooking the garden, and hurried outside to record his daily observations of the weather. His thermometer was a good one, produced by the celebrated London w
atchmaker Thomas Tompion. Locke recorded the temperature: 3.4 on the particular scale used on his instrument—notably colder than the "temperate" reading of 4, but not quite as cold as the day before, when Locke noted frost. This day, he found that the barometric pressure had dropped overnight and a light breeze had set in from the east. Last, he recorded the condition of the sky: thick, uniform clouds. In other words, a typical December day in the east of England: chilly, damp, and dull.

  That same day, about thirty miles to the north, Isaac Newton, in a state of annoyance, began a letter. He drew out a sheet of paper, loaded his quill with ink, and began to write. He filled a page, read it, and paused. Newton was swift to take offense, and as Robert Hooke had already learned to his sorrow, Newton's enemies had to expect overwhelming retaliation for any slight, real or imagined. But today's missive was directed against that amateur meteorologist John Locke, a man whom Newton admired and by whom he was admired in turn. Newton found it difficult to strike the right note of reproach.

  The crime in question? Locke had offered to help his friend Newton gain the post of Master of Charterhouse, a boys' school in London. Newton recoiled at the thought. "You seem still to think on Charterhouse," he wrote, but "I believe your notions & mine are very different about the matter." What was wrong with the proposal? Everything. "The competition is hazzardous," he complained, "and I am loathe to sing a new song" in hopes of persuading the mighty to throw him a sop. Still more galling, the pay was meager, beneath him. "Its but 200 pounds per an besides a Coach (wch I reccon not) & lodging"—not enough to live in the style to which Newton aspired nor fit reward for a man of his reputation.

  And, of course, there was the problem of London.

  Newton had lived in Cambridge for thirty years. All the decades of thought and labor that had transformed an awkward country boy into the dominant mind in Europe had taken place in and around the rooms overlooking the Great Court and chapel of Trinity College, from which he now wrote angrily to his friend. And yet Locke dared to suggest that he should abandon Cambridge for London, with all its filth and pretense. How could Newton express the manifold unsuitability of the suggestion? Try this: "The confinement to ye London air & a formal way of life is what I am not fond of."

  Line after line expressed his sense of insult—and then he stopped. His rage cooled. He did not sign the letter.

  The truth was that Newton desperately hoped to escape his intellectual cloister, and just as desperately desired the exceptionally well-connected Locke's help to do so. What had happened?

  The Principia had, and with it Newton's sudden emergence into the circles of the great.

  From the moment of its publication—and before, in fact—Edmond Halley had done his best to make sure that the Principia received its proper reception. He launched his campaign on the first pages of the work itself, adding to Newton's text a dedicatory ode: "Error and doubt no longer encumber us with mist; /...We are now admitted to the banquets of the Gods; / We may deal with laws of heaven above; and we now have / The secret keys to unlock the obscure earth." And, lest anyone mistake the value of the man who had found the keys to the kingdom, Halley concluded: "Join me in singing the praises of newton, who reveals all this /...No closer to the gods can any mortal rise." More soberly, in his formal review Halley argued for Newton's unique significance. "This incomparable author having at length been prevailed upon to appear in publick, has in this treatise given a most notable extent of the powers of the Mind." This Newton was the new Moses, a prophet revealing the law to the people: he had "at once shewn what are the principles of Natural Philosophy and so far derived from their consequences that he seems to have ... left little to be done by those that shall succeed him."

  Newton could, of course, count on Halley's praise. The reaction that truly mattered would come from the rest of learned Europe. Over the summer and into the autumn of 1687 those responses came in. Acta Eruditorum, Europe's leading scientific journal, called the book "an investigation worthy of so great a mathematician." In Paris, the devout Cartesian who reviewed the Principia for Le Journal des sçavans wanted an account of gravity that would reveal the mechanism by which one object attracted another, the kind of direct connection required by orthodox mechanical philosophers. The Principia's purely mathematical description of gravity emphatically did not supply that kind of explanation, relying instead on the seemingly occult notion of forces acting across space—but the French reviewer still conceded that "it is not possible to make demonstrations more precise than those which [Newton] gives." The then-anonymous Scottish mathematician David Gregory wrote to Newton, offering "my most hearty thanks for having been at the pains to teach the world that which I never expected any man should have knowne." And though "your book is of so transcendent fineness and use that few will understand it," he stressed his awe on behalf of "those few who cannot but be infinitely thankful to you." Gottfried Leibniz was one of that little band who could indeed comprehend the work. His praise came in the most revealing form: in the winter of 1688–89 he rushed into print three articles that suggested he had either earlier arrived at or refuted some of Newton's conclusions. Such attempted theft acknowledged the obvious: the Principia had become the measure of all scientific excellence from the moment it appeared in print.

  From there, it did not take long for Newton's fame to reach the next level. After discussing parts of the Principia, the French philosopher Marquis de l'Hospital burst out, "Good god what fund of knowledge there is in that book!" And then he pressed his companion, an acquaintance of Newton's, for "every particular of Sr I. even to the color of his hair [and]...does he eat and drink & sleep?" Then the Marquis asked the iconic question, the one that has chased Newton ever since: "Is he like other men?"

  Newton had entered a realm of fame that catapulted him out of the narrow company of natural philosophers and into the wide world. One of the most worldly to fall into his orbit was an expatriate English man of letters living in the Netherlands—that genteel revolutionary John Locke. Late in 1687 Locke heard of a new book that was causing a sensation. He borrowed a copy from his friend Christiaan Huygens. But when Locke tried to read it, he found himself adrift in Newton's calculations. So he asked Huygens—after Newton the most important scientific thinker of the day—whether he could accept the Principia's technical arguments on faith, simply assuming their validity. Huygens confirmed that Newton had proved what he had claimed, and so Locke read on, taking each mathematical conclusion for granted.

  He was enthralled. He wrote one of the early, influential reviews of the book in 1688, in the Bibliothèque universelle, and he made sure his English readers took the point, writing in the preface to his Essay on Human Understanding in 1689 that "the commonwealth of learning is not at this time without masterbuilders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments." Chief among them "the incomparable Mr. Newton." The critical Newtonian advance, Locke wrote, was that "we might in time hope to be furnished with more true and certain Knowledge in several parts of this stupendous Machine [Nature] than hitherto we could have expected."

  Locke was eager to meet any man who had devised the path to such certain truth. There was just one problem: in 1687 he was a political exile, a wanted enemy of the English state. Four years before, Locke, thanks to his long association with King Charles Il's Whig enemies, had been under routine surveillance by agents of the Crown when the Rye House Plot broke. The Rye House conspirators had planned to assassinate the King and his brother James, and the collapse of the scheme led to a wider roundup of the usual suspects. Several prominent Whigs were brought to trial and sent to the scaffold, and Locke himself faced arrest and possible execution for his guilt by association with one of the leading conspirators. Sensibly, he began to move around England and then fled the country altogether, reaching the Netherlands in September 1683. As long as the Stuarts remained in power, there he was compelled to remain.

  Newton had his own troubles with his king. When James took the throne af
ter his brother's death in 1685, he began an inept effort to re-Catholicize Protestant England. In 1687, James took aim at Cambridge University, ordering it to grant Father Alban Francis, a Benedictine monk, the degree of master of arts—an honor that would permit Francis to take an official position in the governance of the university. The university's leaders refused, and Newton applauded. He broke into the last weeks of work on the Principia to argue that a "mixture of Papist & Protestants in ye same University can neither subsist happily nor long together." When King James's Court of the Ecclesiastical Commission ordered the university to send representatives to account for its disobedience to the Crown, Newton was selected as a member of the delegation.

  The court threatened and blustered. Newton led his colleagues as they pushed back. The government flinched first. In May 1687 the chief judge of the commission issued his order: the Cambridge delegation should "Go your way, and sin no more." Where it counted, Newton and his colleagues had won: Cambridge never granted the required degree.

  This victory made Newton a marked man, at least as far as King James was concerned. He returned to Cambridge and, prudently, kept mostly to himself. The fame that the Principia brought him was sweet, but for the moment it remained too dangerous to attempt to savor much of celebrity's rewards.

  King James II was a failure at most of the arts of governance. He was, however, a master at enraging his enemies and estranging his friends. It took him just three years on the throne to alienate a critical mass of his subjects. By mid-1688, the traditionally pro-monarchy Tories and their opponents, the Whigs, were both conspiring to replace James with his nephew and son-in-law William, Prince of Orange, whose wife was the King's elder daughter, Mary. In November, William landed on the south coast of England with an army of between eighteen and twenty thousand men (including about two hundred black soldiers recruited—or acquired—from plantations in the American colonies). James was able to counter with a force of about the same size and gathered his army at Salisbury, blocking William's path to London, but the royalist strength drained away as first James's generals and then his own daughter Anne defected to William's side. After a couple of minor skirmishes, James ran. He fled London on December 9 and, a week later, surrendered to a Dutch detachment. Two weeks later, William turned a blind eye as his father-in-law escaped to France.