Читать книгу Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer - Michael White - Страница 8

[Truth is] the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation.

ISAAC NEWTON¹

Cambridge during the 1660s was far from a Utopia of academic purity. It was both academically backward and a dangerous place in which to live. The buildings were overcrowded and huddled together along filthy streets which at night were unlit and during the day teemed with merchants, beggars, unschooled children and gowned students. An anonymous visitor to the town described it as:

so abominably dirty that Old Street, in the middle of the winter’s thaw, or Bartholomew’s Fair, after a shower of rain, could not have more occasion for a scavenger than the miry streets of this famous corporation, and most of them so very narrow that should two wheelbarrows meet in the largest of their thoroughfares they are enough to make a stop for half an hour before they can well clear themselves of one another to make room for passengers. The buildings in many parts of the town are so little and so low that they looked more like huts for pygmies than houses for men.²

Covering little more than half a square mile, Cambridge had a population of about 8,000 including almost 3,000 students, graduates and university staff. Students could easily find themselves at risk – their souls in jeopardy from the attentions of prostitutes and innkeepers (a danger made much of by the hypocritical masters), and their physical safety threatened by ubiquitous thieves and murderers. In a letter to his mother written in 1664, one John Strype, a young student in his first year at the university, describes graphically the social climate in the town:

We have hereabouts most intolerable robbing: never by reports so much. I have heard within two or three days of six or seven robberies hereabouts committed: whereof two or three killed. No longer than last Sabbath, a mile off, a man knocked on the head. Lately a scholar of Peter House had both his ears cut off, because he told the thieves, after he had delivered some money to them, that he would give them leave to inflict any punishment upon him, if he had a farthing more: but they searching him, found, it seems, 20s. more: so they took him at his word, and inflicted the cheater’s punishment upon him.³

Such incidents were not attributable solely to the perceived wealth of the students, nor was it simply that students were easy targets for thieves; there had been bad feeling between town and gown for centuries. Although town considerably outnumbered gown, the lives of the townsfolk were dominated by an autocratic university governing body that often behaved in corrupt and self-interested fashion. Most of the town’s tradesmen relied upon the university for their livelihoods, and many resented the draconian powers of the Vice-Chancellor. His sphere of influence was by no means restricted to university property or the student body: he was, in all but name, a feudal lord who controlled all forms of commerce and oversaw all legal and financial matters within the town. A royal charter drawn up in 1600 stipulated that Cambridge was allowed a mayor, bailiffs and burgesses and that the civic authorities could have and use their own seal. But the final clause of the charter specified that ‘Nothing in this charter shall prejudice or impede the privileges, liberties and profits of the Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University.’⁴

Little over a year before Newton arrived in the town, the Mayor had been humiliated by the Vice-Chancellor and made to apologise for apparently overstepping his authority. In his written recantation, he was forced to make it clear exactly who was boss:

Whereas I, Edward Chapman, Mayor of the Town of Cambridge, did upon the XXVIth day of February 1660 by error send my warrant for releasing of William Land, John Devole and James Delamot out of the Tolbooth Gaol, to which they had been committed by the then Vice-Chancellor, Dr Ferne, I therefore, in satisfaction to the University, hereby acknowledge the error and do promise not to do or to my power suffer anything hereafter to be done that may anyways infringe the liberties or privileges of this University to my knowledge. In witness whereof I have set my hand the second day of March in the year of our Lord God 1660.⁵

Amazingly, little changed until the late Victorian era, when both the power of the university over the town and the limitations placed upon the freedom of students were gradually eroded. In Newton’s student days – and until long after Darwin attended the university during the late 1820s – the activities of the students were monitored by the university police, the proctors. Students were forbidden to associate with tradesmen, to drink in taverns, to have dealings with prostitutes and to break an evening curfew. Although many of these rules were frequently broken by the students and their enforcement was lax, examples were made.

Outside the city walls, England had changed and was continuing to change, but little of this was reflected in the attitude of the university authorities or in the antiquated curriculum taught. The peaceful restoration of the monarchy in 1660 had brought with it a nationwide climate of renewal. Cromwell’s Protestant Commonwealth had died with him in 1658, and, although the country would remain suspicious of the Catholic leanings of the house of Stuart, Newton entered Cambridge in 1661 in a new age of religious tolerance and political stability.

This radically altered the broader character of society, and fellows of the university who had fallen victim to Puritan purges were reinstated (although not to the exclusion of former Roundhead sympathisers). Yet the university authorities maintained a hold over the town hardly changed since medieval times. Since the reign of Henry VIII, the King had the legal right to shut down any college in the realm and claim its possessions. Consequently the university remained loyal to the Crown, and as a monarchist institution it was rooted in tradition and notions of a glorious past.

To Isaac Newton – a country boy who had never visited a town larger than Grantham – Cambridge was Avalon. He left Woolsthorpe on the second or third day of June 1661 and set out along the Great North Road on the fifty-mile trip to the town that would be his home almost without a break for the next thirty-five years. En route, he broke his journey first at Sewstern, where he took his first look at a piece of land bequeathed to him in Barnabas Smith’s will (the annual income from which would pass to him after his twenty-first birthday), and then at Stilton on the approach to the Great Fens, a day’s ride from Cambridge.

According to Stukeley, on Newton’s last day under Stokes’s tutelage the proud headmaster made his prize student stand in front of the school while he delivered a speech praising the boy and, with tears in his eyes, urged Newton’s fellow pupils to follow his academic example. Apparently the other boys were as moved as their headmaster. More believable is Stukeley’s admission that the farm hands and servants at the manor were glad to see Newton leave home and ‘rejoiced at parting with him, declaring, he was fit for nothing but the “Versity”’.⁶

Hannah, however, had ensured that her son would not be allowed fully to escape the mundanity of ‘real life’ and the hardships he may have thought he was leaving behind.

When Newton enrolled at Trinity College, on 5 June 1661, he entered the college on the lowest rung of the social ladder, as a subsizar (becoming a sizar after he had matriculated at Trinity a month after his arrival). Subsizars and sizars were little more than servants who paid their way by emptying the bedpans and cleaning the rooms of the more privileged students. These included the elite – fellow-commoners, young men from noble families, and pensioners (usually the sons of wealthy businessmen).

The exact form that sizarship took for Newton remains unclear. Traditionally, sizars waited on other students, but there was another type who worked solely for one fellow, invariably their tutor. It has always been supposed that Newton’s sizarship was of the first type, and this may be true, but there is evidence to suggest that he was in fact sizar to Humphrey Babington, brother of Mrs Clark, the Grantham apothecary’s wife, and fellow of Trinity.

It may even have been that Newton was only able to attend the university thanks to Babington taking him on as his personal servant. Babington had himself been a Cambridge student. As a royalist sympathiser, he had been sacked from his fellowship under the Puritan purge of the Commonwealth years but was reinstated with the Restoration. After Newton’s death, Ayscough family tradition had it that ‘the pecuniary aid of some neighbouring gentleman’⁷ had enabled Newton to study at Cambridge.

If Newton was Babington’s sizar his duties would have been particularly easy, because his master was in college for only a few weeks a year and would have demanded little of him. What is clear is that the conflict of interests between Isaac’s mother and those who saw scholarly potential in the young man did not end when Hannah complied reluctantly with the wishes of Babington, Ayscough and Stokes. Newton’s academic fees at the university were in the region of £10 to £15 per year, and he was given an allowance of a further £10. Both of these expenses were met by Hannah. But, considering she commanded a very comfortable annual income of around £700, it is evident that she wanted deliberately to make life hard for her son at Cambridge.

Sizarship was bad enough for those who could afford nothing better, and the failure rate of sizars was naturally much higher than that of the more privileged pensioners and fellow-commoners. But for Newton the shame of having to empty the chamber-pots of rich contemporaries, or the stigma of running errands for his tutor, must have weighed heavily.

Although he may have had an easier time of it than most subsizars, Newton was still, in the eyes of the college and his contemporaries, on the lowest rung of the social ladder. As a consequence, he would have been treated with contempt by those in superior social positions or else ignored by the sons of the wealthy who considered the university a playground – a place in which to waste a few years before accepting undemanding roles in the upper reaches of society.

Aside from making him even more determined to create an impression, this new humiliation did little for the positive aspects of Newton’s personality as a youth. It fuelled the flames of his insecurity and led to a desire to improve his social status and to sever further the links with his family, to leap at any chance of social improvement. If Hannah had imagined that by deliberately making life difficult for her son he might be persuaded to give up notions of an academic life and return to the family farm, she clearly did not know him. If her actions created anything positive it was to convince him he had to break away from Woolsthorpe, to turn even further in upon himself and to excel within his vocation.

The academic pattern at Cambridge had been set by the Elizabethan Statutes of 1571, which not only dictated the manner of dress and conduct of students and academic staff but also determined the structure of degree courses. To obtain a BA, all students had to reside in the university for a minimum of twelve terms of tuition (four years) and to attend all public lectures given by the members of the college faculty. There was really only one course. The first year covered rhetoric, the art of eloquent oral and written communication, encompassing classical history, geography, art, scripture and literature. Also, by the end of their first year students were expected to be fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

For a time, Newton became a conscientious and dedicated student, but, initially at least, he neither shone nor attracted the attention of his masters. In fact, he was all but invisible. Like most of his fellow students, he had little intellectual guidance. Upon his arrival, he was assigned a tutor who was both his teacher and a surrogate parent – one Benjamin Pulleyn, of whom little is known except that he entered Trinity in 1650 as a sizar and rose to the position of Regius Professor of Greek, a seat he occupied for twelve years. Pulleyn was a lax tutor in an academically sterile university. Known as a pupil-monger – he took on as many students as possible, to bolster his meagre income – he did almost nothing to help Newton, who was just one of over fifty undergraduates in his care.

Within weeks of his arrival, Newton had cut himself off from the other sizars and, following the pattern of life at school in Grantham, he began a very lonely first year at the university. It is significant that not one anecdote of Newton’s earliest period at Trinity has been passed on to us from fellow students. There is no record of a personal relationship with any other student even in the most vague terms, except that he appears to have detested his room-mate. We only know this from two ‘confessions’ which appear in the Fitzwilliam Notebook. The first of these is ‘Using Wilford’s towel to spare my own’; the other involves Newton owning up to the sin of ‘Deceiving my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot’.⁸ From the first of these we can glean that Newton’s first room-mate was the otherwise unknown Francis Wilford, who appears in the Alumni Cantabrigienses as a pensioner admitted to the college on the same day as Newton. It is also clear that Newton did little to endear himself even to the unfortunate Wilford; small wonder his first year was a lonely one.

Apart from the frustration his mother had caused him, Newton had two other problems during his early days at the university. The first was his age. Almost nineteen that first autumn, he was two years older than the average student. Although some have suggested that this may have been to his advantage academically, in terms of helping him to mix with the other students it could only have been a hindrance. The second and more serious difficulty, and one which was to remain with him throughout his academic life, was his Puritan faith. The teaching of the era centred around the great universities was supported and sustained by the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church. And, although the Restoration had heralded a religious tolerance that would remain a central pillar of British society, Newton was expected to subscribe officially to the tenets of the Anglican Church and to keep his Puritan beliefs to himself.

But, in spite of the potential problems offered by his religious leanings and the extra barrier they created between him and other, orthodox, students, his Puritan ethics also fuelled his drive to learn and focused his thoughts and energies. The distress his mother had caused him early in life had left Newton damaged and emotionally impotent. Puritanism offered him a world with strict emotional and sensual limits in which he did not have to find excuses for his inability to love – a world in which the twin pillars of God and Knowledge (the search for which was a God-given responsibility) could replace most other needs. With Puritanism and the thirst for understanding as his guides, he could at least attempt to shun sex, ignore any lingering desire to marry or to have a family, and keep in check his material ambitions and social goals.

In his first academic year, at least, Newton was preoccupied with sin and with the slightest let-up in religious observance – an obsession which led later in that year to the purchase of the notebooks in which he confessed his misdeeds, past and present. Although he lightened up a little and enjoyed the odd ale and game of cards in a tavern later in his postgraduate days, during his first few months in Cambridge, outside his lectures and tutorials, Newton existed in a permanent state of isolation – lonely, disorientated and trying to feel his way into an alien world of new-found but largely scorned freedom.

His was not the Puritanism of the political extremist (of which there were still many following the turbulent days of civil war and regicide); nor was he the Puritan of the Victorian caricature – the solemn kill-joy who saw debauchery and evil in all the doings of his fellow man. Newton was of the type that elevated the principles of hard work and dedication to learning as the highest hopes of humanity. He believed that the acquisition of knowledge and the unravelling of Nature’s truths were to the greater glory of God. But to his contemporaries he must have appeared a flashing beacon of misanthropy.

If he professed indifference towards almost every other student he encountered, they must have been even more dismissive of him. He could suffer this, and indeed appeared to care little what his fellow students thought of him. An example of his high-mindedness comes from the oldest letter in Newton’s hand, written to a sick friend around 1661:

Loving friend,

It is commonly reported that you are sick. Truly I am sorry for that. But I am much more sorry that you got your sickness (for that they say too) by drinking too much. I earnestly desire you first to repent of your having been drunk & then to seek to recover your health. And if it please God that you ever be well again then have a care to live healthfully & soberly for time to come. This will be very well pleasing to all your friends, especially to

Your very loving friend.

I.N.⁹

During his early days at university it was not just his pious detachment from everyday pleasures that so alienated Newton: he did little to encourage others to like him. An example of this was his decision to become a money-lender.

It is easy to imagine Newton at the age of nineteen or twenty growing to accept that he could not mix easily with the other students. He had also been left to his own devices to supplement Hannah’s allowance, and by this time he was certainly showing an active interest in money. Indeed, one of his repeated confessions in the list of sins of the Fitzwilliam Notebook is that of paying too much attention to money: ‘Setting my heart on money more than God’, as he put it. This was followed by several incidents of ‘relapse’.¹⁰ Being the meticulous record-keeper for which he was later renowned, Newton noted every transaction in another notebook he purchased at Trinity:

His Puritan caution showed in the fact that he never lent more than £1 to a debtor, and when he did deal with such large sums his nervousness shows in a note beside this transaction: ‘to be paid on Friday’.¹¹

Newton was never a big-time loan shark, but by the end of his second year business was flourishing and he kept it up until he became a man of independent means two years later. Quite how he started in business is unclear. Bearing in mind his own precarious financial position when he first arrived at Trinity, one can only assume he took a risk by making a short-term loan and then began to realise the potential of the venture.

A short time later, things began to improve on other fronts. Eighteen months after arriving at Trinity, Newton managed to change room-mate. John Wickins, the son of the Master of Manchester Grammar School, entered Trinity as a pensioner early in 1663 and met Newton towards the end of his first term. Sadly, aside from a few comments about Newton’s hypochondria and brief descriptions of his work patterns, Wickins, who lived with Newton for over two decades (until he gave up his fellowship in 1683), left little record of their close association.¹² The most detailed recollection that he passed on to his son Nicholas in old age was a brief description of his first meeting with Newton, in 1663:

My Father’s intimacy with him came by mere accident. Father’s first chamber-fellow being very disagreeable to him he retired one day into the walks where he found Mr Newton solitary & dejected. Upon entering into discourse they found their cause of retirement the same & thereupon agreed to shake off their present disorderly companions & chum together, which they did as soon as conveniently they could & so continued as long as my father stayed at college.¹³

Wickins’s reticence in discussing what must have been one of the most important relationships of his life is odd. He and Newton separated in 1683 under a cloud, and, despite Wickins living for another thirty-six years, the two men never met again.

So, who exactly was John Wickins, and what was the nature of his relationship with Newton? From the story of their introduction, it is clear they must have been of similar temperament. Both were unhappy with their ‘disorderly companions’ and each quickly saw a kindred spirit in the other. Their staying room-mates for the next twenty years (including a move in 1673 to rooms in Great Court) is evidence of their closeness.

Wickins also became Newton’s assistant. He regularly transcribed experiment notes and helped set up apparatus and monitor investigations. Their rooms became a live-in laboratory, at first strewn with documents and simple home-made optical instruments but later crowded with furnaces and bottles of chemicals. Wickins eventually became a clergyman, married and had a family. Shortly after his departure, Newton sent him a parcel of Bibles to be distributed to his flock in the village of Stoke Edith, near Monmouth. The only other correspondence occurred some thirty years later, when Wickins wrote to ask his erstwhile room-mate for a further donation of Bibles and attempted to start a friendly exchange. Newton duly sent the Bibles but brushed off any subtle overtures of Wickins by ending his letter with the rather curt ‘I am glad to hear of your good health, & wish it may long continue, I remain … Newton’.¹⁴

For all the attempts that have been made to find clues in the meagre correspondence between the two men, the strongest evidence for an acrimonious break lies in the fact that Wickins neither wrote a word about Newton nor related more than a scrap of anecdote about their time together. When, soon after Newton’s death in 1727, Robert Smith, Plumian Professor of Natural History at Cambridge, wrote to Nicholas Wickins requesting information about his father, he was told that John Wickins had long considered collecting together everything in his possession related to Newton but had done nothing about it. This would not have been a difficult task, because all Nicholas Wickins could pass on to Smith were three short letters transcribed into a notebook, five other notes concerning mundane financial matters, and the anecdote describing their first meeting.

Fortunately, much more is known of Newton’s academic life as an undergraduate. As at other great seats of learning throughout Europe, the curriculum at Cambridge was based almost exclusively upon the teachings of the Greek masters – especially the ideas of Aristotle, with which Newton would already have been familiar from his reading at the Clarks’. Throughout his first year he attended his lectures conscientiously, but he was already beginning to question the validity of classical ideas.

Like many of the more conscientious students, he had been following the latest philosophical developments and was reading ‘fashionable’ philosophers, such as Descartes and Galileo, whose works were gradually becoming available in England. As a result, sometime in early 1663, Newton underwent a radical change of approach. During a lecture, while making meticulous notes on Aristotle’s teachings, mid-page he stopped abruptly. Then, after leaving dozens of pages blank, he wrote at the top of a fresh page, ‘Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae’ – ‘Some Problems in Philosophy’. Beneath this he wrote, ‘Amicus Plato, amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas’ – ‘I am a friend of Plato, I am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.’¹⁵

This collection of ‘Quaestiones’ – or the Philosophical Notebook, as it is sometimes called – marks the point at which Newton stepped away from tradition and began to question what he was taught. He began by creating forty-five headings in the notebook – topics concerning the nature of the universe which he would attempt to investigate and answer. These included ‘Of Water and Salt’, ‘Attraction Magnetical’, ‘Of the Sun Stars & Planets & Comets’ and ‘Of Gravity & Levity’. In some cases nothing has been written under the heading, but elsewhere there is a paragraph or two of neatly written text, while some headings are followed by lengthy discourses.

Like his schoolboy exercise books, these undergraduate notebooks contain questions and attempts at answers taken from the works of well-known natural philosophers. In many places the arguments are then dissected and questioned further. Sometimes a section of text is followed by a piece composed by Newton in which he seems to be addressing the quoted author and asking him questions directly or drawing attention to things that do not appear clear. In this way, Descartes and Boyle come under scrutiny along with the antiquated philosophies of Aristotle.

An example is a piece under the heading ‘Of Water and Salt’ which involves an early hypothesis to explain the ebb and flow of the sea, later explained by Newton in Proposition XXIV of Book II of the Principia, first published some twenty-four years later:

To discover whether the Moon pressing the atmosphere causes the flux of the sea, take a tube of about 30 inches filled with quicksilver or else take a tube with water which is so much longer than 30 inches as the quicksilver is weightier than water & the top being stopped the liquor will sink 3 or 4 inches below it leaving a vacuum (perhaps). Then, as the air is more or less pressed without by the Moon so will the water rise or fall as it does in a weatherglass by heat or cold.¹⁶

At this stage of his career Newton could offer no explanation for this, but he analyses it in terms of what others say. Can the movement of the quicksilver be explained by the theories of Aristotle, who would declare that the substance is merely trying to find its place in the world? Or is Descartes closer to the truth: is the rise and fall of the surface of the quicksilver due to the movement of particles and ether bearing down upon it, creating vortices within the liquid?

Elsewhere there are speculations based upon thought experiments. Under the heading ‘Of Gravity & Levity’ Newton wrote:

Try to discover whether the weight of a body may be altered by heat or cold, by dilatation or condensation, beating, powdering, transferring to several places or several heights, or placing a hot or heavy body over it or under it or by magnetism, whether lead or its dust spread abroad, whether a plate flat-ways or edgeways is heaviest.¹⁷

Although these inquiries seem to us to have obvious answers (why, for example, should an object weigh different amounts if it is laid flat or edgeways?), no one before Newton had recorded their efforts to verify these things. Rather than accepting tradition, Newton wanted to clarify such matters for himself.

He acquired some of these notions from books available in the extensive library at Trinity College, which contained works by the great natural philosophers of the day. Here could be found texts by Descartes, Boyle, Thomas More, Hobbes, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo (with the exception of Galileo’s two most important works, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems and Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, both of which appear to have been too risqué for the conservative thinkers who authorised the purchase of books for the library). The problem for Newton was not the range of material to be found in Cambridge university libraries: it was that students could use the libraries only at special times, and then only when supervised by a tutor. From what we know of Newton’s tutor, Pulleyn, who was usually unavailable and quite uninterested in natural philosophy, it would seem most likely that Newton gained access to these all-important works through the agency of another fellow, almost certainly Humphrey Babington.

Although at first inspired and influenced by Descartes, Newton quickly rejected the Frenchman’s mechanical theory as a concept that denied the omnipotence of the Creator. He was able to accept Pierre Gassendi’s Christianised atomism, but even this was with reservations. In the ‘Quaestiones’ he wrote:

Of Atoms

It remains therefore that the first matter must be atoms and that matter may be so small as to be indiscernible. The excellent Dr More [the Cambridge fellow Henry More] in his book of the soul’s immortality has proved this beyond all controversy, yet I shall use one argument to show that it cannot be divisible in infinitum & that is this: Nothing can be divided into more parts than it can possibly be constituted of. But matter (i.e. finite) cannot be constituted of infinite parts.¹⁸

Newton is here using logic to dispel the possibility of anyone taking the atomic theory too far. Matter being a finite thing, it cannot, he reasoned, be divided forever into infinitesimally small parts. (If Newton sounds overconfident here and seems to be treating the issue with the same overzealousness that Aristotle might have employed, we can perhaps put it down to his relative youth. These were, after all, musings in a private notebook.)

The key influence in guiding Newton towards a view of the universe that maintained a supreme role for the Creator was the Cambridge philosopher Henry More, a man who was interested in all areas of natural philosophy and mysticism and a leading member of the group of fellows known as the Cambridge Platonists.

Born a gentleman, More had gained the finest education at Eton and was elected a fellow of Christ’s College in 1639. Believing in the pursuit of knowledge as a means of exalting God, and upholding the Scholastics’ edict ‘Understand so that you may believe, believe so that you may understand’, More declined all offers of ecclesiastical positions and even the mastership of Christ’s College in order to lead an academic life unhindered by other responsibilities.

He and the other Cambridge Platonists believed that the world was permeated by spirit, which More termed the ‘Spirit of Nature’. This esoteric ‘force’, he believed, mediated between God – who controlled all actions, all purpose and all outcomes – and a purely mechanical universe – the mundane physical world in which we live and conduct our lives.

As a young scholar, More had shared many of Descartes’s ideas and had initially seen Cartesian philosophy as a means of reconciling theology and natural philosophy; but gradually he had turned away from this view, later becoming its vehement opponent. At the root of More’s ideology, and of his influence on Newton, was an amalgamation of atomism and Christian Platonism. Plato had believed in the notion of spirit, an essence within all things, manifest in man as the soul, but also an extension of God, a force at work in Nature, guiding the universe. In Descartes’s philosophy there appeared to be no continuing need for God. Descartes never intended this interpretation and was himself a devout Christian, but to More, and later to Newton, the mechanisms and ideas portrayed in Descartes’s Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy could easily be interpreted as atheistic. In More’s universe, matter was guided by spirit, manipulated by God entirely at his discretion.

More, who was born in Grantham, had tutored Joseph Clark (the brother of Clark the apothecary) at Cambridge. He visited Grantham occasionally, and it is possible that he may thus have met Newton several years before the young man entered university. It is clear from entries in his philosophical notebook that Newton came under More’s influence quite early in his university career. As well as the mention of a text by ‘the excellent Dr More’ in his notes on atomism, Newton has listed headings clearly influenced by More’s main areas of interest, such as ‘Of the Creation’, ‘Of the Soule’ and ‘Of God’.¹⁹ These may have been prompted by Newton’s natural curiosity for things spiritual, but it is also likely that they stemmed from reading More’s most important book, The Immortality of the Soul, to which Newton had referred in the earlier entry ‘Of Atoms’.

More’s influence upon Newton extended beyond the inspiration provided by his writings.²⁰ Newton’s ideas and loyalties changed so radically within such a short period of time during his second year at university that the influence of at least one academic guide is likely. Having been Clark’s tutor and an associate of Babington, More probably talked to Newton on a number of occasions during the young man’s final years in Grantham and Woolsthorpe and may even have singled him out upon his entry into the university. He was another father-figure within the academic and social network forming around the serious-minded and inquisitive young man. Although Babington was more of a practical guide (and almost certainly provided access to his private library), he was in Cambridge only rarely. More provided a greater and more lasting intellectual foundation.

But, if More’s influence was strong, to the modern mind he seems to have offered a confusing philosophy. To us, atomism is the foundation of modern physics, but the seminal work of Rutherford, who first postulated the existence of smaller particles within the atom, early in the twentieth century, led to the oddities of quantum theory. From this derives indeterminism, as expressed in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, leading to theories of unpredictability and a philosophical viewpoint far removed from the image of a universe manipulated by a benign God. Though some have managed to visualise and have faith in a strange marriage between quantum theory and God, mainstream modern atomism could not be further removed from More’s idea of a personal, all-pervading deity. Yet, to More – naturally unaware of where it would one day lead – atomism was a way of proving the actions of an omnipresent Creator, a confirmation of the Testaments; because, as Newton had underscored in his notebook, matter could be divided only to a finite degree, and the resulting fundamental particles must have been created and guided by a divine hand.

If More offered a theoretical foundation which combined natural philosophy with theology, from reading Galileo and Bacon contemporaneously Newton had also learned how to construct a working system with which to verify his ideas. By the summer of 1664 he was able to state in his notebook that ‘The nature of things is more securely and naturally deduced from their operations one upon another than upon the senses. And when by the former experiments we have found the nature of bodies … we may more clearly find the nature of the senses.’²¹ What he means by this is that scientists cannot simply trust what they observe with their senses, but need to experiment before attempting to deduce the nature of the universe and the objects that fill it – that there may be more going on than we know from the information our senses give us by superficial observation.

Newton’s first experiments, begun during the summer of 1664, were probably his investigations into the nature of light. Years later these appeared in the Opticks, first published in 1704.

His earliest interest in light began when he bought a glass prism at the Stourbridge fair, held on a piece of land beside the river about a mile from the centre of Cambridge. Amid stages for the jugglers and clowns, minstrels and children’s games, dancers and actors stood stalls selling all manner of oddities – trinkets from exotic travels in Bohemia, potions and elixirs, and toys. It was from such a stall that Newton purchased his prism.

According to Conduitt, ‘In August 1665, Sir I. bought a prism at Stourbridge fair to try some experiments upon Descartes’s books of colours.’²² However, on this occasion Conduitt got his dates wrong and Newton actually acquired the prism on his visit to the fair in 1664, not 1665. Plague prevented the holding of the fair in 1665 – a fact documented in the diary of Alderman (later Mayor) Samuel Newton (no relation): ‘On the first of September, a proclamation was posted prohibiting Stourbridge fair on account of the great plague in London.’²³ It is also agreed by most authorities that, because of the plague, Newton had left Cambridge to return to Woolsthorpe before the beginning of August 1665, and was absent from the university for most of the next two years.²⁴

The prevailing hypothesis of light at the time was that of Descartes. He believed that light was a ‘pressure’ transmitted through the transparent medium of the ether. Sight, he claimed, was due to this pressure impinging upon the optic nerve.

Newton was acquainted with this hypothesis and had already made notes on the subject in his philosophical notebook. But it is likely that, in keeping with his support for atomism, by the summer of 1664 he was beginning to doubt the accuracy of Descartes’s explanation. He was already thinking that light might be corpuscular, and by imagining light to be particle-like he was more readily able to explain phenomena such as reflection, refraction, and optical and chromatic distortions. Writing to Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, some eight years later, Newton described his earliest experiments with the prism:

I procured me a triangular glass-prism, to try therewith the celebrated Phenomena of Colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall. It was at first a very pleasing divertissement, to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby …²⁵

With the prism he was able to demonstrate how white light is composed of a range of component colours and how it can be split into the colours of the spectrum, with blue light, at one end of the spectrum, being bent (or refracted) more markedly than red light, at the other end. Furthermore, he was able to judge – correctly – that the colour of an object depends upon which part of the spectrum is absorbed by it and which part reflected. ‘Hence redness, yellowness etc.,’ he wrote, ‘are made in bodies by stopping the slowly moved rays without much hindering of the motion of the swifter rays, & blue, green & purple by diminishing the motion of the swifter rays & not of the slower.’²⁶

In short, an object will look red if the other colours (what Newton refers to as ‘the slowly moved rays’) are absorbed by it more than is red light. The red will then be reflected back much more than the other colours. In the same way, an object will appear blue because it reflects blue more than the other colours (those that Newton called ‘the swifter rays’). The ability to absorb or reflect different parts of the spectrum depends on the nature of the object and produces the rich diversity of colour that we observe in the universe.^*

Following this discovery, Newton copied out an extract from Descartes’s Dioptricks and wrote after it:

Of Light

Light cannot be by pressure for we should see in the night as well or better than in the day we should see a bright light above us because we are pressed downwards … there could be no refraction since the same matter cannot press 2 ways, the Sun could not be quite eclipsed, the Moon & planets would shine like suns. A man going or running would see in the night …²⁷

Throughout the summer and autumn of 1664 Newton conducted further experiments and observed diffraction through feathers and different fabrics held up to the light: ‘A feather or a black riband put between my eye and the setting Sun makes glorious colours,’ he observed.²⁸ But then his fervour for experiment seemed to take him over. Within days he performed two experiments that left him almost totally blind.

The first near-catastrophe was when he looked directly at the Sun for too long, with the intention of observing coloured rings and spots before the eyes – a practice he repeated over and over again. In a letter to his friend the political philosopher John Locke, written a quarter of a century later, in 1691, he describes the experience:

I looked a very little while upon the Sun in a looking glass with my right eye and then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber & winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours which encompassed it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished … And now in a few hours’ time I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look upon no bright object … but I saw the Sun before me, so that I could neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together & used all means to direct my imagination from the Sun.²⁹

This mishap could be put down to Newton’s ignorance of the true danger involved, but what is the explanation for the following experiment?

I took a bodkin [from the illustration accompanying this entry in the notebook, astonishingly, this appears to be a small dagger similar to an envelope knife], and put it between my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with the end of it (so as to make the curvature in my eye) there appeared several white, dark and coloured circles. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with the point of the bodkin, but if I held my eye and the bodkin still though I continued to press my eye with it yet the circles would grow faint often disappear until I resumed them by moving my eye or the bodkin.³⁰

Youthful enthusiasm and dedication are one thing, but most people would agree that sticking a blade into one’s own eye goes far beyond the call of duty. As a result, by nearly causing permanent blindness, he came close to destroying his scientific career almost before it had begun.

In spite of these set-backs, Newton was learning rapidly from his experiments. The synthesis of Baconian method, innate talent and theoretical rigour was almost complete, but one crucial element was still missing.

There is general disagreement regarding the timing and even the exact method by which Newton acquired the mathematical knowledge that transformed his approach. No mathematics appear in the Philosophical Notebook, but early in 1664, and before his optical experiments, he began to make mathematical notes in what he called the ‘Waste Book’, the barely used notebook of his stepfather, Barnabas Smith.³¹ By late that summer he was already familiar with the most complex mathematical ideas of the times, gleaned largely from major texts of the period, including John Wallis’s Arithmetica Infinitorum (1655) and Descartes’s Geometry.³²

Until his entry into Cambridge University, Newton’s mathematical knowledge had been limited to simple arithmetic, perhaps some algebra and a little trigonometry. But it is a mark of his genius that during the course of only two years he taught himself advanced mathematics and developed the calculus.

From letters and a collection of private papers which a few privileged disciples were allowed to rake through towards the end of his life, it is clear that Newton approached mathematics with the same autodidactic fervour he had shown as an adolescent pursuing his quest for knowledge at the Clarks’ home. But this time, in his enthusiasm, he skipped the fundamentals. The French mathematician Abraham Demoivre made the most intense study of Newton’s earliest mathematical work, and in a memorandum he wrote in 1727 he gives us an account of Newton’s stumbling, maverick approach:

In ’63 [Newton] being at Stourbridge fair brought a book of astrology to see what there was in it. Read it ‘til he came to a figure of the heavens which he could not understand for want of being acquainted with trigonometry. Bought a book of trigonometry, but was not able to understand the demonstrations. Got Euclid to fit himself for understanding the ground of trigonometry. Read only the titles of the propositions, which he found so easy to understand that he wondered how anybody would amuse themselves to write any demonstrations of them.³³

Whether or not Newton had any official help with mathematics towards the end of his second year at Cambridge is difficult to ascertain. In March 1664 Isaac Barrow began a series of mathematical lectures as part of his duties as the first Lucasian Professor – a position he had accepted that winter. We know that Barrow and Newton were acquainted closely a few years after this, and that Barrow surrendered his chair to Newton in 1669, but it is by no means certain that Newton attended Barrow’s mathematics lectures. According to statutes laid down by the King, these lectures were for fellow-commoners only. This may have prevented Newton; however, such rules were flaunted openly and, being the sort of student he was, Newton may have worked his way in despite his lowly social position within the university.

For the future advancement of science, his efforts at teaching himself advanced mathematics were of the utmost significance. Without an understanding of algebra, Newton could not have developed the calculus, and without that he could not have manipulated and communicated his physics – calculus provided the formal structure needed to turn his notions of gravity from concept to hard science.

In 1664 such grand designs were some way ahead; more pressing were the demands of the university. Although he had been working consistently hard, his efforts had been exerted almost entirely outside the curriculum. Like Darwin, Einstein, Hawking and many other great scientists after him, Newton found himself ill-prepared for the various exams he needed to pass in order to continue as a student.

Having realised that his charge was more interested in mathematics and the latest philosophical ideas from Europe than in the official curriculum, Newton’s tutor, Benjamin Pulleyn, referred him to Isaac Barrow for his scholarship appraisal. Newton was required to pass an examination in April 1664 which would make him an undergraduate scholar, allowing him to sit for his BA the following spring. Pulleyn presumed that Barrow would be the most useful fellow to access the young man’s talents. Unfortunately, Barrow decided to quiz Newton on Euclid. This could have spelled disaster, because Newton had paid little attention to simple Euclidean theorems en route to more advanced mathematics. Conduitt tells us:

When he stood to be scholar of the house his tutor sent him to Dr Barrow then mathematical professor to be examined, the Dr examined him in Euclid which Sir I. had neglected and knew little or nothing of, never asked him about Descartes’ Geometry which he was master of. Sir I. was too modest to mention it himself & Dr Barrow could not imagine that one could have read the book without first [being] master of Euclid, so that Dr Barrow conceived then but an indifferent opinion of him but however he was made scholar of the house.³⁴

Having been made aware of his deficiency, true to form, Newton immediately went back to the basics of mathematics and quickly absorbed Euclidean geometry and simple algebraic theorems. His dedication is evident from the fact that the most dog-eared and tatty book in Newton’s library was Euclidis Elementorum by Isaac Barrow.

Newton may have made up for his mistakes, but, viewing the situation dispassionately, it is clear that he must have received help in convincing the fellows of his true worth. If the interview with Barrow had indeed gone as badly as Conduitt reported, it must have created a poor initial impression and Newton’s supporters must have brought their influence to bear in order to salvage the young man’s career. Humphrey Babington was rising high in the college hierarchy (becoming a senior fellow in 1667), and he enjoyed the King’s favour. The well-documented fact that Newton visited him frequently during the plague years spent in Woolsthorpe shows that the two men remained in contact throughout Newton’s early years in Cambridge. Having helped to get him into Trinity, Babington would not have wanted him to flunk his scholarship. He almost certainly realised the young man’s potential and may have appreciated his disenchantment with the outdated university curriculum.

Even though he brushed up his Euclid, Newton clearly did little in the way of formal study for the BA examinations the following spring. As a result, he did graduate – but in an undistinguished manner. According to Stukeley, ‘when Sir Is. stood for his Bachelor of Arts degree, he was put in second posing, or lost his groats, as they call it,^* which is looked upon as disgraceful’.³⁵

In a larger historical perspective, the fact that in the spring of 1665 Newton graduated with a mere second-class BA is laughable, but in the pantheon of scientific greats this is not so unusual. Robert Darwin had to remove his son Charles from medical studies in Edinburgh because it was clear he would make nothing of his time there; Albert Einstein scraped through his degree and then found it almost impossible to find a job; and Stephen Hawking, who was unpopular with the Oxford University authorities because he spent more time on the river than in lecture theatres, was awarded a first only to ensure that he did his PhD in Cambridge. But, for the twenty-two-year-old Newton, graduation, whatever the grade, was enough to secure his future at the university. Setting an example for his scientific heirs, he had long since decided that his vocation was to unravel the laws governing God’s universe; passing exams was merely a means to an end and was conducted with the minimum of effort. He now had official sanction to pursue his true goal, but even he, with the arrogance of youth and a single-minded determination, could not have realised just how soon would come his first successes en route to his dream.