The Clockwork Universe
Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
EDWARD DOLNICK
For Lynn
The universe is but a watch on a larger scale.
—BERNARD DE FONTENELLE, 1686
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Chronology
Preface
Part One: Chaos
Chapter One - London, 1660
Chapter Two - Satan’s Claws
Chapter Three - The End of the World
Chapter Four - “When Spotted Death Ran Arm’d Through Every Street”
Chapter Five - Melancholy Streets
Chapter Six - Fire
Chapter Seven - God at His Drawing Table
Chapter Eight - The Idea That Unlocked the World
Chapter Nine - Euclid and Unicorns
Chapter Ten - The Boys’ Club
Chapter Eleven - To the Barricades!
Chapter Twelve - Dogs and Rascals
Chapter Thirteen - A Dose of Poison
Chapter Fourteen - Of Mites and Men
Chapter Fifteen - A Play Without an Audience
Chapter Sixteen - All in Pieces
Part Two: Hope and Monsters
Chapter Seventeen - Never Seen Until This Moment
Chapter Eighteen - Flies as Big as a Lamb
Chapter Nineteen - From Earthworms to Angels
Chapter Twenty - The Parade of the Horribles
Chapter Twenty-One - “Shuddering Before the Beautiful”
Chapter Twenty-Two - Patterns Made with Ideas
Chapter Twenty-Three - God’s Strange Cryptography
Chapter Twenty-Four - The Secret Plan
Chapter Twenty-Five - Tears of Joy
Chapter Twenty-Six - Walrus with a Golden Nose
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Cracking the Cosmic Safe
Chapter Twenty-Eight - The View from the Crow’s Nest
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Sputnik in Orbit, 1687
Chapter Thirty - Hidden in Plain Sight
Chapter Thirty-One - Two Rocks and a Rope
Chapter Thirty-Two - A Fly on the Wall
Chapter Thirty-Three - “Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare”
Chapter Thirty-Four - Here Be Monsters!
Photographic Insert
Chapter Thirty-Five - Barricaded Against the Beast
Chapter Thirty-Six - Out of the Whirlpool
Part Three: Into the Light
Chapter Thirty-Seven - All Men Are Created Equal
Chapter Thirty-Eight - The Miracle Years
Chapter Thirty-Nine - All Mystery Banished
Chapter Forty - Talking Dogs and Unsuspected Powers
Chapter Forty-One - The World in Close-Up
Chapter Forty-Two - When the Cable Snaps
Chapter Forty-Three - The Best of All Possible Feuds
Chapter Forty-Four - Battle’s End
Chapter Forty-Five - The Apple and the Moon
Chapter Forty-Six - A Visit to Cambridge
Chapter Forty-Seven - Newton Bears Down
Chapter Forty-Eight - Trouble with Mr. Hooke
Chapter Forty-Nine - The System of the World
Chapter Fifty - Only Three People
Chapter Fifty-One - Just Crazy Enough
Chapter Fifty-Two - In Search of God
Chapter Fifty-Three - Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
Also by Edward Dolnick
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chronology
1543 Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which says that the planets circle the sun rather than the Earth
1564 Shakespeare born
1564 Galileo born
1571 Kepler born
1600 Shakespeare writes Hamlet
1609 Kepler publishes his first two laws, about the paths of planets as they orbit the sun
1610 Galileo turns a telescope to the heavens
1616 Shakespeare dies
1618–1648 Thirty Years’ War
1619 Kepler publishes his third law, which tells how the planets’ orbits relate to one another
1630 Kepler dies
1633 Inquisition puts Galileo on trial
1637 Descartes declares “I think, therefore I am,” and, in the same book, unveils coordinate geometry
1642–1651 English Civil War
1642 Galileo dies
1642 Newton born
1646 Leibniz born
1649 King Charles I beheaded
1660 Official founding of the Royal Society
1664–66 Newton’s “miracle years.” He invents calculus and calculates gravity’s pull on the moon.
1665 Plague strikes London
1666 Great Fire of London
1674 Leeuwenhoek looks through his microscope and discovers a hidden world of “little animals”
1675 Newton becomes a member of the Royal Society
1675–76 Leibniz’s “miracle year.” He invents calculus, independently of Newton.
1684 Leibniz publishes an account of calculus
1684 Halley visits Newton at Cambridge
1687 Newton publishes the Principia, which describes “The System of the World”
1696 Newton leaves Cambridge and moves to London
1699–1722 Newton and Leibniz, and supporters of both men, battle over calculus. Each genius claims the other stole his idea.
1704 Newton publishes an account of calculus, after thirty years of near silence
1705 Newton knighted
1716 Leibniz dies (Newton continues fighting to claim calculus)
1727 Newton dies
Preface
Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order. Historians would later talk of the “Age of Genius,” but the “Age of Tumult” would have been just as fitting. In the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, the natural and the supernatural still twined around one another. Disease was a punishment ordained by God. Astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens.
The only man-made light came from flickering flames and sputtering lanterns. Unless the moon was out, nights were dark and dangerous. Thieves and muggers prowled the streets—the first police forces lay far in the future—and brave souls who ventured outdoors carried their own lanterns or hired a “linkboy” to light the way with a torch made from a hunk of fat-soaked rope. The murder rate was five times as high as it is today.
Even in midday, cities were murky and grimy. Coal smoke left a “sooty Crust or Furr” on all it touched. London was one of the world’s great cities and a center of the new learning, but it was, in one historian’s words, “a stinking, muddy, filth-bespattered metropolis.” Huge piles of human waste blocked city streets, and butchers added heaps of the “soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses” to the towering mounds.
Ignorance made matters worse. The same barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage, to fertilize the fields. When Shakespeare and his fellow investors built the Globe Theatre in 1599, the splendid new building held at least two thousand people but was constructed without a single toilet. Well over a century later, hygiene had scarcely improved. At about the time of Louis XIV’s death in 1715, a new rule was put in place requiring that the corridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of feces once a week.
No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desir
e.1 (Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.) Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were near-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies.
On the public stage, all was crisis and calamity. Through the early part of the century, Germany had suffered through what would later be called the Thirty Years’ War. The blandness of the name obscures the horror of a religious war where one raping, looting, marauding army gave way to another, endlessly, and where famine and disease followed close on the armies’ heels. England had been convulsed by a civil war. In London in 1649, a shocked crowd looked on as the royal executioner lifted his axe high and chopped off the king’s head. In the 1650s plague swept across Europe. In 1665 it jumped the Channel to England.
In the wings, the events that would reshape the world went on unnoticed. Few knew, and fewer cared, about a handful of curious men studying the heavens and scribbling equations in their notebooks.
Humans had recognized nature’s broad patterns from the beginning—night follows day, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars form their familiar constellations, the seasons recur. But they had noticed, too, that no two days were identical. “Men expected the sun to rise,” wrote Alfred North Whitehead, “but the wind bloweth where it listeth.” If people referred to “laws of nature,” they had in mind not true laws but something akin to rules of thumb, guidelines subject to exceptions and interpretation.
Then, at some point in the 1600s, a new idea came into the world. The notion was that the natural world not only follows rough-and-ready patterns but also exact, formal, mathematical laws. Though it looked haphazard and sometimes chaotic, the universe was in fact an intricate and perfectly regulated clockwork.
From the cosmically vast to the infinitesimally small, every aspect of the universe had been meticulously arranged. God had created the world and designed its every feature, and He continued to supervise it with minute care. He had set the planets in orbit and lavished care on every one of a housefly’s thousand eyes. He had chosen the perfect rate for the Earth’s spin and the ideal thickness for a walnut’s shell.
Nature’s laws were vast in range but few in number; God’s operating manual filled only a line or two. When Isaac Newton learned how gravity works, for instance, he announced not merely a discovery but a “universal law” that embraced every object in creation. The same law regulated the moon in its orbit round the Earth, an arrow arcing against the sky, and an apple falling from a tree, and it described their motions not only in general terms but precisely and quantitatively. God was a mathematician, seventeenth-century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key.
My focus is largely on the climax of the story, especially Newton’s unveiling, in 1687, of his theory of gravitation. But Newton’s astonishing achievement built on the work of such titans as Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler, who themselves had deciphered paragraphs and even whole pages of God’s cosmic code. We will examine their breakthroughs and false trails, too.
All these thinkers had two traits in common. They were geniuses, and they had utter faith that the universe had been designed on impeccable mathematical lines. What follows is the story of a group of scientists who set out to read God’s mind.
Part One: Chaos
Chapter One
London, 1660
A stranger to the city who happened to see the parade of eager, chattering men disappearing into Thomas Gresham’s mansion might have found himself at a loss. Who were these gentlemen in their powdered wigs, knee breeches, and linen cravats? It was too early in the day for a concert or a party, and this was hardly the setting for a bull-baiting or a prizefight.
With its shouting coachmen, reeking dunghills, and grit-choked air, London assaulted every sense, but these mysterious men seemed not to notice. Locals, then, for the giant metropolis left newcomers reeling. The men at Gresham’s looked a bit like a theater crowd—and with the Puritans out of power and Oliver Cromwell’s head on a pole in front of Westminster Hall, theaters had opened their doors again. But in that case where were the women? Perhaps the imposing building on the fashionable street concealed a gentlemen’s gambling club? A high-class brothel?
Even a peek through a coal-grimed window might not have helped much. Amid the bustle, one man seemed to be spilling powder onto the tabletop and arranging it into a pattern. The man standing next to him held something between his fingers, small and dark and twitching.
The world would eventually learn the identity of these mysterious men. They called themselves natural philosophers, and they had banded together to sort out the workings of everything from pigeons to planets. They shared little but curiosity. At the center of the group stood tall, skeletally thin Robert Boyle, an aristocrat whose father was one of Britain’s richest men. Boyle maintained three splendid private laboratories, one at each of his homes. Mild-mannered and unworldly, Boyle spent his days contemplating the mysteries of nature, the glories of God, and home remedies for an endless list of real and imaginary ills.
If Boyle was around, Robert Hooke was sure to be nearby. Hooke was hunched and fidgety—“low of stature and always very pale”—but he was tireless and brilliant, and he could build anything. For the past five years he had worked as Boyle’s assistant, cobbling together equipment and designing experiments. Hooke was as bad-tempered and sharp-tongued as Boyle was genial. To propose an idea was to hear that Hooke had thought of it first; to challenge his claim was to make a lifelong enemy. But few questioned the magic in his hands. Hooke’s latest coup was a glass vessel that could be pumped empty of air. What would happen if you put a candle inside? a mouse? a man?
The small, birdlike man was Hooke’s closest friend, the ludicrously versatile Christopher Wren. Ideas tumbled from him like coins from a conjuror’s fingertips. Posterity would know Wren as the most celebrated architect in English history, but he was renowned as an astronomer and a mathematician before he sketched his first building. Everything came easily to this charmed and charming creature. Early on an admirer proclaimed Wren a “miracle of youth,” and he would live to ninety-one and scarcely pause for breath along the way. Wren built telescopes, microscopes, and barometers; he tinkered with designs for submarines; he built a transparent beehive (to see what the bees were up to) and a writing gizmo for making copies, with two pens connected by a wooden arm; he built St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, the formal name of this grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits, and eccentrics, was by most accounts the first official scientific organization in the world. In these early days almost any scientific question one might ask inspired blank stares or passionate debate—Why does fire burn? How do mountains rise? Why do rocks fall?
The men of the Royal Society were not the world’s first scientists. Titans like Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo, among many others, had done monumental work long before. But to a great extent those pioneering figures had been lone geniuses. With the rise of the Royal Society—and allowing for the colossal exception of Isaac Newton—the story of early science would have more to do with collaboration than with solitary contemplation.
Newton did not attend the Society’s earliest meetings, though he was destined one day to serve as its president (he would rule like a dictator). In 1660 he was only seventeen, an unhappy young man languishing on his mother’s farm. Soon he would head off to begin his undergraduate career, at Cambridge, but even there he would draw scarcely any notice. In time he would become the first scientific celebrity, the Einstein of his day.
No one would ever know what to make of him. One of history’s strangest figures, Newton was “the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper that I ever knew,” in the judgment of one contemporary. He would spend his life in secrecy and solitude and die, at eighty-four, a virgin. High-strung to the p
oint of paranoia, he teetered always on the brink of madness. At least once he would fall over the brink.
In temperament Newton had little enough in common with the other men of the Royal Society. But all the early scientists shared a mental landscape. They all lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up in and a new one they had only glimpsed. These were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws.
In time they would fling open the gates to the modern world.
Chapter Two
Satan’s Claws
Scientists in the 1600s had set out to find the eternal laws that govern the universe, but the world they lived in was marked by precariousness.2 Death struck often, and at random. “Any cold might be the forerunner of a terminal fever,” one historian remarks, “and the simplest cut could lead to a fatal infection.” Children died in droves, but no one was safe. Even for the nobility, life expectancy was only about thirty. Adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties dropped dead out of the blue, leaving their families in desperation.