“Let us hope … there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.”
—Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, 1620
“Their first purpose was no more, than onely [sic] the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d [sic] in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age.”1
—Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 1667
On a sunny spring morning in London 1715, a group of young scientists gathered at the world’s greatest clubhouse for insatiably curious people. Weeks before, the astronomer Edmund Halley had issued a bold claim: he had carefully reviewed the star charts, calculated the courses of the sun and the moon, and was predicting, with startling bravado, that a total solar eclipse would engulf the city of London on the morning of April 22. Come to the Royal Society’s home on Crane Court—he bade the virtuosi—and witness the spectacle with me.
There are apocryphal stories of ancient stargazers predicting eclipses; usually these prophecies were stated in months, if not years. Eclipses are not altogether rare; such predictions were not completely daring. Alternatively, Halley (the one member of the Royal Society who could interface with the brilliant and testy Isaac Newton) was inviting the geniuses of the firmament to gather in the old city on a particular day, hour, and even minute. There had not been a total solar eclipse in London since 1104, and those intervening six hundred years had barely witnessed any technological advancements. Most Englishmen believed in witches, werewolves, unicorns, and magic; although heliocentrism and the new mathematics had acceptance among the learned, there were no practical applications for the common man.
A total solar eclipse was a biblical event. For those lucky enough to witness a total eclipse on a cloudless day, the phenomenon of utter darkness for a few minutes is fantastical and, well, magical. We are, at once, Mayans staring at the sky, dutifully shoulder to shoulder with our fellow man, swept up in the vortex of planets, stars, and moons.
Halley calculated the path of totality and published a map of his predictions. By making known the imminence of the event, Halley hoped to limit terror and to maximize calculations from the learned on the British Isles and throughout continental Europe.
With quill in hand, Halley had spent weeks reviewing the data tables generated by “natural philosophers” in the preceding decades. Prior to 1662, there was essentially no sharing of scientific information among the scholarly, but the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society changed everything. Halley was able to gather data from years of astronomical records, and with industrious determination, was convinced there was an impending eclipse. An invitation was proffered just in time, and the well-to-do intelligentsia arrived at Crane Court, wearing wigs and waistcoats at the break of dawn.
Crane Court is a narrow alleyway off Fleet Street in the heart of the City of London (the City is the formerly walled enclave in the heart of modern-day greater London); the Court was on the outermost boundary of the Great Fire of 1666 that consumed almost the entire core of London. At the end of Crane Court was the building that served as the Royal Society’s meeting house, and it was here that scientific history was forged with sunlight and shadows.
In the hours before an eclipse, you cannot see the moon nearing the sun—it is simply invisible to the naked eye as it is outstripped by our star. What is appreciable, particularly on a sunny day, is the diminution of radiant heat. An odd, windless, cloudless cooling occurs.
The eclipse started shortly after daybreak in London (just after 8:00 A.M.), and an hour later, totality occurred nine minutes after 9:00 A.M. For the next three minutes, darkness reigned over London, exactly as Halley had predicted, and precisely when he said it would happen. Because so many astronomers and scientists were poised with their equipment and recording devices, important observations were made about the surface of the moon and the exact duration of totality.
To the fortunate catechumens at Crane Court that day, what optimism must have filled their hearts and minds? Yes, there was certainly gratitude and more than a little awe directed toward Halley; those gathered must have reveled in their newfound powers of prediction, but the more significant contemplation must have been, is there nothing we cannot predict, experience, and conquer?
David Wootton has concluded, “A basic description of the Scientific Revolution is to say that it represented a successful rebellion by the mathematicians against the authority of the philosophers, and of both against the authority of the theologians.”2
It was a fundamental principle of Aristotelian philosophy that there could be no change in [the heavens],3 yet the last of the “naked eye” astronomers—Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler—were able to observe exploding stars and to predict the motions of the planets. David Wootton argues that Tycho’s nova (two stars fusing together in a thermonuclear reaction, eight thousand light years away) marks, quite precisely, the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. It was not the cause of the revolution, but it is the signpost that signals the start of the insurrection. Whereas Aristotle was preoccupied with qualities to explain the world (the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water), Tycho painstakingly gathered data and charted the skies. Instead of sophisticated dialogue and intellectual guile, the leaders of the revolution would use measuring instruments, numbers, data tables, and calculations. In short, they would mathematize nature, and the world.4
When Galileo Galilei’s book Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) arrived in Prague a few weeks later, in April 1610, Kepler was desperate to digest what Galileo had seen. The book announced on the title page that Galileo was a “Patritio Florentino,” a gentleman from Florence, and that he was a “Patauini Gymnasii Publico Mathematico,” a mathematics professor in Padua. In the middle of the page, on its own line was the word “PERSPICILLI,” Galileo’s word for his telescope.
In the opening of the book, the forty-six-year-old Galileo describes how his telescope came to be. Ten months earlier, in May 1609, Galileo received word that a Dutchman had constructed a telescope with the aid of lenses and a tube. After some thought, Galileo “finally determined to give myself up first to inquire into the principle of the telescope, and then to consider the means by which I might compass the invention of a similar instrument, which a little while after I succeeded in doing, through deep study of the theory of Refraction; and I prepared a tube, at first of lead, in the ends of which I fitted two glass lenses, both plane on one side, but on the other side one spherically convex, and the other concave.”5
As will be seen time and again in this work, the breakthrough in an area of science resulted from a tinkerer who relentlessly focused on the problem at hand and physically involved himself in the manufacture of tools, instruments, and measuring devices. The innovation that made telescopes possible was first the development of clear glass in Murano and the subsequent perfection of curved glass fabrication by the Dutch and Germans. Galileo himself prepared the lenses, perfecting the size and shape of each glass disk, turning a three-powered spyglass into a twenty-times magnification tool suitable for celestial navigation. In all, he fashioned over two hundred lenses, ending up with ten telescopes with magnification of at least twenty times.6
Realizing the functional military usefulness of his viewing instrument, Galileo approached the Senate and Doge (chief magistrate) of Venice. In the bell tower of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, Galileo demonstrated the superiority of using his telescope over the naked eye. On August 21, 1609, a faraway ship was invisible to onlookers, but with his 12x telescope, Galileo was able to show the Doge the potentially threatening vessel in the Venetian Lagoon. Pleased with the promise of naval superiority based on early detection of enemy warships, the Doge granted Galileo a handsome salary and a mathematical professorship at the University of Padua.
Galileo spent eighteen years in Padua (1592–1610), including an overlap of three years, between 1599 and 1602, in which he and Englishman William Harvey were both at the university. In an Italian university town at the turn of the 17th century, two men occupied the same sphere; two giants of science who would be the first physicist, observational astronomer, and experimental scientist; and the world’s first physiologist, who explained how blood circulated through our blood vessels. Galileo and Harvey represent the best and worst of their time. Galileo is one of the last scientists to be tried by the Roman Inquisition, spending the last decade of his life under house arrest for his belief in heliocentrism. Harvey rose to fame as Physician Extraordinary to King James I and “Doctor of Physic” at Oxford.
“Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1665, thought that there was no astronomy worth the name before Copernicus, no physics before Galileo, no physiology before William Harvey.”7 Both Harvey and Galileo saw the world with mechanical sensibilities, perceiving orbits and revolutions; their insights into the ambulations of satellites, the motion of blood, and trajectory and velocity of moving objects were radical indeed, but were limited by simple, Euclidian geometry.
The Scientific Revolution had been launched, but what was desperately needed was an earth-shattering insight into how to numerically describe and predict the world. In the same year that Galileo died, in a small hamlet far north of London, Isaac Newton was born a fatherless, premature infant who would become perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, and who would provide the rules and the calculus to contemplate our world.
The year 1610 found the city of London as the principal North Sea port, with an exploding population of a quarter-million people enjoying the English Renaissance of Elizabethan times. Literary giants like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne held center stage; performances of Macbeth at the Globe Theatre delighted crowds (although there was no bathroom for the three thousand spectators). The Jamestown settlement was underway in the New World, and the Ulster Plantation had just been initiated by King James I, who authorized an English translation of ancient scripture for the Bible that would bear his name.
The fragile world of the 17th century left the European metropolitans “extremely liable to disease, physical suffering, and early death … with life expectancy not much over thirty years of age.”8 Plagues, epidemics, famine, overcrowding, rampant poverty, and poor sanitation meant that London was awash in both poetic brilliance and excrement; new institutions and outdated, filthy traditions.
When Galileo released his Starry Messenger in March 1610, it didn’t take long to reach Gray’s Inn, one of the four “inns of the court” in London. These professional associations of barristers (British litigators) and judges have been headquartered in stone and brick building complexes (resembling Ivy League college dorms) in the heart of London for hundreds of years. Even today, if a sightseer were to saunter about the neighborhood where the inns are parceled, you would likely encounter barristers in white wigs and red robes making their way to the nearby Courts of Justice. Like encountering young brokers in power suits near Wall Street and stumbling into sleepless, unshaven residents schlepping their way home post-call near Mass General Hospital, ensembles do “make the man,” if not mark the man.
Into that powdered-wig world of barristers and jurists came the Starry Messenger; Galileo’s central character was the supernova, but to a particular political philosopher living at Gray’s Inn, the Italian genius was himself the envoy. That barrister was Francis Bacon, who never conducted a scientific experiment himself, but is considered by most to be the father of empirical science.
Francis Bacon was born into privilege in a stone mansion on the banks of the Thames in 1561. A child prodigy, he entered Cambridge University at age twelve; his precociousness prompted his portraitist to inscribe the motto, “If I could only paint his mind” directly onto the canvas itself. His brilliance was renowned his entire life. Bacon was meditative, scientifically curious, and a thinker of “soaring ambition and vast range.”9 Simultaneously a professional lawyer, politician, courtier, and royal adviser, he was also ruthlessly insecure and preternaturally striving for advancement.
Bacon’s “active public life, under both Elizabeth and James I, was taken up with political business and legal reform. Bacon achieved high office as Lord Chancellor in 1618, until disgraced by corruption charges. His final years saw a furious spate of writing on natural philosophy, politics, and history.”10 Much of that writing occurred late in life when he was largely abandoned by his friends, his wife, and the king.
In three great works, the last of which was published posthumously, Bacon accomplished a project of rethinking how we think. Universities were stuck in a morass of Aristotelian futility, impotent in generating new knowledge. Worse, because their philosophies were grounded in his “first principles,” it was impossible to challenge their conclusions. “Bacon rejected all existing knowledge as being unfit for making discoveries and useless for transforming the world.”11
With cartographers creating new continents ex nihilo and our solar system made to reveal new planetary satellites, learned minds were open to new realities. The late Renaissance was characterized by openness, and “the idea of discovery [of truth] is inextricably tied up with ideas of exploration, progress, originality, authenticity and novelty.”12 For centuries, learning had been limited exclusively to gathering together what Aristotle had posited; there was almost no new knowledge, just new commentaries about his conclusions. Realizing the supreme limitations that this worldview had engendered, Bacon exposed the “inability of the logic of the day to make scientific discoveries or invent new sciences”13 in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and The Great Instauration, New Organon (1620).
Arguing that our process of intellectual discovery was flawed, Bacon set about proposing a methodology to unearth new truths. This organized approach would lead to the scientific method—where future scientists would turn conjecture into a hypothesis, then perform systematic observations and measurements, thus drawing conclusions, and finally developing general theories based upon experimental outcomes, which would lead to new hypotheses and new experiments. No one more than Bacon emphasized methodology14 (not even Descartes), and it was Bacon who introduced the concept of interpretation.15 The ancient unscientific, mystical (even paranormal) arts of astrology and alchemy would be transformed into the technical sciences of modern astronomy, physics, and chemistry with the scientific method; however, the revolution in medicine would take a century more to shake off the bonds of Hippocrates and Galen for good in the late 19th century.
Criticizing the philosophers of old, “Bacon compared empiricists to ants, who ‘only collect and use,’ and rationalists to spiders, ‘who make cobwebs out of their own substance.’ With these two insects he contrasted the bee, who both gathers its material from garden and field and ‘transforms and digests it by a power of its own.’ The business of philosophy, he said, is to imitate the bee.”16 Profound insight from a man of letters, who had no scientific education, and was bereft of mathematical understanding or laboratory organization. Somehow, he perceived there were more scientific discoveries to be made, novel planets to detect, and ideas to formulate. He could not possibly have dreamed of the invention of calculus, electricity, or manned flight, but interestingly, he did imagine a new medicine.
In his final work, New Atlantis, an incomplete masterpiece published in 1627 (the year following his death), Bacon gave “remarkable composition to scientific utopianism.”17 He concluded that the great works for human use consisted of “the prolongation of life, the restitution of youth in some degree, the retardation of age, the curing of diseases counted incurable, and the mitigation of pain.”18 To achieve that, microscopy would have to be developed, germs understood, chemistry refined, and epidemiology conceived. Vaccination and prevention would have profound affects in the coming centuries, but to achieve “restitution of youth … and the mitigation of pain” mankind would need a series of breakthroughs to create the implant revolution.
Bacon predicted, remarkably, that in the future our society would be led by benevolent philosophers, with scientists playing a dominant role. He dreamed of a new college, which would be a great research institution, “a scientific establishment endowed with facilities for pursuing far-flung investigations into the secrets of nature.”19 In essence, the jurist was describing the modern research university. In Gorhambury, St. Alban’s, an immense brick and stone mansion in the faraway reaches of outer London, warmed by log fire and illuminated by candlelight, Bacon dreamed of a new academy and a novel way of thinking. Today, Gorhambury lies in ruins, but its 450-year-old skeleton is accessible via a “permissible path” on private property. Standing among the ruins, gazing over the undulating, verdant hills, speckled with sheep and cows and interrupted here and there with patches of ancient trees, one can only wonder what Bacon would think of, say, Boston, with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology dominating the land north and south of the Charles River, with space-age engineering, DNA research, cancer mitigation, and computer programming and artificial intelligence proceeding at warp speed.
Francis Bacon proposed a moniker for his intellectual establishment: Solomon’s House. While it is true that he had indulged in philosophical debates and legal disputations over the decades, he, like every scholar in the world, lacked an “establishment … pursuing … the secrets of nature.” Remarkably, within two generations, the hypothetical Solomon’s House would come to fruition in the assemblage of the Royal Society (not by coincidence in the City of London); but it would take a civil war, the beheading of the king, a fortuitous conglomeration of virtuosi, and the restoration of the sovereign to spark the world’s first genius society.
After centuries of increasing power and broadening influence, the monarchs of England had authenticated their greatest dominion under the rule of King Henry VIII and later, Queen Elizabeth and her son, King James I. Church and state were united, land and assets had been seized, and the Divine Right of Kings was proclaimed to an unprecedented degree. King James’s son King Charles I assumed the throne in 1625, ratcheting up the tension between king and parliament, with its eventual dissolution. Parliament and the king went to war, with Charles I beheaded in 1649. England was ruled by Oliver Cromwell and his cabinet for over a decade, but by 1660, Parliament restored the monarchy and installed Charles II as king. The Houses of Commons and Lords had never been so powerful, and to this day enjoy authority of rule throughout Britain.
In the half century before the ascension of Charles II, the Roman Catholic Church on the continent was still persecuting Christians for heretical scientific thinking (while Catholics in England faced similar life-threatening persecution). With the restoration of the monarchy and the English antipathy toward Catholicism, combined with the new king’s interest in intellectual topics, those intrepid philosophers of the new Scientia (Latin: knowledge) had found their man.
For a few brief years, there was peace and quiet in London. A political and rational homeostasis had been secured in England following the interregnum, and as happens so regularly, the philosophical advancements that occurred during and after the revolution were massively consequential.
Francis Bacon had thrown down the gauntlet for science. “Bacon’s main and permanent significance, therefore, is as a thinker about science: the conditions favorable to its growth; the changes and procedures required to ensure its progress; its contribution to the inauguration of a new regime of knowledge; and its technological and moral realization in works to improve the human condition.”20 Solomon’s House, slowly at first, became a reality. On November 28, 1660, three dozen men met at Gresham College in London to hear twenty-eight-year-old Christopher Wren speak on astronomy. In attendance that night were some of the most important thinkers of the century, including Robert Boyle and Henry Oldenburg.
In due time, Charles II granted a Royal Charter to the bourgeoning scientists, and thus the name “Royal Society” is used. The complete, proper name is “The Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge.” It did not take long for those early members to realize the gravitas of their “venerable learned society” (the “finest club” in the world21), and soon, regular meetings were occurring in London. Speeches and presentations were given, with King Charles II oftentimes in attendance, particularly for scientific demonstrations or dissections. “As to our work,” wrote an anonymous member of the Royal Society in 1674, “we are all agreed, or should be so, that it is not to whiten the walls of an old house, but to build a new one.” Tearing down the old and starting again from scratch is what revolutions are all about.22
There are other genius societies that originated in the same era, such as the Académie des Sciences (founded by Louis XIV in 1666), but it is undisputable that the Philosophical Transactions (still in publication) is the oldest scientific publication in the world, starting in 1665. “The Royal Society invented scientific publishing and peer review. It made English the primary language of scientific discourse, in place of Latin. It systematized experimentation. It promoted—indeed, insisted upon—clarity of expression in place of high-flown rhetoric. It brought together the best thinking from all over the world. It created modern science.”23
Copies of the Transactions (produced as a newssheet) were sent, of course, to Oxford and Cambridge, eventually reaching a young man; solitary and obsessive, abstemious and born of exceptional concentration—Isaac Newton.
Isaac Newton’s entry into the world, in retrospect, is messianic. He was born on Christmas morning in the bedchamber of a stone farmhouse. His illiterate father, a yeoman who had inherited the carefully constructed, local cream-colored limestone manor house and associated barns, died months before Isaac’s birth.
A three-hour journey (on the A1 motorway), north of London to the farming lands and forests of Lincolnshire, lies the small village of Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth. Like thousands of hamlets and parishes throughout the English countryside, it is a clutch of homes surrounded by pastures and rolling hills. However, on the southeast corner of the settlement, a group of stone and brick buildings present a different appearance, perfectly preserved over the centuries. This is Woolsthorpe Manor, the birthplace and home of Sir Isaac Newton. The outbuildings and barn are to the east, but to the westward-facing ancient stone farmhouse lies an apple orchard, with one exceptionally old, craggy apple tree, still bearing fruit. The tree has survived pestilence, fire, lightning strike, and mayhem, and like its famous former lord of the manor, has stood the test of time.
The limestone manor house has two floors; Newton’s bedroom is upstairs, with a large window facing the apple orchard. Low doorways, expansive fireplaces for cooking, and creaky, uneven floors give further reminder of the age of the structure. The artistic significance of the apple tree’s appearance from his window is outweighed by the scientific, practical usefulness of a smaller second window in the room, facing south. This is the window that Newton used as his source of sunlight, perfect for capturing light during long English winters, particularly when he needed uninterrupted shafts of white light. The “chief architect of the modern world”24 conceived the future in this simple country abode.
Isaac’s challenging entry into the world turned cruel when his mother married an Anglican priest from a nearby parish whose precondition for marriage was to leave young Isaac behind. Raised by his maternal grandmother in Woolsthorpe, one wonders if his solitary inclinations and lifelong difficulty with relationships arose from childhood trauma. He would never marry and lacked deep friendships, begging the question of autism or other social-disconnection conditions. When Isaac was ten, his mother, again widowed, returned to the farmhouse, with three half-siblings in tow. Instead of adapting to life with his own family in Woolsthorpe, Isaac faced another challenge of being shipped off to boarding school eight miles up the road in Grantham, living with the local apothecary.
In Grantham, Newton became well acquainted with the works of René Descartes, the brilliant French philosopher who, along with Bacon, is one of the chief founders of the new Western philosophy. “I think, therefore I am” is Descartes’s most famous quotation, but his lasting influence was in mathematics and physics, and most important, his insistence on a mechanistic view of the world and cosmos. He echoed Bacon with his insistence on empirical investigation and an emphasis on a scientific method. It would not be long until Newton was incorporating Descartes’s techniques and building upon his theories.
As Newton was nearing manhood, it was becoming increasingly obvious that he would make a distracted and uninspiring farmer. (Similar to Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein, Isaac was often criticized for having “his head in the clouds.”) Thankfully, arrangements were made for Isaac’s admission to Cambridge University, three days’ journey to the south. In June of 1661, he was installed in Trinity College, Cambridge University, completely dedicated to his scholastic mission. By his third year Newton had absorbed all that could be known. This sounds impossible to modern ears, but Newton was able to learn all contemporary math and physics in his first few years in Cambridge.
And then, in 1664, an astonishing and beautifully horrific upheaval occurred across England. Plague, the ancient scourge, began to claim lives and ignite fear from down south. Cities and universities began to drain across the country, and Cambridge, bowing to the Black Death, shuttered in 1665. Isaac returned home to Woolsthorpe, living with his mother and half-sisters for the first time. Medieval instincts called for isolation in the face of pandemics, and Newton may be seen as the greatest solo artist of all time.
In 1665, the Royal Society was gaining momentum and preparing for publication; Isaac Newton was secreted away in the upstairs bedroom of Woolsthorpe Manor. Unanswered questions plaguing Newton, he began an approximate eighteen-month project that would be the most productive and astounding by any theorist, ever. Taking fastidious notes in tiny script (on precious paper bequeathed to him by a former tutor), the solitary Newton unlocked the secrets of light, the meaning of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics, as well as the calculus concepts of integration and derivation that would make all modern mathematics and science possible.
What held the moon above us? Why did it not come crashing down to earth, or simply fly away? Why did all objects have a certain weight that pulled them to earth, and why always straight down? The ancient Greeks and early Renaissance philosophers had tried, in vain, to unlock the mysteries of orbits and objects; Newton employed all the known mathematics of the time and invented more.
Through an amazing coincidence, the sun is four hundred times the diameter the moon, but is also four hundred times farther away. This explains their similar “apparent size” in the sky and the mathematical prospect of complete solar eclipse. Both orbs occupy one-half degree of arc across our sky (it is 180 degrees from horizon to horizon), meaning that you could line up 360 moons across the sky. By sheer coincidence, or providence, lying in the Woolsthorpe apple orchard and gazing up at the ancient apple tree, an apple would subtend the same half-degree in the sky. Newton’s thought experiment about falling objects and the pull of the moon by the earth started at Woolsthorpe, further bolstered by initial simplistic calculations about the size of the moon, the distance from earth, its velocity across the sky, and thoughts about the powers of attraction. While it would take many years to form a comprehensive lexicon about universal gravitation and the laws of thermal dynamics, the seeds were planted in the Lincolnshire countryside, with Newton gazing at the moon and sometimes staring straight at the sun.
The Royal Society lacked a formal meeting place of its own at first, but the ingenious members did not tarry in adopting a motto—Nullius In Verba, Latin for “take nobody’s word for it.” This contemporary Solomon’s House would base all new knowledge on proof. Adopting Baconian empirical processes, the intelligentsia disputed old beliefs, tested new theories, and reported new findings. The center of the group from the beginning was Robert Boyle, a tall and thin aristocrat from Ireland who devoted his life to scientific experimentation. Boyle’s law is familiar to every chemistry student as the explanation of the behavior of gases, and is remarkably insightful for the 17th century. Boyle’s longtime lab assistant was Robert Hooke, an Englishman who was a brilliant technical scientist, manufacturer of equipment and devices, and grumpy sidekick.
Also present from the outset was Christopher Wren, a polymath anatomist, astronomer, physicist, and most notably, architect. Wren’s monstrous energy and architectural cunning would be tried in 1666, when all the buildings at the heart of London were razed by the great fire that had been foretold by soothsayers who feared the implications of 666 in the year.
Geniuses all, none would claim to be the first scientists or philosophical wunderkinder; what made them remarkable was the congregation of virtuosi, the world’s original scientific organization. The story of “early science would have more to do with collaboration than with solitary contemplation,”25 with the glaring exception of a young man in Woolsthorpe.
Whether in Woolsthorpe, Cambridge, or later, London, Newton was characterized by one, most unusual trait: his power of concentration. When asked by a devotee how he had conjured the concept of gravitation, Newton replied, “By thinking on it continually.” When faced with a theoretical dilemma, he did without sleep and almost completely without food. He took no pleasure in exercise, avocation, epicurean delights, or fraternity; only intellectual pursuits provided temptation. For a man who decoded the tides, it is remarkable that he never saw the sea, yet his ascetic lifestyle yielded profound insights into the physics of motion, light, and gravity. His radical curiosity about the mechanics of the world did not extend, physically, more than a one-hundred-mile radius from his origination.
Completely (intellectually) alone in Woolsthorpe, Newton began a project of mathematical and philosophical exploration in 1665 that started with the proof of the binomial theorem, a pillar of mathematics to this day. How much farm work and tasks around the house did the twenty-three-year-old perform? We don’t know, but it is clear that a huge amount of mental energy was expended by Newton.
For any reader who has struggled with high school and college calculus, it is startling to consider one man inventing the process of differentiation, and later, integration. (There was a protracted debate over primacy in the innovation of calculus between Newton and German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), with Newton never surrendering the title.) Newton developed the mathematics of calculus to deal with the complex computations he was faced with when considering the motions of the planets and properties of gravity. Setting aside his new math weapon, he turned to the triangular glass prism he had purchased at a country fair outside Cambridge.
Rainbows in the sky have always had the same color pattern (ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet); but nothing more than the order of the colors was understood. Why were they always the same? Newton retreated upstairs to his room where a small window faced the southern sky. Cutting a small hole into a board covering the window, Newton was able to isolate a shaft of light into the dark room. This afternoon light, particularly on a sunny winter day, was used to pass light through a prism, diffracting the sunlight into a rainbow of colors splashing onto a distant wall. In a stroke of genius, Newton arranged a second prism in the path of the isolated colors, curious to see if another dispersion of a second rainbow occurred. Dear Reader, what is your guess—does another rainbow ensue, or is it maintained as that selfsame color? Or another?
The answer: the same color emerges from the second prism. With this result, and others, Newton concluded that sunlight, or white light, is composed of the colors of the rainbow. The experiment to confirm this is to angle a series of prisms, or mirrors, into one focal point. Colors flow in, and white light emerges. “Newton’s experiment of sunlight refracted by two prisms—so ingeniously conceived, carefully performed, and exquisitely narrated—came to be seen as a landmark in the history of science. It established a great truth of nature. It created a template for the art of reasoning from observation to theory. It shines as a beacon from the past so brightly as to cast the rest of the Society’s contemporaneous activity to relative shadow.”26
During the “miracle years” in Woolsthorpe, Newton also performed the foundational work on gravitational theory; exploring how the moon was held in balance above the world, spinning and rotating, without flying away or crashing down to earth. Using only his basic estimations and new mathematics, Newton was able to prove to himself that all objects have gravitational pull, and for the first time in world history, was able to grasp why objects fell, why water flowed, why cannon balls arced in the air as they were shot from a cannon, and why the celestial bodies traveled across the sky. These concepts would underpin his laws of thermodynamics in years to come, but for now, wandering around the manor, Newton could take pleasure in gazing up at the moon and understanding what forces held it in balance.
For that matter, Newton was allowed a full measure of satisfaction everywhere he looked. The moon, orbiting overhead, sunlight reflecting off rivulets in the Woolsthorpe pastureland, apples plopping onto the orchard sod, the arced trajectory of a stone thrown by a neighbor boy, and even the function of his own eyes all were, to him, the function of the mechanical laws he was discovering. A deeply religious man, Newton’s insights convinced him that everything around him conformed to his conception of a “clockwork universe,” an orderly reality that he could understand, if he concentrated with enough gusto. He later concluded, that during the “plague years of 1665–1666 … I was in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks [sic] & Philosophy more than at any time since.” Among the Lincolnshire heath, Newton had tilted the earth toward a new philosophical understanding; and in intellectual investigation, there “is nothing remotely like it in the history of thought.”27 He had the added pleasure of knowing that only he comprehended the rules of the machine, and many years would transpire until he was essentially forced to divulge his discoveries to the members of the Royal Society.
Following Newton’s annus mirabilis, in which he created modern mathematics, optics, and mechanics, he returned to Cambridge, quickly ascending to the title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, vacated by his mentor, Isaac Barrow. (The most recent, familiar Lucasian Professor has been Stephen Hawking.) Barrow departed to London, where he was an early member of the Royal Society—and the link between the Society and his protégé back in Cambridge. Over the course of many years, Barrow urged Newton to correspond with various members in London, and beyond, but the reclusive professor evaded contact with surprising dedication. After more than a decade, Isaac Newton finally made an appearance at a Royal Society meeting, in 1675.
As the years passed, Newton overcame isolationism and envy. At first, Newton’s discoveries were steadfastly cloaked behind a murky veil, but a small circle of trusted friends, like Isaac Barrow, Robert Boyle, and Edmund Halley, were able to entice him to reveal his secrets. The first taste of his genius was an examination of the telescope he had fashioned by hand. Later, papers started to trickle in to Oldenburg, followed by months, or years, of silence. To a society dedicated to information flow, these tantalizing notes from the nearby mastermind were scintillating, if not frustrating.
Another new discovery had recently descended upon English shores: coffee. The first London coffeehouse opened in 1652, and by 1663, there were eighty-two coffeehouses within the old Roman walls of the City.28 Just as the Royal Society was emerging, “coffee came to be portrayed as an antidote to drunkenness, violence and lust; providing a catalyst for pure thought, sophistication and wit.”29 The Enlightenment was coming into full bloom, and characters like Newton were the focus of debate in the coffeehouses and homes of the great city.
Isaac Newton published his masterpiece, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, referred to simply as Principia, in 1687. Fortunately for mankind, Halley, the skillful diplomat, was able to cajole the reluctant Newton to share his ideas about mechanics and mathematics. Principia is Newton’s magnum opus, one of the most important works in the history of science. In it, Newton had painstakingly laid out, in overwhelming intelligence and insight, the laws of physics, explaining gravity, celestial motions, and why things work the way they do. Like Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, it was hailed by everyone, read by few, and understood by only a tiny handful. It set the stage for the Scientific Revolution.
Newton would rise to become president of the Royal Society and Master of the Mint of England. He died at age eighty-four having never married and with no heirs. Deeply religious and dedicated to alchemy, he was described by economist John Maynard Keynes as the “last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than ten thousand years ago.”30 However magical were his inclinations, he was able to see a new “system of the world,” presenting the mathematical framework necessary for all future advanced calculations, including the mathematics required to launch spaceships to mingle with comets and planets.
This is not a book about comets and spaceships, but it is about the birth of science that gave support and foundation to the rise of medicine. And it was the 17th-century scientists, most notably Bacon and Descartes and Newton, who theorized that our world could be scientifically investigated and codified. “Bacon may have been among the earliest, if not the first, of Western philosophers to give to the concept of a law of nature the meaning it came to acquire in the natural sciences. When he refers to law in defining forms, it seems to be detached from any association with a divine lawgiver, providential design or oversight, or teleological purpose.”31 Descartes and Newton would rightly claim that their discoveries were universal truths and laws; this mentality would open the door to the modernization of medicine, and within a few decades of Newton’s death, another unlikely character would arrive in London to become the world’s first scientific surgeon.
Although the Royal Society had only existed for a few short years, the members immediately understood that a tidal wave of inspiration and change was sweeping through their lives. In what can only be considered a bold move, if not ostentatious, the members decided to write a history of their founding. In 1667, Thomas Sprat wrote The History of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, just five years after it received its royal charter. On the frontispiece, an engraving of the bust of King Charles II receiving laurels, and flanked by Francis Bacon and the first president of the society, William Brouncker.
In the preface of the book, Sprat dedicated the book to their royal patron, King Charles II, declaring that glory was due to the King for freeing man from the “bondage of errors.” Later, Sprat considered what the ancients had decided about the philosophers of old:
What Reverence all Antiquity had for the Authors of Natural Discoveries, is evident by the Diviner sort of Honor they conferr’d on them…. That a higher degree of Reputations is due to Discoverers, then to Teachers of Speculative Doctrines, nay even to Conquerors themselves. [italics added]
Finally, Sprat concluded, proposing what glory and remembrance awaited the king and not just the inventors:
Nor has the True God himself omitted to shew his value of Vulgar Arts. In the whole History of the first Monarchs of the World, from Adam to Noah, there is no mention of their Wars, or their Victories: All that is recorded is this, They liv’d many years, and taught their Posterity to keep Sheep, to till the Ground, to plant Vineyards, dwell in Tents, to build Cities, to play on the Harp and Organs, and to work Brass and Iron. And if they deserve’d a Sacred Remembrance, for one Natural or Mechanical Invention, Your Majesty will certainly obtain Immortal Fame, for having establish’d a perpetual Succession of Inventors. [italics added]
Prophecy fulfilled. The Royal Society’s fellows have split the atom, discovered hydrogen, the double helix, and the electron. They’ve invented the World Wide Web and established peer review. The world’s first scientific organization, truly a house of Solomon, paved the way for modern science and in so doing, established the proper foundation for the transformation of medicine in the 1800s into a scientific discipline. But first, a wild, unschooled Scotsman would arrive in London, unbelievably becoming the world’s first scientific surgeon.