Historians of science often refer to the year 1666 as the annus mirabilis… It was during this year that Isaac Newton, returned to the protection of his mother’s house in Lincolnshire by the Great Plague of 1665… formulated… most of the basic concepts that transformed physics into a serious quantitative science. (Bernstein 1973:132).
In eighteen months, according to Bernstein, Newton drew up his basic laws of mechanics and the calculus, differential and integral, for working out their consequences, as well as the law of universal gravitation and his optical discoveries, of which the most celebrated is his observation that ‘white light’ from the sun is dispersed by a prism into a rainbow.
Time-wise it was not that simple, however. Westfall (1994:38-40) shows that the notion of an annus mirabilis is mythical (i.e. false history); that Newton came and went from Cambridge in that period, chiefly to get money it appears; and that, more importantly, a focus on the Plague distracts from the continuity of his development, before and after 1666.
Why then the myth (i.e. sacred tale) of an annus mirabilis? We can readily identify the theme of the mythic hero (see Campbell, 1993) obtaining revelation in a wilderness from the image of Newton’s enforced retreat to Lincolnshire. That Woolsthorpe constituted a wilderness is proven well enough by Newton’s alienated behaviour when stuck there, especially as a youth. As for the trials suffered in this wilderness, Rankin (1993) gives us a graphic description of the route leading to discovery. Isaac does not spare himself in researching the phenomenon of colour. His practical experimentation is carried as far as staring at the sun (until he almost goes blind) and sticking blunt needles in behind his eyeball to see the effect. He finds that everyone else has misunderstood the fundamental nature of light (Rankin 1993:91). Newton instead finds it is the colours themselves which are pure, and they are seen not by modifying white light but by splitting it into its components.
Nonetheless it is the story of the apple which is of most interest from the Plague period. The most famous mythic element, it is also the overriding and often the only association the general public makes with Newton. According to Westfall (1994:51) the story of the apple is too well attested to be thrown out of court. He interprets its mythic meaning as a vulgarization of universal gravitation by its treatment of it as a bright idea, a flash of insight, the effect of which plays on the Judeo-Christian association of the apple with knowledge.
Nowhere, though, does he mention the aspect of the anecdote which seems to have overtaken our consciousness as the story has evolved. Rankin (1993:88) literally gives us a graphic representation of this aspect with his drawing of an apple hitting Newton on the head. No matter what the origin of this distortion, therein perhaps lies the key to the story’s resonant appeal, which resembles that of the death of Aeschylus when an eagle, mistaking his bald head for a stone, dropped a tortoise on it.
The moral of each story seems to be circumspection. The very discoverer of universal gravitation gets caught out by its operation when the real world makes its presence felt once more. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud gives us a plausible explanation of why such a situation may be found comic.
Under the heading of ‘unmasking’ we may also include a procedure for making things comic with which we are already acquainted – the method of degrading the dignity of individuals by directing attention to the frailties which they share with all humanity, but in particular the dependence of their mental functions on bodily needs. The unmasking is equivalent here to an admonition: such and such a person, who is admired as a demigod, is after all only human like you and me. (1991:263)
Freud also states that the ‘comic of situation’ is extracted from the relation of human beings to an often over-powerful external world (1991:257). Bodily needs of course include the need to avoid falling objects and Newton’s discovery of the way this phenomenon works may be perceived to be prompted by a failure to keep that in mind. Hence the existential need for circumspection.
At this level, the extent of Newton’s discovery is thus of secondary importance. The image of the apple hitting Newton’s head suggests to us something about mass assimilation. It is slapstick in the history of ideas – the banana skin route to discovery, if you will. It would of course be absurdly superficial to restrict our analysis to examples of Newton’s symbolic resonance which derive only from such anecdotes, for there is also the metaphorical meaning(s) of the actual science, and this is just as important as the echoes caused by Newton’s persona.
At this point let us turn to the Principia of 1687. Mass, force and motion are therein defined. The whole is constructed in Euclidean fashion with a rigorous logical structure of Definitions, Axioms (laws), Propositions, Lemmas (assumptions), Corollaries and Scholia (explanatory notes) (Rankin 1993:120).
Perhaps the only example from the above group to have entered everyday speech is the third axiom which commonly appears as the statement, To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is what we may term Newton’s proverb.
In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud asserts that superstition is in large part the expectation of trouble (1975:323). The partial nature of this equation suggests that unfounded belief, however judged so, can often coincide with (and obscure) the existential expectation of hassle but, at the same time, allow the latter to find autonomous expression in statements such as Newton’s axiom. If so, the proverb can be seen to appeal to the same level of consciousness as the story of the apple.
Concerning the gigantic leap made by Newton in the Principia with regard to understanding the mechanics of the universe, let us first outline the materials he had to work with, in terms of pre-existing scientific knowledge. From Copernicus he took heliocentric theory; from Kepler the Three Laws on the motion of the planets, the concept of gravitation and the cause of tides; from Galileo the behaviour of falling and projected bodies; and from Descartes the concept of rectilinear inertia in motion. We can take Kepler’s laborious discovery of the Mars ellipse as an example of the limitations of pre-Newtonian developments. Kepler’s result was essentially an empirical observation. It had little predictive power. There was no way, for example, to account for why the planets moved in ellipse or account for why other objects, like projectiles, did not (Bernstein 1973:30).
Through his invention of the differential calculus, Newton could define velocity and acceleration at any point along an orbit. This acceleration is caused by the force(s) acting on the orbiting object and Newton thereon produced the ‘differential’ equation F = ma, relating force to mass and acceleration. In order to specify the force, Newton produced a mathematical expression for the force of gravity. This is the law of universal gravitation which states that every mass attracts every other mass with a force that is proportional to the product of the masses involved and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Newton inserts this expression into F = ma and solves the equation by ‘integration’, which he also invented. Integration enables a summing up of the effects of the infinitesimal pieces of the orbit. The solutions yield the particle orbits and Newton was able to show, with his expression for gravitation, that the only possible orbits are conic sections: ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas.
Newtonian mechanics was devised to describe motions of objects that move much more slowly than the speed of light and, for such objects, it gives almost the same results as the special theory of relativity. Its huge practical success, combined with the fact that the apparently ‘fixed’ stars, the motions of which are very slight when viewed from Earth, provide a stationary frame of reference adequate for most of its problems, meant that its theological underpinnings with regard to absolute (i.e. fixed) space and time (i.e. in the consciousness of God) tended to be ignored by Newton’s successors.
All we are left without then is a set of relative motions. Absolute space, motion and time are metaphysical (i.e. attribution of meaning) notions which derive from earthly experience but clearly not in the crude sense by which the earth seems flat and the sun appears to travel across the sky.
Before we explore further the implications for symbolization of such technical detail let us bring in another anecdote which also appeals to the empirical mindset but again at a much less technically sophisticated level. Westfall (1994:197) grants that this incident may have really occurred but it is Rankin who describes it more succinctly. It concerns Newton’s position in the aftermath of the overthrow of King James II in 1688. Newton was rewarded for his anti-Catholic stance with a seat in the Parliament which decided the Revolutionary settlement. He had an impeccable voting record but spoke only once. Feeling a draught, he asked an usher to close a window (1993:139).
One does not have to think hard to recall other anecdotes which act as parallel metaphors employing bathos. There is Plutarch’s image of Diogenes the Cynic’s sole request upon receiving a visit from Alexander. I would have you stand from between me and the sun (1939:473). In Plutarch’s account, such a reply only prompted Alexander to say, Were I not Alexander I would be Diogenes.
Then there is Samuel Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley’s view that the world exists only to the extent that we perceive it. Kicking a large stone, he said to Boswell, “I refute it thus” (1979:122).
Thirdly, there is the celebrated reply of Dr Jowett’s unknown Oxford undergraduate to the question, in the course of a lecture on the Stoics, as to if a man could be happy even on the wrack. Perhaps, sir, a very good man, on a very bad wrack (Gellner 1985:86).
In comparing and contrasting the temptations faced by Buddha and Christ, Campbell (1991) identifies in the Christian image of Jesus being urged to throw himself from the roof of the Temple the danger to the mystic of what Jung (1990:146-47) calls “inflation” i.e. the temptation to believe one has surpassed the earth and its physical demands. Herein may lie the shared source of the resonance of these anecdotes, which all assert the primacy of bodily needs over mental functions, no matter how exceptional the human figure.
We can now begin to draw together the common mythic implications of the physics and the stories. In an important sense the practical success of the technical detail is of less interest here than the flaws. The sheer comprehensiveness of the physical and mathematical discoveries had a deep, convincing appeal in terms of explanatory usefulness but the retention of notion of absolutes points us towards the limits of that spirit of empiricism which Newton embodied.
In other words, it is as if Newton represents the pinnacle of achievement of a type of outlook in which material reality is viewed as something based on the earthly perspective. Thus the empiricist’s most basic task is to specify and analyse earthly conditions properly, by which, say, Aristotle will be shown to be wrong and Newton right.
To illustrate exactly what is meant let us borrow Plato’s simile of the cave (1987:255-59) in which he portrays the ordinary run of humanity as prisoners chained with their backs to the light, taking the shadows on the wall of the cave to be reality. Now, instead of having one of the prisoners (i.e. the philosopher) leave the cave and enter the light, as Plato asks us to envisage, let us instead picture another (the ‘empiricist’) being freed to examine the properties of these shadows, which have previously either not been remarked upon and simply accepted without reflection, or viewed as divine portents, or the work of providence, or even seen in terms of Aristotelian physics.
The empiricist determines that they are mere shadows and names them thus and attributes the cause of the phenomenon to the movements of bodies beyond the cave. Nevertheless, since our subject cannot leave the interior, he never directly experiences the perspective to be gained from entering the light. More significantly, he does not leave in imagination either and assumes that he has determined the true nature of reality from his collection and interpretation of data available from the cave, when it is really only the reality of his perspective he has uncovered, despite his identification of the source of the shadows as lying in another realm.
In this situation, for the empiricist to tell his companions that it is simply all God’s plan (teleology) is ultimately less misleading than his assumption of the universality of the cold and damp conditions of the cave, of which his companions are only too well aware, if ignorant as to their real causes. Indeed this awareness may well be expressed in cave anecdotes among the prisoners which become fondly quoted in a manner equivalent to the honour accorded by Plato’s prisoners to “those best able to remember the order of sequence among the passing shadows and so… best able to divine their future appearances”. Moreover, the attribution of the workings of physical phenomena to supernatural causes at least admits an alternative, if ineffable reality, whereas the assumption that observation is ‘pure’ does not because it neglects to admit to being a mere perspective.
It would be wrong, though, to try to imprison Newton’s scientific imagination in induction, but, rather than employ his Unitarianism or his devotion to alchemy to make him look less uniform in his means of apprehension, let us quote instead his well-known late summation of his life.
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Westfall 1994:309)
To what does this passage correspond, symbolically? According to Campbell (1991) the first of four essential functions of mythology is to elicit and support a sense of awe at the mystery of being. More practically, Freud states that among tendentious jokes the rarest class is that of the sceptical joke, which attacks not a person or institution but “the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions” (1991:160-61).
Whereas the relatively common cynical joke or anecdote denigrates inflation and abstraction by an emphasis on the primacy of material needs over mental functions, the sceptical joke has as its “more serious substance… the problem of what determines the truth”. Outside Western culture there is an example from Chinese philosophy which metaphorically expresses this dilemma as vividly as any. It concerns the sage who, when asleep in his garden, dreams he is a butterfly, and is prompted by his experience to wonder is he really a butterfly who dreams he is a man?
A common thread links the appeal of anecdotes such as the story of the apple to the assumptions underlying the English empiricism of which Newton was the outstanding figure. This connection centres on the primacy given to the earth’s conditions and both degrees of apprehension parallel each other in two ways.
The popular wisdom reflected in the appeal of Newton anecdotes is analogous to the scientific wisdom inherent in an empirical approach to the gathering of knowledge. Empiricism is an outlook that stresses the priority of the accumulation and analysis of data. Nevertheless, just as popular wisdom can combine practical representations of problematic contexts with superstitious explanations of their meaning, so empirical methods can mask insidious and unwarranted metaphysical assumptions.
In other words, cynical popular wisdom and empiricism as a theory share strengths and weaknesses and differ from each other really only in the degrees of their technical sophistication and metaphysical explicitness. Thus Newton’s references to God are more scientifically harmless, in a God-made-everything-but-this-is-how-it-works sort of way, than the in-built metaphysics whereby the physical has become the metaphysical, even though that too depends on one’s perspective.
Therefore to reconstitute one’s material circumspection in terms of a fear of divine retribution or caprice, or plain bad luck – which is usually a euphemism for some injustice or else denotes failure by a narrow margin – is actually quite ingenuous, as is Newton’s alchemy and Biblical chronology, on which Bernstein quotes from J.M. Keynes’ essay Newton the Man.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was 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 10,000 years ago. (1973:135)
Though Keynes rightly demolished the then-reigning image of Newton as the ‘complete’ empiricist, two important points need to be made. Firstly, Westfall (1994:154) shows that alchemy helped Newton to conceive of action at a distance which, though since shown to be technically untrue, was essential for his theoretical structure. More importantly, it is clearly wrong of Keynes to imply that metaphysics in science ended with Newton, when it never ends as long as observation continues.
We have also argued that the less commonplace ability to transcend in imagination the effects and implications of the earth’s physical conditions is evident not only in mystics but also in diverse phenomena such as sceptical jokes and Newton’s boy-on-the-shore simile. In the end then we are left with a conception of Newton as still the greatest savant of the way this world physically works, yet in the end also as one capable of at least metaphorically representing the possibility that he had got hold of the wrong end of the cosmic stick, so to speak. In other words, he is the chief symbolic embodiment of ‘hard’ reality in our intellectual history and yet his example also pushes us to grasp the limitations of such reality.
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Dr. John Flynn 