Child of the C17 Scientific Revolution and all its works and ways that you are, you can no more escape the long sidereal shadow of Sir Isaac Newton than you can avoid seeing red when you fall, thoroughly sauced, out of an apple tree – or avoid a prism sentence when reading of the crystalline refraction of the light spectrum.
Newton’s birthday is proverbially attributed to December 25, though debate still roils over the point, as Olivia Judson 
, biology blogger babe at The New York Times and agony auntie to the lower-Linnaean (livin’)libida(loca)lorn, notes in a post nominating the titanic scientist for a dedicated holiday all his own, in which she explores the calendrical conundrum and tucks in many of the delectable Christmas plums – or Newtonian figs – with which his works and days were instinct.
As DJ Mintmaster Ike, spinning scratch-free gold discs for His and Her Royal Highnesses, his Fife-drumming attempts to nip in the bud the coin-clipping blackguards of his day sent him into counter fits:
Physics was only one of his interests. He was deeply religious, though a heretic — he did not believe in the Holy Trinity — and he wrote more about religion than he did about physics, mathematics or his other great interest, alchemy. Though he never managed to turn base metal into gold in an experiment, later in life he became Warden of the Mint — the man in charge of making the country’s money. Here, he oversaw the production of gold and silver coins, and ensured that they were made more exactly than they had ever been made before. He also went after counterfeiters, several of whom were hanged.
Newton’s discoveries, a forever staple of classroom lore worldwide, were the culmination of a continent-wide scientific revolution a hundred years and more in the making, in which the forces of church and state alike had their jealous hands, and it helps to study at a prefatory stretch the equally engrossing lives and works of such forerunners as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo the better to grasp entire the earth-spinning grandeur of the revolution in material consciousness taking place, the collaborative majesty of the crowning glories of science of this period of which Newton was the Koh-i-Noor. His formulation of the law of gravity alone - whose rates and ratios he only claimed to discern, while leaving its unfathomable reasons untouched – was by itself almost superhuman in the powers of reasoning it required. That he added to it his formulation (as did Leibniz, too, independently) of the differential calculus, as a workshop tool of sorts for his other works – i.e., a sort of what’s-this-in-my-glove Willie Mays vest-pocket catch, in the form of a sort of nifty Leatherman by which the finite Euclidean statics of geometry might be rejiggered to discern the dynamic, fluid motions of infinite gradations up and down in magnitude, whose rates along a curve might be discerned with a smoothness of almost Stradivarian polish; of the full-color spectrum from which white light is synthesized; and, lest we forget, his laws of terrestrial motion, lunar tide-pulls and planetary orbits, really is gilding the lily. So the rationalist philosophers, largely French, of the Enlightenment gathering force over the century after his death came to see in him the greatest man who ever lived, and the dawn of a new age in human affairs in which the obscurantist tyrannies of throne and altar would at last breathe their last.
The hosannas among the educated were never as one, however loud and long the cannonades issuing from France might crowd the history books. A loose dissident tradition whose early lights included William Blake and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came to distrust the relentlessly dissecting, rationalist, hyperanalytic, prosaic disenchantment Newtonian modes seemed to them to indicate, with Goethe, who had a hand not just in a half-dozen literary forms but in spheres ranging from plant morphology to his own anti-Newtonian theories of light, laying the foundations of a more “organic”, intuitive, participatory science whose leads continue to inspire latter-day critics of “scientism”. Orthodox science in the West, under an increasingly secular, materialist dispensation in state and society, would gradually kick out from under it the theological preoccupations undergirding Newton’s long life’s labors. And the energies of those hoping to gain the ears and arms of the states themselves, which had long centred round the claims of one denominational fold or another to an exclusive purchase on the eternal afterlife and the immortal souls of their subjects-cum-citizens, turned more and more to the secular power-claims of the nation-state and its divers colonialist expansions, and the attempts to turn the titanic achievements of scientific methods in the world of mind, matter and machine to that of man himself, in hopes of rendering the imagined construct of Paradise closer to hand not in the hereafter but in the here and now. The misapplication thus of the engineering mentality to society now fills libraries and mass graves the world over, its derangements marking to one degree and another nominally capitalist and once-communist nations alike. Persuade enough people that his schemes have at their backs the immense gales of Science, and – hey Presto! – Every Man of Mind His Own Archimedes. It was no accident, comrade, that Herr Marx modulated from the ethical, hortatory humanist socialism of his youth to the “scientific” socialism of his mature years, fatalist and determinist in the Inevitable Laws of History we hapless sentimentalists with our cobwebbed notions of the Soul and individual volition were powerless to divert. It helps to have a baton handy, at the outset…
One hears quite often that with the post-Einstein revolutions in relativity, quantum mechanics and sub-atomic particle physics, that the Newtonian discoveries had been superseded for good and all, so get out of the way, Great-times-17 Grandpa Isaac, with your alchemy and your gold coins, and drop your rotten apple in the compost bin.
This is not quite the case. What the post-1900 advances did on the scientific football field was to move the goalposts at either end exponentially further apart than ever dreamed before; the passes traversing the old 50-yard line unto the respective and now-grassy goalpost holes of old still found in Newton a trusty color commentator, without whose unexampled heavy lifting two hundred forty years prior (to 1900) the newly musclebound might never have left the home gymnasium.
The law of averages alone, and the ruthless aristocracy Nature delights in enacting in the sphere of intellectual talent, dictate that one of Newtonian magnitude walks among us only once, even under the proverbial imagined construct of a room filled with a hundred monkeys typing feverishly for an eternity under the enforceable promise they will all receive, should one among them draft the Principia, a retirement of endless bananas, or hot monkey sex, or, summum bonum, both at once. We could do far worse than to instill in our amnesiac age a renewed exposure to his singular achievements – while recognizing that science in all forms is servant not master, that ethics is and always will be lord and master over it, and when it attempts to smuggle itself in with pantomime nose and glasses as ethics itself, or seduces us after its methods to treat man as an atom devoid of soul, will, or conscience, to show it the door with the rebuke of Shaw’s Ancient, from Back to Methuselah:
Infant, one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it would strike you dead.
Postscript:
Isaac Newton and I spent an intense week together during our student days twenty and three hundred forty-six years ago, reverse-respectively. From only the loftiest motives of disinterested scholarship, after the University of Chicago motto adapted from Tennyson, “Let Knowledge Grow from More to More, and Thus Be Human Life Enriched,” I append my comments posted beneath Olivia Judson’s Newton tribute at her New York Times blog; were there two of me, which the scales tell me there may well be after one more cup of Christmas cheer and Henrician turkey leg
, I should read all 257 such:
Newton’s life makes for captivating reading from start to finish. As a graduate student in modern European history at the University of Virginia twenty years ago, I sported throughout a ninety-minute talk on Newton and his discoveries I prepared for a colloquium with one episode after another of singular amusement, e.g., the day of Cromwell’s death, when great winds were reported over the kingdom, saw young Newton harnessing them so as to jump further than his schoolmates at recess.
All Newton scholars have reason to recall more than most documents the so-called Fitzwilliam Notebook, for whose decipherment from a then-popular shorthand we owe the industry in the early 1960s of Richard Westfall. Newton had recently arrived in Cambridge for his studies, and an intense phase of religious self-examination led him to confess before God in code his life’s sins from both before and after Whitsunday 1662. Examples from the pre-1662 omnibus heading include:
Making pies on Sunday night
Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
Wishing death and hoping it to some
Striking many
Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
Denying that I did so
Punching my sister
Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
Peevishness with my mother.
With my sister.
Falling out with the servants
Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses [of this offense, Newton biographer A. Rupert Hall remarks, with the assured and knowing authority of the scholar and the post-adolescent male alike, "Some may take this to refer to magical practices, but this seems really unlikely."]
Beating Arthur Storer. [those Storer Boys must have come to dread young Isaac's every approach, et tu, Eduard, above?]
Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
Among Newton’s more up-to-the-minute offenses, a portrait of the artist in penance as young Cambridge man:
Vsing Wilfords towel to spare my own
Lying about a louse
Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot.
Neglecting to pray 3
Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night
Given the social and personal context of Newton’s scientific achievements, it was not for nothing that I entitled my talk, “The Universal Gravity of a Royal Society Puritan: Sir Isaac Newton and His Orbit.”
One last bit for our tabloid age: there was one aspect of universal gravitation, it seems, that spared Newton as it did such occasional fellow sages as Kant and Ruskin, in that he lived to the ripe age of 84 with chastity intact; when Voltaire got wind of the fact soon after, he wasted no time in “blogging” it avant la lettre to the whole of Europe, via, no doubt, the stagecoach “Internets” of the age…
Newton laid the foundation for so much we have now. It is difficult to rare science from the past compared with what we have now. I once read a book by a NASA physicist (?) rating the most influential people in history. He rated Newton very highly, but did note that some of Newton’s discoveries were, like calculus, just around the corner anyway.
Steve