322 113 18MB
English Pages [414] Year 2011
THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE
ALSO BY EDWARD DOLNICK The Forgers The Rescue
Down
the
Spell
Artist
Great
Madness on
the
Unknown Couch
CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE
Isaac Newton, the Royal Society,
and
the Birth of the
Modern World
EDWARD DOLNICK
HARPER
An
Imprint o/HarperCollinsP«Mw/7er5 www.harpercollins.com
THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE. Copyright
© 2011 by Edward Dolnick.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
of this book
may be used
or reproduced in any
No part
manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied
in critical articles
and reviews. For information, address
HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street,
New York, NY
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promotional use. For information, please write: Special Markets Department,
HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street,
New York, NY
10022.
FIRST EDITION Designed by Eric Butler Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied
for.
ISBN: 978-0-0647195U6 11
12
13
14
15
ov/rrd
10
987654321
For Lynn
The
universe
is
but a watch on a larger
— Bernard
scale.
de Fontenelle, 1686
CONTENTS
Chronology
xiii
xv
Preface
PART ONE. CHAOS 1
London, 1660
3
2
Satans Claws
7
3
The End of the World
4
''When Spotted Death Ran Arm'd
Through Every
13
20
Street"
5
Melancholy Streets
25
6
Fire
29
7
God at His Drawing Table
34
8
The
9
Euclid and Unicorns
50
10
The
58
11
To
12
Dogs and Rascals
72
13
A
76
14
Of Mites and Men
83
15
A Play Without an Audience
90
Idea That Unlocked the
Boys' Club
the Barricades!
Dose of Poison
World
42
66
X 16
Contents
/
97
All in Pieces
PART TWO. HOPE AND MONSTERS 17
Never Seen Until This Moment
18
Flies as Big as a
19
From Earthworms
20
The Parade
21
‘‘Shuddering Before the Beautiful”
22
Patterns
23
140
24
Gods Strange Cryptography The Secret Plan
25
Tears of Joy
152
26
Walrus with
27
Cracking the Cosmic Safe
162
28
The View from
169
29
Sputnik in Orbit, 1687
177
30
Hidden
182
31
Two Rocks and a Rope
187
32
A Fly on the Wall
190
33
‘‘Euclid
34
Here Be Monsters!
200
35
Barricaded Against the Beast
207
36
Out of the Whirlpool
212
Lamb
105 114
to Angels
120
of the Horribles
126
Made with
a
Ideas
Golden Nose the
Crows Nest
in Plain Sight
Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare”
129 135
145
157
194
PART THREE. INTO THE LIGHT
Men Are Created Equal
219
37
All
38
The
39
All Mystery Banished
233
40
Talking Dogs and Unsuspected Powers
237
Miracle Years
225
Contents
/
xi
41
The World in Close-Up
244
42
When the Cable Snaps
253
43
The
259
44
Battle s
45
The Apple and the Moon
271
46
A Visit to Cambridge
278
47
Newton
Down
281
48
Trouble with
49
The System
50
Only Three People
297
51
Just Crazy
Enough
301
52
In Search of God
307
53
Conclusion
314
Acknowledgments
321
Notes
323
Bibliography
353
Illustration Credits
361
Index
363
Best of All Possible Feuds
End
266
Bears
Mn Hooke
288
of the World
293
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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
1619
Kepler publishes his third law, which
how
War tells
the planets orbits relate to one another
1630
Kepler dies
1633
Inquisition puts Galileo
1637
Descartes declares in the
same book,
1642-1651
English Civil
1642
Galileo dies
War
‘1
on
trial
think, therefore
unveils coordinate
I
am," and,
geometry
1642
Newton born
1646
Leibniz born
1649
King Charles
1660
Official founding of the Royal Society
1664-66
Newtons and
'
I
beheaded
'miracle years/'
He invents calculus
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"
member of the Royal
1675
Newton becomes
1675-76
Leibniz's "miracle year."
a
Society
He invents
calculus, independently of Newton.
1684
Leibniz publishes an account of calculus
1684
Halley
1687
Newton
visits
Newton
at
Cambridge
publishes the Principia, which
describes
"The System of the World"
1696
Newton
1699-1722
Newton and
leaves
Cambridge and moves
Leibniz,
to
London
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
seemed
ages could have
start
men dreaming
would later
less likely
than the
late
1600s to
of a world of perfect order. Historians
talk of the 'Age of Genius/’ but the 'Age of Tumult”
would have been just
as fitting. In the tail
century, the natural
and the supernatural
end of Shakespeare’s still
twined around
one another. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, As-
tronomy had not yet broken filled
free
from
astrology,
and the sky was
with omens.
The
only
man-made
light
came from
moon was
sputtering lanterns. Unless the
out, nights
and dangerous. Thieves and muggers prowled the the
the future
first police forces lay far in
ventured outdoors carried their to light the
rope.
way with
The murder
Even
rate
a torch
was
in midday, cities
a ’sooty Crust or Furr”
world’s great cities in
one
and
streets
own lanterns or hired a "linkboy” a
hunk of
times as high as
it is
fat-soaked
today.
were murky and grimy. Coal smoke
on
all it
touched,
a center of the
historian’s words, "a stinking,
metropolis,”
were dark
— and brave souls who
made from
five
and
flickering flames
left
London was one of the
new
learning, but
it
was,
muddy, filth-bespattered
Huge piles of human waste blocked city streets, and
butchers added heaps of the ”soyle and
houses” to the towering mounds.
filth
of their Slaughter
xui
Ignorance
made matters
vegetables to the city
laden with
human
Preface
/
worse.
The same
from farms
barges that brought
in the countryside returned
sewage, to fertilize the
fields.
When
Shake-
speare 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
hygiene had scarcely improved. At about the time of Louis
death in 1715, a
new
was put
rule
later,
XIV s
in place requiring that the cor-
ridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of feces once a week.
No
one bathed, from kings to peasants.
choice,
and the wealthy had no
The poor had no
(Doctors explained that
desire,*
water opened the pores to infection and plague,
and grime sealed disease away,) Worms, were near-universal ize the world,
yoked to
afflictions. Science
but the minds that
all
early part of the century,
the
later
and bedbugs
would soon revolutionthe
modern world were
was
crisis
and calamity. Through the
Germany had
suffered through
be called the Thirty Years' War,
name obscures
looting,
fleas, lice,
itchy, smelly, dirty bodies.
On the public stage, would
made
A coat of grease
The
what
blandness of
the horror of a religious war where one raping,
marauding army gave way
where famine and disease followed England had been convulsed by a
to another, endlessly, close
civil
on the armies'
war. In
London
shocked crowd looked on as the royal executioner
and
heels,
in 1649, a
axe
lifted his
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
*
The
historian Jules Michelet described the
years without a bath.”
Middle Ages
as “a
thousand
s
Preface
men
curious
/
xvii
studying the heavens and scribbling equations in
their notebooks.
Humans had beginning stars
recognized natures broad patterns from the
— night follows day, the moon waxes and wanes, the
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 "laws of nature," they had in
it
listeth." If
mind not
people referred to
true laws but something
akin to rules of thumb, guidelines subject to exceptions and interpretation.
Then, world.
at
The
some point
in the
1600 s,
a
new
came
idea
into 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
From
and perfectly regulated clockwork.
the cosmically vast to the infinitesimally small, every
God had and He con-
aspect of the universe had been meticulously arranged.
created the world and designed
tinued to supervise in orbit
eyes.
it
its
every feature,
with minute care.
He had
and lavished care on every one of a
He had
set the planets
housefly's
chosen the perfect rate for the Earth
s
thousand spin
and
the ideal thickness for a walnut s shell.
Natures laws were operating manual learned
how
vast in range but few in
filled
only a line or two.
number;
God
When Isaac Newton
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
round the Earth, an arrow arcing against the falling
from
a tree,
and
it
moon sky,
in its orbit
and an apple
described their motions not only in
Preface
/
xviii
general terms but precisely and quantitatively*
God was
a
math-
ematician, seventeenth-centUry scientists firmly believed*
had written His laws
in a
He
mathematical code* Their task was to
find the key*
My
focus
is
largely
on the climax of the
story, especially
Newtons
unveiling, in 1687, of his theory of gravitation*
Newtons
astonishing achievement built on the
titans as Descartes, Galileo,
work of such
and Kepler, who themselves had
deciphered paragraphs and even whole pages of code*
But
Gods
cosmic
We will examine their breakthroughs and false trails, too*
All these thinkers had two traits in geniuses,
and they had utter
faith that the universe
designed on impeccable mathematical story of a group of scientists
common* They were
who
What follows is the read Gods mind*
lines*
set out to
had been
Part
One
CHAOS
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Chapter One
LONDON,
A
stranger to the city
men
chattering
who happened
disappearing into
might have found himself at a
1660
to see the parade of eager,
Thomas Greshams mansion
loss.
Who were these gentlemen
powdered wigs, knee breeches, and linen
in their
cravats? It
was
too early in the day for a concert or a party, and this was hardly the setting for a bulhbaiting or a prizefight.
With choked
shouting coachmen, reeking dunghills, and
its
air,
London
men seemed lis left
grit-
assaulted every sense, but these mysterious
not to notice. Locals, then, for the giant metropo-
newcomers
reeling.
crowd
like a theater
The men
at
Greshams looked
a bit
— and with the Puritans out of power and
Oliver Cromwells 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 gentlemens
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
powder onto the tabletop and arranging
man
standing next to
it
to be spilling
into a pattern.
him held something between
small and dark and twitching.
The
his fingers,
4
The world would terious
The Clockwork Universe
/
eventually learn the identity of these mys-
men* They called themselves natural philosophers, and
they had banded together to sort out the workings of everything
from pigeons to
planets*
They shared
center of the group stood aristocrat
whose
maintained his
father
little
but curiosity* At the
skeletally thin
tall,
was one of
Robert Boyle, an
Britain's richest
men* Boyle
one
three splendid private laboratories,
at
each of
homes* Mild-mannered and unworldly, Boyle spent his days
contemplating the mysteries of nature, the glories of God, and
home remedies
for
an endless
of real and imaginary
was around, Robert Hooke was sure
If Boyle
Hooke was hunched and very pale"
list
— but he was
fidgety
to be nearby*
— 'dow of stature and always
and
tireless
ills*
brilliant,
and he could build
anything* For the past five years he had worked as Boyle s assistant, cobbling together
Hooke was
bad-tempered and sharp-tongued as Boyle was
To propose an
genial*
of
as
it first;
equipment and designing experiments*
idea was to hear that
to challenge his claim
But few questioned the magic
was a
The
if you
from a conjurors
as the
a lifelong enemy*
Hooke s
pumped empty of
man was Hookes
dicrously versatile Christopher
Wren
make
latest air*
coup
What
put a candle inside? a mouse? a man?
small, birdlike
like coins
to
in his hands*
glass vessel that could be
would happen
was
Hooke had thought
closest friend, the lu-
Wren* Ideas tumbled from him
fingertips* Posterity
most celebrated
would know
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
scarcely pause for breath along the way*
live to
Wren
ninety-one and
built telescopes,
microscopes, and barometers; he tinkered with designs for
London, 1660
5
/
submarines; he built a transparent beehive
were up
to)
and a writing gizmo
making
for
pens connected by a wooden arm; he built
The Royal ral
(to see
St.
what the bees
two
copies, with
Pauls Cathedral.
Society of London for the Improvement of Natu-
Knowledge, the formal name of
this grab-bag collection of
was by most accounts the
geniuses, misfits,
and
official scientific
organization in the world. In these early days
almost any
eccentrics,
scientific question
stares or passionate debate
mountains
rise?
The men
one might ask inspired blank
—Why
does
fire
burn?
How
entists.
Titans like Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo,
others,
had done monumental work long
before.
first sci-
among many
But to a great
With
extent those pioneering figures had been lone geniuses.
the rise of the Royal Society
more
to
do
Why do rocks fall?
of the Royal Society were not the world s
ception of Isaac
first
Newton
— and allowing
— the story of
for the colossal ex-
early science
do with collaboration than with
would have
solitary contemplation.
Newton did not attend the Society's earliest meetings, though he was destined one day to serve as like a dictator). In
president (he would rule
1660 he was only seventeen, an unhappy
young man languishing on head off to begin
its
his
his mother's farm.
undergraduate career,
at
Soon he would Cambridge, but
even there he would draw scarcely any notice. In time he would
become the
No
first scientific celebrity,
one would ever know what to make of him.
tory's strangest figures,
Newton was The most
and suspicious Temper that contemporary.
and
the Einstein of his day.
He would
I
One
fearful, cautious,
ever knew," in the judgment of one
spend his
die, at eighty-four, a virgin.
life
in secrecy
and solitude
High-strung to the point of
paranoia, he teetered always on the brink of madness.
once he would
fall
of his-
over the brink.
At
least
6
/
In temperament the other
men
The Clockwork Universe
Newton had
little
enough
of the Royal Society. But
shared a mental landscape.
They
all
all lived
in
common
the early scientists
precariously between
two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up one they had only glimpsed. These were confused, conflicted men.
and the cise,
devil,
They
with
in
brilliant,
believed in angels
and
a
new
ambitious,
and alchemy
and they believed that the universe followed pre-
mathematical laws.
In time they would fling open the gates to the
modern
world.
Chapter Two
SATAN'S CLAWS
1600 s had
Scientists in the
out to find the eternal laws that
set
govern the universe, but the world they lived in was marked by
Death struck
precariousness**
and
often,
might be the forerunner of a terminal
at
random* 'Any cold
fever,”
one historian
marks, "and the simplest cut could lead to a
Children died in droves, but no one was ity, life
expectancy was only about
ties, thirties,
and
safe*
thirty*
fatal infection*”
Even
for the nobil-
Adults in their twen-
dropped dead out of the
forties
re-
blue, leaving
their families in desperation*
London was
so
disease-ridden that deaths
births; only the constant influx of
melancholy
and doctors were more
who
*
likely to
fell ill
a reeking cupboard of called for
newcomers disguised that
Medical knowledge was almost nonexistent,
fact*
them* Those
outnumbered
harm
could do
their patients than to heal
little
quack remedies*
more than choose from
One
treatment for gout
"puppy boiled up with cucumber, rue and juniper*” As
For convenience into use in the
I
will use the
word
scientist,
though the word only came
1800 s. The seventeenth century had not
settled
on
a con-
venient term for these investigators. Sometimes they were called “natural
philosophers” or “virtuosos.”
8
The Clockwork Universe
/
1699 the Royal Society was
late as
benefits
from 'cows
The main
drank
piss
of a
feaver/' a
1717. "It
submit
tis
about a
was woeful
alternative
my
the misfortune of losing
to
debating the health
still
pint/'
resignation. "I have
dear child Johney he died
woman named
a great trouble to
Sarah Smyter wrote
me but these
last
had
week
in a letter in
misfortunes
we must
to.”
The mighty had no
better options than the lowly.
Many times
they were worse off because they were more likely to face a doc-
When
tors attentions.
Charles
his doctors "tortured him/'
Indian at a
stake.'' First
II suffered a
one historian
stroke in 1685,
later wrote, "like
the royal physicians drained the king of
two cups of blood. Next they administered an enema, tive,
an
a purga-
and a dose of sneezing powder. They drained another cup
of blood,
still
to
no
effect.
dung and powdered
They rubbed an ointment of pigeon
pearls onto the royal feet.
and bare
king's shaved skull
helped, and the king
fell
feet
They
seared the
with red-hot irons. Nothing
into convulsions. Doctors prepared a
potion whose principal ingredient was "forty drops of extract of
human
Two
skull.''
After four days Charles died.
killers inspired
the other
fire.
in different
more
Both
that this pestilence
is
in
One was
stealthily
for its horror. "For
from victim
what
one panicky writer had asked during an citie
plague,
huge numbers, but
is
and towne why
is it
in
and not
earlier epi-
one part, or
one house, and not in another? and in the same house, why
upon
one,
and not upon
all
the
rest?''
to
the cause
so greatly in one part of the land,
demic. "And in the same
it
and
manners. Plague leaped
made
in
than any others.
killed swiftly
victim. Its mystery
another?''
fear
is
Satan's Claws
9
/
Dance of the Skeletons (1493)
Fire
had
because
it
scarcely
any mystery about
It terrified
it.
and
killed spectacularly, mercilessly,
crowded, cramped
cities built
of wood and
lit
in plain view. In
by flame,
but inevitable that somewhere a hot coal would or a furnace, or a candle a pile of straw.
Once
would tumble against
precisely
fall
was
it
all
from a stove
a curtain or onto
escaped, even a small fire could blaze up
into an inferno that sped along like a leaping, crackling tsunami.
desperate victims raced for their
Its
after another, fleeing
round
lives
down one twisting alley
this corner
and down that
street,
more powerful
as the
trying to outrun a pursuer that grew ever
chase continued.
The dread
that these ancient enemies inspired never died
away, for everyone
Nor
knew
that no
did anyone think of
fire
lull
and plague
last.
as natural calamities,
way we think of earthquakes and volcanoes. The seventeenth
the
century was God-fearing in the most ters its
could be counted on to
literal sense.
Natural disas-
were divine messages, warnings to sinful mankind to change
ways
lest
an angry and impatient
God
unleash
still
rounds of punishment. Even today insurance claims
further refer to
10
The Clockwork Universe
/
earthquakes and floods as 'acts of God
”
In the 1600s and long
beyond, our ancestors invoked the same phrase, but they spoke of Gods mysterious will with fright and cowering awe* *
*
*
In that harsh age religion focused far more on damnation than
on consolation* For
scientists
and
course of the universe and for the
God
intellectuals
pondering the
common man
as well, fear of
shaped every aspect of thought* To study the world was to
ponder
Gods plan, and that was
Today damn and
hell
daunting work*
are the mildest of oaths, suitable re-
sponses to a stubbed toe or a spilled drink* For our forebears, the prospect of being
damned
to hell
was
vivid
and horrifying*
"People lived in continual terror of what they were told awaited
them
after death,"
wrote the historian Morris Kline* "Priests
and ministers affirmed that nearly everyone went death,
and described
to hell after
in greatest detail the hideous, unbearable
tortures that awaited the eternally
damned* Boiling brimstone
and intense flames burned victims who,
consumed but continued
nevertheless, were not
to suffer these unabating tortures*
God was
presented not as the savior but as the scourge of man-
kind, the
power who had fashioned
and who consigned people
to
it,
hell
and the tortures herein
confining F^is affection to only a
small section of F^is flock* Christians were urged to spend their
time meditating upon eternal damnation in order to prepare themselves for
life
after death*"
God, who knew unroll,
the details of
how
the future would
had decided already who would be saved and who pun-
ished* F^e
good
all
life
would not be bartered with* Whether a person
or a depraved one
dict; to say
would do nothing
otherwise would imply that lowly
all-powerful
God*
to alter
man
led a
Gods
ver-
could direct
Satan's Claws
A
book
called
The Day
of Doom appeared in 1662, the
year the Royal Society received
America),
condemned
it
same
formal charter, and explained
its
A huge success
such doctrines in verse. seller in
11
/
(it
became the
first best'
dealt curtly with such matters as infants
to the flames of hell:
But get away without delay Christ pities not your cry:
Depart
And
may you yell.
to Hell, there
roar eternally.
Children learned these poems by heart. Eventually such views
would prove too grim
to prevail, but they lasted well into the
1700s. Jonathan Edwards lambasted tions with his
hell,
insect over the
much fire,
"The God
late as 1741.
as
one holds a
abhors you, and
wrath towards you burns
like fire;
than to bear to have you in his
more abominable
in his eyes
is
that holds you over
he looks upon you as worthy
sight;
fire;
he
of purer eyes
is
you are ten thousand times
than the most hateful venomous
acknowledging His might in contrast with
"Those are
my
Few
to stir
best days sins
when
I
shake with
God fear,"
John Donne
thus
edly complete, listed fifty-eight items.
far.
The
wrath
in that
Newton compiled
life
puniness.
God s
up soul-wrenching guilt. At age nineteen,
he had committed in his
began with
human
were too small to bring down
Royal Society year of 1662, Isaac sins
some loathsome
dreadfully provoked: his
This was standard doctrine. Worship of
and
Hands of
in ours."
is
declared.
in the
spider, or
of nothing else but to be cast into the
serpent
England congrega-
most famous sermon, "Sinners
an Angry God," as the pit of
New
a
list
tally,
Thoughts and
same
of the
suppos-
acts
were
12
The Clockwork Universe
/
jumbled together, the one the eye
tries catch [i,e,,
as the other.
One
or two en-
— ‘'Threatening my father and mother Smith
Newtons mother and
house over them"
bad
as
stepfather] to
— but nearly
all
the
list is
burne them and the
mundane. "Making
a
Thy day." "Punching my sister." "Using Wilford s spare my owne." "Having uncleane thoughts words and
mousetrap on towel to actions sins
and dreamese." "Making
pies
on Sunday
may strike us as minor and commonplace.
In
night."
These
Newtons
eyes,
they were deeply shameful betrayals of himself and his God. In this self-lacerating respect, at
unique.
The
grow up
to
compose such hymns
the late seventeenth century.
am
a
vile
Newton was
far
from
and theologian Isaac Watts, who would
writer
as "Joy to the World," first re-
vealed his talent in an acrostic he
I
least,
polluted
So Tve continued
It
composed
as a
young
boy, in
began:
lump of earth
ever since
my
birth
Although Jehovah grace does daily give me,
As
sure this monster Satan will deceive me,
Come
A
therefore.
Lord, from Satan s claws
relieve
me.
second verse spelled out similar thoughts for the name
Watts.
Chapter Three
THE END OF THE WORLD
In the 1650s and '60s the long-simmering fear of
grew
acute. Every Christian
knew
his Bible,
that the Bible talked of a day ofjudgment.
Gods wrath
and everyone knew
The question was
not
whether the world would end but how soon the end would come.
The
answer,
it
seemed, was very soon.
Almost no one believed scientists
whose
not believe in
discoveries
it,)
On
would
From high and
men
modern world did
falling apart since
were banished from Eden, Now,
pamphlets,
create the
the contrary, the nearly universal belief
was that the world had been
erated,
(The very
in the idea of progress,
it
Adam
seemed, the
low, in learned
and Eve
had
fall
accel-
sermons and shrieking
pointed out the signs that the apocalypse was
near.
At some moment, ''The trumpet
at
any moment, in one historians summary,
would sound, motion would
to blood, the stars fall like withered leaves,
cease, the
moon
turn
and the earth would
burn to the accompaniment of horrible thunders and lightnings," In the midst of this chaos, the dead would sinner alike
would
rise,
receive a sentence that permitted
and no pardon. In the minds of our ancestors, oric but fact,
and
this
saint
no appeal
was not
God had ordained it, and it would be so.
and
rhet-
— 14
The
The Clockwork Universe
/
debate about the timing of the end was intense and
widespread* Today warnings, that
of television preachers and
New
The end
nigh!" are the stuff
is
Yorker cartoons* In the seven-
teenth century this was urgent business* Deciphering biblical
prophecies was as
much
as poring over stock
had arisen
market figures
before, for
as mysteriously*
Coming were
a mainstream, high-stakes concern then
no
is
now* Similar waves of fear
clear reason,
That was no
and then died down just on the Second
consolation* "Books
written by the score during this period," one emi-
nent historian observes, "and members of the Royal Society were
preoccupied with dating the event*"
They proceeded methodi-
looking for hidden meanings in biblical texts or manipu-
cally,
lating
numbers
Many
and
scholars
ticular figure
one sacred passage or another**
cited in
scientists
pointed with alarm to a par-
— 1,260 years — that popped up At some point
places in the Bible*^
at several different
in the past, they believed, the
clock had started ticking* Twelve hundred and sixty years from
moment, the world would end* The question
that obsessed
the most powerful minds of the Royal Society was,
when had the
that
countdown begun? One frequently of "great apostasy" It
did not
when
demand
true Christianity
from 400
a*d* brought
Christopher Wren's father, a prominent est in
the
— 400
cleric
a*d*, a
Newton
to
one to the year 1660*
who
also
had
a
deep
mathematics, calculated the apocalypse in a different way.
Roman
time
had been subverted*
the mathematical talent of Isaac
see that 1,260 years
*
cited date
numerals, in order from biggest to smallest
A
interlist
— MDCLXVI
of
corresponded to the date 1666, which “may bode some ominous Matter,
and perhaps the t
last
End.”
They cited passages such witnesses,
and they
shall
as Revelation 11:3: “I will give
power unto
my two
prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore
days, clothed in sackcloth.” Scholars took each day to represent a year.
The End
of the
World
/
15
Jesus himself had talked of the signs that would announce the final days.
At the Mount of Olives the
disciples
had asked
him, ‘‘What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?“
War and
misery on Earth, Jesus had replied, and chaos in the
heavens, “Nation shall rise against nation, and
kingdom: and there quakes,"
And
then, after
darkened, and the shall fall
shall
moon
kingdom
against
be famines, and pestilences, and earth' still
more
afflictions, “Shall the
shall not give her light,
sun be
and the
stars
from heaven,"
Now, both on Earth and in the heavens, danger signs abounded. Adulterers, blasphemers,
don
into a
and
disbelievers
had transformed Lon-
modern-day Babylon, Such carryings-on were nearly
inevitable, for a long,
dour Puritan interlude had only recently
ended. Following Charles Is execution in 1649, theaters had
been closed, celebrations of Christmas banned, dancing
at
wed-
dings outlawed.
After the restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, the
changed
utterly, at
had been and
court and throughout the nation, Charles
earnest, stubborn, hidebound, Charles II
restless,
I
was witty
always ready to play another set of tennis, gamble
on another hand of cards, chase at court
mood
after yet another beauty. Life
was notoriously indulgent, with everyone from the king
on down “engaged
in
an endless game of sexual musical
(The “Merrie Monarch" kept mistresses by the
score, but in
these early years of his reign he observed a sort of stricting himself to
one mistress
at a time,)
chairs,"
fidelity, re-
For the wealthy and
the well connected generally, the tone of the era was one of cyni-
cism and self-indulgence. Inevitably,
many
people ignored the prophets of
doom
or
scoffed at their warnings and lamentations. But like distant
16
The Clockwork Universe
/
sounds of shouting
at a party, the signals
of something amiss
mood, God would not be mocked. In 1662,
tainted the festive
terrified onlookers in the English countryside reported that
several
women had given
At the same time the night sky.
came reports were
birth to monstrously deformed babies.
had mysteriously appeared
a brilliant star
From Buckinghamshire,
that blood
in
in
southern England,
had rained from the
The
sky.
heavens
askew, just as Jesus had warned.
all
Then,
in the fall
of 1664, Europe and England saw a comet
ablaze in the heavens.
To
was bad news, (The word
the seventeenth-century mind, this disaster
comes from
as in disgrace
dis,
or disfavor, and astrum, Latin for star or comet.)
The
domain of order and harmony. Comets were
the Earth, was a
ominous
intruders,
horrible
was
and they had been feared
for millennia, '‘So
so terrible, so great a fright did
it,
sky, unlike
it
engender
one eyewitness had written, about a comet
in the populace,”
1528, "that some died of fear; others the color of blood; at
extremity
its
holding a great sword as
fell
we saw
if about to strike
the blade there were three stars.
sick
,
,
,
this
comet was
the shape of an
us down.
in
arm
At the end of
On either side of the rays of this
comet were seen great numbers of axes, knives, bloody swords, amongst which were a great number of hideous human beards and hair
all
signs of God
to lightning bolts but longer lasting,
Luther,
the
“,
,
,
s
displeasure akin
“The thick smoke of human
every day, every hour, every
ally so thick as to
with
awry,”
Comets were cosmic warnings, sins, rising
faces,
moment
,
,
,
[grow] gradu-
form a comet,” explained one follower of Martin
which
at last
is
kindled by the hot and fiery anger of
Supreme Heavenly Judge,”
Unsettlingly, comets
appeared,
Where
hung overhead
for days before they dis-
they went, or why, no one knew. Night after
The End night, all
of the
World
one could do was check the sky to see
had appeared again and guess
visitor
17
/
at
if
the dreaded
what calamity
it
might
foretelL
This newest comet refused to disappear. The fearsome ings of
On
1664 persisted
December
mood grew
parition near the
November and then
King Charles
17,
late into the night to
public
into
II
into
sight'
December.
and Queen Catherine waited
witness the spectacle for themselves.
ever darker. In January,
comet
—
The
word came of an ap-
‘a Coffin,” floating in the sky,
“which
causes great anxiety of thought amongst the people.”
An bury,
astrologer
and member of the Royal
warned that
“this
Society,
comet portends pestiferous and horrible
winds and tempests.” Another astrologer foresaw
“a
ITY which will bring MANY to their Graves.” In
March 1665,
John Gad'
a second
MORTAL'
comet appeared.
Closer to home, the natural world seemed just as unsettled.
Rumors and omens
started with worrisome sightings
— clouds
of flies swarmed inside houses; ants smothered the roads; frogs clogged the ditches
— and grew ever more
ancient days, England had angered
passed along the
latest
news
lurid.
God. Even the
Like Egypt in well educated
in horrified whispers, as fright'
ened and fascinated as the most superstitious countrymen. “A
deformed monster” had been born
in
London, the Spanish am'
bassador reported, “horrible in shape and color. Part of him was fiery red
and part of him
yellow.
He had the legs of a bull,
On his chest was a human face.
the feet of a man, the
tail
breasts of a goat, the shoulders of a camel, a long
place of a head a kind of
tumor with the
monstrous prodigies are permitted by as harbingers of calamities.”
of a wolf, the
body and
ears of a horse.
God to
in
Such
appear to mankind
18
The
The Clockwork Universe
/
greatest scientists of the age, Isaac
Newton
them, believed as fervently as everyone
else that
shadow of the apocalypse. Every era
lives
that
it
slaves.
manages
to ignore.
The Greeks
they lived in the
with contradictions
talked ofjustice and kept
The Crusaders preached the gospel of the
and rode off to annihilate the
infidels.
chief among
The
Prince of Peace
seventeenth century
believed in a universe that ran like clockwork, entirely in accord
with natural law, and also in a
God who
reached
down
into the
world to perform miracles and punish sinners.
Many
of the early scientists tended not to pay
monsters and bloody
renowned today
how much
Hebrew, and Chaldean,
hidden meanings, Newton himself owned some
thirty Bibles in various translations lessly
time remained, Robert
as the father of chemistry, studied the
Bible not only in English but in Greek, to ferret out
to
but they pored over their Bibles in
rains,
an urgent quest to determine Boyle,
much heed
and languages that he end-
perused and compared one against another.
Every word in the Bible was meaningful, just as every twig
and sparrow intent.
The
in the natural
Bible
cording to ones
was not a
taste,
world offered up a clue to literary
work
to be interpreted ac-
but a cipher with a single meaning that
Newton
could be decoded by a meticulous and brilliant analyst,
devoted thousands of hours secrets of gravity or light
the dimensions of the
Gods
—
—
as
much time
on the
as he spent
in looking for concealed
messages in
Temple of Solomon and trying
to
match
the prophecies in Revelation with the battles and revolutions of later days, ''The fourth beast [in the
exceeding dreadful and
devoured and brake in feet,”
wrote Newton,
terrible,
pieces,
''and
book of Revelation]
and had great iron
,
,
,
teeth,
was
and
and stamped the residue with
such was the
Roman
empire,”
its
The End
*
With
World
of the *
/
19
*
nearly everyone in agreement that the
end had drawn
the debate turned to just how the end would come»
One
near,
faction
maintained that the world would drown in a global flood, as
Noah s
had
in
The
tide of fear rose ever higher as the
day; others held out for an alhconsuming
in 1665, a year
number 666*
when plague swooped down on England
ahead of schedule, and death carts began
their cargo into
mass
fire*
ominous year 1666 ap-
peared, because of the Satanic associations of the
Fear turned to panic
it
graves*
spilling
Chapter Four
"WHEN SPOTTED DEATH RAN ARM'D THROUGH EVERY STREET"
For a thousand years, whenever ation, plague
God
lost patience
with his cre-
had swept across Europe. For a few hundred
years,
those waves of disease had taken on a fearsome rhythm, appearing and vanishing at intervals of roughly ten or twenty years. In
the deadliest assault, from 1347 through 1350, plague killed
twenty million people. Somewhere between one-third and onehalf of all Europeans died in that three-year span.
England's population crashed so far that its
it
did not return to
pre-plague level for four centuries. In Florence the dead lay
piled in pits "like cheese
between
layers of lasagna," in the
of one repelled, stunned observer.
more than gape
at the devastation.
The
survivors could
"Oh happy
words
do
posterity,"
little
wrote
the Italian poet Petrarch, "who will not experience such abysmal
woe and
will look
upon our testimony
as a fable."
This was the bubonic plague, a disease spread fleas that
had
bitten infected rats,
to
humans by
though no one would know
that for centuries. Plague sputtered along between full-fledged
“When
Spotted Death
Ran Arm'd ...”
21
/
outbursts, claiming a few lives almost every year but seldom flaring out of control. For decades in the
had been granted city or
a respite. Plague
mid-1600s England
had devastated one European
another through those years, but since 1625
it
had spared
London.
No
beyond
city lay
ships, armies,
and merchants
ingly brought rats
grow
reach, though, for plague traveled with
and
fleas
— with any
coffee, silk
who unknow-
with them. England had begun to
rich in the seventeenth century,
based on trade. From
travelers
and much of its wealth was
over the world, ships brought tea and
all
and china, tobacco and
ports. Europe, in the meantime,
sugar, to England's
teeming
had spent the 1650s and
watching helplessly as plague moved across the continent.
'60s Italy
and Spain had succumbed first, then Germany. In 1663 and 1664, plague devastated Holland. In England, at
all
was quiet
—a
single plague death in
London
Christmas, 1664; another in February; two in April.
On
April 30, 1665, Samuel Pepys mentioned plague in his diary for the
first time.*
embarked on that
Pepys was
still
young, just past thirty and newly
a career as a Royal
would one day become
Navy
bureaucrat.
a world treasure
diversion. Pepys's first reference to plague
The
was only a
was
brief,
diary
private
an
after-
thought following a cheery description of dinner and the state of his finances.
He had gone through his account books and found,
"with great joy,” that he was richer than he had ever been in his life.
Then
a quick observation: "Great fears of the sicknesse here
in the City,
shut up. It is
*
Pepys
it
being said that two or three houses are already
God preserve us all.”
hard to read that
is
first,
pronounced “peeps.”
ominous passage without hearing
22 a horror
The Clockwork Universe
/
movies minor chords in the background* In the face of
the calamity that lay ahead, Pepys s mention of "two or three" tragedies
would come
Plague killed
sound almost quaint*
to
arbitrarily, agonizingly,
executioner," in the
man
healthy
knew
a cure* All that
overnight*
jumped from person
"A nimble
No
it
could
one knew the cause; no one
was known was that plague somehow
to person*
not-yet-infected cowered first
quickly*
words of one frightened observer,
kill a
The
and
The
sick
fell
and
died,
and the
and waited*
symptom could be
as
innocuous as a sneeze (the
custom of saying "Bless you!" when someone sneezes dates from and vomiting followed
this era)* Fever
"the surest Signes," in the
close behind*
Next came
words of one pamphlet from England's
epidemic of 1625, an onslaught of blisters on the skin and swellings beneath
appeared
it*
first*
Blue or purplish spots about the size of a penny
Shortly
after,
angry red sores flared up,
did burne a hole with a hot iron*"
Then
black swellings that marked the end*
followed the dreaded
They bulged out from
neck, armpits, or groin, sometimes "no bigger than a
but some as bigge as a tender lumps and
Mans fist*"
moaned
Once plague had struck,
"as if one
Nutmeg
*
*
*
Victims oozed blood from the
in pain*
doctors could provide no help beyond
a soothing word* Authorities focused all their attention
guarding the healthy* Those to step out of their
the
who had
fallen
ill
on
safe-
were forbidden
homes; hired guards stood watch to keep the
prisoners from escaping*
Food was supposedly
left
on the door-
step by "plague nurses," but they were as likely to rob their dying
charges as to help them*
Many
houses where plague had struck were nailed shut, with
those inside
left to
die or not as fate decreed*
erence to "houses already shut up*")
(Thus Pepyss
Some slum tenements
ref-
held
“When
Ran Arm’d ...”
Spotted Death
half a dozen captive families. carried a large cross,
The
23
/
houses of the condemned
marked on the door
warn
in red chalk, to
others to keep away. Scrawled near the cross were the forlorn
words, 'Tord have mercy upon us.”
On June for himself.
7,
On June
15,
dying this
1665, Pepys
On June
10,
first
saw
he decided
Two it
or three such houses”
was time
he noted that The town grows very sickly
last
rose throughout the
.
there
.
summer. Frightened Lorn
doners discussed such patterns endlessly, as
when
a
madman might
saw 'seven or eight houses plague.”
.
week of the plague 112, from 43 the week before.”
The numbers to guess
to write his will.
On July
if
strike next.
they were trying
On July
in Bazing-hall street shut
1
Pepys
up of the
13 he recorded "above 700 dead of the plague
this week.”
The numbers were unreliable, rant, despised old
was
to count the
women
were gathered by igno-
called "searchers.”
Their twofold task
dead and to seek out signs of plague among the
living, so that officials
homes.
tine inside their
for they
searchers were poor
could
know which
families to quaran-
No one volunteered for such work. The
women, on the
dole, forced to take
on
their
task by parish officials' threats to withhold their meager benefits.
Shunned even
in ordinary times, the searchers
now bore
the
added stigma of carrying contagion with them. Passersby who saw the ragged
women
scurried to get away, and the law
made
sure that was easy. Searchers were required to carry a two-foot-
long white
wand
as
an emblem of office, and to walk close to the
refuse channels in the street.
Shaky able.
a
as the plague statistics were, the trend
was unmistak-
Throughout the summer of 1665 the death
toll
rose
from
few hundred a week in June to one thousand a week in July
and then
to six
thousand a week by the end of August. London
24
The Clockwork Universe
/
witnessed scenes that jarred even hardened witnesses* Children
were more vulnerable than, adults, but whole families a matter of days* ''Death
was the sure midwife
and infants passed immediately from the wrote Nathaniel Hodges, a doctor all
fell ill
in
to all children,
womb
to the grave,"
who performed heroic service
through the plague time* "Some of the infected ran into the
streets;
while others
waked but by the
lie
last
half-dead and comatose, but never to be
trumpet; some
drunk poison; and others
At
first,
when
fell
dead
lie
vomiting as
if
they had
in the market*"
the death rate was
still
low. Dr*
Hodges had
dared hope that the damage would stay in bounds* All such
hopes were soon dashed* Plague was a "cruel enemy," Hodges lamented, like an army that
"at first
only scattered about
arrows, but at last covered the whole city with dead*" told of priests in perfect health
who went
and died alongside them* Doctors
its
Hodges
to comfort dying
men
at the bedside keeled over
next to their patients* Pepys heard about a now-commonplace disaster that
to sell us ale in a day*"
had befallen an acquaintance* "Poor Will that used *
*
*
,
his wife
and three children
died,
all, I
think
Chapter Five
MELANCHOLY STREETS
The
authorities flailed about in search of a solution* Plays,
bull-baitings,
plague was
who
and other entertainments were banned, because
known
to be a disease of crowds*
carried this diseased
The
lord
mayor
Was
it
the poor
tried to restrict the
movements of the “Multitude of Rogues and wandering Beggars that
swarm
in every place
about the City, being a great cause of
the spreading of the Infection*"
summer of ing of “all
and dogs* Orders went out
their dogs of
The
killed*
the culprits? In the
1665, the authorities called for the immediate
all cats
furthest*"*
Were animals
what
sort or kind before
to
result
was to send the
rat
Londoners to
Thursday next
Thousands upon thousands of
kill-
cats
kill
at ye
and dogs were
population soaring*
Nothing helped* Throughout the summer panicky crowds bent on escaping the contaminated city clogged the roads out of
London* The poor stayed put* They had no money no place
to go, but the rich
lawyers, clergymen,
*
The
ye
we
nounced
/ for 5
.
are
“the.”
all
and the merely well-to-do
and merchants
— shoved
familiar with (“Ye Fox
The
for travel
their
and
— doctors,
way
into the
and Hounds Tavern”) was pro-
use of the letter _y was a typographical convention, like
26
The Clockwork Universe
/
scrum* Coaches and carriages knocked against one another, their horses pawing the position*
The
mud, while heavy-laden wagons fought
frenzied pack fighting through the narrow streets
reminded one eyewitness of a
Some
fled
crowd
terrified
in a
burning theater*
toward the Thames and tried to commandeer fishing
boats, anything that could float
and take them
who managed
had
to escape the city
who
countryside,
The
for
to safety*
Those
to brave the residents of the
greeted the refugees with clubs and muskets*
Duke
king and his brother, the
of York, fled London
in early July*
Most of the Royal Society had
too, looking
forward to a time ‘when we have purged our foul
sins
and
this horrible evil will cease*”
scattered by then,
Pepys sent his family away,
but he himself retreated only as far as Greenwich* At the end of
August he ventured on a long walk
in the city*
“Thus the month
ends,” he wrote, “with the plague everywhere through the King-
dom
almost* Every day sadder and sadder news of
increase*”
week of August, Pepys wrote, plague had claimed
In the last
6,102
its
lives in
Worse was
London
alone*
to come*
September 1665 unnerved even Pepys*
“Little noise
heard day or
night but tolling of bells,” he lamented in a letter to a friend*
was plague that had inspired John Donne to
know
for
whom the bell tolls;
it
to write,
(It
“Never send
tolls for thee*”)
By now, with so many dead and so many gone, frenzy had given
way
to desolation* Grass
grew
In place of the usual clamor of voices
in the streets
—
street vendors
banned, so newsboys and rat catchers and
hawked till
their wares
—
of London*
fish sellers
had been no longer
silence reigned* “I have stayed in the city
above 7,400 died in one week, and of them above 6,000 of
the plague,” Pepys wrote, “and
little
noise heard day or night but
Melancholy Streets tolling of bells;
till I
27
/
Lombard
could walk
Street
twenty persons from one end to the other lies,
,
,
,
;
and not meet
till
whole fami-
ten and twelve together, have been swept away/'
Now
many dead
there were too
night death carts rattled along
for individual burials.
empty
At
streets in search of bodies,
the darkness penetrated only by flickering, yellow torchlights. Cries of ''Bring out your dead!" echoed mournfully. But with
death striking
willy-nilly, there
were too few
men
left to
drive
the carts, too few priests to pray over the victims, too few laborers to dig their graves. pits
and
The
made
carts
spilled in their cargo.
somber words of King Edward
to
Many Englishmen
III,
idemic of an earlier day. "A just
way
their
mass burial recalled the
eyewitness to the horrific ep-
God now
visits
the sons of men
and lashes the world."
And
October, Pepys reported before.
The
"But Lord, Pepys, "so so
many
six
how empty
many poor
blessedly,
ended. In mid-
it
hundred fewer deaths than the week
survivors began the
gloomy process of taking
sick people in the streets, full of sores,
sad stories overheard as
man dead and that man many in that."
sick,
I
and so many
in this place,
to flock
London. Within another month the epidemic had
The plague had claimed one-fifth of one hundred thousand
of the
city's
some
back to
but ended.
population, a total
cases, as in the
else,
named George
but
all
famous calamity
lage of Eyam, the cause could be pinpointed. In
a village resident
all
and
lives.
Plague hit London harder than anywhere suffered. In
and
walk, everybody talking of
By the end of November 1665, people began
had
stock.
the streets are, and melancholy," wrote
this
so
and
then, mysteriously
England
in the vil-
September 1665
Vicars opened a box.
Someone
28 in
London had sent a gift. Vicars found a packet of used clothing,
felt it
was
The it
The Clockwork Universe
/
was damp, and hung
flea'infested. In
it
before the fire to dry.
two days Vicars was
delirious, in four dead.
futile to leave
and dangerous to others
siders left provisions at the village outskirts.
year to burn
its
The
besides.
Out'
plague took a
way through Eyam. In the end, 267 of the
lages 350 residents lay dead.
(The
Reverend Mompesson, survived, but
rector
who
some ghostly poison. The
which had weathered
refused to
university
several epidemics
town of Cambridge,
through the centuries,
idyllic
would one day
grounds.)
When plague
settled onto the town, the university shut
down and
dents and faculty away, to wait for a time
when
to gather in groups again. In June
and the university
flee.
out of nowhere,
rise
a long-established policy in place. (Builders
unearth mass graves beneath the
viL
his wife did not.)
Nearly always, though, plague seemed to
had
clothing
disease spread, but the local rector persuaded the villagers
would be
like
The
it
sent
its
stu-
would be
safe
1665 plague struck Cambridge,
closed.
A young student named Isaac Newton gathered up his books and retreated
to his
mother s farm
to think in solitude.
Chapter Six
FIRE
In the fateful year of 1666^ a second calamity struck London*
Perhaps
God had
haps those
who had
all-consuming sidious
not forgiven sinful
fire
mankind,
after
all*
Per^
prophesied that the world would end in
had been
right all along* Plague
and creeping; the new
disaster
had been
in-
was impossible to miss*
But the Great Plague and the Great Fire had one similarity that outweighed the differences between them* Both were the work of
God whose patience was plainly drawing to
an outraged
The
fire
burned out of control
a close*
for four days, starting in the
slums near London Bridge and quickly threatening great swaths of the
city*
One hundred thousand
people were
left
homeless*
Scores of churches burned to the ground* Iron bars in prison cells
melted*
The stunned
survivors stumbled through the ruins
of their smoldering capital and gazed in horror* city is
had stood just days
before,
Where
a great
one eyewitness lamented, There
nothing to be seen but heaps of stones*''
As
for
who had started the fire,
everyone had a theory* Catho-
down,
to
weaken the Protestant hold
on power* Foreigners had done
it,
out of envy and malice*
lics
had burned the
Dutch had done
it,
city
The
because Holland and England were at war, or
the French had, because the French and the
Dutch were
allies*
30
The
The Clockwork Universe
/
king himself even figured in the rumors
— he was, people
London (which had
whispered, a monarch filled'with hatred for
clamored for his father s execution) and obsessed with building
monuments
to himself.
destroying the his
own
But
To
vengeance could compare with
home of his enemies and then
it
to suit
such explanations were, in a sense, beside the point.
focus on
who had
set the fire
symptoms of a
was a mistake akin
disease with the illness
calamity reflected the will of God,
what
rebuilding
taste?
all
ing the
What
God had
tool
seen
The proper
Any
itself.
such
question was not
what had
to employ, but
fit
to confus-
stirred his
wrath. In any case, even the best of investigations would yield
merely what Robert Boyle called ‘second causes," the inscrutable "first cause" of everything.
God remained
He had imposed laws
on nature when he had created heaven and Earth, and ever
ward he had been
free to
to intervene in the world
The
fire
began
after-
change those laws or suspend them or
however he saw
in the early
fit.
hours of Sunday, September
1666, in one of Londons countless bakeshops,
owned a bakery on Pudding Lane, deep
made up Londons crowded
slums.
in
Thomas
Farriner
one of the mazes that
He had
a contract to supply
ships biscuits for the sailors fighting the Dutch,
On
Saturday
night Farriner raked the coals in his ovens and went to bed.
woke
to flames
and smoke,
Someone woke started
he
said,
At
"A
and
He
his staircase afire.
the lord mayor and told
up near London Bridge,
reluctantly,
2,
He made
cast a disdainful eye at the
woman might piss
it
that point, perhaps, the
him his
that a blaze
way
had
to the scene,
puny flames,
"Pish!"
out,"
damage might
still
have been
Fire
confined. But a gust of
Pudding Lane
31
/
wind
to the Star Inn
carried sparks
and flame beyond
on Fish Street Hilf where a pile of
straw and hay in the courtyard caught
fire.
Everything conspired to create a disaster. For nearly a year
London had been city
was dry and poised
for the
The wooden
suffering through a drought.
to explode in flames, like kindling ready
match. Tools to fight the blaze were almost nonexistent,
and the warren of tiny, twisting streets made access firefighters nearly impossible in
any
case,
(On
for
would-be
his inspection
tour the lord mayor found that he could not squeeze his coach into
Pudding Lane,) Pumps
clumsy, place
weak
and
if
to
throw water on the flames were
contraptions, if they could be located in the
someone could manage
to connect
them
first
to a source
of water. Instead firefighters formed lines and passed along buckets
the
filled at
Thames, The contents of a
flung into an inferno vanished with a hiss and
of water on a hot
sizzle, like
drops
skillet.
Making matters harder
wood but built in
leather bucket
still,
London was not
just built of
way possible.
Rickety, slap-
the most dangerous
dash buildings leaned against one another each other for support.
like
drunks clutching
On and on they twisted, an endless laby-
rinth of shops, tenements,
and taverns with barely a gap
to slow
the flames. Even on the opposite sides of an alleyway, gables tottered so near together that anyone could reach out and grab the
hand of someone
in the garret across the way.
a city of warehouses
and shops,
it
was a
city
And since this was
booby-trapped with
heaps of coal, vats of oil, stacks of timber and cloth,
all
poised to
stoke the flames.
The
only real way to fight the
buildings in
its
path, in the
fire
was
to demolish the intact
hope of starving
it
of
fuel.
As
the
,
32 fire roared,
The Clockwork Universe
/
the king himself pitched in to help with the demoli-
mud and water,
tion work, standing ankle-deep in
tearing at the
walls with spade in hand. Slung over his shoulder filled
with gold guineas, prizes for the
One
him.
split
stream of flames headed into the heart of the
city,
fire
the other toward the
Thames and
The
leaped onto
river-bound
fire
covered with shops and
tall,
bled through the
the warehouses that lined
London
wooden
the flames reached heights of fifty
On
men working with
roared along and then
Propelled by strong winds, the in two.
was a pouch
Bridge, in those days
At the water s
houses.
feet.
it.
edge,
Panicky refugees stum-
mud and begged boatmen to carry them away.
the fires second night Pepys watched in shock from a
barge on the Thames, smoke stinging his eyes, showers of sparks threatening to set his clothes
grew
until they
afire.
As he watched,
formed one continuous arch of fire that looked
to be a mile long,
'A horrid noise the flames made," Pepys wrote,
and the crackling flames were only one note People screamed in terror as they ashes.
House beams cracked
through.
the flames
Hunks
fled,
in a devils chorus.
blinded by smoke and
when they burned
like gunfire
of roofs smashed to the ground with great, per-
cussive thuds. Stones
from church walls exploded,
as if they
had
been flung into a furnace.
Through eyes
may
the next day things grew worse,
never behold the
sand houses
all
in
like,
"God grant mine
who now saw
one flame," wrote the
above ten thou-
diarist
John Evelyn,
"The noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of fall
women and
children, the hurry of people, the
of towers, houses and churches, was like a hideous storm
near two miles in length and one in breadth. ing, a
Thus
resemblance of Sodom or the Last Day,"
I left it,
,
,
burn-
Fire
33
/ *
*
*
After four days, the wind finally weakened. For the the demolition crews
with gunpowder
— who had resorted
— managed
to
first
blowing up houses
As
to corral the flames.
burned down, Londoners surveyed the remnants of Acre
after acre
time,
the fires
their city.
was unrecognizable, the houses gone and even
the pattern of roads and streets obliterated. People wandered in search of their
homes, John Evelyn wrote,
'dike
men
in
some
dismal desert,"
One Londoner hurried to St, Pauls Cathedral, long one of the city's landmarks but now only rubble, "The ground was so hot as almost to scorch my shoes," William Taswell wrote. The church walls
had
collapsed,
and the
bells
had splashed onto the ground
in
and the metal areas of the roof
molten puddles, Taswell loaded
his pockets with scraps of bell metal as souvenirs,
Taswell was not the only visitor to St, Pauls,
own homes
destroyed,
With
many Londoners had sought
the huge, seemingly permanent cathedral.
their
refuge in
They found
little
but smoldering rocks. In desperate need of shelter, the refugees crawled inside the underground crypts and took their place alongside the dead.
The
city itself lay silent
and devastated, "Now
nettles are
growing, owls are screeching, thieves and cut-throats are lurking,"
one witness cried out, "And
Lord been, which hath been
terrible
hath the voice of the
crying, yea roaring in the City, by
these dreadful judgments of the Plague and Fire which he hath
brought upon
us,"
Chapter Seven
GOD AT
HIS
DRAWING TABLE
England's trembling citizens,
it
would eventually become
clear,
had the story exactly backward* The 1660 s did not mark the end of time but the beginning of the modern blame them
for getting
it
wrong
— the
age*
We can hardly
earliest scientists
looked
out at a world that was filthy and chaotic, a riot of noise, confusion,
and sudden, arbitrary death* The sounds that
ears were a
mix of pigs squealing on
against grinders' sharpening stones,
away
at their fiddles*
The
city streets, knives shrieking
and
street musicians
smells were dried sweat
with a background note of sewage* Chronic pain was versal*
Medicine was
filled their
and all
sawing cattle,
but uni-
useless, or worse*
Who could contemplate that chaos and see orders And yet Isaac Newton turned his attention to the heavens and described a cosmos as perfectly proportioned as a Greek temple*
John Ray, the most eminent living
naturalist of the age, focused
on the
world and saw just as harmonious a picture* Every plant
and animal provided
yet another example of nature's perfect
design* Gottfried Leibniz, the
become Newton's
German
philosopher destined to
greatest rival, took the widest view of
all
and
— God
His Drawing Table
at
/
35
reported the sunniest news* Leibniz took as his province
New-
ton s stars and planets, Ray s insects and animals, and everything in its
between* variety
The
great philosopher surveyed the universe in
and found, on every
scale,
an
intricate, perfectly en^
God had fashioned the
gineered mechanism*
all
best of all possible
worlds*
One
reason that seventeenth-century scientists had such faith
was mundane*
Much
of the
mayhem
all
around them went un-
heeded, like the noise of screeching brakes and whooping sirens
on
city streets today*
The founding
But the crucial reasons ran deeper*
fathers of science looked
under their wigs, but they ours*
The
point
is
tures of everyday
more or
less like us,
mental world nothing
like
not that they took for granted countless
fea-
life
that
lived in a
we
find horrifying or bewildering
criminals should be tortured in the city square and their bodies cut in pieces and
mounted prominently around town,
as a
warning to others; an excursion to Bedlam to view the lunatics
made
for ideal entertainment; soldiers captured in
might spend the
rest
of their
lives
wartime
chained to a bench and rowing
a galley*
The
crucial differences lay deeper than
specifics
can
reveal*
On
sumptions conflict with
any such roster of
even the broadest questions, our astheirs*
We honor Isaac Newton for his
colossal contributions to science, for example, but he himself re-
garded science as only one of his interests and probably not the
most important* The theory of gravity cut
into the time he could
devote to deciphering hidden messages in the book of Daniel*
Newton and
all
his contemporaries, that
the heavens and the Earth were as well,
and so
all
God s
made
To
perfect sense
work, and the Bible was
contained His secrets*
To moderns,
it is
as if
36
/
The Clockwork Universe
Shakespeare had given equal time to poetry and to penmanship, as if Michelangelo
Look only
had put
aside sculpture for basket weaving*
and the same gulf yawns*
at scientific questions,
We take for granted,
for instance, that
we know more than our
ancestors did, at least about technical matters*
more
insight into
we know ters*
that the
human nature than Homer, but unlike him moon is made of rock and pocked with era-
Newton and many
of his peers, on the other hand, believed
fervently that Pythagoras, Moses,
sages
Solomon, and other ancient
had anticipated modern theories
mathematical
We may not have
detail*
and
in every scientific
Solomon and the others knew not only
that the Earth orbited the sun, rather than vice versa, but they
knew
that the planets travel around the sun in elliptical orbits*
This picture of history was completely
and many others had boundless
wisdom of the
(The
ancients*''
that the world was in decline*) that ancient thinkers specifics
knew
all
faith in
false,
Newton
but
what they
called
The
belief fit neatly with the doctrine
Newton went about
so far as to insist
gravity, too, including the
of the law of universal gravitation, the very law that
all
the world considered Newton's greatest discovery*
God had lost*
The
revealed those truths long ago, but they
ancient Egyptians and
had been
Hebrews had rediscovered
them* So had the Greeks, and, now, so had Newton*
The
great
thinkers of past ages had expressed their discoveries in cryptic language, to hide
them from the unworthy, but Newton had
cracked the code*
So Newton gnant* Isaac
believed*
The
Newton was
times but also a
ploded in fury
at
man
notion
is
both surprising and poi-
not only the supreme genius of modern
so jealous
and bad-tempered that he
anyone who dared question him*
to speak to his rivals; he deleted all references to
He
ex-
refused
them from
— God
at
His Drawing Table
his published works;
he hurled abuse
at
37
/
them even
after their
deaths*
But here was Newton arguing vehemently that
had
sights
The
been known thousands of years before his
all
belief in ancient
By
trines.
bedrock
his boldest in-
wisdom was overshadowed by other
doc-
most important of the seventeenth century's
far the
beliefs
birth.
was
this:
the universe had been arranged by an
all-knowing, all-powerful creator. Every aspect of the world
why
there
lobster
one sun and not two, why the ocean
is
delicious
is
and deer are swift and gold
man
died of plague but another survived
plicit
decision by
decisions,
God.
we may
is
is salty,
scarce,
why
why one
— represented an
ex-
We may not grasp the plan behind those we can be
see only disarray, but
certain that
God ordained it all. "All disorder,"
The world was an
derstood."
how
to read
did not.
was
wrote Alexander Pope, was "harmony not un-
it,
a tangle of blotches
God was
to study
orderly text to those
His
creation, secure in the
letter reflected divine
a reason,"
we
willed
small
*
At the
it.*
us.''
was always the same:
God had
and used events great and
fires, victories in
war, illness, a stumble
over the highest and the humblest. In
reign the bishops of Canterbury,
wards
purpose. "Things happen for
a daily presence
— earthquakes,
sterility in
knowledge that every
our forebears everything happened for a
core, the reason
God was
God watched
who
one another nowadays, by way of consolation
after a tragedy, but for
reason.
to those
the author of that text, and mankind's task
word and
tell
and squiggles
who knew
Queen
London, and Ely declared
Elizabeth's
“this
continued
your Highness' person to be a token of God's displeasure
to-
38
on the
stairs
—
The Clockwork Universe
/
to
demonstrate his wrath or his mercy. To imply
that anything in the world to
malign Him,
happened by chance or accident was
One should not speak of 'Tate/' Oliver Cromwell
had scolded, because
it
was "too paganish
a word,"
God saw every sparrow that falls, but that was only for starters, If God were to relax his guard even for a moment, the entire world would immediately collapse into chaos and anarchy.
The
very plants in the garden would rebel against their "cold, dull, inactive
life,"
one Royal Society physician declared, and
strive
instead for "self motion" and "nobler actions,"
To
we can
a degree
drenched
scarcely imagine, the
era, "People rarely
or 'belonging
to'
thought of themselves as 'having'
a religion," notes the cultural historian Jacques
Barzun, 'just as today nobody has
and
it
is
'a
physics'; there is
only one
automatically taken to be the transcript of
Atheism was
sume
1600s were a God-
literally
that either
God
unthinkable. In exists or
He
modern
doesn't.
We
times,
reality,"
we
pre-
can fight about
the evidence, but the statement itself seems perfectly clear, no different in principle
from
either there are
mountains on the moon
or there are not.
In the seventeenth century no one reasoned that way. that
God might not exist made no sense. Even
of the farthest-ranging thinkers that
it
would be "absurd
to affirm of
He
supremely perfect being" that meaningless.
To
possibility, like
For
another aspect
raise the question
asking
Newton and
who
if today
Blaise Pascal, one
ever lived, declared flatly
an absolutely
did not
would be
to
and designed every
Not
infinite
The
exist.
idea
and was
ponder an im-
might come before yesterday.
the other intellectuals of the day,
entirely.
The idea
only had
last feature
He
God also had
created the universe
of every single object within
it.
God not only did
He
at
His Drawing Table
39
/
continue to supervise His domain with an alh
God was not merely a creator but a parGod was a mathematician.
seeing, ever-vigilant eye, ticular
kind of creator,
That was new. The Greeks had exalted mathematical knowledge above
all
others, but their gods
Zeus was too busy chasing Hera
to sit
had other concerns,
down with compass and
ruler,
Greek thinkers valued mathematics so highly
thetic
and philosophical reasons, not
virtue of mathematics
and
inevitable
was that
its
religious ones.
for aes-
The
great
truths alone were certain
— in any conceivable universe, a straight
line
is
the shortest distance between two points, and so on,* In the
Greek way of thinking,
all
A
precisely 10,257 feet
mountain might be
other facts stood on shakier ground, tall,
just as well have been a foot higher or lower. historical facts
seemed contingent,
Persians, but he might have
come
to the throne at
cidental
reason
it
feel.
Sugar
is
all.
Even the
as a
could
the Greeks,
young boy and never
facts of science
sweet, but there
had an
ac-
seemed no particular
could not have tasted sour. Only the truths of math-
ematics seemed tamper-proof. circle
it
Darius was king of the
too,
drowned
To
but
Not even God could make
a
with corners.
Seventeenth-century thinkers rejected the Greeks distinction
between truths that have to be
and truths that happen
to be
— two and two make four—
—gold
is
soft
and easy
Since every facet of the universe reflected a choice
chance had no role in the universe. orderly, ‘It just so
*
to scratch*
made by God,
The world was
rational
and
happens” was impossible.
In 1823 a twenty-one-year-old
Hungarian named Johann Bolyai conceived
the inconceivable: a universe in which parallel lines meet and straight lines curve. In 1919 Einstein proved that
we
live in
such a universe.
40
The Clockwork Universe
/
But the seventeenth century found
its
own
reasons for regard-
ing mathematics as the highest form of knowledge.
excitement
among
the
new
scientists
The huge
was the discovery that the
abstract mathematics that the Greeks
had esteemed
for its
own
sake turned out in fact to describe the physical world, both on
Earth and in the heavens.
might
On the face of it this was absurd. You newly discovered island had
as well expect to hear that a
proved to be a perfect
circle or a
newfound mountain an exact
pyramid.
Sometime around 300 had explored the a knife.
Cut
you get an studied
b,c,,
different shapes
straight across
sully
it.
one
circle; at
a cone with
an angle and
side, a parabola,
Euclid had
Greek world, where manual labor
slaves, to label
Even
if you slice
and parabolas because he found them
beautiful, not useful, (In the
was the domain of
you get
and you get a
ellipse; parallel to
circles, ellipses,
been to
Euclid and his fellow geometers
work
to
an idea 'usefuf' would have
as a
tradesman or a shopkeeper
was contemptible; Plato proposed that
a free
man who took such
a job be subject to arrest,)
Nineteen centuries falling objects ies
came
from
a
Galileo found the laws that govern
on Earth, After he showed the way, the discover-
in a flood.
bow
later,
Rocks thrown
travel in parabolas,
along ellipses exactly as
in the air
and arrows shot
and comets and planets move
if a colossal
diagram from Euclid had
— God been
set
among
at
His Drawing Table
the stars.
The
universe had been meticulously
arranged, Galileo and Kepler and
the arrangement was the
work of a
Then came an amazing leap.
41
/
It
Newton demonstrated, and brilliant geometer.
was not simply that one aspect
of nature or another followed mathematical law; mathematics
governed every aspect of the cosmos, from a pencil table to a planet
wandering among the
falling off a
Galileo and the
stars.
other seventeenth'Century giants discovered a few golden threads
and inferred the existence of a broad and gorgeous If
God was
was the most laws are
a mathematician,
it
went without saying that
skilled of all mathematicians.
Gods
tapestry.
And
He
since natures
handiwork, they must necessarily be flawless
few in number, compact, elegant, and perfectly meshed with one another. "It
is
ye perfection of
done with ye greatest ye
Gods works
simplicity," Isaac
that they are
Newton
declared.
all
"He
is
God of order and not of confusion." The primary
itself
was
would
first
mission that seventeenth-century science set
to find
His
laws.
have to invent a
The problem was
that
new kind of mathematics.
someone
Chapter Eight
THE IDEA THAT UNLOCKED THE WORLD
The Greeks had been ries
brilliant
mathematicians, but for centu-
afterward that was the end of the story, Europe
knew
less
mathematics in 1500, wrote Alfred North Whitehead, than Greece had ters
in the
had begun
small
time of Archimedes,
A
century
later,
to improve, Descartes, Pascal, Fermat,
number of
others had
made genuine
mat-
and
a
advances, though
almost no one outside a tiny group of thinkers had any idea what they had been working on.
knew Greek and typically
The
Newtons day
Latin fluently, but a mathematical education
ended with arithmetic,
common,” one
well educated in
if it
reached that
far, 'It
was
historian writes, "for boys entering university to
be unable to decipher the page and chapter numbers in a book,”
When
Samuel Pepys took
a high-level job as an administrator
with the British navy, in 1662, he hired a tutor to teach him the mysteries of multiplication.
As
able as the
Greeks had been, they never found a way
around one fundamental about motion. But
if
obstacle.
They had nothing
to say
mathematics was going to describe the
real
The Idea That Unlocked world, is
it
had
to find a
shot into the
air,
Alone on
his
Newton
way
how fast
World
the
to deal with
moving objects*
How high does
does itfly^
43
/
it
If a bullet
rise?
mothers farm, twenty-three-year-old Isaac
himself to unraveling the mystery of motion* (His
set
mother hoped he would help run her farm, but he ignored
her*)
Newtons
self-imposed task had two parts, and each was impos-
ing* First,
he had to invent a new language, some not-yet-known
form of mathematics that would
him
let
translate questions in
English into numbers and equations and pictures* Second, he
had It
to find a
was a
way
to
answer those questions*
colossal challenge, but the
Greeks
spoke more of distaste than of confusion*
silence
To
on the
the Greek
topic
way of
thinking, the everyday world was a grimy, imperfect version of
an
ideal,
unchanging, abstract one* Mathematics was the highest
art because
it
was the
discipline that,
more than any
other, dealt
with eternal truths* In the world of mathematics, nothing dies or decays*
The
angles of a triangle
add up
to
180 degrees, and
they did so a thousand years ago, and they will a thousand years in the future*
To
try to create a
mathematics of change would
be purposely to introduce impermanence and decline into the realm of perfect order* Challenge a Greek mathematician with even the most elaborate question
about a triangle or a
he would immediately have solved just
sit
it*
path will
it
follow?
it
into the sky*
How
and
But triangles and spheres
there* Instead of drawing a picture of a sphere
take a cannonball and shoot
What
circle or a sphere, then,
fast will
on a page,
How high will it gof’
it
be moving when
it
crashes to the ground? In place of a cannonball, take a comet* If it
passes overhead tonight, where will
The Greeks had no
it
be a month from now?
idea* Until Isaac
Newton and
Gottfried
44
The Clockwork Universe
/
Leibniz came along to press the 'on button and set the static '
world in motion, no one
else,
did, either. After they revealed their
secrets, every scientist in the
world suddenly held in his hands a
magical machine. Pose a question that asked, how far? how fast?
how
high?
The
and the machine
spit
out the answer.
conceptual breakthrough was called calculus.
key that opened the way to the modern
conjures up
today, than vague images of long equations
as
it is
vital
made
pos-
calculus
more, in the minds of most educated people
little
But the world we
it
The word
advances throughout science.
sible countless
and
age,
was the
It
live in is
made of steel and
and arcane symbols.
made of ideas and
inventions as
concrete. Calculus
is
much
one of the most
of those ideas. In an era that gave birth to the telescope and
the microscope, to Hamlet and Paradise Lost,
it
one distinguished historian proclaimed "by
was calculus that
all
odds the most
truly revolutionary intellectual achievement of the seventeenth
century,"
Isaac
Newton and
dently,
Newton on
Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus, indepenhis
mothers farm and Leibniz
XIV, Neither man
Paris of Louis
that anyone else was
on the same
in the glittering
ever suspected for a
trail.
moment
Each knew he had made
a stupendous find. Neither could bear to share the glory.
No
hero ever rose from
Newton, His his
mother
father
scarcely
months before
less
auspicious roots than Isaac
was a farmer who could not sign
more
his son
learned.
Newtons
widow, not yet
Newton
The
did
thirty; the
live,
fatherless boy,
name,
father died three
was born. The baby was premature, so tiny
and weak that no one expected him a
his
and
to survive; the
mother was
country was embroiled in
lived to see
civil
war,
honors heaped upon him.
who was born on Christmas
Day, believed
The Idea That Unlocked throughout his
life
that he
so implausible that
story
is
been
right.
When Newton
the
World
had been singled out by God, His it
almost seems that he might have
finally died, in 1727, at age eighty^
stunned Voltaire watched dukes and
four, a
45
/
earls carry his
casket, ‘1 have seen a professor of mathematics, simply because
he was great in his vocation, buried
good
like a
king
who had been
to his subjects,'"
Newtons
great opponent was a near contemporary
was four years younger himself,
A
— and every
bit as
— Leibniz
formidable as
Newton
boy wonder who had grown into an even more
ac'
complished adult, Gottfried Leibniz had two strengths seldom
found together: he was a scholar of such range that he seemed to have swallowed a library,
and he was a
poured forth ideas and inventions
creative thinker
in half a
dozen
fields so
who new
they had not yet been named. Even supremely able and ambitious
one
,
niz,"
men ,
,
quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers,
compares
one's
own
to
small talents with those of a Leib-
wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet
piled an encyclopedia of
throw away
some dark
one's
all
"When
human
who had com-
knowledge, "one
books and go die peacefully
is
in the
tempted
depths of
corner,"
Leibniz was a lawyer and a diplomat by profession, but he
seemed, almost
literally, to
ogy and philosophy and
know
history,
mathematics and new theories in at seven
everything.
He knew
theol-
he published new theorems in ethics,
he taught himself Latin
and wrote learned essays on Aristotle
at thirteen,
he had
invented a calculating machine that could multiply and divide
(when
No
rival
subject
machines could do no more than add and subtract). fell
outside his range.
He knew more
about China
than any other European, Frederick the Great declared him
whole academy
in himself,"
"a
46
The Clockwork Universe
/
Leibniz s view of his erick
s,
On
plied
it
himselL
and
own
when
the rare occasions
exercises,
‘1 invariably
His
first
was
lacking, he sup-
rank in
private,"
favorite
with Fred-
fully in line
praise
took the
whether public or
recalling his school days*
was
abilities
discussions
all
he remarked happily,
wedding
gift to
young
own maxims* But somehow
brides was a collection of his
his
vanity was so over-the-top, as was his flattery of the royal pa-
trons he was forever wooing, that his exuberance seemed almost
endearing*
Throughout
his long
life,
Leibniz retained the frantic
eagerness of the smartest boy in fifth grade, desperately waving his
hand
for attention*
Newton and
Leibniz never met*
They would have made
curious-looking pair* Unlike Newton, clothes, Leibniz fits
who
often slept in his
was a dandy who had a weakness
with lace-trimmed
cuffs,
a
for
gleaming boots, and
showy
out-
silk cravats*
He favored a wig with long, black curls* Newton had a vain side, too, despite his austere
some seventeen figure*
He
was
manner
portraits slim,
— and
with a
— eventually he would pose in his
prime he cut a handsome
cleft chin, a long, straight nose,
shoulder-length hair that turned silver-gray while he was his twenties*
(Newtons
said, "as if from
and
still
in
early graying inspired his only recorded
foray into the vicinity of humor*
working with mercury
for
He had
spent so
much time
in his alchemical experiments,
he once
thence he took so soon that Colour*")
In appearance Leibniz was an odder duck*
He
was
small,
jumpy, and so nearsighted that his nose almost scraped the page as he wrote*
Even
so,
he knew
could set his earnestness aside*
how "It s
to
charm and
so rare," the
chat,
and he
Duchess of Orl-
eans declared happily, "for intellectuals to be smartly dressed,
and not
to smell,
Today we
and
slap the
to
understand jokes*"
word
genius
on every
football coach
who
The Idea That Unlocked
the
World
47
/
Leibniz was greatly impressed by a demonstration of “a
Machine
for walking on water,” which was apparently akin
to this
arrangement
of inflatable pants and ankle paddles.
wins a Super Bowl, but both Newton and Leibniz commanded intellectual
ents were
powers that dazzled even their enemies. If their taL
on a
day'tO'day
life,
off boldly in
all
par, their styles
were completely different. In his
as well as in his work, Leibniz
was always riding
directions at once, ''To remain fixed in one place
like a stake in the
ground" was torture, he remarked, and he
knowledged that he "burned with the desire
to
ac-
win great fame
in
the sciences and to see the world,"
Endlessly energetic and fascinated by everything under the sun, Leibniz
was perpetually setting out
to design a
new
sort
of clock or write an account of Chinese philosophy and then
dropping that project halfway through in order to build a better windmill or investigate a free will or tall.
go to look
At the same time
at a
silver
man who was
that he
1675, Leibniz interrupted his to see
an inventor
No man Isaac
ever
who
had
mine or explain the nature of supposedly seven feet
was inventing
calculus, in Paris in
work and scurried
off to the Seine
claimed he could walk on water.
less
of the flibbertigibbet about him than
Newton, He had not
a
drop of Leibnizs impatience or
48
Newton
wanderlust. tirely
The Clockwork Universe
/
spent the eighty-four years of his
life
en-
within a triangle a bit more than one hundred miles on
longest side,
formed by Cambridge, London, and Woolsthorpe,
Lincolnshire, his birthplace. for the first
its
time
He made
at age seventy-seven,
far as the English
Channel.
the short trip to Oxford
and he never ventured
The man who
as
explained the tides
never saw the sea.
Newton was
a creature of serial obsessions, focusing single-
mindedly on a problem until that took.
When
however long
finally gave way,
it
an admirer asked him how he had come up
with the theory of gravitation, he replied, simply and intimidatingly,
‘Ty thinking on
So
continually.”
it
it
was with alchemy
or the properties of light or the
book of Revelation. Week
week, for months at a stretch,
Newton
nearly without food (”his cat
standing on his
”His peculiar
tray,”
grew very
until he
wrote John Maynard Keynes,
on the food he
had seen
who was one
amine Newtons unpublished papers. due to
fat
left
one acquaintance noted).
mind a purely mental problem it,”
did without sleep and
was the power of holding continuously
gift
after
in his
straight through
of the
first to ex-
fancy his pre-eminence
is
his muscles of intuition being the strongest
and most en-
An
economist of
during with which a
man
has ever been gifted.”
towering reputation and intelligence, Keynes could only marvel at
Newtons mental
pure a
scientific or philosophical
problem momentarily
in
and days and weeks
how one
ones mind and apply it,
and escape and you find that what you
Newton
has ever attempted
thought knows
of concentration to piercing through
believe that
who
stamina. “Anyone
and how
it
surrendered to
Nothing diverted Newton. To
test
ones powers
it
are surveying
could hold a problem in his
until
all
him
can hold
will dissolve is
mind
a blank. for
I
hours
its secret.”
whether the shape of the
,
The Idea That Unlocked
•*”»-
SJ$2:
^
/•
/t-
'
the
*>
“x.
/
World
49
/
X
^'/'
*
‘
.
^
iv0^'i~