Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

Citation preview

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

10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or

sales

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

’S

iImI

•

f

l|v;iJbn. ,,

|


.

,

•

'•-*... i •

•

r

-

*

*i

^

•.

'«

:>

V ^>AU“' ,

'

v

««t'F-

•» M«»V A'

‘‘i,’)

'

'

-^

'

_

.

v

r^

*,

-

‘*

•

.:

.

’.'1

‘;v‘

'’yryl^

.

r

'

*

^^’y

'

.

..

.//•'Ijihivj

» ri

v.

‘

#

'

*•*.’:

/ ^

:

:-;

1

’

.

*

••

A, J-'

«

'A.Li'

1

-'?

It

v;4

t'

twm

s

,*

-’ii-

•

« /i

»

*

-

rf.

W*'

aj4M*tt&7

*

«

J ,*'*,

'

^

If

i

.

,

\!f'' ¥.. ‘

}

#4

I

V

'

i,

'

"*

#' ) -

’ ‘'i

j

i

**^

*

i’-

I-

r

Jl.** '

'

, .

'^''

’ll '

f

,

.,'

;

')*

V

r

'

\

7

.

-

t

U'J --

'

4

f:.'

"

.

.

r.

*,

'fj

i

A*?

.

‘V r

"'^^.-i '' -

;,

I

I

K!»

*

•

i'

5-

'

'

'

,4

!'‘>

-•

Y*

1

**%

-'?A

•

Vs

ji*'

*v.

i

i..

f

,

•

'

i"'.

•!,..

«

lAd

#

ti

'

‘

5

'

.-

’

v/’iy"

t

i

*

'.

... *

•

>

,

1

.'*

.

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

'

*

V

'

P

i

.’

-W

•

^

^ :.

*L

’

V-

y

M. *

*

0 >

‘s

k i

•:—*

V:;

i-

an

r-«r" ~y‘

;....l5‘*.

I

V*.,v '

-

!

•

4

,

f*‘aM '

¥ 3^ i» «

,i

'

»•?

1

t.

V-—'-

-,

'*

V

..*

(

V'

i".V,

^

.\

r

li^j

'

:•>*

;)»

S'

Vl.

»

' ,

. •

'

‘

V

*(

.1-

ri

A

:^ U'»

/

*

f^v.

r

r*

'

V

f-

r.

a

ff-,

,,#“V..

.*-

:

>

'’Vy

f'*'!',.

.“^*

I

*

.'

t

*

’

»

•\"*

'

'A

'

i

•' / »

*

‘

"''v

V

'

«•

•••/

!»;,

-1^-

'

'

Vf'^'

Ilrl.*-;-

.

-

*’

-

"l

'

i

.

-

,

n

Vt*!,’-

..

^

”>'.

« ':

i'

'if

':i-

«v

r

\

II

\'

,i'\=

'

'

i

:

..

x •

4

V :i.'

•v^ :

p

i/

./

«.

'

..

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~