Part 1 (1/2)

The Clockwork Universe.

Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World.

by EDWARD DOLNICK.

Preface.

Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order. Historians would later talk of the ”Age of Genius,” but the ”Age of Tumult” would have been just as fitting. In the tail end of Shakespeare's century, the natural and the supernatural still twined around one another. Disease was a punishment ordained by G.o.d. Astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens.

The only man-made light came from flickering flames and sputtering lanterns. Unless the moon was out, nights were dark and dangerous. Thieves and muggers prowled the streets-the first police forces lay far in the future-and brave souls who ventured outdoors carried their own lanterns or hired a ”linkboy” to light the way with a torch made from a hunk of fat-soaked rope. The murder rate was five times as high as it is today.

Even in midday, cities were murky and grimy. Coal smoke left a ”sooty Crust or Furr” on all it touched. London was one of the world's great cities and a center of the new learning, but it was, in one historian's words, ”a stinking, muddy, filth-bespattered metropolis.” Huge piles of human waste blocked city streets, and butchers added heaps of the ”soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses” to the towering mounds.

Ignorance made matters worse. The same barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage, to fertilize the fields. When Shakespeare 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 later, hygiene had scarcely improved. At about the time of Louis XIV's death in 1715, a new rule was put in place requiring that the corridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of feces once a week.

No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desire.1 (Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.) Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were near-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies. (Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.) Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were near-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies.

On the public stage, all was crisis and calamity. Through the early part of the century, Germany had suffered through what would later be called the Thirty Years' War. The blandness of the name obscures the horror of a religious war where one raping, looting, marauding army gave way to another, endlessly, and where famine and disease followed close on the armies' heels. England had been convulsed by a civil war. In London in 1649, a shocked crowd looked on as the royal executioner lifted his axe 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 curious men studying the heavens and scribbling equations in their notebooks.

Humans had recognized nature's broad patterns from the beginning-night follows day, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars 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 it listeth.” If people referred to ”laws of nature,” they had in mind not true laws but something akin to rules of thumb, guidelines subject to exceptions and interpretation.

Then, at some point in the 1600s, a new idea came into the world. 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 and perfectly regulated clockwork.

From the cosmically vast to the infinitesimally small, every aspect of the universe had been meticulously arranged. G.o.d had created the world and designed its every feature, and He continued to supervise it with minute care. He had set the planets in orbit and lavished care on every one of a housefly's thousand eyes. He had chosen the perfect rate for the Earth's spin and the ideal thickness for a walnut's sh.e.l.l.

Nature's laws were vast in range but few in number; G.o.d's operating manual filled only a line or two. When Isaac Newton learned how 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 moon in its...o...b..t round the Earth, an arrow arcing against the sky, and an apple falling from a tree, and it described their motions not only in general terms but precisely and quant.i.tatively. G.o.d was a mathematician, seventeenth-century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key.

My focus is largely on the climax of the story, especially Newton's unveiling, in 1687, of his theory of gravitation. But Newton's astonis.h.i.+ng achievement built on the work of such t.i.tans as Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler, who themselves had deciphered paragraphs and even whole pages of G.o.d's cosmic code. We will examine their breakthroughs and false trails, too.

All these thinkers had two traits in common. They were geniuses, and they had utter faith that the universe had been designed on impeccable mathematical lines. What follows is the story of a group of scientists who set out to read G.o.d's mind.

Part One: Chaos

Chapter One.

London, 1660.

A stranger to the city who happened to see the parade of eager, chattering men disappearing into Thomas Gresham's mansion might have found himself at a loss. Who were these gentlemen in their powdered wigs, knee breeches, and linen cravats? It was too early in the day for a concert or a party, and this was hardly the setting for a bull-baiting or a prizefight.

With its shouting coachmen, reeking dunghills, and grit-choked air, London a.s.saulted every sense, but these mysterious men seemed not to notice. Locals, then, for the giant metropolis left newcomers reeling. The men at Gresham's looked a bit like a theater crowd-and with the Puritans out of power and Oliver Cromwell's head on a pole in front of Westminster Hall, theaters had had opened their doors again. But in that case where were the women? Perhaps the imposing building on the fas.h.i.+onable street concealed a gentlemen's gambling club? A high-cla.s.s brothel? opened their doors again. But in that case where were the women? Perhaps the imposing building on the fas.h.i.+onable street concealed a gentlemen's gambling club? A high-cla.s.s brothel?

Even a peek through a coal-grimed window might not have helped much. Amid the bustle, one man seemed to be spilling powder onto the tabletop and arranging it into a pattern. The man standing next to him held something between his fingers, small and dark and twitching.

The world would eventually learn the ident.i.ty of these mysterious men. They called themselves natural philosophers, and they had banded together to sort out the workings of everything from pigeons to planets. They shared little but curiosity. At the center of the group stood tall, skeletally thin Robert Boyle, an aristocrat whose father was one of Britain's richest men. Boyle maintained three three splendid private laboratories, one at each of his homes. Mild-mannered and unworldly, Boyle spent his days contemplating the mysteries of nature, the glories of G.o.d, and home remedies for an endless list of real and imaginary ills. splendid private laboratories, one at each of his homes. Mild-mannered and unworldly, Boyle spent his days contemplating the mysteries of nature, the glories of G.o.d, and home remedies for an endless list of real and imaginary ills.

If Boyle was around, Robert Hooke was sure to be nearby. Hooke was hunched and fidgety-”low of stature and always very pale”-but he was tireless and brilliant, and he could build anything. For the past five years he had worked as Boyle's a.s.sistant, cobbling together equipment and designing experiments. Hooke was as bad-tempered and sharp-tongued as Boyle was genial. To propose an idea was to hear that Hooke had thought of it first; to challenge his claim was to make a lifelong enemy. But few questioned the magic in his hands. Hooke's latest coup was a gla.s.s vessel that could be pumped empty of air. What would happen if you put a candle inside? a mouse? a man?

The small, birdlike man was Hooke's closest friend, the ludicrously versatile Christopher Wren. Ideas tumbled from him like coins from a conjuror's fingertips. Posterity would know Wren as the most celebrated 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 live to ninety-one and scarcely pause for breath along the way. Wren built telescopes, microscopes, and barometers; he tinkered with designs for submarines; he built a transparent beehive (to see what the bees were up to) and a writing gizmo for making copies, with two pens connected by a wooden arm; he built St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, the formal name of this grab-bag collection of geniuses, misfits, and eccentrics, was by most accounts the first official scientific organization in the world. In these early days almost any scientific question one might ask inspired blank stares or pa.s.sionate debate-Why does fire burn? How do mountains rise? Why do rocks fall?

The men of the Royal Society were not the world's first scientists. t.i.tans like Descartes, Kepler, and Galileo, among many others, had done monumental work long before. But to a great extent those pioneering figures had been lone geniuses. With the rise of the Royal Society-and allowing for the colossal exception of Isaac Newton-the story of early science would have more to do with collaboration than with solitary contemplation.

Newton did not attend the Society's earliest meetings, though he was destined one day to serve as its president (he would rule like a dictator). In 1660 he was only seventeen, an unhappy young man languis.h.i.+ng on his mother's farm. Soon he would head off to begin his undergraduate career, at Cambridge, but even there he would draw scarcely any notice. In time he would become the first scientific celebrity, the Einstein of his day.

No one would ever know what to make of him. One of history's strangest figures, Newton was ”the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious Temper that I ever knew,” in the judgment of one contemporary. He would spend his life in secrecy and solitude and die, at eighty-four, a virgin. High-strung to the point of paranoia, he teetered always on the brink of madness. At least once he would fall over the brink.

In temperament Newton had little enough in common with the other men of the Royal Society. But all the early scientists shared a mental landscape. They all lived precariously between two worlds, the medieval one they had grown up in and a new one they had only glimpsed. These were brilliant, ambitious, confused, conflicted men. They believed in angels and alchemy and the devil, and and they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws. they believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws.

In time they would fling open the gates to the modern world.

Chapter Two.

Satan's Claws Scientists in the 1600s had set out to find the eternal laws that govern the universe, but the world they lived in was marked by precariousness.2 Death struck often, and at random. ”Any cold might be the forerunner of a terminal fever,” one historian remarks, ”and the simplest cut could lead to a fatal infection.” Children died in droves, but no one was safe. Even for the n.o.bility, life expectancy was only about thirty. Adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties dropped dead out of the blue, leaving their families in desperation. Death struck often, and at random. ”Any cold might be the forerunner of a terminal fever,” one historian remarks, ”and the simplest cut could lead to a fatal infection.” Children died in droves, but no one was safe. Even for the n.o.bility, life expectancy was only about thirty. Adults in their twenties, thirties, and forties dropped dead out of the blue, leaving their families in desperation.

London was so disease-ridden that deaths outnumbered births; only the constant influx of newcomers disguised that melancholy fact. Medical knowledge was almost nonexistent, and doctors were more likely to harm their patients than to heal them. Those who fell ill could do little more than choose from a reeking cupboard of quack remedies. One treatment for gout called for ”puppy boiled up with cuc.u.mber, rue and juniper.” As late as 1699 the Royal Society was still debating the health benefits from ”cows p.i.s.s drank to about a pint.”

The main alternative was woeful resignation. ”I have had the misfortune of losing my dear child Johney he died last week of a feaver,” a woman named Sarah Smyter wrote in a letter in 1717. ”It tis a great trouble to me but these misfortunes we must submit to.”

The mighty had no better options than the lowly. Many times they were worse off, because they were more likely to face a doctor's attentions. When Charles II suffered a stroke in 1685, his doctors ”tortured him,” one historian later wrote, ”like an Indian at a stake.” First the royal physicians drained the king of two cups of blood. Next they administered an enema, a purgative, and a dose of sneezing powder. They drained another cup of blood, still to no effect. They rubbed an ointment of pigeon dung and powdered pearls onto the royal feet. They seared the king's shaved skull and bare feet with red-hot irons. Nothing helped, and the king fell into convulsions. Doctors prepared a potion whose princ.i.p.al ingredient was ”forty drops of extract of human skull.” After four days Charles died.

Two killers inspired more fear than any others. One was plague, the other fire. Both killed swiftly and in huge numbers, but in different manners. Plague leaped stealthily from victim to victim. Its mystery made for its horror. ”For what is the cause that this pestilence is so greatly in one part of the land, and not another?” one panicky writer had asked during an earlier epidemic. ”And in the same citie and towne why is it in one part, or in one house, and not in another? and in the same house, why is it upon one, and not upon all the rest?”

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Dance of the Skeletons (1493) (1493) Fire had scarcely any mystery about it. It terrified precisely because it killed spectacularly, mercilessly, and in plain view. In crowded, cramped cities built of wood and lit by flame, it was all but inevitable that somewhere a hot coal would fall from a stove or a furnace, or a candle would tumble against a curtain or onto a pile of straw. Once escaped, even a small fire could blaze up into an inferno that sped along like a leaping, crackling tsunami. Its desperate victims raced for their lives down one twisting alley after another, fleeing round this corner and down that street, trying to outrun a pursuer that grew ever more powerful as the chase continued.

The dread that these ancient enemies inspired never died away, for everyone knew that no lull could be counted on to last. Nor did anyone think of fire and plague as natural calamities, the way we think of earthquakes and volcanoes. The seventeenth century was G.o.d-fearing in the most literal sense. Natural disasters were divine messages, warnings to sinful mankind to change its ways lest an angry and impatient G.o.d unleash still further rounds of punishment. Even today insurance claims refer to earthquakes and floods as ”acts of G.o.d.” In the 1600s and long beyond, our ancestors invoked the same phrase, but they spoke of G.o.d's mysterious will with fright and cowering awe.

In that harsh age religion focused far more on d.a.m.nation than on consolation. For scientists and intellectuals pondering the course of the universe and for the common man as well, fear of G.o.d shaped every aspect of thought. To study the world was to ponder G.o.d's plan, and that was daunting work.