Isaac Newton by James Glick

The book was recently released in preparation for Book Week starting today, published by Aryeh Nir. From the English of Emmanuel Lotem. the first chapter

Isaac Newton was born in a farm house in a remote village in England, in 1642. A baby unwanted by his mother and the son of an ignorant farmer who could not read and write, who died before the birth of his son. The world around him was shrouded in darkness, mystery and witchcraft.

And in the heart of this darkness, Newton opened wide a door that led to a new universe, fixed in absolute place and time, measurable and subject to the law of nature. He defined concepts such as "mass", "gravity", "velocity", which have since become basic terms of science.

Newton's name remains to this day a symbol of method and order in the world, and what he discovered is still the essence of our knowledge, so-called intuitive, about the universe.

However, the man who revealed, more than any other man before or after him, the heart of the human mind, the chief architect of the modern world, was a lonely man, bitter and quick-tempered, who never approached a woman.

The teachings of Aristotle, the discoveries of Galileo and the philosophy of Descartes served as his inspiration, but he quarreled rudely with great personalities who came across his path. Newton, who showed how the trajectory of the heavenly bodies could be predicted and thus determined our place in the universe, was also a devout religious, an alchemist in secret and did not give up his attraction to mysticism. He shrouded his work in a shroud of secrecy and teetered at least once on the brink of insanity.

Newton was famous even in his day. When he died in London at the age of 84, in 1727, England honored him with a state funeral. It was the first time that the British kingdom had bestowed such an honor on its subject for his achievements in the field of spirituality. On the tombstone erected in his memory is engraved an inscription in Latin that praises the strength of his almost divine spirit, and the principles he formulated, and crowns him as a crowning glory for the human race.

We assimilated the Newtonian Torah, and it serves as a basis for our perception of the universe to this very day. However, Newton himself, who wanted to impose method and order on the world, was a mystical, mysterious, feverish and agitated person. He was, more than any other man, a non-Newtonian.

James Glick, one of the most famous science journalists and writers these days. Author of the book Chaos and the biography of Richard Feynman. Science reporter for the New York Times. The biography he wrote about Newton relies, among other things, on certificates and historical documents and on an in-depth study of the period. He meticulously follows the details of Newton's life and thought, and describes them as a fascinating story.
First chapter What occupation is he suitable for?Wellsthorpe Farmhouse, built in the Middle Ages and now in need of some renovation, nestles in the lap of a hill beside the River Witham. His front door was short, his windows were shuttered, his kitchen was always active and his floor was bare boards of elm and lime on a bed of reeds. He had belonged to the Newton family for twenty years, no more. Behind him stood apple trees. Sheep grazed around him as far as the eye could see.

Isaac was born in a small room at the top of the stairs leading to the second floor. By virtue of feudal law, this house was considered a manor house and the fatherless boy was its master: he had sovereign authority over the handful of harris who lived in the nearby cabins. He has not been able to trace his ancestry beyond his grandfather Robert, who is buried in the churchyard about a mile east of the house. Still, it was only expected that the boy would run the farm, instead of the father he never got to know. His mother, Hannah Eskoff, belonged to a higher class. Her brother, the Reverend William Askoff, studied at the University of Cambridge, on his way to the ranks of the Anglican clergy; And now he lived in a country priest's house, two miles away.

When Isaac was three years old, Hannah received a marriage proposal from another country priest, Barnabas Smith. Smith wanted a wife, but not a stepson; Negotiations were opened on the terms of the marriage, mediated by one of the members of the priest's congregation, for a fee, and Hana's brother. Barnabas Smith was sixty-three, well established; Hannah Askoff was probably thirty years old; It was agreed that Isaac would remain in Wellsthorpe, under the care of his grandmother, and that Smith would grant him a plot of land. Hannah's contribution to the new family was a leasehold which brought in £50 a year.

Throughout his youth, war raged in these rural districts. The great rebellion, which lasted ten years, broke out in the year of his birth; Parliamentary Loyalists fought Royalist Loyalists, Puritans rebelled against what they saw as idolatry in the Church of England. Vast armies of mercenaries clashed across Middle England. Sometimes spearmen and musketeers passed in the fields near Wellsthorpe. One of the skirmishes broke out near Grantham on May 13, 1643; Fighting continued intermittently near the city throughout the summer, returning and flaring up at times until the end of the decade. Gangs ransacked the farms in their search for her side. England was torn apart by the war, and at the same time became more and more aware of itself - of its nationality, its uniqueness. Despite the divisions, despite the struggles over religious belief and ways of expressing it, the nation brought about a real revolution. The Puritans, who ultimately had the upper hand, rejected the absolute monarchy and denied the divine right of kings. In 1649, shortly after Isaac turned six years old, King Charles was beheaded by the Stuart family under the walls of his palace.

This agricultural land surrounded one thousandth of the land surface of the world, and had been cut off from the body of the continent since the melting of the polar ice, 13,000 years before. Robber tribes that arrived by sea settled on its shores, wave after wave, and spread into its lowlands and valleys, where they gathered in villages. What they knew about nature and what they believed about it was partly due to the uses of technology. They learned to use the power of water and wind to crush, grind and polish. The furnace, the reactor and the mill took their place in an economy that became more and more professionalized and scalable in this way. The inhabitants of England, like many other human communities, produced metal tools - copper and brass kettles, iron rods and nails. They also made glass. These arts and materials were essential to the great leap of knowledge that was about to take place. Other essential components were lenses, paper and ink, mechanical clocks, numbering methods that allowed the indication of infinitely small fractions, and postal services that embraced hundreds of millions.

Before Newton was born, there was one large city in the country, with about 400,000 people; No other city reached even a tenth of its size. England was still a country of villages and farms, which managed its seasons according to the Christian calendar and the rhythms of agriculture: the calving season of heifers and calves, the season of gathering hay and the harvest. Years of crop failure caused a great famine. Itinerant laborers and vagabonds were the majority of the population. But a class of artisans and merchants began to be established: peddlers, shopkeepers, pharmacists, glaziers, carpenters and surveyors, all of whom developed a practical and mechanical perception of knowledge. The merchants were supposed to possess "knowledge and proficiency in reading and writing" as well as "knowledge and ability to calculate" - if not with a pen, at least with beads on a board. They used numbers and built tools. The development of a manufacturing economy was taking shape.

When Isaac was old enough for his needs, he began attending the school run by one of the village women in her home, where he learned to read and memorized the Holy Scriptures and recited the multiplication table. He was smaller than his age, lonely and abandoned. Sometimes his heart secretly hoped for the death of his stepfather, and even for the death of his mother: once he threatened, in a fit of rage, to burn down their house for them. Sometimes he asked his soul to die, and he knew that this wish was a sin. When he turned twenty, and was already a student at Trinity College, he was beset by a kind of crisis of conscience around the time of the Christian holiday of Shavuot, and he wrote down - in his private brevity - a catalog of his sins. Among the first sins was "threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and their house on them" and "wishing for death and imposing it on some". He also remembered "grumpiness" towards his mother and half-sister, beatings he gave to his sister and others, "impure thoughts and words and deeds and impure dreams" and many cases of lying and desecration of the Sabbath (ie Sunday).

On fine days the sunlight crept along the wall surrounding the house. Darkness and light seemed to emerge from the window - or was it from the eye? No one knew. The sun radiated diagonal lips, a dynamic echo of the window frame in light and shadow, sometimes sharp and sometimes blurred, an expression of an interesting geometry of intersecting planes. It was difficult to compare form to details, even if the sun is the most regular of all celestial bodies, and its circles already defined the measurement of time. Isaac drew crude geometric shapes, circles marked with arcs, and hammered wooden pegs into the walls and ground to measure time accurately, to the nearest quarter of an hour. "He demonstrated another method of satisfying his curiosity in the search for the movement of the sun, which is the creation of sundials of different shapes and acts of thought everywhere in the house, in his own room, in doorways and rooms and wherever the sun reached."

He carved sundials in stone and outlined the shadows cast by their points. It meant seeing time as the partner of space, and its duration as the length of an arc. He measured small distances with strings and translated inches into minutes of time. He had to change this translation constantly, with the changing of the seasons. During the day the sun rose and fell; Over the course of the year, its position in the sky changed somewhat against the stars of the Sabbath and outlined a slowly twisting figure of eight, a shape that can only be seen with the eyes of the spirit. Isaac came to know this pattern long before he realized that it was the result of two peculiarities, the elliptical orbit of the Earth and the tilt of its axis.

In Wellsthorpe, anyone who wanted to know the time was helped by Isaac's sundials. "And he created a kind of almanac of these lines, by which he knew the day of the month, and the entry of the sun into the zodiac signs, the times of the equinoxes and the times of the solstice. Thus Isaac's sundials, whenever the sun shone, gave guidance to his family members and neighbors." "My God," said Shakespeare's Henry VI, "how happy they are as they imagine this life, to carve sundials with a delicate hand, point by point, and thus see the minutes, how they pass." Sundials - and perhaps it would be better to call them shadow clocks - were still used by most people to measure their time, although there were a few churches with mechanical clocks that could be used to read the time. At night the stars turned in the black dome of the sky; The moon filled and waned and moved in its own way, much like the sun, but not exactly - these great spheres, the rulers of the seasons, the luminaries of day and night, were bound together in a kind of hidden thickets. Later Newton would write:

Indeed, this is a very difficult matter, the discovery and distinction in practice between the real movements of certain bodies and the simulated movements, because the parts of that motionless space in which these movements take place are in no way exposed to the observations of our senses. And yet one should not say desperate; Because we have certain claims to guide us, some from the similar movements, which are the differences of the real movements; And some of the forces, which are the causes and circulators of the real movements. For example, if two balls, held at a given distance from each other by means of a wick connecting them, rotate around their common center of gravity, we can discover from the tension of the wick the effort of the balls to withdraw from their axis of movement, and from this we can calculate the size of their circular movements...

The sundials embodied practical knowledge that had crystallized over thousands of years. In the raw among them, the hours were not equal in length, which varied from season to season. The better versions reached some degree of accuracy, and helped to acquire a different sense of time itself: not only as a repeating cycle, or as a mystical virtue that affects events, but as a dimension with its own length - the duration of time, which can be measured. And yet, no one was able to perfect the sundials, or even understand them, before all the pieces of the assembly were put together: the shadows, the rhythms, the paths of the planets, the particular geometry of the ellipse, the attraction of matter to matter. All of these were one and only problem.

When Isaac was ten years old, in 1653, Barnabas Smith died and Hannah returned to Wellsthorpe, with the three children she had by him. She sent Isaac to school in the market town of Grantham, eight miles away on the Great Northern Road, which then had several hundred families - and now also housed a militia. In Grantham there were two inns, a church, a guild house, an apothecary and two mills, for wheat and malting. It was impossible to do eight miles round trip every day, and Isaac Len was at the druggist William Clark's house on Main Street. He was given a place to sleep in the attic, and he left behind signs of his residence there - he engraved his name in the floorboards and drew with charcoal on the walls: birds and beasts, people and ships, as well as abstract circles and triangles. Other crude charts were also discovered there, presumably made by his own hands. The biographer Whiteside judged them unkindly: "It takes the blindness of a mother's love to find in these combinations of cutting circles, and in the scribbles of the matchstick figures, an incipient artistic ability or an early mathematical talent."

At King's School, which had only a single room, strict Puritan discipline prevailed. The teacher Henry Stokes taught Latin, theology and a little Greek and Hebrew to eighty children. Most schools in England did not go beyond this, but Stokes added a little practical calculus to his students, who were destined to be farmers: mainly in what concerns the measurement of areas and shapes, algorithms for making land measurements, marking fields in a chain of surveyors, calculating acres (although the size of an acre still varied from village to village , or according to soil fertility). He offered little more than what was necessary for the farmer: how to block elaborate polygons in a circle and calculate the length of the side - the way Archimedes used to estimate the value of .

Isaac scribbled Archimedes' diagrams on the wall. He entered the lowest grade at the age of twelve, a lonely, anxious and competitive boy. He quarreled with other children in the churchyard, sometimes to the point of bloodshed. He filled his Latin notebook with fragments of sentences free of embarrassment, in a gloomy stream of thought: a small bransh; my poor health; he is pale; I have no place to sit; At the top of the house - at the bottom of the underworld; What occupation is he suitable for? What is he good at? Biographer Manuel added: "There is an incredible absence of positive feelings. The word love does not appear at all, and expressions of joy and passion are rare. A fondness for roast meat is the only intense sensual instinct." he said desperately. I will put an end to it. I can't help but cry. I don't know what to do.

Only sixty human generations have passed since the mind began to be written in symbols, on a stone or on a scroll. England's first paper mill was opened at the end of the sixteenth century, on the river Detford. Paper was priceless, and the written word hardly took part in everyday life. Most of mankind's thoughts were not recorded at all; Most of the things that were recorded remained hidden, or were lost. But some found these times crammed with too much information. "I hear new lines every day," wrote Reverend Robert Burton, who was attentive like no other - he actually lived in the Bodleian Library in Oxford - to the flow of information and its storage:

The same usual sounds of war, epidemics, fires, floods, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectra, miracles, nightmarish photographers... and the like, which provide these stormy times. ... new books every day, bulletins, betas, stories, entire catalogs of books of all kinds and types, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresy, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc.

Burton strove to gather all the knowledge he had accumulated up to his time in a single encyclopedic book of his own, and it was a chatty book with many interesting jumps to the subject. He made no attempt at all to apologize for blatant plagiarism; Or better to say, he apologized in this language: "Even if there were many ancient giants in physics and philosophy, I will repeat the words of Didacus Stella: the dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will be far from the giant himself; And I can add to my predecessors, change them and distance myself from them." This is not the beginning of the story of this saying of the wing, nor is it the end. He tried to understand what was written in rare books brought from abroad, which suggested fantastic and contradictory properties of the universe - by Tycho, Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. He sought to reconcile them with the ancient wisdom.

Does the earth move? Copernicus breathed new life into this idea, "not as truth, but as hypothesis." Some adopted him. "For if the earth is the center of the world, and it stands still, as the accepted opinion holds," and if the heavenly spheres revolve around it, then the firmament must move at an unreasonable speed. This is due to the measurements of the distances to the sun and the stars. Burton took a bit of arithmetic in stride (and messed it up in the process). "If a person rides his way at a speed of 40 miles a day, and persists in it for 2,904 years, he will not travel the distance that the starry sky travels in 24 hours; And in 203 years it will not go the way that the aforementioned sky does in one minute; And this is unacceptable." Stargazers now used binoculars; Burton himself saw Jupiter through binoculars that were eight feet long, and shared Galileo's opinion that this "wandering star" had its own moons.

He was forced to delve into the issues of changing points of view, although there was no convenient language to express such questions: "If a human eye were in the sky, it would not notice at all that great annual movement of the earth, but still sees it as an indivisible point." If a human eye can be found at such a distance, why wouldn't a human be found there? Imagination lifted all burdens. "If the earth moves, let it be a planet, and shines on the inhabitants of the moon, and on the inhabitants of the other planets, as the moon and the stars shine on us in the land."

Similarly, we can hypothesize... that there are an infinite number of worlds, and an infinite number of countries or systems, in the infinite ether... and therefore, there are an infinite number of populated worlds: because what would prevent this? ... After all, it is a relationship that is difficult to untie.

It is doubly difficult because there were so many members of Samka, who presented so many hypotheses: the priests of today, the idolatrous philosophers of long ago, the heretics, the pagans, the Church of Rome. "The mathematicians of to-day have uprooted every stone that has a reference: and they have ... produced new methods of the world out of their Daedalus heads." Many human races have explored the face of the heavens throughout history, Burton said, and here came the day when God revealed his hidden mysteries. Truly turbulent times indeed.

But all those new books every day didn't find their way to rural Lincolnshire. Smith, Newton's stepfather, had books, on Christian subjects. Apothecary Clerk also had books. In Smith's possession was even a piece of smooth paper, bound in a large, plain-looking book which he kept for forty years. He diligently numbered the pages, wrote theological headings at the top of the first ones, and apart from that he left it almost completely empty. Shortly after his death this treasure passed into Isaac's possession. Before that, in Grantham, with twopence and a half given to him by his mother, Isaac had managed to buy a tiny notebook of sewn pages and bound in calfskin. He stamped his right of ownership on the first page: Isacus Newton hunc librum possidet – Isaac Newton is the owner of this book. Over the course of many months, Isaac filled the pages in his meticulous handwriting, with letters and numbers that in many cases did not exceed a millimeter and a half in height. He started from both ends towards the middle. Mainly, he copied a book of secrets and magic that had been published in London a few years before, John Bate's Mysteries of Nature and Art - a collection of everything that came to hand, scattered, but encyclopedic in its aims.

He copied instructions for painting from it. "Place the object you intend to paint in front of you, so that the path of the light falling on it is not blocked." "If you express the sun, present it as rising or setting behind some hill; But never express the moon or the stars, unless you have no choice." He copied recipes for creating paints and types of ink and pastes and powders and liquids. "The color of the sea. Take ligustrum berries as the sun enters Libra, around September 13th, dry them in the sun, then crush them and put them in water.” Colors enchanted him. He cataloged several dozen of them, in minute and practical distinctions: purple, crimson, green, another green, light green, rust, brownish blue, "colors for nude pictures", "colors for dead bodies", charcoal black and sea coal black. He copied methods for melting metal (in a shell), for catching birds ("put black wine in front of them so that they would drink it instead of coming"), for engraving in flint, for creating pearls from chalk.

During his residence with Clerk, the pharmacist and chemist, he learned to grind leaves and a mortar; Practice roasting and boiling and mixing; He made pills out of chemicals and left them to dry in the sun. He prescribed types of medicine, types of medicine, things to avoid:

The things that hurt the eyes

Garlic, onions and leeks... getting up too fast after meals. Hot wines. Cold air… too much bloodshed… dust. fire. crying a lot…

In Bate's book, the teachings of Aristotle and folklore were mixed together: "various experiments, both useful and stimulating, which I will list, because they are mixed to the point of confusion, under the heading of excesses." Isaac copied that word at the top of several pages. Bate described and illustrated many types of water machines and fireworks, and Isaac spent hours carving bowler wood, and building water mills and windmills. The town of Grantham then built a new mill; Isaac followed its progress and built a model, imagining the squeaks and thuds of the mechanism and the governing principles in cams, levers, conveying rollers and pulleys. He built in his attic a water clock from a wooden box, four feet tall, with an hour hand on top of a painted dial. He built paper lanterns. He made kites and launched them high at night, with burning lanterns - lights in the black sky, to scare his neighbors.

Bate offered knowledge as a game, but with a hint of method: "The four elements, fire, air, water and earth, and also the first principle," he wrote. This old and respected four-part system - with the virtues that accompany them: dry, cold, hot and moist - expressed an ambition to organize the elements of the world, sort them and give them names, in the absence of mathematical and technological tools. Simple wisdom surrounded the movement as well. Bate explained: "Their light parts rise to the top; And the rougher and heavier ones do the opposite."

Isaac omitted these principles from his copy. He crammed into his tiny pages astronomical tables relating to the construction of sundials, and added to them a complicated calculation of the calendar for the next twenty-eight years. He copied lists of words, and added his own as they occurred to him. In forty-two of the notebook's pages, he organized 2,400 nouns in thematic columns:

Arts, Crafts, and Sciences:… Apothecary… Armourer, Astrologer, Astronomer… Diseases:… Chipped Tooth… Rheumatism… Necrosis… Bullet Wound… Remains and Titles: Son-in-law… Baron bastard brother… Small chatterbox… Brownist right-hand man… Adulterous father…

Thoughts of his family brought no relief to his tormented soul. Yet,
In the fall of 1659, when Isaac turned sixteen,
His mother brought him back home to make him a farmer.