Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [48]
Figure 26
And There Was Light
The great eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was thirty-nine years old when Isaac Newton (1642–1727) died (figure 27 shows Newton’s tomb inside Westminster Abbey). In a well-known couplet, Pope attempted to encapsulate Newton’s achievements:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.
Almost a hundred years after Newton’s death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) added in his epic poem Don Juan the lines:
And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.
To the generations of scientists that succeeded him, Newton indeed was and remains a figure of legendary proportions, even if one disregards the myths. Newton’s famous quote “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants” is often presented as a model for the generosity and humility that scientists are expected to display about their greatest discoveries. Actually, Newton may have written that phrase as a subtly veiled sarcastic response to a letter from the person whom he regarded as his chief scientific nemesis, the prolific physicist and biologist Robert Hooke (1635–1703). Hooke had accused Newton on several occasions of stealing his own ideas, first on the theory of light, and later on gravity. On January 20, 1676, Hooke adopted a more conciliatory tone, and in a personal letter to Newton he declared: “Your Designes and myne [concerning the theory of light] I suppose aim both at the same thing which is the Discovery of truth and I suppose we can both endure to hear objections.” Newton decided to play the same game. In his reply to Hooke’s letter, dated February 5, 1676, he wrote: “What Des-Cartes [Descartes] did was a good step [referring to Descartes’ ideas on light]. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” Since, far from being a giant, Hooke was quite short and afflicted with a severe stoop, Newton’s best-known quote might have simply meant that he felt he owed absolutely nothing to Hooke! The fact that Newton took every opportunity to insult Hooke, his statement that his own theory destroyed “all he [Hooke] has said,” and his refusal to take his own book on light, Opticks, to the press until after Hooke’s death, argue that this interpretation of the quote may not be too far-fetched. The feud between the two scientists reached an even higher peak when it came to the theory of gravity. When Newton heard that Hooke had claimed to be the originator of the law of gravity, he meticulously and vindictively erased every single reference to Hooke’s name from the last part of his book on the subject. To his friend the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656–1742), Newton wrote on June 20, 1686:
Figure 27
He [Hooke] should rather have excused himself by reason of his inability. For tis plain by his words he knew not how to go about it. Now is not this very fine? Mathematicians that find out, settle and do all the business must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators and drudges and another that does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things must carry away all the invention as well of those that were to follow him as of those that went before.
Newton makes it abundantly clear here why he thought that Hooke did not deserve any credit—he could not formulate his ideas in the language of mathematics. Indeed, the quality that made Newton’s theories truly stand out—the inherent characteristic that turned them into inevitable