Is God a Mathematician_ - Mario Livio [49]
Incidentally, the handwritten minutes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682, which were for a long time considered lost, suddenly surfaced in February 2006. The parchment, which contains more than 520 pages of script penned by Robert Hooke himself, was found in a house in Hampshire, England, where it is thought to have been stored in a cupboard for about fifty years. Minutes from December 1679 describe correspondence between Hooke and Newton in which they discussed an experiment to confirm the rotation of the Earth.
Returning to Newton’s scientific masterstroke, Newton took Descartes’ conception—that the cosmos can be described by mathematics—and turned it into a working reality. In the preface to his monumental work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (in Latin: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica; commonly known as Principia), he declared:
We offer this work as the mathematical principles of philosophy, for the whole burden of philosophy seems to consist in this—from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena: and to this end the general propositions in the first and second Books are directed. In the third Book we give an example of this in the explication of the System of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the former Books, in the third we derive from the celestial phenomena the force of gravity with which bodies tend to the Sun and the several planets. Then from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon, and the sea.
When we realize that Newton truly accomplished in Principia everything he promised in the preface, the only possible reaction is: Wow! Newton’s innuendo of superiority to Descartes’ work was also unmistakable: He chose the title of his book to read Mathematical Principles, as opposed to Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy. Newton adopted the same mathematical reasoning and methodology even in his more experimentally based book on light, Opticks. He starts the book with: “My design in this book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which I shall premise the following definitions and Axioms.” He then proceeds as if this were a book on Euclidean geometry, with concise definitions and propositions. Then, in the book’s conclusion, Newton added for further emphasis: “As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition.”
Newton’s feat with his mathematical tool kit was nothing short of miraculous. This genius, who by a historical coincidence was born in exactly the same year in which Galileo died, formulated the fundamental laws of mechanics, deciphered the laws describing planetary motion, erected the theoretical basis for the phenomena of light and color, and founded the study of differential and integral calculus. These achievements alone would have sufficed to earn Newton a place of honor in the gallery of the most prominent scientists. But it was his work on gravity that elevated him to the top place on the podium of the magicians—the one reserved for the greatest scientist ever to have lived. That work bridged the gap between the heavens and the Earth, fused the fields of astronomy and physics, and put the entire cosmos under one mathematical umbrella. How was that masterpiece—Principia—born?
I Began to Think of Gravity Extending to the Orb of the Moon
William Stukeley (1687–1765), an antiquary and physician who was Newton’s friend (in spite of the more than four decades in age separating them), eventually became