The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [75]
Science is institutionalised. An engraving showing the work of the new French Academy of Sciences established by Louis XIV. Close examination of the illustration reveals the wide-ranging search to find scientific applications which would enhance the economic well-being of the country.
In 1685 the last of the inventive middle-class French Protestant Huguenots left France for England, to settle in Norwich, Southampton, Bristol and London. They also went to Holland. While France employed all her capital resources to support Europe’s largest army, and in so doing crippled the economy, Holland became the only nation at peace on the Continent. England meanwhile had passed first through Civil War, then Restoration, finally offering the English crown to the Dutch sovereigns William and Mary, who became joint monarchs of both England and Holland in 1688.
In each of these northern countries two men were working towards the logical end of what Benedetti and Galileo had begun when they tried to bring the sky down to earth for experimental examination. In Holland the man was a quiet lens-polisher and philosopher whose father had come to Holland to escape persecution as a Spanish Jew. Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jews, attacked by the Christians and tolerated by the Dutch state. From 1663 he published his views, exalting the powers of reason, applying Cartesian theory to philosophy and ethics. Spinoza replaced Descartes’ dictum, ‘Obey the law and respect religion,’ with his own: ‘Love your neighbour and perfect your reason.’
For Spinoza, in a mechanical universe which operated according to natural laws there was no need for religious direction regarding the sacredness of life. God existed everywhere and could be adequately worshipped by a free man, working to advance his reason by increasing his knowledge. In an essay entitled ‘Of Human Bondage’, Spinoza argued that we were prisoners of religion or the state only if we thought we were. When we recognised that on the whole we were not captives, we immediately set ourselves free. The state, Spinoza added, should have obligations not to curb but to enhance the individual’s chance of self-fulfilment. God might have created the world, but man operated it. In the second half of the seventeenth century Holland was the only country in Europe in which anyone could have risked such a statement of belief.
In England another thinker was to turn this desire for a rationally operating universe into physical reality. His name was Isaac Newton and in 1665, at the age of twenty-three, he had just taken his degree at Cambridge, where he was the protege of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Barrow. When the plague struck later that year Newton, like many others, went to the country to escape contagion, returning to his birthplace in Woolsthorp, Lincolnshire.
In the two years he remained there Newton discovered how the universe worked. He only began to write his theory down, however, twenty years later, in 1685. It was published in 1687 under the title Principia Mathematica. The Principia provided such an all-embracing cosmological system that it stunned science into virtual inactivity for nearly a century.
Newton began the book by stating that his sole interest was in the behaviour of the universe. He showed his rejection of the old, scholastic approach to phenomena when he wrote: ‘I design only to give mathematical notion of these forces, without consideration of their physical causes and seats.’ Newton’s basic question was ‘How?’, not ‘Why?’
To measure the celestial phenomena with sufficient accuracy Newton was obliged to develop a new way