The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [77]
An illustration from a popular edition of 1725 of Newton’s work, showing the experiment to investigate the inertia of suspended bodies by measuring the effects of their collision. The modern toy which uses this principle is known as ‘Newton’s cradle’.
In his statement, ‘Every body attracts every other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them,’ Newton gave man a tool with which all planetary behaviour could be analysed.
With the theory of universal gravity Newton destroyed the medieval picture of the world as a structure moved by the unseen but ever-present hand of God. Man was no longer at the centre of a system created for his edification by the Almighty; the earth was merely a small planet in an incomprehensibly vast and inanimate universe which behaved according to laws that could be calculated. There seemed, for the first time, no place in the cosmos for the providential involvement of God in the affairs of mankind. The human race was alone, with its curiosity and dexterity, to invent instruments with which to examine the universe without fear of intervention or guidance.
Coalbrookdale, where mass-production was bom. Rather than with dark Satanic mills, this was the way the Industrial Revolution came, emerging from the forests and rivers as a distant wisp of smoke against the green backdrop of a rural world unchanged for centuries.
Credit Where It’s Due
It is sometimes difficult to imagine that the world has not always been as we know it today. There have always been mouths to feed and work to do, rules to obey, in the cycle of birth, procreation and death. In the past the crops grew in the ground as they still do. People harvested and ate them. They used the tools they had to shape the world around them as we do. But in many respects the constituents of modern living are very different in nature from what: went before. The differences are profound, and much greater than the similarities.
Today it is normal to be a consumer, separated from the producer of the goods we use. Life is ordered by the need to work so as to be able to buy the goods. The day is divided into periods of work and rest. Holidays come in specific months for specific times. The money earned at work is either spent or invested in other people’s work. In the modern factory production system few of those on the conveyer belt see the final result of their labours.
In this democracy of possessions what we possess is inalienably ours, private property protected by strict legislation from appropriation by any other individual or by the state. Most of us have the right of free speech. Each of us, at least in the Western world, has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Above all, our lives are no longer totally controlled by nature. In general we do not suffer the cycle of feast and famine brought by the vagaries of the seasons. We control nature, with power far beyond what it can muster against us.
This power, and the world today which it created, is a relatively recent acquisition. Throughout the entire history of man until 1720, the number of people alive at any time in any society was ultimately dictated by the weather. In good weather and full harvest, people ate more and were healthier They produced more children, because they expected them to be able to survive in the clement temperature. When the population became too big for the land to support, either more land was cleared and planted, or the food supply became marginal. Whichever was the case, the next time the weather turned bad, the fall in crop levels would cause widespread famine and death. In turn the succeeding generation married later and had fewer children, so there were fewer mouths to feed. Fewer people would work the land and output would fall again, until the return of good weather.
This romantic eighteenth-century view of country life owes more to imagination than reality. In spite