Sir Isaac Newton
English physicist and mathematician
born December 25, 1642 [January 4, 1643, New
Style], Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
died March 20 [March 31], 1727, London
Main
English physicist and mathematician, who was the
culminating figure of the scientific revolution
of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of
the composition of white light integrated the
phenomena of colours into the science of light
and laid the foundation for modern physical
optics. In mechanics, his three laws of motion,
the basic principles of modern physics, resulted
in the formulation of the law of universal
gravitation. In mathematics, he was the original
discoverer of the infinitesimal calculus.
Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy), 1687, was one of the most important
single works in the history of modern science.
Formative influences
Born in the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, Newton
was the only son of a local yeoman, also Isaac
Newton, who had died three months before, and of
Hannah Ayscough. That same year, at Arcetri near
Florence, Galileo Galilei had died; Newton would
eventually pick up his idea of a mathematical
science of motion and bring his work to full
fruition. A tiny and weak baby, Newton was not
expected to survive his first day of life, much
less 84 years. Deprived of a father before
birth, he soon lost his mother as well, for
within two years she married a second time; her
husband, the well-to-do minister Barnabas Smith,
left young Isaac with his grandmother and moved
to a neighbouring village to raise a son and two
daughters. For nine years, until the death of
Barnabas Smith in 1653, Isaac was effectively
separated from his mother, and his pronounced
psychotic tendencies have been ascribed to this
traumatic event. That he hated his stepfather we
may be sure. When he examined the state of his
soul in 1662 and compiled a catalog of sins in
shorthand, he remembered “Threatning my father
and mother Smith to burne them and the house
over them.” The acute sense of insecurity that
rendered him obsessively anxious when his work
was published and irrationally violent when he
defended it accompanied Newton throughout his
life and can plausibly be traced to his early
years.
After his mother was widowed a second time, she
determined that her first-born son should manage
her now considerable property. It quickly became
apparent, however, that this would be a
disaster, both for the estate and for Newton. He
could not bring himself to concentrate on rural
affairs—set to watch the cattle, he would curl
up under a tree with a book. Fortunately, the
mistake was recognized, and Newton was sent back
to the grammar school in Grantham, where he had
already studied, to prepare for the university.
As with many of the leading scientists of the
age, he left behind in Grantham anecdotes about
his mechanical ability and his skill in building
models of machines, such as clocks and
windmills. At the school he apparently gained a
firm command of Latin but probably received no
more than a smattering of arithmetic. By June
1661, he was ready to matriculate at Trinity
College, Cambridge, somewhat older than the
other undergraduates because of his interrupted
education.
Influence of the scientific revolution
When Newton arrived in Cambridge in 1661,
the movement now known as the scientific
revolution was well advanced, and many of the
works basic to modern science had appeared.
Astronomers from Copernicus to Kepler had
elaborated the heliocentric system of the
universe. Galileo had proposed the foundations
of a new mechanics built on the principle of
inertia. Led by Descartes, philosophers had
begun to formulate a new conception of nature as
an intricate, impersonal, and inert machine. Yet
as far as the universities of Europe, including
Cambridge, were concerned, all this might well
have never happened. They continued to be the
strongholds of outmoded Aristotelianism, which
rested on a geocentric view of the universe and
dealt with nature in qualitative rather than
quantitative terms.
Like thousands of other undergraduates, Newton
began his higher education by immersing himself
in Aristotle’s work. Even though the new
philosophy was not in the curriculum, it was in
the air. Some time during his undergraduate
career, Newton discovered the works of the
French natural philosopher René Descartes and
the other mechanical philosophers, who, in
contrast to Aristotle, viewed physical reality
as composed entirely of particles of matter in
motion and who held that all the phenomena of
nature result from their mechanical interaction.
A new set of notes, which he entitled
“Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae” (“Certain
Philosophical Questions”), begun sometime in
1664, usurped the unused pages of a notebook
intended for traditional scholastic exercises;
under the title he entered the slogan “Amicus
Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas”
(“Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend,
but my best friend is truth”). Newton’s
scientific career had begun.
The “Quaestiones” reveal that Newton had
discovered the new conception of nature that
provided the framework of the scientific
revolution. He had thoroughly mastered the works
of Descartes and had also discovered that the
French philosopher Pierre Gassendi had revived
atomism, an alternative mechanical system to
explain nature. The “Quaestiones” also reveal
that Newton already was inclined to find the
latter a more attractive philosophy than
Cartesian natural philosophy, which rejected the
existence of ultimate indivisible particles. The
works of the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle
provided the foundation for Newton’s
considerable work in chemistry. Significantly,
he had read Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist,
and was thereby introduced to another
intellectual world, the magical Hermetic
tradition, which sought to explain natural
phenomena in terms of alchemical and magical
concepts. The two traditions of natural
philosophy, the mechanical and the Hermetic,
antithetical though they appear, continued to
influence his thought and in their tension
supplied the fundamental theme of his scientific
career.
Although he did not record it in the
“Quaestiones,” Newton had also begun his
mathematical studies. He again started with
Descartes, from whose La Géometrie he branched
out into the other literature of modern analysis
with its application of algebraic techniques to
problems of geometry. He then reached back for
the support of classical geometry. Within little
more than a year, he had mastered the
literature; and, pursuing his own line of
analysis, he began to move into new territory.
He discovered the binomial theorem, and he
developed the calculus, a more powerful form of
analysis that employs infinitesimal
considerations in finding the slopes of curves
and areas under curves.
By 1669 Newton was ready to write a tract
summarizing his progress, De Analysi per
Aequationes Numeri Terminorum Infinitas (“On
Analysis by Infinite Series”), which circulated
in manuscript through a limited circle and made
his name known. During the next two years he
revised it as De methodis serierum et fluxionum
(“On the Methods of Series and Fluxions”). The
word fluxions, Newton’s private rubric,
indicates that the calculus had been born.
Despite the fact that only a handful of savants
were even aware of Newton’s existence, he had
arrived at the point where he had become the
leading mathematician in Europe.
Work during the plague years
When Newton received the bachelor’s degree
in April 1665, the most remarkable undergraduate
career in the history of university education
had passed unrecognized. On his own, without
formal guidance, he had sought out the new
philosophy and the new mathematics and made them
his own, but he had confined the progress of his
studies to his notebooks. Then, in 1665, the
plague closed the university, and for most of
the following two years he was forced to stay at
his home, contemplating at leisure what he had
learned. During the plague years Newton laid the
foundations of the calculus and extended an
earlier insight into an essay, “Of Colours,”
which contains most of the ideas elaborated in
his Opticks. It was during this time that he
examined the elements of circular motion and,
applying his analysis to the Moon and the
planets, derived the inverse square relation
that the radially directed force acting on a
planet decreases with the square of its distance
from the Sun—which was later crucial to the law
of universal gravitation. The world heard
nothing of these discoveries.
Career » The optics » Inaugural lectures
at Trinity
Newton was elected to a fellowship in
Trinity College in 1667, after the university
reopened. Two years later, Isaac Barrow,
Lucasian professor of mathematics, who had
transmitted Newton’s De Analysi to John Collins
in London, resigned the chair to devote himself
to divinity and recommended Newton to succeed
him. The professorship exempted Newton from the
necessity of tutoring but imposed the duty of
delivering an annual course of lectures. He
chose the work he had done in optics as the
initial topic; during the following three years
(1670–72), his lectures developed the essay “Of
Colours” into a form which was later revised to
become Book One of his Opticks.
Beginning with Kepler’s Paralipomena in 1604,
the study of optics had been a central activity
of the scientific revolution. Descartes’s
statement of the sine law of refraction,
relating the angles of incidence and emergence
at interfaces of the media through which light
passes, had added a new mathematical regularity
to the science of light, supporting the
conviction that the universe is constructed
according to mathematical regularities.
Descartes had also made light central to the
mechanical philosophy of nature; the reality of
light, he argued, consists of motion transmitted
through a material medium. Newton fully accepted
the mechanical nature of light, although he
chose the atomistic alternative and held that
light consists of material corpuscles in motion.
The corpuscular conception of light was always a
speculative theory on the periphery of his
optics, however. The core of Newton’s
contribution had to do with colours. An ancient
theory extending back at least to Aristotle held
that a certain class of colour phenomena, such
as the rainbow, arises from the modification of
light, which appears white in its pristine form.
Descartes had generalized this theory for all
colours and translated it into mechanical
imagery. Through a series of experiments
performed in 1665 and 1666, in which the
spectrum of a narrow beam was projected onto the
wall of a darkened chamber, Newton denied the
concept of modification and replaced it with
that of analysis. Basically, he denied that
light is simple and homogeneous—stating instead
that it is complex and heterogeneous and that
the phenomena of colours arise from the analysis
of the heterogeneous mixture into its simple
components. The ultimate source of Newton’s
conviction that light is corpuscular was his
recognition that individual rays of light have
immutable properties; in his view, such
properties imply immutable particles of matter.
He held that individual rays (that is, particles
of given size) excite sensations of individual
colours when they strike the retina of the eye.
He also concluded that rays refract at distinct
angles—hence, the prismatic spectrum, a beam of
heterogeneous rays, i.e., alike incident on one
face of a prism, separated or analyzed by the
refraction into its component parts—and that
phenomena such as the rainbow are produced by
refractive analysis. Because he believed that
chromatic aberration could never be eliminated
from lenses, Newton turned to reflecting
telescopes; he constructed the first ever built.
The heterogeneity of light has been the
foundation of physical optics since his time.
There is no evidence that the theory of colours,
fully described by Newton in his inaugural
lectures at Cambridge, made any impression, just
as there is no evidence that aspects of his
mathematics and the content of the Principia,
also pronounced from the podium, made any
impression. Rather, the theory of colours, like
his later work, was transmitted to the world
through the Royal Society of London, which had
been organized in 1660. When Newton was
appointed Lucasian professor, his name was
probably unknown in the Royal Society; in 1671,
however, they heard of his reflecting telescope
and asked to see it. Pleased by their
enthusiastic reception of the telescope and by
his election to the society, Newton volunteered
a paper on light and colours early in 1672. On
the whole, the paper was also well received,
although a few questions and some dissent were
heard.
Career » The optics » Controversy
Among the most important dissenters to
Newton’s paper was Robert Hooke, one of the
leaders of the Royal Society who considered
himself the master in optics and hence he wrote
a condescending critique of the unknown parvenu.
One can understand how the critique would have
annoyed a normal man. The flaming rage it
provoked, with the desire publicly to humiliate
Hooke, however, bespoke the abnormal. Newton was
unable rationally to confront criticism. Less
than a year after submitting the paper, he was
so unsettled by the give and take of honest
discussion that he began to cut his ties, and he
withdrew into virtual isolation.
In 1675, during a visit to London, Newton
thought he heard Hooke accept his theory of
colours. He was emboldened to bring forth a
second paper, an examination of the colour
phenomena in thin films, which was identical to
most of Book Two as it later appeared in the
Opticks. The purpose of the paper was to explain
the colours of solid bodies by showing how light
can be analyzed into its components by
reflection as well as refraction. His
explanation of the colours of bodies has not
survived, but the paper was significant in
demonstrating for the first time the existence
of periodic optical phenomena. He discovered the
concentric coloured rings in the thin film of
air between a lens and a flat sheet of glass;
the distance between these concentric rings
(Newton’s rings) depends on the increasing
thickness of the film of air. In 1704 Newton
combined a revision of his optical lectures with
the paper of 1675 and a small amount of
additional material in his Opticks.
A second piece which Newton had sent with the
paper of 1675 provoked new controversy. Entitled
“An Hypothesis Explaining the Properties of
Light,” it was in fact a general system of
nature. Hooke apparently claimed that Newton had
stolen its content from him, and Newton boiled
over again. The issue was quickly controlled,
however, by an exchange of formal, excessively
polite letters that fail to conceal the complete
lack of warmth between the men.
Newton was also engaged in another exchange on
his theory of colours with a circle of English
Jesuits in Liège, perhaps the most revealing
exchange of all. Although their objections were
shallow, their contention that his experiments
were mistaken lashed him into a fury. The
correspondence dragged on until 1678, when a
final shriek of rage from Newton, apparently
accompanied by a complete nervous breakdown, was
followed by silence. The death of his mother the
following year completed his isolation. For six
years he withdrew from intellectual commerce
except when others initiated a correspondence,
which he always broke off as quickly as
possible.
Career » The optics » Influence of the
Hermetic tradition
During his time of isolation, Newton was
greatly influenced by the Hermetic tradition
with which he had been familiar since his
undergraduate days. Newton, always somewhat
interested in alchemy, now immersed himself in
it, copying by hand treatise after treatise and
collating them to interpret their arcane
imagery. Under the influence of the Hermetic
tradition, his conception of nature underwent a
decisive change. Until that time, Newton had
been a mechanical philosopher in the standard
17th-century style, explaining natural phenomena
by the motions of particles of matter. Thus, he
held that the physical reality of light is a
stream of tiny corpuscles diverted from its
course by the presence of denser or rarer media.
He felt that the apparent attraction of tiny
bits of paper to a piece of glass that has been
rubbed with cloth results from an ethereal
effluvium that streams out of the glass and
carries the bits of paper back with it. This
mechanical philosophy denied the possibility of
action at a distance; as with static
electricity, it explained apparent attractions
away by means of invisible ethereal mechanisms.
Newton’s “Hypothesis of Light” of 1675, with its
universal ether, was a standard mechanical
system of nature. Some phenomena, such as the
capacity of chemicals to react only with certain
others, puzzled him, however, and he spoke of a
“secret principle” by which substances are
“sociable” or “unsociable” with others. About
1679, Newton abandoned the ether and its
invisible mechanisms and began to ascribe the
puzzling phenomena—chemical affinities, the
generation of heat in chemical reactions,
surface tension in fluids, capillary action, the
cohesion of bodies, and the like—to attractions
and repulsions between particles of matter. More
than 35 years later, in the second English
edition of the Opticks, Newton accepted an ether
again, although it was an ether that embodied
the concept of action at a distance by positing
a repulsion between its particles. The
attractions and repulsions of Newton’s
speculations were direct transpositions of the
occult sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic
philosophy—as mechanical philosophers never
ceased to protest. Newton, however, regarded
them as a modification of the mechanical
philosophy that rendered it subject to exact
mathematical treatment. As he conceived of them,
attractions were quantitatively defined, and
they offered a bridge to unite the two basic
themes of 17th-century science—the mechanical
tradition, which had dealt primarily with verbal
mechanical imagery, and the Pythagorean
tradition, which insisted on the mathematical
nature of reality. Newton’s reconciliation
through the concept of force was his ultimate
contribution to science.
Career » The Principia » Planetary motion
Newton originally applied the idea of
attractions and repulsions solely to the range
of terrestrial phenomena mentioned in the
preceding paragraph. But late in 1679, not long
after he had embraced the concept, another
application was suggested in a letter from
Hooke, who was seeking to renew correspondence.
Hooke mentioned his analysis of planetary
motion—in effect, the continuous diversion of a
rectilinear motion by a central attraction.
Newton bluntly refused to correspond but,
nevertheless, went on to mention an experiment
to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth: let a
body be dropped from a tower; because the
tangential velocity at the top of the tower is
greater than that at the foot, the body should
fall slightly to the east. He sketched the path
of fall as part of a spiral ending at the centre
of the Earth. This was a mistake, as Hooke
pointed out; according to Hooke’s theory of
planetary motion, the path should be elliptical,
so that if the Earth were split and separated to
allow the body to fall, it would rise again to
its original location. Newton did not like being
corrected, least of all by Hooke, but he had to
accept the basic point; he corrected Hooke’s
figure, however, using the assumption that
gravity is constant. Hooke then countered by
replying that, although Newton’s figure was
correct for constant gravity, his own assumption
was that gravity decreases as the square of the
distance. Several years later, this letter
became the basis for Hooke’s charge of
plagiarism. He was mistaken in the charge. His
knowledge of the inverse square relation rested
only on intuitive grounds; he did not derive it
properly from the quantitative statement of
centripetal force and Kepler’s third law, which
relates the periods of planets to the radii of
their orbits. Moreover, unknown to him, Newton
had so derived the relation more than ten years
earlier. Nevertheless, Newton later confessed
that the correspondence with Hooke led him to
demonstrate that an elliptical orbit entails an
inverse square attraction to one focus—one of
the two crucial propositions on which the law of
universal gravitation would ultimately rest.
What is more, Hooke’s definition of orbital
motion—in which the constant action of an
attracting body continuously pulls a planet away
from its inertial path—suggested a cosmic
application for Newton’s concept of force and an
explanation of planetary paths employing it. In
1679 and 1680, Newton dealt only with orbital
dynamics; he had not yet arrived at the concept
of universal gravitation.
Career » The Principia » Universal
gravitation
Nearly five years later, in August 1684,
Newton was visited by the British astronomer
Edmond Halley, who was also troubled by the
problem of orbital dynamics. Upon learning that
Newton had solved the problem, he extracted
Newton’s promise to send the demonstration.
Three months later he received a short tract
entitled De Motu (“On Motion”). Already Newton
was at work improving and expanding it. In two
and a half years, the tract De Motu grew into
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,
which is not only Newton’s masterpiece but also
the fundamental work for the whole of modern
science.
Significantly, De Motu did not state the law of
universal gravitation. For that matter, even
though it was a treatise on planetary dynamics,
it did not contain any of the three Newtonian
laws of motion. Only when revising De Motu did
Newton embrace the principle of inertia (the
first law) and arrive at the second law of
motion. The second law, the force law, proved to
be a precise quantitative statement of the
action of the forces between bodies that had
become the central members of his system of
nature. By quantifying the concept of force, the
second law completed the exact quantitative
mechanics that has been the paradigm of natural
science ever since.
The quantitative mechanics of the Principia is
not to be confused with the mechanical
philosophy. The latter was a philosophy of
nature that attempted to explain natural
phenomena by means of imagined mechanisms among
invisible particles of matter. The mechanics of
the Principia was an exact quantitative
description of the motions of visible bodies. It
rested on Newton’s three laws of motion: (1)
that a body remains in its state of rest unless
it is compelled to change that state by a force
impressed on it; (2) that the change of motion
(the change of velocity times the mass of the
body) is proportional to the force impressed;
(3) that to every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction. The analysis of circular
motion in terms of these laws yielded a formula
of the quantitative measure, in terms of a
body’s velocity and mass, of the centripetal
force necessary to divert a body from its
rectilinear path into a given circle. When
Newton substituted this formula into Kepler’s
third law, he found that the centripetal force
holding the planets in their given orbits about
the Sun must decrease with the square of the
planets’ distances from the Sun. Because the
satellites of Jupiter also obey Kepler’s third
law, an inverse square centripetal force must
also attract them to the centre of their orbits.
Newton was able to show that a similar relation
holds between the Earth and its Moon. The
distance of the Moon is approximately 60 times
the radius of the Earth. Newton compared the
distance by which the Moon, in its orbit of
known size, is diverted from a tangential path
in one second with the distance that a body at
the surface of the Earth falls from rest in one
second. When the latter distance proved to be
3,600 (60 × 60) times as great as the former, he
concluded that one and the same force, governed
by a single quantitative law, is operative in
all three cases, and from the correlation of the
Moon’s orbit with the measured acceleration of
gravity on the surface of the Earth, he applied
the ancient Latin word gravitas (literally,
“heaviness” or “weight”) to it. The law of
universal gravitation, which he also confirmed
from such further phenomena as the tides and the
orbits of comets, states that every particle of
matter in the universe attracts every other
particle with a force that is proportional to
the product of their masses and inversely
proportional to the square of the distance
between their centres.
When the Royal Society received the completed
manuscript of Book I in 1686, Hooke raised the
cry of plagiarism, a charge that cannot be
sustained in any meaningful sense. On the other
hand, Newton’s response to it reveals much about
him. Hooke would have been satisfied with a
generous acknowledgment; it would have been a
graceful gesture to a sick man already well into
his decline, and it would have cost Newton
nothing. Newton, instead, went through his
manuscript and eliminated nearly every reference
to Hooke. Such was his fury that he refused
either to publish his Opticks or to accept the
presidency of the Royal Society until Hooke was
dead.
Career » International prominence
The Principia immediately raised Newton to
international prominence. In their continuing
loyalty to the mechanical ideal, Continental
scientists rejected the idea of action at a
distance for a generation, but even in their
rejection they could not withhold their
admiration for the technical expertise revealed
by the work. Young British scientists
spontaneously recognized him as their model.
Within a generation the limited number of
salaried positions for scientists in England,
such as the chairs at Oxford, Cambridge, and
Gresham College, were monopolized by the young
Newtonians of the next generation. Newton, whose
only close contacts with women were his
unfulfilled relationship with his mother, who
had seemed to abandon him, and his later
guardianship of a niece, found satisfaction in
the role of patron to the circle of young
scientists. His friendship with Fatio de
Duillier, a Swiss-born mathematician resident in
London who shared Newton’s interests, was the
most profound experience of his adult life.
Career » International prominence » Warden of
the mint
Almost immediately following the Principia’s
publication, Newton, a fervent if unorthodox
Protestant, helped to lead the resistance of
Cambridge to James II’s attempt to Catholicize
it. As a consequence, he was elected to
represent the university in the convention that
arranged the revolutionary settlement. In this
capacity, he made the acquaintance of a broader
group, including the philosopher John Locke.
Newton tasted the excitement of London life in
the aftermath of the Principia. The great bulk
of his creative work had been completed. He was
never again satisfied with the academic
cloister, and his desire to change was whetted
by Fatio’s suggestion that he find a position in
London. Seek a place he did, especially through
the agency of his friend, the rising politician
Charles Montague, later Lord Halifax. Finally,
in 1696, he was appointed warden of the mint.
Although he did not resign his Cambridge
appointments until 1701, he moved to London and
henceforth centred his life there.
In the meantime, Newton’s relations with Fatio
had undergone a crisis. Fatio was taken
seriously ill; then family and financial
problems threatened to call him home to
Switzerland. Newton’s distress knew no limits.
In 1693 he suggested that Fatio move to
Cambridge, where Newton would support him, but
nothing came of the proposal. Through early 1693
the intensity of Newton’s letters built almost
palpably, and then, without surviving
explanation, both the close relationship and the
correspondence broke off. Four months later,
without prior notice, Samuel Pepys and John
Locke, both personal friends of Newton, received
wild, accusatory letters. Pepys was informed
that Newton would see him no more; Locke was
charged with trying to entangle him with women.
Both men were alarmed for Newton’s sanity; and,
in fact, Newton had suffered at least his second
nervous breakdown. The crisis passed, and Newton
recovered his stability. Only briefly did he
ever return to sustained scientific work,
however, and the move to London was the
effective conclusion of his creative activity.
As warden and then master of the mint, Newton
drew a large income, as much as £2,000 per
annum. Added to his personal estate, the income
left him a rich man at his death. The position,
regarded as a sinecure, was treated otherwise by
Newton. During the great recoinage, there was
need for him to be actively in command; even
afterward, however, he chose to exercise himself
in the office. Above all, he was interested in
counterfeiting. He became the terror of London
counterfeiters, sending a goodly number to the
gallows and finding in them a socially
acceptable target on which to vent the rage that
continued to well up within him.
Career » International prominence »
Interest in religion and theology
Newton found time now to explore other
interests, such as religion and theology. In the
early 1690s he had sent Locke a copy of a
manuscript attempting to prove that Trinitarian
passages in the Bible were latter-day
corruptions of the original text. When Locke
made moves to publish it, Newton withdrew in
fear that his anti-Trinitarian views would
become known. In his later years, he devoted
much time to the interpretation of the
prophecies of Daniel and St. John, and to a
closely related study of ancient chronology.
Both works were published after his death.
Career » International prominence » Leader
of English science
In London, Newton assumed the role of
patriarch of English science. In 1703 he was
elected President of the Royal Society. Four
years earlier, the French Académie des Sciences
(Academy of Sciences) had named him one of eight
foreign associates. In 1705 Queen Anne knighted
him, the first occasion on which a scientist was
so honoured. Newton ruled the Royal Society
magisterially. John Flamsteed, the Astronomer
Royal, had occasion to feel that he ruled it
tyrannically. In his years at the Royal
Observatory at Greenwich, Flamsteed, who was a
difficult man in his own right, had collected an
unrivalled body of data. Newton had received
needed information from him for the Principia,
and in the 1690s, as he worked on the lunar
theory, he again required Flamsteed’s data.
Annoyed when he could not get all the
information he wanted as quickly as he wanted
it, Newton assumed a domineering and
condescending attitude toward Flamsteed. As
president of the Royal Society, he used his
influence with the government to be named as
chairman of a body of “visitors” responsible for
the Royal Observatory; then he tried to force
the immediate publication of Flamsteed’s catalog
of stars. The disgraceful episode continued for
nearly 10 years. Newton would brook no
objections. He broke agreements that he had made
with Flamsteed. Flamsteed’s observations, the
fruit of a lifetime of work, were, in effect,
seized despite his protests and prepared for the
press by his mortal enemy, Edmond Halley.
Flamsteed finally won his point and by court
order had the printed catalog returned to him
before it was generally distributed. He burned
the printed sheets, and his assistants brought
out an authorized version after his death. In
this respect, and at considerable cost to
himself, Flamsteed was one of the few men to
best Newton. Newton sought his revenge by
systematically eliminating references to
Flamsteed’s help in later editions of the
Principia.
In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German
philosopher and mathematician, Newton met a
contestant more of his own calibre. It is now
well established that Newton developed the
calculus before Leibniz seriously pursued
mathematics. It is almost universally agreed
that Leibniz later arrived at the calculus
independently. There has never been any question
that Newton did not publish his method of
fluxions; thus, it was Leibniz’s paper in 1684
that first made the calculus a matter of public
knowledge. In the Principia Newton hinted at his
method, but he did not really publish it until
he appended two papers to the Opticks in 1704.
By then the priority controversy was already
smouldering. If, indeed, it mattered, it would
be impossible finally to assess responsibility
for the ensuing fracas. What began as mild
innuendoes rapidly escalated into blunt charges
of plagiarism on both sides. Egged on by
followers anxious to win a reputation under his
auspices, Newton allowed himself to be drawn
into the centre of the fray; and, once his
temper was aroused by accusations of dishonesty,
his anger was beyond constraint. Leibniz’s
conduct of the controversy was not pleasant, and
yet it paled beside that of Newton. Although he
never appeared in public, Newton wrote most of
the pieces that appeared in his defense,
publishing them under the names of his young
men, who never demurred. As president of the
Royal Society, he appointed an “impartial”
committee to investigate the issue, secretly
wrote the report officially published by the
society, and reviewed it anonymously in the
Philosophical Transactions. Even Leibniz’s death
could not allay Newton’s wrath, and he continued
to pursue the enemy beyond the grave. The battle
with Leibniz, the irrepressible need to efface
the charge of dishonesty, dominated the final 25
years of Newton’s life. It obtruded itself
continually upon his consciousness. Almost any
paper on any subject from those years is apt to
be interrupted by a furious paragraph against
the German philosopher, as he honed the
instruments of his fury ever more keenly. In the
end, only Newton’s death ended his wrath.
Career » Final years
During his final years Newton brought out
further editions of his central works. After the
first edition of the Opticks in 1704, which
merely published work done 30 years before, he
published a Latin edition in 1706 and a second
English edition in 1717–18. In both, the central
text was scarcely touched, but he did expand the
“Queries” at the end into the final statement of
his speculations on the nature of the universe.
The second edition of the Principia, edited by
Roger Cotes in 1713, introduced extensive
alterations. A third edition, edited by Henry
Pemberton in 1726, added little more. Until
nearly the end, Newton presided at the Royal
Society (frequently dozing through the meetings)
and supervised the mint. During his last years,
his niece, Catherine Barton Conduitt, and her
husband lived with him.
Richard S. Westfall
