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
