The Clockwork Universe (11 page)

Mankind had always occupied a conspicuous place in the universe, in other words, but it was a dangerous and exposed
position rather than a seat of honor. Theologians through the ages had thought well of that arrangement precisely because it did
not
puff up human pride. Humility was a virtue, they taught, and a home set amid “filth and mire” was nearly certain to have humble occupants.

In a sense, Copernicus had done mankind a favor. By moving the Earth to a less central locale, he had moved humankind farther from harm's way. For religious thinkers, ironically, this was yet another reason to object to the new doctrine. Theologians found themselves contemplating a riddle—how to keep humanity in its place when its place had moved?

In time, they would come up with an answer. They would seize on a different aspect of the new astronomy, the vast expansion in the size of the universe. If the universe was bigger, then man was smaller. For theologians in search of a way to reconcile themselves to science's new teachings, a doctrine that seemed to belittle mankind was welcome news.

Chapter Eighteen
Flies as Big as a Lamb

The microscope came along a bit later than the telescope, but its discovery produced just as much amazement. Here, too, were new worlds, and this time teeming with life! The greatest explorer of these new kingdoms was an unlikely conquistador, a Dutch merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. He seems to have begun tinkering with lenses with no grander ambition than to check for defects in swatches of cloth.

Leeuwenhoek quickly moved beyond fabric samples. Peering through microscopes he built himself—more like magnifying glasses than what we think of as microscopes—he witnessed scenes that no one else had ever imagined. In a frenzy of excitement, he dashed off letters to the Royal Society, hundreds altogether, describing the “secret world” he had found. He thrilled at the living creatures in a drop of water scooped from a puddle and then found he did not even have to venture outdoors to find teeming, complex life. He put his own saliva under the microscope and “saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the spittle like a pike does through the water.”

Hooke had been experimenting with microscopes of his own design for years. Leeuwenhoek's microscopes yielded clearer images, but on November 15, 1677, Hooke reported that he, too, had seen a great number of “exceedingly small animals” swimming in a drop of water. And he had witnesses. Hooke rattled off a list: “Mr. Henshaw, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Hoskyns, Sir Jonas Moore, Dr. Mapletoft, Mr. Hill, Dr. Croone, Dr. Grew, Mr. Aubrey, and diverse others.” The roll call of names highlights just how shocking these findings were. The microscope was so unfamiliar, and the prospect of a tiny, living, hitherto invisible world so astonishing, that even an eminent investigator like Hooke needed allies. It would be as if, in our day, Stephen Hawking turned a new sort of telescope to the heavens and saw UFOs flying in formation. Before he told the world, Hawking might coax other eminent figures to look for themselves.

But Hooke and the rest of the Royal Society could not catch Leeuwenhoek. Endlessly patient, omnivorously curious, and
absurdly sharp-eyed, he racked up discovery after discovery.
²⁵
Sooner or later, everything—pond water, blood, plaque from his teeth—found its way to his microscope slides. Leeuwenhoek jumped up from his bed one night, “immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” and raced to his microscope. There he became the first person ever to see sperm cells. “More than a thousand were moving about in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand,” he wrote in amazement, and “they were furnished with a thin tail, about five or six times as long as the body . . . and moved forward owing to the motion of their tails like that of a snake or an eel swimming in water.
”
²⁶
Leeuwenhoek hastened to assure the Royal Society that he had obtained his sample “after conjugal coitus” (rather than “by sin
fully defiling myself”), but he did not discuss whether Mrs.
Leeuwenhoek shared his fascination with scientific observation.

No matter. Others did. Even Charles II delighted in peer
ing through microscopes and witnessing life in miniature. “His Majesty seeing the little animals, contemplated them in astonishment and mentioned my name with great respect,” Leeuwenhoek wrote proudly. This was a development almost as striking as Leeuwenhoek's findings themselves. In the new world of science, a merchant who had never attended a university and knew only Dutch, not Latin, could make discoveries that commanded the attention of a king.

Both the microscope and the telescope fascinated the seventeenth century's intelligentsia, not just its scientists. The telescope tended to produce unwelcome musings on man's puniness, as we have seen, but the picture of worlds within worlds revealed by the microscope did not trouble most people. Pascal was an exception. The endless descent into microworlds—“limbs with joints, veins in these limbs, blood in these veins, humors in this blood, globules in these humors, gases in these globules”—left him queasy and afraid. Many a ten-year-old has delighted in an imaginary outward zoom that plays Pascal's voyage in reverse:
I live at 10 Glendale Road in the town of Marblehead in the county of Essex in the state of Massachusetts in the United States of America on the planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy.
Pascal's inward journey shared the same rhythm, but the dread in his tone stood the child's exhilaration on its head.

Most people felt more fascination than fright, perhaps simply because we tend to feel powerful in proportion to our size. In any case, both telescope and microscope strengthened the case for God as designer. The ordinary world had already provided countless examples of God's craftsmanship. “Were men and beast made by fortuitous jumblings of atoms,” Newton wrote contemptuously, “there would be many parts useless in them—here a lump of flesh, there a member too much.” Now the microscope showed that God had done meticulous work even in secret realms that man had never known. Unlike those furniture makers, say, who lavished all their care on the front of their bureaus and desks but neglected surfaces destined to stay hidden, God had made
every
detail perfect.

The heavens declared the glory of God, and so did fleas and flies and feathers. Man-made objects looked shoddy in comparison. Hooke examined the tip of a needle under a microscope, to test the aptness of the expression “as sharp as a Needle.” He found not a perfect, polished surface but “large Hollows and Roughnesses, like those eaten in an Iron Bar by Rust and Length of Time.” A printed dot on the page of a book told the same story. To the naked eye it looked “perfectly black and round,” wrote Hooke, “but through the Magnifier it seemed grey, and quite irregular, like a great Splatch of London Dirt.”

No features of the natural world were too humble to inspire rapt study. In some of the earliest experiments with microscopes, Galileo had tinkered with various designs. His astonishment reaches us across a gap four centuries wide. Galileo had seen “flies which look as big as a lamb,” he told a French visitor, “and are covered all over with hair, and have very pointed nails by means of which they keep themselves up and walk on glass, although hanging feet upwards.”

Many of the objects that came in for close examination were even less grand than houseflies. In April 1669 Hooke and the other members of the Royal Society gazed intently at a bit of fat and then at a moldy smear of bookbinder's paste, “which was found to have a fine moss growing on it.” One early scientist who studied plants under the microscope marveled that “one who walks about with the meanest stick holds a piece of nature's handicraft which far surpasses the most elaborate . . . needlework in the world.”

Robert Hooke's drawing of a fly's meticulously “designed” eyes

Hooke published a lavish book called
Micrographia
that featured such stunning illustrations (by Hooke himself) as a twelve-by-eighteen-inch foldout engraving of a flea. The creature was, Hooke noted admiringly, “adorn'd with a curiously polish'd suit of sable Armour, neatly jointed.” Another oversize illustration showed a fly's eyes, with some fourteen thousand facets or “pearls.” Hooke went out of his way to justify lavishing attention on so lowly an insect. “There may be as much curiosity of contrivance and structure in every one of these Pearls, as in the eye of a Whale or Elephant,” he wrote, and he noted that in any case God was surely up to such a task. “As one day and a thousand years are the same with him, so may one eye and ten thousand.”

Both telescope and microscope had opened up new worlds. The new vistas served to reinforce the belief that on every scale the universe was a flawless, harmonious, and unimaginably complex mechanism. God was a sculptor who could shape stars and planets and a craftsman with a delicacy of touch to shame the finest jeweler.

Chapter Nineteen
From Earthworms to Angels

If the thinkers of the seventeenth century had been content to see God as a superbly talented artist and craftsman, their homage might have taken a different form. Instead they looked at the marvelous sights revealed by the telescope and microscope and found new support for their favorite doctrine, that God was a mathematician.

They believed it already, thanks largely to their discoveries about the geometry of the cosmos, but they saw the new evidence as proving the case beyond the least possible doubt. In part this was because of the new sights themselves. Seen through the microscope, the least imposing objects revealed a geometer's shaping hand. One early scientist wrote an astonished hymn to grains of salt, which turned out to be “Cubes, Rhombs, Pyramids, Pentagons, Hexagons, Octagons” rendered “with a greater Mathematical Exactness than the most skilful Hand could draw them.”

But the renewed emphasis on God-the-mathematician came mostly by way of a different, stranger path. One of the seven
teenth century's most deeply held beliefs had to do with the
so-called great chain of being. The central idea was that all the objects that had ever been created—grains of sand, chunks of gold, earthworms, lions, human beings, devils, angels—occupied a particular rank in a great chain that extended from the lowest of the low to the hem of God's garment. Nearby ranks blended almost insensibly into one another. Some fish had wings and flew into the air; some birds swam in the sea.

It was a fantastically elaborate system, though it strikes modern ears as more akin to a magical realist fantasy than a guide to everyday life. Purely by reasoning, the intellectuals of the seventeenth century believed, they could draw irrefutable conclusions about the makeup of the world. Angels, for example, were as real as oak trees. Since God himself had fashioned the great chain, it was necessarily perfect and could not be missing any links. So, just as there were countless creatures reaching
downward
from humans to the beasts, there had to be countless steps leading
upward
from humans to God. QED.

That made for a lot of angels. “We must believe that the angels are there in marvelous and inconceivable numbers,” one scholar wrote, “because the honor of a king consists in the great crowd of his vassals, while his disgrace or shame consists in their paucity. Thousands of thousands wait on the divine majesty and tenfold hundreds of millions join in his worship.”

Each link had its proper place in the hierarchy, king above noble above commoner, husband above wife above child, dog above cat, worm above oyster. The lion was king of beasts, but
every
domain had a “king”: the eagle among birds, the rose among flowers, the monarch among humans, the sun among the stars. The various kingdoms themselves had specific ranks, too, some lower and some higher—stones, which are lifeless, ranked lower than plants, which ranked lower than shellfish, which ranked lower than mammals, which ranked lower than angels, with innumerable other kingdoms filling all the ranks in between.

In a hierarchical world, the doctrine had enormous intuitive appeal. Those well placed in the pecking order embraced it, unsurprisingly, but even those stuck far from the top made a virtue of “knowing one's place.” Almost without exception, scholars and intellectuals endorsed the doctrine of the all-embracing, immutable great chain. To say that things might be different was to suggest that they could be better. This struck nearly everyone as both misguided—to attack the natural order was to shake one's fist at the tide—and blasphemous. Since God was an infinitely powerful creator, the world necessarily contained all possible things arranged in the best possible way. Otherwise He might have done more or done better, and who would presume to venture such a criticism?

As usual, Alexander Pope summarized conventional wisdom in a few succinct words. No one ever had less reason to endorse the status quo than Pope, a hunchbacked, dwarfish figure who lived in constant pain. He strapped himself each day into a kind of metal cage to hold himself upright. Then he took up his pen and composed perfectly balanced couplets on the theme that God has His reasons, which we limited beings cannot fathom. “Whatever is, is right.”

The great chain had a long pedigree, and from the beginning the
idea that the world was jam-packed had been as important as
the idea that it was orderly. Plato had decreed that “nothing incomplete is beautiful,” as if the world were a stamp album and any gap in the collection an affront. By the 1600s this view had long since hardened into dogma. If it was possible to do something, God would do it. Otherwise He would be selling himself short. Today the cliché has it that we use only 10 percent of our brains. For a thousand years philosophers and naturalists wrote as if to absolve God from that charge. “The work of the creator would have been incomplete if aught could be added to it,” one French scientist declared blithely. “He has made all the vegetable species which could exist. All the minute gradations of animality are filled with as many beings as they can contain.”

This was also the reason, thinkers of the day felt certain, that God had created countless stars and planets where the naked eye saw only the blackness of space. God had created infinitely many worlds, one theologian and Royal Society member explained, because only a populous universe was “worthy of an infinite CREATOR, whose
Power
and
Wisdom
are without bounds and measures.”

But why did that all-powerful creator have to be a mathematician? Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher who took all knowledge as his domain, made the case most vigorously. The notion of a brim-full universe provided Leibniz the opening he needed. Leibniz was as restless as he was brilliant, and, perhaps predictably, he believed in an exuberantly creative God. “We must say that God makes the greatest number of things
that he can,” Leibniz declared, because “wisdom requires variety.”

Leibniz immediately proceeded to demonstrate his own wisdom by making the same point in half a dozen varied ways. Even if you were wealthy beyond measure, Leibniz asked, would you choose “to have a thousand well-bound copies of Virgil in your library”? “To have only golden cups”? “To have all your buttons made of diamonds”? “To eat only partridges and to drink only the wine of Hungary or of Shiraz”?

Now Leibniz had nearly finished. Since God loved variety, the only question was how He could best ensure it. “To find room for as many things as it is possible to place together,” wrote
Leibniz, God would employ the fewest and simplest laws of nature.
That
was why the laws of nature could be written so compactly and why they took mathematical form. “If God had made use of other laws, it would be as if one should construct a building of round stones, which leave more space unoccupied than that which they fill.”

So the universe was perfectly ordered, impeccably rational, and governed by a tiny number of simple laws. It was not enough to
assert
that God was a mathematician. The seventeenth century's great thinkers felt they had done more. They had proved it.

The scientists of the 1600s felt that they had come to their view of God by way of argument and observation. But they were hardly a skeptical jury, and their argument, which seemed so compelling to its original audience, sounds like special pleading today. Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, and their peers leaped to the conclusion that God was a mathematician largely because
they
were mathematicians—the aspects of the world that intrigued them were those that could be captured in mathematics. Galileo found that falling objects obey mathematical laws and proclaimed that
everything
does. The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, he wrote, “and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”

The early scientists took their own deepest beliefs and ascribed them to nature. “Nature is pleased with simplicity,” Newton declared, “and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.” Leibniz took up the same theme. “It is impossible that God, being the most perfect mind, would not love perfect harmony,” he wrote, and he and many others happily spelled out different features of that harmony. “God always complies with the easiest and simplest rules,” Galileo asserted.

“Nature does not make jumps,” Leibniz maintained, just as Einstein would later insist that “God does not play dice with the universe.” We attribute to God those traits we most value. “If triangles had a god,” Montesquieu would write a few decades later, “he would have three sides.”

Newton and the others would have scoffed at such a notion. They were describing God's creation, not their own. Centuries later, a classically minded revolutionary like Einstein would still hold to the same view. In an essay on laws of nature, the mathematician Jacob Bronowski wrote about Einstein's approach to science. “Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions,” Bronowski observed, “and what his life showed, and his work, is that when the answers are simple too, then you hear God thinking.”

For a modern-day scientist like Bronowski, this was a rhetorical flourish. Galileo, Newton, and the other great men of the seventeenth century could have expressed the identical thought, and they would have meant it literally.