The Clockwork Universe (26 page)

Chapter Forty-Three
The Best of All Possible Feuds

For a long while, Newton and Leibniz spoke of one another in the most flattering terms. Newton wrote Leibniz a friendly letter in 1693, nearly a decade after Leibniz had claimed calculus for himself, hailing Leibniz as “one of the chief geometers of this century, as I have made known on every occasion that presented itself.” Surely, Newton went on, there was no need for the two men to squabble. “I value my friends more than mathematical discoveries,” the friendless genius declared.

Leibniz was even more effusive. In 1701, at a dinner at the royal palace in Berlin, the queen of Prussia asked Leibniz what Newton had achieved. “Taking Mathematicks from the beginning of the world to the time of Sir Isaac,” Leibniz replied, “what he had done was much the better half.”

But the kind words were a sham. For years, both rivals had carefully praised one another on the record while slandering
each other behind the scenes. Each man composed detailed, malicious attacks on the other and published them anony
mously. Each whispered insults and accusations into the ears of colleagues and then professed shock and dismay at hearing his own words parroted back.

The two geniuses had admired one another, more or less, until they realized they were rivals. Newton had long thought of the multitalented Leibniz as a dabbler in mathematics, a brilliant beginner whose genuine interests lay in philosophy and law. Leibniz had no doubts about Newton's mathematical prowess, but he believed that Newton had focused his attention in one specific, limited area. That left Leibniz free to pursue calculus on his own, or so he believed.

By the early 1700s, the clash had erupted into the open. For the next decade and a half, the fighting would grow ever fiercer. Two of the greatest thinkers of the age both clutched the same golden trophy and shouted, “Mine!” Both men were furious, indignant, unrelenting. Each felt sure the other had committed theft and compounded it with slander. Each was convinced his enemy had no motive beyond a blind lust for acclaim.

Because calculus was the ideal tool to study the natural world, the debate spilled over from mathematics to science and then from science to theology. What was the nature of the universe? What was the nature of God, who had designed that universe? Almost no one could understand the technical issues, but everyone enjoyed the sight of intellectual titans grappling like mud wrestlers. Coffeehouse philosophers weighed in; dinner parties bubbled over with gossip and delicious rumor; aristocrats across Europe chortled over the nastiest insults; in England even the royal family grew deeply involved, reviewing tactics and egging on the combatants. What began as a philosophers' quarrel grew and transmogrified until it became, in the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, “the spectacle of the century.”

* * *

Royalty came into the story—and threw an even brighter spotlight on Newton and Leibniz—because of Europe's complicated dynastic politics. When England's Queen Anne died without an heir, in 1714, the throne passed not to Anne's nearest relative but, so great was the fear of Catholic power, to her nearest
Protestant
relative. This was a fifty-four-year-old German nobleman named Georg Ludwig, Duke of Hanover, a brave, bug-eyed ex-soldier of no particular distinction. In England Georg Ludwig would rule as King George I.

Fond of women and cards but little else, the future king had, according to his mother, “round his brains such a thick crust that I defy any man or woman ever to discover what is in them.” No matter, for Georg Ludwig had the next best thing to brains of his own. He had Europe's most renowned intellectual, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, permanently on tap and at the ready.

For nearly forty years, Leibniz had served Georg Ludwig (and his father before him and that father's brother before
him
), as historian, adviser, and librarian in charge of cataloging and enlarging the ducal book collection. Among his other tasks, Leibniz had labored to establish the Hanoverian claim to the English throne. Now, with his patron suddenly plucked from the backwaters of Germany and dropped into one of the world's plum jobs, Leibniz saw a chance to return to a world capital. He had visions of accompanying his longtime employer, taking his proper place on a brightly lit stage, and trading ideas with England's greatest thinkers. Georg Ludwig had a different vision.

By the time of King George's coronation, Isaac Newton had long since made his own dazzling ascent. In 1704, he had published his second great work,
Opticks
, on the properties of light. In 1705, the onetime farmboy had become Sir Isaac Newton, the first scientist ever knighted. (Queen Anne had performed the ceremony. Anne was no scholar—“When in good humour Queen Anne was meekly stupid, and when in bad humor, was sulkily stupid,” the historian Macaulay had observed—but she had savvy counselors who saw political benefit in honoring England's greatest thinker.)

By the time of his knighthood, Newton was sixty-two and had largely abandoned scientific research. A few years before, he had left Cambridge in favor of London and accepted a government post as warden of the Mint. At roughly the same time he took on the presidency of the Royal Society, a position he would hold until his death. Old, imposing, intimidating, Newton was universally hailed as the embodiment of genius. English genius, in particular. Many who could not tell a parrot from a parabola gloried in the homage paid to England's greatest son. When dignitaries like Russia's Peter the Great visited London, they made a point of seeing Newton along with the capital's other marvels.

Newton did not become much of a partygoer in his London days, but his new circle of acquaintances did come to include such ornaments as Caroline, Princess of Wales. King George himself kept a close watch on the Newton-Leibniz affair. His motive was not intellectual curiosity—the king's only cultural interests were listening to opera and cutting out paper dolls—but he took malicious delight in having a claim on two of the greatest men of the age. King George seemed an unlikely candidate to preside over a philosophical debate. In Germany his court had been caught up not only in scandal but quite likely in murder.

The problems rose out of a tangled series of romantic liai
sons. All the important men at the Hanover court had mistresses, often several at a time, and a diagram of whose bed
partner was whose would involve multiple arrows crossing one another and looping back and forth. (Adding to the confusion, nearly all the female participants in the drama seemed to share the name Sophia or some near variation.) Bed-hopping on the part of the Hanover princes fell well within the bounds of royal privilege. What was
not
acceptable was that Georg Ludwig's wife, Sophia Dorothea, had embarked on an affair of her own. Royal spies discovered that the lovers had made plans to run off together. This was unthinkable. A team of hired assassins ambushed the duchess's paramour, stabbed him with a sword, sliced him open with an axe, and left him to bleed to death. Sophia Dorothea was banished to a family castle and forbidden ever to see her children again. She died thirty-two years later, still under house arrest.

Through the years Leibniz's attempts to engage Georg Ludwig had met with about the success one would expect, but the women of the Hanoverian court were as intellectual as the men were crude. While the dukes collected mistresses and plotted murder, their duchesses occupied themselves with philosophy. Georg Ludwig's mother, Sophia, read through Spinoza's controversial writings as soon as they were published and spent long hours questioning Leibniz about the views of the Dutch heretic.

Sophia was only the first of Leibniz's royal devotees. Sophia's daughter Sophia Charlotte (sister to the future King George) had an even closer relationship with Leibniz. And yet a third high-born woman forged a still closer bond. This was Caroline, a twenty-one-year-old princess and friend of Sophia Charlotte. Leibniz became her friend and tutor. Soon after, Caroline married one of Georg Ludwig's brothers. When she was whisked off to England in 1714, Caroline became princess of Wales and in time, as the wife of King George II, queen of England. Leibniz had allies in the highest of circles.

But he was stuck in Germany, and none of his royal friends seemed inclined to send for him. From that outpost, he tried to enlist Caroline on his side in his ongoing war against Newton. Their battle represented not just a confrontation between two men, Leibniz insisted, but between two nations. German pride was at stake. “I dare say,” Leibniz wrote to Caroline, “that if the king were at least to make me the equal of Mr. Newton in all things and in all respects, then in these circumstances it would give honor to Hanover and to Germany in my name.”

The appeal to national pride proved ineffective. Newton was all but worshipped in England—as we have noted, Caroline had met him on various grand occasions at court—and the newly arrived king had no desire to challenge English self-regard just to soothe the hurt feelings of his pet philosopher. In any case, King George had his own plans for Leibniz. They did not include science. Leibniz's chief duty, the king reminded him, was to continue his history of the House of Hanover. He had bogged down somewhere around the year 1000.

The wonders of calculus, and the injustice of Newton's theft of it, concerned the king not at all. What was life and death for Leibniz was sport for King George. “The king has joked more than once about my dispute with Mr. Newton,” Leibniz lamented.

From his exile in Hanover, Leibniz wrote to Caroline attacking Newton's views on science and theology. Caroline studied the letters intently—they dealt mainly with such questions as whether God had left the world to run on its own or whether He continued to step in to fine-tune it—and she passed them along to a Newton stand-in named Samuel Clarke. On some questions Caroline wrote directly to Newton himself. Clarke composed responses to Leibniz (with Newton's help). The correspondence was soon published, and the so-called Leibniz-Clarke papers became, in one historian's judgment, “perhaps the most famous and influential of all philosophical correspondences.”

But to Caroline's exasperation, Leibniz persisted in setting aside deep issues in theology and circling back instead to his priority battle with Newton. The princess scolded her ex-tutor for his “vanity.” He and Newton were “the great men of our century,” Caroline wrote, “and both of you serve a king who merits you.” Why draw out this endless fight? “What difference does it
make whether you or Chevalier Newton discovered the calculus?”
Caroline demanded.

A good question. The world had the benefit of this splendid new tool, after all, whoever had found it. But to Newton and Leibniz, the answer to Caroline's question was simple. It made all the difference in the world.

Chapter Forty-Four
Battle's End

From its earliest days, science has been a dueling ground. Disputes are guaranteed, because good ideas are “in the air,” not dreamed up out of nowhere. Nearly every breakthrough—the telescope, calculus, the theory of evolution, the telephone, the double helix—has multiple parents, all with serious claims. But ownership is all, and scientists turn purple with rage at the thought that someone has won praise for stolen insights. The greats battle as fiercely as the mediocre. Galileo wrote furiously of rivals who claimed that they, not he, had been first to see sunspots. They had, he fumed, “attempted to rob me of that glory which was mine.” Even the peaceable Darwin admitted, in a letter to a colleague urging him to write up his work on evolution before he was scooped, that “I certainly should be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrines before me.”

What vexed the mild Darwin sent Newton and Leibniz into apoplectic rages. The reasons had partly to do with mathematics itself. All scientific feuds tend toward the nasty; feuds between mathematicians drip with extra venom. Higher mathematics is a peculiarly frustrating field. So difficult is it that even the best mathematicians often feel that the challenge is just too much, as if a golden retriever had taken on the task of understanding the workings of the internal combustion engine. The rationalizations so helpful elsewhere in science—she had a bigger lab, a larger budget, better colleagues—are no use here. Wealth, connections, charm make no difference. Brainpower is all.

“Almost no one is capable of doing significant mathematics,” the American mathematician Alfred W. Adler wrote a few decades ago. “There are no acceptably good mathematicians. Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.”

That is a romantic view and probably overstated, but mathematicians take a perverse pride in great-man theories, and they tend to see such doctrines as simple facts. The result is that mathematicians' egos are both strong and brittle, like ceramics. Where they focus their gaze makes all the difference. If someone compares himself with his neighbors, then he might preen himself on his membership in an arcane priesthood. But if he judges himself not by whether he knows more mathematics than most people but by whether he has made any real headway at exploring the immense and dark mathematical woods, then all thoughts of vanity flee, and only puniness remains.

In the case of calculus, the moment of confrontation between Newton and Leibniz was delayed for a time, essentially by incredulity. Neither genius could quite believe that anyone else could have seen as far as he had. Newton enjoyed his discoveries all the more because they were his to savor in solitude, as if he were a reclusive art collector free to commune with his masterpieces behind closed doors. But Newton's retreat from the world was not complete. He could abide adulation but not confrontation, and he had shared some of his mathematical triumphs with a tiny number of appreciative insiders. He ignored their pleas that he tell everyone what he had told them. The notion that his discoveries would speed the advance of science, if only the world knew of them, moved Newton not at all.

For Leibniz, on the other hand, his discoveries had value precisely because they put his merits on display. He never tired of gulping down compliments, but his eagerness for praise had a practical side, too. Each new achievement served as a golden entry on the résumé that Leibniz was perpetually thrusting before would-be patrons.

In Newton's view, to unveil a discovery meant to offer the unworthy a chance to paw at it. In Leibniz's view, to proclaim a discovery meant to offer the world a chance to shout its hurrahs.

In history's long view, the battle ended in a stalemate. Historians of mathematics have scoured the private papers of both men and found clear evidence that Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus independently, each man working on his own. Newton was first, in 1666, but he only published decades later, in 1704. Leibniz's discovery followed Newton's by nine years, but he published his findings first, in 1684. And Leibniz, who had a gift for devising useful notations, wrote up his discoveries in a way that other mathematicians found easy to understand and build upon. (Finding the right notation to convey a new concept sounds insignificant, like choosing the right typeface for a book, but in mathematics the choice of symbols can save an idea or doom it. A child can multiply 17 by 19. The greatest scholars in Rome would have struggled with XVII times XIX.)
⁴⁷

The symbols and language that Leibniz devised are still the ones that students learn today. Newton's discovery was identical, at its heart, and in his masterly hands it could be turned to nearly any task. But Newton's calculus is a museum piece today, while a buffed and honed version of Leibniz's remains in universal use. Newton insisted that because he had found calculus before anyone else, there was nothing to debate. Leibniz countered that by casting his ideas in a form that others could follow, and then by telling the world what he had found, he had thrown open a door to a new intellectual kingdom.

So he had, and throughout the 1700s and into the 1800s, European mathematicians inspired by Leibniz ran far in front of their English counterparts. But in their lifetimes, Newton seemed to have won the victory. To stand up to Newton at his peak of fame
was nearly hopeless. The awe that Alexander Pope would later encapsulate—“Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night, / God said ‘Let Newton be!' and all was light”—had already become common wisdom.

The battle between the two men smoldered for years before it burst into open flames. In 1711, after about a decade of mutual abuse, Leibniz made a crucial tactical blunder. He sent the Royal Society a letter—both he and Newton were members—
complaining of the insults he had endured and asking the Society
to sort out the calculus quarrel once and for all. “I throw myself on your sense of justice,” he wrote.

He should have chosen a different target. Newton, who was president of the Royal Society, appointed an investigatory committee “numerous and skilful and composed of Gentlemen of several Nations.” In fact, the committee was a rubber stamp for Newton himself, who carried out its inquiry single-handedly and then issued his findings in the committee's name. The report came down decisively in Newton's favor. With the Royal Society's imprimatur, the long, damning report was distributed to men of learning across Europe. “We take the Proper Question to be not who Invented this or that Method but who was the first Inventor,” Newton declared, for the committee.

The report went further. Years before, it charged, Leibniz had been offered surreptitious peeks at Newton's mathematical papers. There calculus was “Sufficiently Described” to enable “any Intelligent Person” to grasp its secrets. Leibniz had not only lagged years behind Newton in finding calculus, in other words, but he was a sneak and a plagiarist as well.

Next the
Philosophical Transactions
, the Royal Society's scientific journal, ran a long article reviewing the committee report and repeating its anti-Leibniz charges. The article was unsigned, but Newton was the author. Page after page spelled out the ways in which “Mr. Leibniz” had taken advantage of “Mr. Newton.” Naturally Mr. Leibniz had his own version of events, but the anonymous author would have none of it. “Mr. Leibniz cannot be a witness in his own Cause.”

Finally the committee report was republished in a new edition accompanied by Newton's anonymous review. The book carried an anonymous preface, “To the Reader.” It, too, was written by Newton.

Near the end of his life Newton reminisced to a friend about his long-running feud. “He had,” he remarked contentedly, “broke Leibniz' heart.”