The Clockwork Universe (31 page)

Acknowledgments

My first career ambition, years ago, was to play professional
basketball. This plan did not long endure. It was succeeded by a far longer-lived but perhaps equally foolish notion, to spend a
lifetime studying theoretical mathematics. After several years
wandering dazed through infinite dimensional spaces, I left the hunt to those better suited to it. But I owe thanks to a host of mentors, Fred Solomon and Gene Dolnick notable among them, who first opened my eyes to mathematical beauty.

In researching this book I pestered many long-suffering
physicists, historians, and philosophers with queries about every
thing from spiral galaxies to Leibniz's thoughts on unicorns. I
owe special gratitude to Rebecca Grossman, Mike Briley, Cole Miller, and, especially, Larry Carlin, who carried out, solely for my benefit, the best of all possible philosophy tutorials. Steven Shapin, an eminent historian of science, generously shared his deep insights into science and the 1600s. Owen Gingerich and
Simon Schaffer sorted out historical mysteries that had stumped
me. All my guides have been disabused of the belief that there's no such thing as a foolish question.

Michele Missner once again tracked down countless articles,
the more obscure the better. Katerina Barry, an unflappable
researcher as well as an artist and web designer, gathered images
from libraries and museums across Europe and America. Rob Crawford resolved crises large and small with skill and grace.
Hugh Van Dusen, my friend and my editor, demonstrated once again that he is the ideal ally.

My sons Sam and Ben, both writers, read every draft and
weighed in on every editorial decision. No one could have better colleagues.

Lynn deserves more thanks than I know how to put in words.

Notes

Sources for quotations and for assertions that might prove elusive can be found below. To keep these notes in bounds, I have not documented facts that can be readily checked in standard sources. Publication information is provided in the notes only for those sources not listed in the bibliography.

Epigraph

The universe is but a watch
: Bernard de Fontenelle,
Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
(London, 1803), p. 10.

Preface

xv
The murder rate
: Manuel Eisner, “Modernization, Self-Control, and Lethal Violence. The Long-Term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective,”
British Journal of Criminology
41, no. 4 (2001).

xv
“a sooty Crust or Furr”
: Barbara Freese,
Coal
:
A Human History
(New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 35, quoting John Evelyn.

xv
“a stinking
,
muddy
,
filth-bespattered”
: J. H. Plumb,
The First Four Georges
(London: Fontana, 1981), p. 17.

xvi
The same barges
: Emily Cockayne,
Hubbub
:
Filth
,
Noise
,
and Stench in England
, p. 93.

xvi
When Shakespeare and his fellow
: Gregory Clark,
A Farewell to Alms
:
A Brief Economic History of the World
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 107.

xvi
the palace at Versailles
: Katherine Ashenburg
, The Dirt on Clean
, p. 116.

xvifn
The historian Jules Michelet
: Ashenburg,
The Dirt on Clean
, p. 12. Ashenburg notes that Michelet exaggerated. She puts the correct figure at four centuries.

xvii
“Men expected the sun”
: Alfred North Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World
, p. 5.

Chapter 1. London, 1660

4
skeletally thin Robert Boyle
: Steven Shapin,
A Social History of Truth
. Shapin devotes a fascinating chapter to the riddle of “Who Was Robert Boyle?”

4
Boyle maintained
three: Lisa Jardine,
On a Grander Scale
, p. 194.

4
“low of stature”
: Leo Hollis,
London Rising
, p. 48.

4
a “miracle of youth”
: Jardine,
On a Grander Scale
, p. 236, quoting John Evelyn.

5
“the most fearful”
: John Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” p. 278, quoting the Cambridge mathematician William Whiston.

Chapter 2. Satan's Claws

7
“Any cold might be”
: Peter Earle,
The Making of the English Middle Class
:
Business
,
Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 302.

7
life expectancy was only
: Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, p. 5.

7
London was so disease-ridden
: A. Lloyd Moote and Dorothy Moote,
The Great Plague
, p. 26.

7
“puppy boiled up”
: Anna Beer,
Milton
, p. 386.

8
“I have had the misfortune”
: Earle,
The Making of the English Middle Class
, p. 302.

8
When Charles II suffered
: T. B. Macaulay,
History of England
, ch. 4, “James the Second,” available at http://www.strecorsoc.org/macaulay/m04a.html. I drew details from Macaulay's
History
; Antonia Fraser's
Royal Charles
, p. 446; and an account by the king's chief physician, Sir Charles Scarburgh, at http://tinyurl.com/y3wgtom.

8
“For what is the cause”
: Adam Nicolson,
God's Secretaries
(New York: Harper, 2005), p. 25.

10
“People lived in continual terror”
: Morris Kline,
Mathematics in Western Culture
, p. 235.

11
“Those are my best days”
: Eugen Weber,
Apocalypses
, p. 100.

12
“Threatening my father and mother”
: Richard Westfall includes the entire list in his “Writing and the State of Newton's Conscience.”

12
writer and theologian Isaac Watts
: Roy Porter,
The Creation of the Modern World
, p. 157.

Chapter 3. The End of the World

13
“The trumpet would sound”
: Perry Miller, “The End of the World,” p. 171.

14
“Books on the Second Coming”
: Frank Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 129.

14fn
Christopher Wren's father
: Adrian Tinniswood
, His Invention So Fertile
:
A Life of Christopher Wren
, p. 17.

14
“great apostasy”
: Richard Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 321.

15
“What shall be the sign”
: Matthew 24:3, King James Bible.

15
“sexual musical chairs”
: Lawrence Stone,
The Family
,
Sex
,
and Marriage
, p. 328.

16
“So horrible was it”
:
David Levy's Guide to Observing and Discovering Comets
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 9, quoting Ambroise Pare.

16
“The thick smoke”
: Tinniswood,
His Invention So Fertile
, p. 10, quoting Andreas Celichius.

17
“a Coffin
,
” floating
: Ibid., p. 11.

17
“this comet portends pestiferous”
: Moote and Moote,
The Great Plague
, p. 20.

17
clouds of flies
: J. Fitzgerald Molloy,
Royalty Restored
(London: Downey, 1897), p. 167.

17
“A deformed monster”
: Neil Hanson,
The Great Fire of London
, p. 28.

18
Robert Boyle
,
renowned today
: Westfall,
Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England
, p. 124. The historian Frank Manuel discusses Boyle's belief in the imminence of the apocalypse in
Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 129.

18
“The fourth beast [in the book of Revelation]”
: Isaac Newton,
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel
,
and the Apocalypse of St. John
, part 1, ch. 4, “Of the vision of the four Beasts.” This posthumous work by Newton can be found, along with seemingly everything else Newton-related, at the indispensable Newton Project website, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1. This essay is at http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00198.

Chapter 4. “When Spotted Death Ran Arm'd Through Every Street”

20
“like cheese between layers”
: Norman Cantor,
In the Wake of the Plague
, p. 8.

20
“Oh happy posterity”
: Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror
(New York: Ballantine, 1978), p. 99.

21
“Great fears of the sicknesse”
: Samuel Pepys's diary entry for April 30, 1665, available at www.pepysdiary.com.

22
“A nimble executioner”
: Margaret Healy, “Defoe's
Journal
and the English Plague Writing Tradition,” quoting the seventeenth-century pamphleteer Thomas Dekker.

22
“the surest Signes”
: This quote and the description of plague symptoms in the next several sentences come from Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,”
Gender and History
11, no. 1 (April 1999).

23
despised old women called “searchers”
: Ibid.

24
“Death was the sure midwife”
: Nathaniel Hodge,
Loimolgia
, or
An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665.
See http://rbsche.people.wm.edu/H111_doc_loimolgia.html.

24
“Poor Will that used to sell”
: Pepys's diary, August 8, 1665.

Chapter 5. Melancholy Streets

25
“Multitude of Rogues”
: Roger Lund, “Infectious Wit: Metaphor, Atheism, and the Plague in Eighteenth-Century London,”
Literature and Medicine
22, no. 1 (Spring 2003), p. 51.

25
kill “all their dogs”
: Moote and Moote,
The Great Plague
, p. 177.

26
“when we have purged”
: Tinniswood,
His Invention So Fertile
, p. 115, quoting Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society.

26
“Little noise heard day or night”
: Letter written September 4, 1664, by Pepys to Lady Carteret, in
Correspondence of Samuel Pepys
, vol. 5, p. 286. See http://tinyurl.com/y2aqoze.

27
“A just God now visits”
: John Kelly,
The Great Mortality
, p. xv.

27
“But Lord
,
how empty”
: Pepys's diary, October 16, 1665.

28
Builders would one day
: Raymond Williamson, “The Plague in Cambridge,”
Medical History
1, no. 1 (January 1957), p. 51.

Chapter 6. Fire

29
Iron bars in prison cells
: Hanson,
The Great Fire of London
, p. 165, quoting John Evelyn.

30
what Robert Boyle called
: Moote and Moote,
The Great Plague
, p. 69.

30
“Pish!” he said
: Christopher Hibbert
, London
(London: Penguin, 1977), p. 67, and Hanson,
The Great Fire of London
, p. 49.

31
Even on the opposite sides
: G. M. Trevelyan
, English Social History
(New York: Penguin, 1967), p. 305.

32
Slung over his shoulder
: Antonia Fraser,
Royal Charles
, p. 245.

32
“A horrid noise the flames made”
: Pepys's diary, September 2, 1666.

32
Stones from church walls exploded
: Hollis,
London Rising
, p. 121.

32
“God grant mine eyes”
: John Evelyn,
The Diary of John Evelyn
, vol. 2, p. 12. This is from Evelyn's diary entry for September 3, 1666, available at http./www.pepysdiary.com/indepth/archive/2009/09/02/evelyns–fire.php.

33
People wandered in search
: Hollis,
London Rising
, p. 122.

33
“The ground was so hot”
: Hanson,
The Great Fire of London
, p. 163.

33
“Now nettles are growing”
: Ibid., p. xv, quoting from a pamphlet by Thomas Vincent,
God's Terrible Voice in the City
.

Chapter 7. God at his Drawing Table

35
God had fashioned the best
: Philosophers still debate precisely how Leibniz reconciled his belief that God had created the best possible world with his (apparent) belief in a day of judgment. One notion is that divine punishment was a feature of even the best possible world, because harmony required both that virtue be rewarded and sin punished.

36
Newton and many of his peers
: J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,' ” p. 135. See also Piyo Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” in John Fauvel et al., eds.,
Let Newton Be!
, p. 187; Force and Popkin,
Newton and Religion
, p. xvi; Steven Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
, p. 74.

37
By far the most important
: The only challenges to the mainstream view came from the much-feared, much-reviled Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza.

37
“All disorder
,
” wrote Alexander Pope
: Pope, “An Essay on Man.”

37fn
“this continued sterility”
: Jane Dunn,
Elizabeth and Mary
(New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 17.

38
“too paganish a word”
: Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, p. 79.

38
The very plants in the garden
: Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature
,
1150–1750
, p. 296, quoting Walter Charleton,
The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature
.

38
“People rarely thought of themselves”
: Jacques Barzun,
From Dawn to Decadence
, p. 24.

38
Atheism was literally unthinkable
: People called their enemies “atheists,” but the charge had to do with behaving badly—acting in ways that offended God—rather than with denying God's existence.
Atheist
was a catch-all slur directed at the immoral and self-indulgent.

38
Even Blaise Pascal
: Arthur Lovejoy,
The Great Chain of Being
, p.153.

40
Plato proposed that a free man
: Morris Kline,
Mathematics
:
The Loss of Certainty
, p. 22. See Plato's
Laws
, book 11. “He who in any way shares in the illiberality of retail trades may be indicted for dishonouring his race by any one who likes . . . and if he appear to throw dirt upon his father's house by an unworthy occupation, let him be imprisoned for a year and abstain from that sort of thing; and if he repeat the offence, for two years; and every time that he is convicted let the length of his imprisonment be doubled.” See http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/laws.11.xi.html.