The Clockwork Universe (32 page)

41
“It is ye perfection”
: Richard Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 327.

Chapter 8. The Idea that Unlocked the World

42
“decipher the page and chapter”
: John Carey,
John Donne
, p. 128
.

42
the mysteries of multiplication
: Pepys's diary, July 4, 1662.

43
a mathematics of change
: Ernst Cassirer, “Newton and Leibniz,” p.381. See also Karen Armstrong,
A History of God
, p. 35.

44
“the most truly revolutionary”
: I. Bernard Cohen,
Revolution in Science
, p. 90.

44
a widow
,
not yet thirty
: Hannah Newton's birth date is unknown. The Newton biographer Frank Manuel suggests that she was probably around thirty when she married for the second time, three years after Isaac's birth. See Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 24.

45
“When one
. . .
compares”
: Matthew Stewart,
The Courtier and the Heretic
, p. 12.

45
Frederick the Great declared
: Daniel Boorstin,
The Discoverers
, p. 414.

46
“I invariably took”
: Stewart,
The Courtier and the Heretic
, p. 43.

46
His favorite wedding gift
: Bertrand Russell,
A History of Western Philosophy
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 582.

46
slept in his clothes
: Gale Christianson,
Isaac Newton
, p. 65.

46
seventeen portraits
: Peter Ackroyd,
Newton
, p. 98.

46
so much time working with mercury
: Milo Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” p. 27.

46
“It's so rare
,
” the Duchess
: Stewart,
The Courtier and the Heretic
, p. 12.

47 “a Machine for walking on water
”
:
The drawing comes from a 1637 text by Daniel Schwenter, a German mathematician and inventor, titled
Deliciae physico-mathematicae.
Leibniz witnessed (and was much impressed by) a similar demonstration several decades later.

47
“To remain fixed in one place”
: Ibid., p. 53.

47
walk on water
: Philip Wiener, “Leibniz's Project,” p. 234.

48
“his cat grew very fat”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 103.

48
“His peculiar gift”
: John Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” p. 278.

49
“I took a bodkin”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 94.

Chapter 9. Euclid and Unicorns

50
“weapon salve”
: Liza Picard,
Restoration London
, p. 78.

50
“a living chameleon”
: Charles Richard Weld,
History of the Royal Society
(London: John W. Parker, 1848), v. 1, p. 114.

51
The spider
,
unfazed
: Ibid., p. 113.

51
Newton's paper followed
: Robert Crease,
The Prism and the Pendulum
, p. 72.

51
Visitors ogled such marvels
: Christopher Hibbert,
London
, p. 100.

51
the best cure for cataracts
: Stone,
The Family
,
Sex
,
and Marriage
, p. 65.

52
a “flying chariot”
: Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler, “Swift's ‘Flying Island' in the
Voyage to Laputa
, ” p. 422.

52
Since reliable men vouched
: John Henry, “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy,” p. 359. The highly regarded member of the Royal Society was Joseph Glanvill.

52
the seas contained mermaids
: John Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
, book 3, ch. 6, “Of the Names of Substances” (London: Thomas Tegg, 1841), p. 315.

52
an ancient
National Enquirer: Daston and Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature
, p. 231.

53
The “Tyburn tree”
: The gallows stood near what is now Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.

53
“All the Way
,
from Newgate to Tyburn”
: Simon Devereaux, “Recasting the Theater of Execution,”
Past & Present
202, no. 1 (February 2009).

53
a hand's “death sweat”
: Hanson,
The Great Fire of London
, p. 216, and Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, p. 204.

54
the corpse “identified”
: Daston and Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature
, p. 241.

54
painstakingly dissected one witch's
: Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, p. 644.

55
the “philosopher's stone”
: Christianson,
Isaac Newton
, p. 55.

55
some half million words
: Rattansi, “Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients,” p. 193.

55
Leibniz's only fear
: Stewart,
The Courtier and the Heretic
, p. 48.

55
“Whatever his aim”
: Christianson,
Isaac Newton
, p. 55.

55
He never spoke of
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 298.

55
“the Green Lion”
: William Newman, Indiana University historian of science, speaking on PBS in a
Nova
program,
Newton's Dark Secrets
, broadcast November 15, 2005.

56
“Just as the world was created”
: Jan Golinski, “The Secret Life of an Alchemist,” in
Let Newton Be!
, p. 160.

56
Keynes purchased a trove
: For an excellent, detailed history of Newton's papers, see http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=23.

56
“the last of the Babylonians”
: John Maynard Keynes, “Newton, the Man,” p. 277.

Chapter 10. The Boys' Club

58
New arrivals found places
: Tinniswood,
His Invention So Fertile
, p. 79.

59
“the expansive forces”
: Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift's
Voyage to Laputa
,” in Nicolson,
Science and Imagination
, p. 328.

59
“We put in a snake”
: Lisa Jardine,
Ingenious Pursuits
, p. 114.

60
“A man thrusting in his arm”
: Lisa Jardine,
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
, p. 105. Jardine writes that the unnamed showman with his arm in the pump was “almost certainly Hooke.”

60
one Arthur Coga
: Weld,
History of the Royal Society
, vol. 1, p. 220.

60
a perfect subject
: I owe this insight to Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” p. 376.

61
“to be the Author of new things”
: Boorstin,
The Discoverers
, p. 409, quoting Thomas Sprat,
History of the Royal Society
, (London: 1734), p. 322.

62
“old wood to burn”
: Cohen,
Revolution in Science
, p. 87.

62
“not to discover the new”
: Boorstin,
The Discoverers
, p. 409.

62
In the fourteenth century Oxford
: John Barrow,
Pi in the Sky
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 205.

63
“the hallmark of the narrow-minded”
: Daston and Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature
, p. 61.

63
“For God is certainly called”
: Ibid., p. 39.

63
The “lust to find out”
: William Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 60.

63
“what the Lord keeps secret”
: Ecclesiastes 3:22–23, quoted in Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 60.

64
“If the wisest men”
: Westfall,
Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England
, p. 22.

64
How could anyone draw
: Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
, p. 82.

64
“absorbing
,
classifying
,
and preserving”
: Allan Chapman,
England's Leonardo
:
Robert Hooke and the Seventeenth-Century Scientific Revolution
, p. 40.

65fn
Bacon's zeal for experimentation
: John Aubrey,
Brief Lives
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1982), entry for “Francis Bacon.”

65
Nature must be “put to the torture”
: Ibid., p. 40.

65
dizzy and temporarily deaf
: Jardine,
Ingenious Pursuits
, p. 56.

Chapter 11. To the Barricades!

66
“I swear to you by God's”
: David Berlinski,
Infinite Ascent
, p. 66.

67
“like torches
,
that in the lighting”
: Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 330.

68
“I've known since yesterday”
: Simon Singh,
Big Bang
(New York: Harper, 2004), p. 302. Richard Feynman tells the story in its classic, romantic form in his
Feynman Lectures on Physics
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1963), pp. 3–7, almost as soon as he begins.

68
For decades Hooke argued
: Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 347.

68
“Nothing considerable in that kind”
: Ibid., p. 347.

68
“Do not throw your pearls”
: Paolo Rossi,
The Birth of Modern Science
, p. 18.

69fn
The historian Paolo Rossi
: Rossi,
The Birth of Modern Science
, p. 15.

70
“to improve the knowledge”
: Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature
, p. 348.

70
“not by a glorious pomp”
: Ibid., p. 25, quoting Sprat,
History of the Royal Society
, pp. 62–63.

70
“a close
,
naked
,
natural way”
: Sprat,
History of the Royal Society
, p. 113.

71
“All that I mean”
: Carey,
John Donne
, p. 58.

Chapter 12. Dogs and Rascals

72
“If you would like”
: Rossi,
The Birth of Modern Science
, p. 24.

73 “glacial remoteness”
: The modern physicist is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; the remark comes from a talk he gave in April 1975 at the University of Chicago, titled “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven, or Patterns of Creativity,” available at http://www.sawf.org/newedit/edit02192001/musicarts.asp.

73
Samuel Johnson's remark
: James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
(London: Henry Frowde, 1904), vol. 2, p. 566.

73fn
The esteemed eighteenth-century
: Laplace's despairing admirer was Nathaniel Bowditch, quoted in Dirk Struik,
A Concise History of Mathematics
, p. 135.

73
“baited by little Smatterers”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 459.

74
“the first time that a major”
: Merton,
On the Shoulders of Giants
, p. 11, quoting I. Bernard Cohen,
Franklin and Newton.

75
Hooke denounced his enemies
: Steven Shapin, “Rough Trade,”
London Review of Books
, March 6, 2003, reviewing
The Man Who Knew Too Much
:
The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke
, by Stephen Inwood
.

75
Newton's aim was evidently
: Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 145, and Mordechai Feingold,
The Newtonian Moment
, pp. 23–24.

Chapter 13. A Dose of Poison

76
dissections had been performed
: Terence Hawkes
, London Review of Books
, December 11, 1997, reviewing
Issues of Death
:
Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy
, by Michael Neill.

76
“the culture's preference”
: Ibid.

77
the Quaker James Nayler
: Beer,
Milton
, p. 301.

77
a section titled “Excursions”
: Picard,
Restoration London
. Pepys certainly thought of executions in this casual way. On October 13, 1660, he found himself with some unexpected free time. “I went out to Charing Cross,” Pepys wrote in his diary, “to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.” Within a sentence or two, Pepys went on to report that he'd eaten oysters for dinner.

77
“A man sentenced to this terrible”
: Picard,
Restoration London
, p. 211.