The Clockwork Universe (36 page)

252
“the philosopher's stone that changed”
: Bell,
The Development of Mathematics
, p. 134.

Chapter 42. When the Cable Snaps

254
We find good news
: My discussion here of position, speed, and acceleration draws heavily on Ian Stewart's elegantly written account in
Nature's Numbers
, pp. 50–52.

256
“You can work out distances”
: Stewart,
Nature's Numbers
, p. 15.

257
Proust's “little pieces of paper”
: Marcel Proust,
Swann's Way
, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 51.

257
Of all the ways to fire a cannon
: Paul Nahin,
When Least is Best
, p. 165. Nahin also discusses the physics of shooting a basketball.

258
“as dawn compares to the bright”
: Dunham,
The Calculus Gallery
, p. 19, quoting James Gregory.

Chapter 43. The Best of All Possible Feuds

259
“one of the chief geometers”
: Hall,
Philosophers at War
, p. 111. For any student of the Newton-Leibniz feud, Hall's book is the essential text.

259
“I value my friends”
: Ibid., p. 112.

259
“Taking Mathematicks from the beginning”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 721.

260
“the spectacle of the century”
: Boorstin,
The Discoverers
, p. 413.

261
“round his brains such a thick crust”
: William Henry Wilkins,
The Love of an Uncrowned Queen
:
Sophia Dorothea
,
Consort of George I
(New York: Duffield, 1906), p. 72.

262
“When in good humour Queen Anne”
: Macaulay,
History of England
, vol. 5, p. 190.

262
the king's only cultural interests
: Plumb,
The First Four Georges
, p. 41.

262
The problems rose out of
: The best source for the tangled affairs of the Hanover court is www.gwleibniz.com, a website maintained by the University of Houston philosopher Gregory Brown. See http://www.gwleibniz.com/sophie_dorothea_celle/sophie_dorothea_celle.html.

264
“I dare say
,
” Leibniz wrote
: Gregory Brown, “Personal, Political, and Philosophical Dimensions of the Leibniz
-
Caroline Correspondence,” p. 271.

264
“The king has joked”
: Ibid., p. 292.

265
“perhaps the most famous”
: Ibid., p. 262.

265
The princess scolded her ex-tutor
: Ibid., p. 282.

265
“the great men of our century”
: Quoted at http://www.gwleibniz.com/caro oline_ansbach/caroline.html.

265
“What difference does it make”
: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 282.

Chapter 44. Battle's End

266
“attempted to rob me”
: Cited in Robert Merton's classic essay “Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science,” p. 635. Galileo's charge comes at the very beginning of
The Assayer
.

266
“I certainly should be vexed”
: Merton, “Priorities in Scientific Discovery,” p. 648.

267
“Almost no one is capable”
: Alfred Adler, “Mathematics and Creativity,”
New Yorker
, February 19, 1972.

269
“I throw myself”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 724.

269
“numerous and skilful”
: Ibid., p. 725.

270
“Mr. Leibniz cannot be”
: The entire review is reprinted as an appendix to Hall's
Philosophers at War.
The quoted passage appears on p. 298.

270
It
,
too
,
was written
: Charles C. Gillispie
,
“Isaac Newton,” in
Dictionary of Scientific Biography
(New York: Scribner's, 1970–80), vol. 10.

270
“broke Leibniz' heart”
: William Whiston
, Historical Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr. Samuel Clarke
(London, 1748), p. 132.

Chapter 45. The Apple and the Moon

271
“So few went to hear Him”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 209.

272
“In the year 1666”
: Ibid., p. 154.

272
The story
,
which is the one thing
: Westfall discusses the evidence pro and con in
Never at Rest
, pp. 154–55, and is more inclined than many to give the story some credence.

272
Despite his craving
: Simon Schaffer, “Somewhat Divine,”
London Review of Books
, November 16, 2000, reviewing I. Bernard Cohen's translation of Newton's
Principia.

272
Historians who have scrutinized
: See Cohen's “Introduction” to his translation of the
Principia
, p. 15, and Schaffer, “Somewhat Divine.”

273
“I began to think”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 143.

275
By combining Kepler's third law
: I. Bernard Cohen, “Newton's Third Law and Universal Gravity,” p. 572.

277
“compared the force required”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 143.

Chapter 46. A Visit to Cambridge

279
In crowded rooms thick
: Steven Shapin, “At the Amsterdam,”
London Review of Books
, April 20, 2006, reviewing
The Social Life of Coffee
by Brian Cowan. See also Mark Girouard,
Cities and People
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 207.

279
Wren
,
still more skilled
,
confessed
: Merton, “Priorities in Scientific Discovery,” p. 636.

279
“Mr. Hook said that he had it”
: Roche, “Newton's
Principia
,” in Fauvel et al., eds.,
Let Newton Be!
, p. 58.

280
taverns with Peter the Great
: Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 318.

280
he would invent a diving bell
: Alan Cook,
Edmond Halley
:
Charting the Heavens and the Seas
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 11, 140–41, 281.

280
“Sir Isaac replied immediately”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 403.

Chapter 47. Newton Bears Down

282fn
The statement
if a planet
:
Bruce Pourciau, “Reading the Master: Newton and the Birth of Celestial Mechanics,” and Curtis Wilson, “Newton's Orbit Problem.”

283
Albert Einstein kept a picture
: Dudley Herschbach, “Einstein as a Student,” available at http://tinyurl.com/yjptcq8.

283
“Nature to him”
: This was from Einstein's foreword to a new edition of Newton's
Opticks
, published in 1931.

283
“Now I am upon”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 405.

283
“I never knew him take”
: Ibid., p. 192.

284
“When he has sometimes taken”
: Ibid., p. 406.

284
If everything attracted everything
: Kuhn,
The Copernican Revolution
, p. 258.

285
“To do this business right”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 409.

285
“That all these problems”
: Chandrasekhar, “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven.”

287
“swallowed up and lost”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 456.

Chapter 48. Trouble with Mr. Hooke

288
“a nice man to deal with”
: Henry Richard Fox Bourne,
The Life of John Locke
, vol. 2 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1876), p. 514.

289
“There is one thing more”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 446.

289
“Mr Hook seems to expect”
: Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 154.

289
“He has done nothing”
: Ibid., p. 155.

289
“Philosophy [i.e.
,
science] is such”
: Ibid., p. 155.

290
He never replied to Hooke's letter
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, pp. 387–88.

290
Newton had designed a telescope
: Ibid., p. 233.

291
“poore & solitary endeavours”
: Ibid., p. 237.

291
“the oddest
,
if not the most considerable”
: Ibid., p. 237.

292
“Now is not this very fine”
: Ibid., p. 448.

292
Hooke stalked out of the room
: Manuel,
A Portrait of Isaac Newton
, p. 159.

292
Even twenty years after
: Ibid., p. 137.

292
In the course of the move
: Christianson,
Isaac Newton
, p. 106.

Chapter 49. The System of the World

293
“I must now again beg you”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 450.

294
If the universe had been governed by a different law
: Martin Rees,
Just Six Numbers
, p. 150
.
See also Schaffer, “Somewhat Divine.”

295
“Pick a flower on Earth”
: Dirac may have had in mind a line from Francis Thompson's poem “The Mistress of Vision,” where Thompson writes that “thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.” The same thought had moved Edgar Allan Poe to shake his head at the audacity of Newton's theory of cosmic connectedness. “If I venture to displace, by even the billionth part of an inch, the microscopical speck of dust which lies now upon the point of my finger,” Poe marveled in his essay “Eureka,” “ . . . I have done a deed which shakes the Moon in her path, which causes the Sun to be no longer the Sun, and which alters forever the destiny of the multitudinous myriads of stars that roll and glow in the majestic presence of their Creator.”

295
The
Principia
made its first appearance
: Samuel Pepys was president of the Royal Society in 1687, and his name appears on the title page just below Newton's.

296
“Nearer the gods no mortal may approach”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 437.

296
the French astronomer Lagrange declared
: Morris Kline,
Mathematics in Western Culture
, p. 209.

296
It began paying Halley
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 453.

Chapter 50. Only Three People

297
“There goes the man that writt a book”
: Ibid., p. 468.

297
The first print run was tiny
: Ackroyd,
Newton
, p. 89.

297
“It is doubtful
,
” wrote the historian
: Gillispie,
The Edge of Objectivity
, p. 140.

297
Perhaps half a dozen scientists
: Hall,
Philosophers at War
, p. 52.

298
“A Book for 12 Wise Men”
: “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,”
New York Times
, November 9, 1919, p. 17. See http://tinyurl.com/ygpam73.

298
“I'm trying to think who”
: Stephen Hawking,
A Brief History of Time
(New York: Bantam, 1998), p. 85.

298
But he rarely mentions calculus
: I. Bernard Cohen discusses in detail Newton's use of calculus in the “Introduction” to his translation of the
Principia
, pp. 122–27.

298 “
Newton's geometry seems to shriek”
: Roche, “Newton's
Principia
,” in Fauvel et al., eds.,
Let Newton Be
!, p. 50.

299
“By the help of the new Analysis”
: Westfall,
Never at Rest
, p. 424.

299
“There is no letter”
: Cohen, “Introduction,” p. 123.

300
“As we read the
Principia”
:
Chandrasekhar, “Shakespeare, Newton, and Beethoven.”

Chapter 51. Just Crazy Enough

301
Molière long ago made fun
: Thomas Kuhn famously cited Molière in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, p. 104.

302
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy”
: Bohr made the remark to Wolfgang Pauli and added, “My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.” Dael Wolfle, ed.,
Symposium on Basic Research
(Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1959), p. 66.

302fn
In time
,
this bewilderment
: J. J. MacIntosh, “Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God's Existence,” p. 196.

303
“He claims that a body attracts”
: Brown, “Leibniz-Caroline Correspondence,” p. 273.

303
“Mysterious though it was”
: John Henry, “Pray do not Ascribe that Notion to me: God and Newton's Gravity,” in Force and Popkin, eds.,
The Books of Nature and Scripture
, p. 141.