Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

1643–1727

Newton, engraved after the antique manner, with prism and reflecting telescope. He gave the world its gravity, its spectrum, and a great deal of unpublished theology.

Born	4 January 1643 [O.S. 25 December 1642]
Died	31 March 1727 [O.S. 20 March 1727]
Occupation	Natural philosopher; mathematician; Master of the Mint
Known for	The Principia; universal gravitation; the calculus; the spectrum of light
Less advertised	Alchemy; biblical chronology; anti-Trinitarian theology

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was an English natural philosopher and mathematician, whose Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, and accomplished the first great unification in physics: the demonstration that the fall of an apple and the orbit of the Moon obey one rule.^[1] He shares the invention of the calculus with Leibniz, by way of a long and bitter priority dispute; he established, with a prism, that white light is a mixture of colours; he built the first reflecting telescope; and he presided over the Royal Society and the Royal Mint.

He appears in this encyclopedia for two reasons of unequal dignity.^[2] The first is his optics: the prism that separates white light into the spectrum is a demonstration of refraction, the very phenomenon the reluctant-light tradition exists to deny. The second is his gravity, which the flat-Earth doctrine has never accepted, preferring that heavy things fall because they are heavy, and resenting Newton for complicating the matter with a force.

Gravitation, and the resentment of it

Universal gravitation holds that every mass attracts every other, and that this single force governs the apple, the tide, the Moon, and the planets.^[3] It is the most successful idea in the history of physics, and the least welcome in the cosmologies this encyclopedia documents, which require a flat and stationary Earth and have no use for a force that would pull it into a ball. The doctrine of whole-radian geometry and the broadsheets of Samuel Rowbotham alike dispense with gravity and explain falling by density alone—heavy things sink, light things rise, and nothing reaches across empty space to anything.

Newton himself was uneasy about the reaching-across, action at a distance striking him as occult, and he famously declined to explain its cause—"hypotheses non fingo," I feign no hypotheses. The flat tradition has mistaken this caution for an opening, as though a man uncertain how gravity works had thereby conceded it does not.^[3]

Light and the aether

Newton's Opticks (1704) reported the prism experiments: white light is not modified by the glass but separated by it, each colour bent through its own angle.^[4] This is refraction, plainly shown, two centuries before Aird would deny that starlight bends at all. Newton held light to be a stream of corpuscles rather than a wave; but he also, in his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, proposed an aethereal medium filling space, before setting it aside in favour of forces. Even Newton, that is, kept an aether for a while—a fact the Aetheric Concord would have treasured, had its reading extended that far back.

Alchemy and the chronology

A great part of Newton's effort, and the part his admirers tidy away, went to alchemy and to theology.^[5] He wrote at enormous length on the transmutation of metals and on the chronology of ancient kingdoms, computed dates for the events of scripture, and privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a corruption—a heresy he was careful, holding a Cambridge chair, not to publish. The economist Keynes, who acquired a trove of the papers, called him "the last of the magicians" rather than the first of the scientists. The encyclopedia, whose whole business is men who were partly right and wholly serious, finds this the most companionable thing about him.

Legacy

Newton's mechanics governed physics until Einstein, and governs most of it still, bridges and planets being non-relativistic.^[1] His gravitation cemented the heliocentric, spherical, moving Earth that this encyclopedia's subjects spent the following centuries declining to inhabit; his optics established the refraction they declined to see. He is, in short, the founder of nearly everything they are against, and the author, in his spare time, of nearly as much that they might have enjoyed.

See also

• Reluctant light — the doctrine his prism refutes
• Celestial refraction — the real bending of starlight his optics established
• Albert Einstein — who superseded his mechanics
• Johannes Kepler — whose laws his gravitation explained
• Luminiferous aether — which even Newton kept, briefly
• Whole-radian geometry — which dispenses with his gravity
• Earth — the oblate spheroid he predicted from its spin

References

1. ^ Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687); the three laws and universal gravitation. His mechanics held until, and beneath the speed of light still holds against, Einstein.
2. ^ Dates given New Style (Gregorian); Newton was born, by the Old Style calendar then used in England, on Christmas Day 1642. The discrepancy is real and a frequent source of confusion, which this encyclopedia, a connoisseur of such, notes with pleasure.
3. ^ On gravitation and "action at a distance," and Newton's hypotheses non fingo; on the flat tradition's preference for density over force, see Samuel Rowbotham and whole-radian geometry.
4. ^ Newton, Opticks (1704); the prism separates white light by refraction. The corpuscular theory, and the aethereal medium of the 1675 Hypothesis of Light, are both his. Cf. celestial refraction.
5. ^ On the alchemy, the biblical chronology, and the anti-Trinitarian theology, most unpublished in his lifetime; Keynes's phrase "the last of the magicians" is from his 1946 essay on the Newton papers.

External links

• Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) — the first edition, scanned
• Opticks (1704) — the first edition, scanned
• The Newton Project — his theological and alchemical manuscripts