Fun Fact of the Week: Newton: A lost Reedie?
“Nearer the gods no mortal may approach” - Edmond Halley on Newton’s Principia
Isaac Newton: the guy you have to thank for being able to major in theoretical physics and expect to make money. Newton: the guy you have to thank for needing to take Math 111. Newton: the guy who stabbed himself in the eye out of curiosity. Newton: the absolute whack job that nobody seems to know the full story of. So let’s take a moment to learn about this strange English fellow, and all of the strange (some might even say quirky) things which made him a strikingly strong candidate for admittance into Reed.
Beginning at the beginning, Newton had a backstory befitting a superhero. His father, a farm owner in rural England, died before Isaac was born prematurely on Christmas Day. His mother did not necessarily have high hopes for him to survive childhood, owing to his miniscule size at birth, but he began life by surpassing expectations and growing up anyways. Unfortunately, his mother remarried a reverend, and made the decision to send young Isaac to live with his grandmother. Although Isaac was still within sight of his old home, he still felt a separation from his mother, and slight resentment toward his stepfather. Later in life, he recalled how brooding and scheming he felt in his childhood, saying how he had been “wishing death and hoping it to some.”
As he grew up, it became clear that Isaac had a very bright and curious mind, making him perhaps not best suited to life on the farm. Prone to ‘zoning out,’ he was inattentive enough to let flocks of sheep and horses wander away. In a very cinematic fashion, he was known to stare intensely at nothing in particular as he recessed into his mind. Although he was “far too fey to help out reliably on the farm” (Ferris), he did have a knack for the construction of sundials and other small devices. On at least one occasion, he constructed a hot air balloon (candles underneath a wax paper canopy on a wooden frame) and sent it flying up through town, much to the surprise of the general peasantry.
Of course, this Newton fellow had the intellectual potential of an anime character, but refused to apply himself in school. He typically did terribly in the first half of the semester, then would cram like mad and end up excelling to the top of the class in the last part of the year. His reputation caused some friction with his peers. As they described, “he was fit for nothing but the ‘versity,” and they were happy to see him off when the time came.
Upon attending Cambridge, the true Reedie nature of Newton began to show. He frequently wandered the grounds and gardens alone (they didn’t have a Canyon). Maxing out on pretentiousness, he was not exactly a popular fellow and instead found his friends in books. He was quoted as saying (originally in Latin, of course), “Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.” He thrived as an undergraduate in the study of rather strange subjects (Reedie much?), such as universal languages, perpetual motion machines, and optics (yes, he did stab himself in the eye with a needle to figure out how they worked). He graduated in 1655, although he refused to publish his works. After Newton’s graduation, his favorite math professor evidently suffered a midlife crisis and switched to the field of theology, before dying of an opium overdose seven years later.
While doing research at Cambridge, Newton carried on his quirky behavior. In typical Reedie fashion, he frequently demolished his sleep schedule in pursuit of his work. He would eat the leftovers of his dinner for breakfast after pulling all nighters, and once forgot that he had guests after leaving the room to get a bottle of wine. He was found some time later, hunched over his work. He was certainly not alone in these eccentricities; apparently the headmaster kept large spiders in his room as pets.
In terms of his interactions with others, he sometimes gave lectures to students and faculty, although he was a terrible presenter, seeing as nobody could follow his train of thought, and eventually people stopped showing up. This made Newton quite content. He said, “I study to decline [acquaintance].” For this reason, he also refused to publish much of his work. He understood fully the drastic ramifications of his findings, but he simply didn’t want the attention.
Shortly after completing his bachelor's degree, the university closed due to plague. While at his childhood home, he developed much of the pinnacle of his work, including a working method of calculus, and his theory of universal gravitation (and what did you do over COVID-19?). It was from Newton’s own mouth that we got the story of the apple falling from the tree, although he only claimed to have seen it fall from the window. He then made the leap and realized that the same force which pulled on the apple also pulled on objects previously thought to be in a separate plane of existence, at least according to Aristotle. Newton still declined to publish his work. The series of events which caused him to finally publish his findings is as follows…
Picture this: Christopher Wren, once president of the Royal Society, architect of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and generally a wicked smart guy, comes to his two friends with a problem. He is sure that Johannes Kepler’s discovery that planets move in elliptical orbits was derived from the fact that the force due to gravity is proportional to the inverse square of distance, but he can’t prove it mathematically. Robert Hooke asserted that he had a proof, but didn’t want to share it so that others could work on the problem themselves to appreciate how hard it was, and, thus, how impressive it was that Hooke had solved it. Wren offered a prize (a 40 shilling book) to whoever could produce this mathematical proof. Two months later, Hooke failed to produce the proof. Edmond Halley, the 27 year old mathematical prodigy, was also interested in the topic, gave it a crack, but could not solve it. So, having bested three of the greatest minds 1680s England had to offer, he turned to Newton.
As it turns out, Hooke had written Newton a letter years earlier on the problem, and Newton, obviously feeling like he had better things to do, mindlessly scribbled out the proof and sent it off. Hooke discovered a mathematical error in his work, and did the equivalent of invalidating an argument on the basis of bad grammar. Newton, furious at himself and Hooke, corrected himself, but refused to send the papers off, and kept them to himself.
After the reward was announced, Halley paid Newton a visit at Cambridge. Halley asked to see Newton’s work on the subject, and waited impatiently as Newton tossed aside papers on telescope optics, alchemy (Newton most likely died from mercury poisoning), translations of the Book of Revelation, and efforts to determine the floor plan of the temple of Jerusalem and disprove the theory of the Trinity. Newton was “unable” to produce the papers, and Halley left dejectedly. Newton had realized that even his corrected proof still contained errors in it, refused to be snubbed by his colleagues again, and began working on the problem anew. Eventually, he fully derived all three of Kepler’s laws from the inverse law of gravitation, and sent them off to Halley. Halley realized how groundbreaking this was and convinced the extremely reluctant Newton to finally publish a book.
Ever the perfectionist, Newton became obsessed with this book, his Principia, and spent the next few years wandering the gardens more and drawing geometry in the gravel with sticks, before coming to a revelation and running back to his room. He was known to have been so possessed by the desire to write that he didn’t even bother to sit down first.
The book was published in 1686 (even after the setback of claims from Hooke that Newton had stolen his theories), and laid the foundation for the banishment of Aristotelian principles on the physical mechanics of the world. Indeed, Newton believed that he had found evidence for God in the perfect uniform simplicity of the laws he discovered. Regardless of how close Newton had come to divinity, I’m sure that the boys back home in Lincolnshire were thoroughly peeved that they now had to adjust to a life post-gravity, where they could no longer simply float from place to place.
Sourced mostly from Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris. If you have a fun fact or topic that you would like to be brought to light, email me at qhoop@reed.edu!