The Newtonian Scientific Revolution, Bernard Cohen

The Newtonian Scientific Revolution and Its Intellectual Significance Author(s): I.
Bernard Cohen Source: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Dec., 1987), pp. 16-42 Published by: American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3823825 . Accessed: 10/06/2013 00:13
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Stated Meeting Report

The Newtonian Scientific Revolution And Its Intellectual Significance I. Bernard Cohen When the Constitution of the United States was under discussion, a public dispute arose between Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. The dispute centered on the question of whether or not there should be a unicameral Congress, consisting merely of a House of Representatives, or a bicameral Congress with both a House of Representatives and a Senate. The chief point of the argument was whether the will of the electorate should be directly expressed in policy and action according to its changing moods, as in the case of a directly elected unicameral legislature. There were many who argued for a restraining force in the form of a Senate, appointed by the governors and legislatures of the several states. This legislative debate is not my subject here. The only aspect that is of concern to me is the form of the argument of John Adams, who believed that there should be two houses of Congress, much as we have today. In his formal presentation Adams argued that the bicameral system was the only one that conformed with Isaac Newton's third law of motion, that "to every Action there is always opposed an equal Reaction." In any other case, he argued, there can be no equilibrium, no rest. It is perhaps of less significance that John Adams didn't correctly understand the sense of the third law of Newton than that he should have invoked it at all in order to make a political point. He defended his preferred form of the constitution by drawing on the principles of science established by Isaac Newton. Who was this man, Isaac Newton? What was the nature of the revolution that he produced in science? In what sense was the 16
revolution so profound that a century later it figured prominently in political thought? We get some measure of Isaac Newton's greatness when we learn that he was the author of not only one, but at least twoand maybe even three or four-great revolutions. One was in mathematics and the others in physical sciences. In fact, Newton made so many different kinds of fundamental contributions to science that even if we were to ignore most of them, we would still have to rank him as one of the ten or twelve greatest scientists who ever lived. Isaac Newton was born in 1642, within the very year of the death of Galileo and only about a quarter of a century after the death of Shakespeare. He died in 1727, an old man in his eighties, about fifty years before the Declaration of Independence and the birth of our nation. Newton was a solitary man, a real "loner." He was born prematurely; his father (also an Isaac Newton) had died shortly before our Newton was born. He was so small at birth, he later said, that he could be put into a quart mug. His neck was so weak that it was feared his head might snap off; they tied him to a bolster, head and body, to try to keep him alive. When he was about a year and a half old, his mother remarried and left him in the care of an aged grandmother. He grew up in his early years deprived of knowledge of a father and without immediate motherly love. This was a terrible time in England: the years of the Civil War. Roundhead soldiers came roughshod into the house because his grandmother was suspected of royalist tendencies. They threw furniture out of the window and beat up the servants. It must have been a frightening life for a young lad with no friends, with no one truly to love him. When Newton was sent to school, he was at first an indifferent student. He himself has told an engaging story of how he became a scholar. The occasion was the action of a bully in the school who used to beat up on 17
him. Young Newton so hated this humiliating physical pain that he practiced until he was able to take on the bully and fight him. He overcame the bully and was able to rub his nose in the dirt, as they did then in token of victory. But Newton apparently discovered that his was only a Pyrrhic victory: the bully was the number one boy in the school. So Newton decided he would try to beat him in academic work, to become a better scholar. Young Newton was absent-minded. When his stepfather died, his mother came back to the family farm and tried to make a farmer of her son. But his mind was "in the clouds," and it soon became all too evident that he could never be successful at practical farming. One story, told by a neighbor, relates that young Newton, perhaps a lad of sixteen or so, was once asked to lead a horse to market. When he got there the neighbor asked him why he was walking along with a halter in his hand. Newton looked around and saw there was no horse attached to the halter. Newton's family became aware that he wouldn't make a successful farmer. They decided that the only thing to do with someone so far removed from the world of reality was to send him to the university. They would have him become a preacher. Going to the university was a real step forward; R.S. Westfall has pointed out that so low was the level of education of Newton's forebears that "before 1642, no Newton in Isaac's branch of the family had been able to sign his own name." Apparently, according to Newton's contemporaneous biographer William Stukeley, it was the Reverend William Ayscough-the brother of Newton's mother, himself a Cambridge man (M.A. 1637) and a Trinity man to boot-who persuaded Newton's mother to send him to Cambridge and to Trinity. After graduation, Newton stayed on in the university. Many did so in those days. Evidently he didn't want to return home; the farm held no attraction for him. Then the great plague swept over England and the 18
university was closed. This young man, in his early twenties, just barely out of college, went home to the family farm. In the course of the next year and a half, not many years older than our college graduates of today, Newton laid the foundation for his great career in science and mathematics. He discovered the principles of the differential and integral calculus and became one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. I belong to that group of scholars who see in Newton's mathematical work the highest expression of his genius. Some measure of his extraordinary mathematical prowess may be gained from the fact that in some eighteen to twentyfour months he mastered all of the mathematics of his day and began to make his own great contributions. It was at this time that Newton performed the renowned series of experiments in optics that first brought his name to the attention of the international world of science. He made a hole in a window-shutter, so as to admit a narrow beam of sunlight into a dark room. When he caused the light to pass through a triangular glass prism, he observed the way in which the sunlight is broken up into a continuous band of colors, which is called a continuous spectrum. Newton soon advanced far beyond the mere production of a colored spectrum. He began to wonder what causes the sunlight to change into light of so many different colors. Is it the effect of the prism? That is, does the prism "produce" the colors? Or are the colors in the light? Newton came to conceive of sunlight (or any incandescent light) as a mixture of light of all colors, or-as he put it-a mixture of all kinds of color-producing lights. The refraction (or the bending of the light) by the prism, or the changing of the direction of the path of light, as he found by careful measurement, is of a different amount for each of the colors in the mixture. Each color has its own unique degree of bending or refraction as it goes from air into glass. Newton conceived that the prism produces the spectrum
19
by separating the component colors that are mixed in sunlight, a separation that is caused by the differential bending of the colors that make up sunlight. Newton relates that it occurred to him that there could be an "experimentum crucis," an experiment of the crossroads, to test his conception. That is, he devised an experiment which might tell him whether the logical path he had picked was the right one, whether his theory was right or wrong. In this "experimentum crucis," he let a spectrum be formed. Then he took a board with a hole (or aperture) cut in it so that he could select from the spectrum a beam of light of only one color, say green or orange. He then passed this single-colored light through a second prism in order to see what would happen. If it was the action of the prism that produced the colors in the spectrum, then the second prism would cause a spectrum to be formed from the green light. But if the prism merely bent the light, as he had theorized, then the green light would be bent (refracted)but would remain pure green. When Newton performed this experiment, he found that the green light was bent by the second prism and that the light did indeed stay pure green. He tried the same experiment for orange and blue, for each of the colors. In every case the single-colored (monochromatic) light was bent (refracted) by the second prism, but its color was unaltered. with Furthermore, his measurements monochromatic light showed that the amount of bending was different for each color, a result consistent with his guess that the prism separates the colored lights in sunlight by a process of differential refraction. In this way Newton proved that the action of the prism is merely to bend the light or refract it, that the bending is different for each of the colors, and that sunlight is a mixtrue of light of all colors. This was a phenomenal discovery. Newton's discovery tells us the reason why red garments appear to be red when illuminated by sunlight or by 20
the light of an incandescent bulb. The sun and such electric lights give out light of all colors, but the pigment (the dye in the cloth) absorbs all the colors except red, which it reflects and sends back to our eyes. If we illuminated those same red garments with blue light, they would look murky brown or blackish. Gold leaf looks golden because it reflects the part of the sunlight or incandescent light which is yellow and absorbs or transmits the other colors. Newton's discoveries concerning light and Transcolor were published in the Philosophical actions of the Royal Society in 1672. This landmark paper has claim to many "firsts." It was the first published paper by Isaac Newton; it was the first announcement of the modern theory of color; it was the first major scientific discovery to be presented in an article in a scientific journal-setting the pattern for science for all the years to come. The materials in this communication were embodied in the beginning of Newton's Opticks (published in London many decades later, in 1704). The Optickscontained much more: experimental studies and analyses of a variety of phenomena which we would classify under the rubric of diffraction, including the celebrated phenomenon we know by the name of Newton's rings. The first edition concluded with a set of sixteen Queries, a number increased to twenty-three in the Latin edition of 1704 and increased further to thirty-one in the second English edition of 1717/18-Queries which came to embrace not merely optical problems but the structure and properties of matter, chemical reactions and the composition of bodies, the nature of radiant heat, electrical phenomena, the cause and mode of operation of the force of gravity, the methods of proceeding in natural philosophy, and even questions of morals. Whereas the Principiawas written in Latin in an austere mathematical style, the Opticks appeared in English and was a delight to read. Small wonder that it engendered a scientific tradition different from that of the Principia. 21
Above all, Newton's discoveries about light were esteemed because of their paradigmatic value in showing the optimal way in which the phenomena of nature can be explored by science. Newton's optical discoveries provided a brilliant example of experimental inquiry: the new mode of studying the phenomena of nature. The pioneers in this new way of doing science were Galileo, Harvey, Boyle, and Newton himself. As a result of their work, experimental inquiry became recognized as the key to a great scientific revolution. This new way to discover knowledge was not confined to direct experiments, however, since it was recognized that some subjects could be studied only by making critical observations. Newton's experimental disciples came to include Benjamin Franklin and AntoineLaurent Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Newton's discovery of the nature of light and color was hailed as being particularly significant because it didn't use complicated, complex, or expensive apparatus, but relied upon a simple device-a prism-and the creative imagination of a single individual. Newton's experimental career illustrates a major facet of the scientific revolution. Knowledge is to be based upon the senses: on what any man or woman can see or hear or touch or smell, on what can be learned by experiment and critical observation. Science progresses by direct interrogation of nature and not on the statements of learned authorities. The doctrine that sound knowledge of nature should be based only on nature and the exercise of man's reason carried the implication that what mattered in the search for knowledge was how to use one's mind, that is, to know and to use the correct method. The establishment of the new experimentbased science was a stunning victory for the intellect, a great force of democratization, dealing a death-blow to hierarchy. Now a mere youth could perform experiments that 22
could either confound or confute the opinions of his or her elders or confirm the truths of nature. Pupils skilled in the method of science could now speak with as much authority as teachers and great "masters" had done in former times. What revolution could have been greater? Newton was part of this great revolution. But he recognized additionally that significant scientific discoveries should be of use. Thus he made a very practical application of his findings about light and color and the optical properties of prisms. To understand Newton's procedure, consider the action of a lens. We may think of a lens (thick at the center and thin at the edges) as if it were a pair of prisms base-to-base. Each prism or each half of the lens acts to produce a spectrum; therefore, an image produced by a lens has colored fringes, a phenomenon we call chromatic aberration. Because this chromatic aberration makes the image fuzzy, Newton sought a way to improve telescopes that would not use lenses. He devised a reflecting telescope, using a magnifying mirror. He did not envisage the possibility that a combination of lenses made of different glass might produce an image free of chromatic aberration. Newton actually constructed a small telescope of this kind, which was taken from Cambridge to London, where it was demonstrated to the Royal Society. The Fellows of the Society (as the members were called) applauded Newton's invention, and they elected Newton a Fellow of the Royal Society. When he wrote to thank them, he asked when the Society would meet. He wanted to send them his account of the discovery which inspired the telescope and which he called "the oddest if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of nature." The account of his experiments and of the conclusions he drew from them were published in the journal of the Royal Society. Newton waited for the applause of his fellow-scientists. But scientists, 23
like other people, tend often to be jealous and small-minded. The letters that were sent in to the editor did not commend Newton for his ingenious experiments and conclusions; rather, they introduced objections about one point or another. Newton patiently answered each one. Eventually, this arguing became so tedious that Newton resolved he would never again publish his discoveries, in order to avoid arguments of this kind. "Philosophy" (or science), he wrote, is "such an impertinently litigious lady," one who invites or demands arguments or quarrels, that it would be better to let his discoveries come out after his death than to have to spend the days of his life defending them. And so Newton became a confirmed kind of recluse in the university. In his early days as a Fellow of Trinity, he was aware that within seven years, if he wished to continue on the staff as a Fellow, he would be required to take holy orders in the Anglican Church. Could he do so in all conscience? To find out he undertook what was to become a lifelong study of religion and theology. He was soon convinced that he wasn't a strict Trinitarian; he was more like what we would call today a Unitarian. He couldn't in conscience be ordained. The regulations wouldn't allow him to remain a Fellow unless ordained. But he did stay on in the university. He became Lucasian professor of mathematics when Isaac Barrow, his predecessor in that chair, resigned it in favor of the brilliant younger man; now, probably through Isaac Barrow's influence, the Lucasian professor was granted a special royal dispensation by which he was permitted to keep his fellowship without taking holy orders. Newton was at liberty to continue his solitary intellectual work. As a professor, Newton lectured on various topics in mathematics, on optics, on dynamics, and on celestial mechanics. He also worked on problems of chronology. Newton devised methods, for example, of dating events of the past by trying to find astronom24
ical allusions and then using his knowledge of precession to discover when these particular heavenly appearances would have occurred. In particular, he became concerned with church history and with comparative or of ancient synchronized chronologies kingdoms. Another topic of concern to Newton during these years was the "corruption" of Scripture. He attempted to find out which parts of Holy Writ were the ancient or original texts and which were later accretions or emendations and sought for "scientific" standards by means of which to distinguish the two. Newton also studied and wrote about church history. Much of his intellectual effort was expended on a study of the prophetic books of the Bible: the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. He believed there was a secret language of prophecy. If only he could find out the key to that language, he would understand the prophecy he assumed God must have concealed in the text of Holy Writ. Newton was fully convinced that in this way he could find a key to the ultimate fate, purpose, or destiny of the universe. Newton's deep concern with prophecy remained an abiding passion of his intellectual life. Newton was deeply interested in problems of matter, which led him to the topics of alchemy and chemistry. He spent many hours of study and experiment on alchemy. Alchemy was a subject whose main concern was to master the properties of matter so completely and deeply as ultimately to gain the ability or power to transmute one element into another. In Newton's day, many people believed matter to be made up of primordial or ultimate particles. Hence if a scientist could find a way to break into these primordial components and then recombine them, he should be able to change one kind of matter into another. We know today, of course, that the methods explored by Newton, Boyle, Locke, and other students of alchemy could not ever have produced the desired transfor25
mation. Yet we are all too aware today that such transmutations are in fact possible. We produce them in our laboratories regularly. Who does not know that by radioactive disintegration nature is busy transmuting one chemical element into another all the time? We are not surprised to find that Newton was no ordinary student of alchemy; unlike the others, he attempted to introduce precision and quantitative considerations into alchemical theory, so as to make this subject ultimately an exact science like astronomy and physics. During the years of Newton's tenure of the Lucasian professorship, many men of science were concerned about the physics of the universe. A main research task was to find out what kind of force or forces-if anymay hold our solar system together. What kind of force must there be to keep the planets moving in orbit around the sun? What keeps moons or satellites moving in orbits around their respective planets as in the case of Saturn, the earth, or Jupiter? These questions were at the center of a scientific correspondence that began in 1679 between Robert Hooke in London and Isaac Newton in Cambridge. Hooke was one of those who had earlier most strongly challenged Newton's theory of light. Now, he had just been appointed Secretary of the Royal Society. He wrote to Newton saying, in effect, let bygones be bygones. Let us, he suggested, explore questions of science together. During their exchange of letters, Hooke taught Newton what was for him a new principle for analyzing motion. Newton knew that if a body could move freely, without any resistance or without any force acting on it, it would tend to go off in a straight line. That's the principle of inertia. Newton had learned this principle from reading Descartes. When a body moves in orbit, however, it doesn't fly off in a straight line; it constantly falls in toward the center. We would say that 26
the body stays on the curve because the rate of falling is of just such a magnitude that the falling away from a tangential inertial path and consequent descent toward a center keeps it on the curve. If it fell any faster it would get inside its curved orbit and spiral closer and closer to the center. Conversely, if it fell more slowly, it would spiral out in an ever increasing orbit. Hooke made it clear to Newton that the way to study a planet's orbit is to break up the motion into two parts. One is the linear inertial motion, out along a tangent to the curve; the other is an accelerated motion of falling inward toward the sun. Newton himself had not hit upon this mode of analysis; presumably he had been led astray by concentrating on the misleading concept of "centrifugal" force. Hooke, however, despite the brilliance of his physicomathematical intuition, was not sufficiently skilled in mathematics to carry out the consequences of his own ideas. There can be no doubt that Newton was very much impressed by Hooke's mode of analysis. In one of his letters, he freely confessed to Hooke that he had not ever heard of it until then. In his own private papers, Newton began to work out the consequences of what he had learned from Hooke. Before long he discovered that Kepler's law of areas for the planets had the physical significance that there must be a force directed toward the sun, a force that regulates but does not cause the motions of each of the planets. There is a similar force directed toward each planet that regulates the motion of its satellites. Before long, Newton found the physical meaning of the law of elliptical orbits, also discovered by Kepler. This law, Newton discovered, implies that the force in question varies inversely (or reciprocally) as the square of the distance. When we say that the force varies inversely as the square of the distance, we mean that if the distance is doubled, the force is not onehalf of the original but one-quarter (one over two-times-two or one over two-squared). If we 27
triple the distance, go to a point three times as far away, the force is not a third but a ninth. Once having found his law of force, Newton-being secretive by nature and having evidently been hurt by that earlier controversy-told no one about his great discovery. Then in 1684, about four years later, the veil of secrecy was broken. It happened that at the Royal Society of London, the leading scientific society of the world, there was great concern about the question of elliptical orbits and the law of areas. Three who were particularly exercised about the question were the astronomer Edmond Halley, famous for the comet named after him; Christopher Wren, the celebrated architect, who was also a geometer and physicist, an astronomer, and a pioneer in biological experimentation; and Robert Hooke. None of the three saw how to solve the problem. Then Halley thought of the great mathematician in Cambridge. Surely, if anyone could solve this problem, Newton would be the one. He decided he would pay Newton a visit to see if he could get him to work on the law of force. We have a record of his subsequent conversation with Newton. He apparently asked Newton what the orbit of planets would be under an inverse-squarelaw of force. Newton replied, "An ellipse." When Halley then asked Newton how he knew this, Newton is recorded as having replied, "I have calculated it." Halley, quite naturally, asked Newton whether he might see the calculations. But Newton couldn't find them. He promised, however, that he would keep on looking. In the end he had to reconstruct his work. Eventually he wrote up his results and sent them to Halley in London. Halley was so impressed that he rushed back to Cambridge. He told Newton how important this work was. He begged Newton to write up his work more fully so that it could be recorded at the Royal Society. He 28
wanted Newton to have proof of his priority in the great discovery. Newton did just that. As he began to work on the problem, he was led from one topic to another. Eventually, he developed his ideas fully into a book. In this creative process, he altered his original concepts and made one of the greatest creative leaps forward ever recorded in the history of science. Let me try to present Newton's bold invention as simply as possible. Newton had been studying the force with which the sun pulls on the earth, or any other planet, so as to make it keep falling. The result of the action of such a force is that each planet moves in a curved orbit around the sun rather than flying off in a straight line. Eventually, it occurred to Newton that if the sun pulls on the earth, then-according to the law of action and reaction, which we have encountered in relation to John Adams and the Constitution-the earth must also pull on the sun. The same would be true for the sun and Mars or Jupiter or any of the planets. Each of the planets is pulled on by the sun; hence, by the law of action and reaction, each in turn pulls on thesun. This means that each planet, say earth or Mars, is both a center or activator of the pulling force and a body on which the pulling force acts. If each planet has that dual role, then each planet must both pull on all the other planets and be pulled by all of them. Newton concluded that it isn't just the sun that pulls on the planets; the planets also pull on one another. This conclusion, which Newton reached in late 1684, was astonishing. Newton wondered if it was true. Fortunately, an experimental test was possible. In those years, the planet Saturn was moving in orbit rather near the planet Jupiter. Jupiter is the most massive planet in the solar system; its mass is greater than that of all the other planets added together. The second most massive planet is Saturn. It occurred to Newton that if Jupiter does pull on Saturn, there ought to be some 29
observable evidence of the slowing down of Saturn after it passes by Jupiter. Accordingly Newton wrote a letter to the "Astronomer Royal," John Flamsteed, for information on a possible alteration of Saturn's motion as an effect of Jupiter's action. Flamsteed found that this change was indeed discernible and was of the order of magnitude that would be expected from Newton's imaginative conclusion. A stage in reasoning about this pulling force is to shift attention from planets to their moons. If the earth and the planets pull on one another, or are activators of the pulling force, then the earth and the planets must also pull on their respective moons. Newton used this conclusion in a boldly imagined test to see if the earth does indeed have such a pulling power. Is this pulling power the same as "gravity," the force that on earth is the cause of common weight? His test made use of the well-known fact that on the earth's surface (one earth-radius from the earth's center) a freely falling body has a downward acceleration of very nearly 32 feet per second in every second. He imagined a "test body" to be placed in space at a distance of 60 earth-radii from the earth's center. Supposing that the earth's gravity extended out to 60 earth-radii, what would be the body's rate of fall toward the earth? We have seen that Newton had shown that this force would vary inversely as the square of the distance. The word "inversely" in this context means that the "power" or effect of the force decreases as the distance increases. The expression "inversely as the square" quantifies this decrease. In accordance with our earlier explanation, if we know the force at the earth's surface (one earth-radius from the earth's center), then at two earth-radii from the center, the distance would be doubled (multiplied by two), so that the force would now be one-quarter of what it was (1/4th, since 4 is the "square" of 2). At three times the distance, the force is but one-ninth of the original (1/9th, since 9 is the square 30
of 3). And so, out at 60 earth-radii from the earth's center, the force would be not 1/60th, but 1/3600th of 32 feet per second in each second. On the basis of the theory we can thus easily calculate how far toward the earth a body would fall in one second of time if it were placed at a distance of 60 earth-radii from the earth's center. Newton, of course, was fully aware that there actually is a body in space, out at 60 earth-radii from the earth's center. It is our moon. We know exactly how quickly the moon moves in its orbit, and it is a relatively simple matter to compute how fast it falls. In solving this Newtonian problem, using the method of analysis of orbital motion which Newton learned from Robert Hooke in 1679/80, one finds that the moon falls constantly toward the earth while moving forward; the rate of fall is just the right amount so that the moon keeps "falling" to the curved lunar orbit. The Newtonian calculations show that the predicted value of fall for the moon lies within 1/10th of one percent of the observed value. Newton's test shows that gravity, this pulling force of the earth-whatever it is that produces weight, heaviness, or "gravitas" (in Latin)-extends out as far as the moon. This gravity must vary as the inverse square of the distance. Newton was a sound philosopher; he concluded that the force he had found to be acting between the earth and its moon should be the same force (or a force of the same sort) that acts between Jupiter and its four moons. It is also the same force that acts between the sun and the planets. This conclusion is in accord with Newton's "Regulae Philosophandi," or Rules of Proceeding in Natural Philosophy: that one should not propose more causes of natural phenomena than are necessary; that to the same natural phenomena we should-as far as possibleassign the same cause. This kind of reasoning led Newton to conclude that terrestrial gravity extends from the earth to the moon; it is this same force of gravity that acts 31
between Jupiter and its moons and between the sun and planets. This is Newton's first stage in showing that the pulling force which we know on earth as gravity is universal. By mathematics, inductive logic, and a tremendous intellectual leap of the imagination, Newton was able to extend the argument to any two bodies, wherever they may be in the universe. He announced that any pair of such bodies will "attract" each other with this force of universal gravity. It is this concept of a force of universal gravity which is the central idea in Newton's great book. It is this force of universal gravity which holds the universe together and regulates the motions of its parts. Newton gave his famous treatise the title or Naturalis PrincipiaMathematica, Philosophiae "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy."This book was published in London in 1687, just three centuries ago. It is in this work that Newton sets forth the modern that definition of mass. It is in the Principia he explores the actions of forces and enunciates the three laws of motion. Here he sets forth the general principles of universal gravity and its quantitative expression or law. And it is in the Principia that Newton applies his studies of dynamics to the system of the world, showing that the universe is held together and performs the motions of its parts according to the principle of universal gravity. In order to give you some idea of how revolutionary the Newtonian principles were, let me mention some of the new explanations of natural phenomena that Newton produced. First of all, it had become known in Newton's day that for a pendulum clock to keep correct time as it is moved from one latitude of the earth to another, the length of the pendulum must be constantly changed. As we would say today, following Newton, the surface force of the earth's gravity changes with latitude. Newton explained this observed phenomenon in terms of the effect that the rotation of the earth and the earth's shape 32
have on the force of gravity. The shape of the earth, according to Newton, is an oblate spheroid, a "squashed" sphere that has been flattened at the poles and bulges at the equator. It is an additional consequence of this shape, he demonstrated, that the gravitational action of the moon on the rotating earth must produce what is called precession, a rotary turning motion of the axis of the earth. This phenomenon of the precession of the earth's axis had been known to astronomers since the second century B.C., when it had been discovered by Hipparchus. But no one before Newton had reduced this phenomenon of precession to its physical cause. Newton's work aroused great admiration because, with pencil and paper and mathematics, he had been able to compute the actual shape of the earth. One of Newton's most spectacular achievements was to show how the tides in the oceans and seas result from the combined gravitational attractions of the sun and moon on the waters. Kepler had suspected that some "influence" of the moon might be involved in the phenomena of tides in the oceans, but most scientists agreed with Galileo that this fantasy was "unscientific." So it came as something of a surprise that Newton set forth a demonstration that tides are caused by the gravitational pull of sun and moon. After the Principia had been published, and after the revised edition of 1713, especially Newton was particularly celebrated for his gravitational explanation of the motions of the moon. Newton showed how the irregularities in the moon's motion were produced through a combination of the gravitational action of the sun and of the earth. The earth and moon form a gravitating pair, each moving in orbit about their mutual center of gravity, but perturbed by the sun's gravitational attraction. By this analysis Newton shifted the study of the moon's motion from a problem in celestial geometry and pure curve-fitting to a research program based on physical causes. 33
Newton himself was not able to complete the study of the earth-moon-sun system, the famous "three-body problem," but he set astronomers on a wholly new direction of research and practice-a sign of the revolutionary quality of his innovation. Newton's program for studying the moon's motions in relation to causes was one of practical and not mere theoretical importance. In Newton's day it was generally understood that the ability to predict future positions of the moon could be of significant help in solving the pressing problem of finding longitude at sea. Newton's complete reorientation of lunar research was recognized by readers of the Principiaas an unexpected breakthrough. In a review of the second edition of the Principia in the most important journal of those days, the Acta Eruditorum, the reviewer especially commended Newton for this achievement. "The computation Newton has made of the motions of the moon from their own causes through the theory of gravity," he wrote, "proves the divine force of intellect and outstanding sagacity of the discoverer." In each of the foregoing examples-the orbital motion of planets and their moons, the variation of weight with terrestrial latitude, the oblate shape of the earth and the precession of the earth's axis, the cause of the tides, and the regularities and variations in the moon's motion-we may see an outstanding feature of the Newtonian system of the world. In each a group of phenomena is explained by the action of the force of universal gravity, producing its effects according to the Newtonian principles of dynamics, expressed in the three laws of motion. In Newton's system of the world, there is one principal or unifying concept, universal gravity, that serves "to explain" the diverse observed phenomena. In this context, the word "explain" means that Newton accurately and successfully predicted and retrodicted the phenomena of the heavens and the earth. It was a formidable achievement. 34
One of the most significant sets of phenomena studied by Newton was the motion and successively changing appearances of comets. Almost half of the third and final "book" of the Principia was devoted to comets. In order to see why comets have so special an importance in the Newtonian system, let us attempt a reconstruction of Newton's line of argument. Comets are made of matter; that is, they have mass. Therefore Newton's principles imply that they must be subject to the action of gravity, notably the sun's gravity. In this case, as Newton said, they have to move in orbit as a "kind of planet." The consequence of such reasoning, according to the gravitational system set forth in the Principia,must be that some comets move in orbits that are large ellipses, with the sun located at a focus. These very large attenuated elliptical orbits extend out to the far reaches of space. Comets, Newton thus was led to conclude, must in some cases come back regularly to the visible part of our solar system after traveling out in space for many hundreds of millions of miles. In those days comets were thought to be singular or one-time events. Newton came to the very revolutionary conclusion that many comets return periodically, at regular intervals, moving in closed orbits with the same kind of recurring motion observed in the planets. Halley improved upon Newton's theory in some details, and he searched through the records of history to see if he could find regular sequences which could be presumed to be reappearances of one and the same comet with cyclical regularity. One of the comets studied by Halley proved to have a period of about 75 years. He made the Newtonian prediction that it would reappear in the 1740's. This was perhaps the first time that anyone had been willing to submit a new physical theory to such a daring and dramatic public test. Halley made a prediction of a major event that would not occur for some half a century or more. Halley knew, furthermore, that if the comet should appear exactly 35
as he had predicted, the result would contradict the accepted beliefs that scientists and non-scientists had held for many centuries. Such a successful long-term prediction would prove the validity of the Newtonian celestial physics based on the concept of universal gravity. It is well known that the comet came back exactly on time: a stunning triumph for Halley's theory and for the Newtonian system of the world. In the Principia,Newton presented a new physics and a new system of the world based on universal gravity. At once a profound problem arose: how can a grasping force such as gravity travel out from the sun over hundreds and hundreds of millions of miles and in some unexplained way be able at such a distance to affect a planet? This solar gravitational force must also be able to extend itself even further into the distant reaches of space, way beyond our visible range, in order to be able to act on a comet and cause it to turn around and come back to the visible part of our solar system. Can we really believe that a physical force can travel out through so great a distance and still be so powerful as to produce these alleged effects? Technically this is the problem of "action-at-a-distance": how can a body (like the sun) act at a distant place where it "is not"? Most of the philosophers and the members of the scientific community of Newton's day were deeply troubled by the Newtonian concept of universal gravity. Some said that Newton had taken a retrograde step. In introducing the motion of attraction, they averred, he had brought back into the discourse of science the "occult qualities" of a bygone age which had supposedly been dismissed once and for all. Others simply rejected the Newtonian celestial mechanics and the Newtonian system of the world because of their open antipathy to the idea of gravitational attraction. Newton himself was troubled. He wrote that no one who held sound principles of philosophy could possibly 36
believe that a body can act "where it is not." At that time the reigning or "received" philosophy of science was based on the ideas of Rene Descartes. Known widely as the "mechanical philosophy,"this system of belief was posited on the notion that all physical explanations of phenomena must be based on two (and only two) principles: matter and motion. There was no place in this philosophy for a force acting at a distance. We have seen that Descartes himself had invented a system of the world in which the planets were imbedded in huge vortices of swirling "aethereal matter," which caused them to move in orbit around the sun. In the Principia, Newton showed that this particular Cartesian system of cosmology must be false since it leads to conclusions that are inconsistent with Kepler's laws. Since Newton adhered more or less to the principles of the mechanical philosophy, he was faced with a real dilemma! He had shown how a force of universal gravity can account for the observed phenomena of our universe, but how could he believe in a force that acts in such a way as to contravene fundamental philosophical principles? Newton's response was to seek-in vain, as it turned out-to find how this force could act in a way that would not contradict the mechanical philosophy. Many hours of thought and research were expended on this quest. At one time, Newton thought that gravity might be explained by electricity, a new subject in physics being explored in his time. Perhaps, he mused, gravitational force might be related to, or caused by, the particles of electrical "effluvia." At another time he had hopes that some kind of "shower" of effluvial particles might force one body toward another. He also envisioned that gravity could be explained by variations in the density of an all-pervading aether or "aethereal medium." But these attempts tended to founder because of Newton's third law and its effects: each of two bodies had to be made to gravitate toward the other and to do so according to the rule of the "inverse 37
square of the distance." None of his whether "mechanical" explanations, aethereal or electrical, could produce a mutually acting force of gravity that would agree with the quantitative measure of the inverse square. In the end there was no easy solution for Newton. He would not be satisfied by inventing unsupported hypotheses. Newton discussed this problem in a famous concluding "Scholium Generale," which he wrote for the second edition of his book (1713). Here he said that he would not feign hypotheses in place of sound scientific explanations: "Hypotheses non fingo," "I do not feign hypotheses." Universal gravity, he said, really exists, "revera existit." Furthermore, universal gravity acts according to the inverse square law of the distance. This force serves to explain "abundantly" the motions of bodies on the earth and also the motions of planets, of the moon, and of the tides in the sea. That, he said, is enough: "Satis est." It is enough that this force (which really exists) does explain the phenomena. Newton's conclusion was that we should accept and use this force even if we do not understand it, even if we cannot explain how it acts. (The word "explain" in this context implies that the action of gravity must somehow be made to accord with the principles of the received mechanical philosophy.) In short, Newton argued that his system of celestial mechanics and his system of the world need not be rejected simply because the basic concept apparently ran counter to the received philosophy. What was more important was the proven fact that universal gravity could explain so many phenomena. For science, "that is enough." Newton's General Scholium set forth a new view of science: a philosophy of science of the new order, a new scientific credo. Newton was saying that the goal of science is not to seek ultimate explanations. Rather, the scientist should found his or her concepts upon experience; if their use makes it possible to 38
accurately predict and retrodict the phenomena of nature, "that is enough." Newton set forth a simpler goal for science than the traditional search for "first causes," for ultimate explanations. By and large, scientists have been following the "Newtonian way" ever since. It is curious that the resolution of Newton's failure produced the reorientation of the aim of science. There is a final intellectual question that arises before we can leave the subject of the Newtonian Revolution. How was it possible for this difficult and largely unreadable book to exert so great an influence as to dominate thinking-even in the areas of politics and government-for over two centuries? How did such a work establish a model for all the sciences and even the social sciences, if it was devoted, as its title proclaims, to Mathematical Principles of NaturalPhilosophy? Mathematics is a difficult and-for most readers-a forbidding subject. Newton's book is mathematical in the extreme. There couldn't have been many people who were able to read it when it first appeared. Newton said that he had purposely made his Principia difficult to read, evidently in the that smatterers hope (who would not be able to follow the mathematics) would not be able to criticize the doctrine of universal gravity on purely philosophical or ideological grounds. With so small an anticipated readership, the original edition was small, limited to some three hundred or perhaps at most three hundred and fifty copies. How then did it produce its effect? The answer to this question is of interest to all students of intellectual and cultural history. The influence of the Principiaarose primarily through the efforts of a series of inspired educators and great popularizers. The first person who attempted to explain the Newtonian principles to the general public was a British clergyman and classicist, Richard Bentley. In the 1690's Bentley gave 39
an inaugural series of sermons on a new foundation, established by the will of Robert Boyle, sometimes known as the "father of chemistry."Bentley's "Boyle Lectures," as his sermons were called, were devoted to a confutation of atheism. The last two addressed this topic from the point of view of "the frame of the world." Bentley gave a succinct exposition of the Newtonian physical principles and then argued that the Newtonian system of the world must be the best possible argument against atheism, since (by unimpeachable mathematics) it demonstrates God's design in the universe. Bentley was no scientist, but Newton himself was Bentley's advisor on how to study the Principia.Other Boyle Lectures in succeeding years introduced variations on the same Newtonian theme. Since the lectures were reprinted again and again, many readers became familiar with Newtonian principles and the Newtonian system of the world through these published sermons. A second set of expositors wrote books expressly designed to explain the "Newtonian philosophy" for non-mathematicians and even non-scientists. The first was written by Henry Pemberton, a medical doctor and a mathematician, who had edited the third edition of the Principia under Newton's direction. According to Pemberton, Newton had favored the design of such a work and had even given his approval to some parts of the book, which Pemberton had read aloud to him. Another such introduction to Newtonian science for non-scientists was written by Colin Maclaurin, an outstanding mathematician whose name is well known to anyone who has studied the calculus, since the "Maclaurin series" is named after him. Both of these books are very sound and are still rewarding to read today. They give explanations of the Newtonian principles of science in a way that makes it easy for persons without mathematical training to understand. Each of them went through a number of editions and was translated into French. 40
Perhaps the best of the books of this kind was written by the philosopher Voltaire. Often, when I am asked by students or colleagues to recommend a book that constitutes a sound introduction to Newtonian science, I do not choose a scholarly work of our own of Sir day. Rather, I suggest Voltaire's Elements hundred and fifty years ago. This work was rated so highly that it was rapidly translated into English. Men and women of Newton's own nation were thus educated in the principles of Newtonian science by a foreigner. Voltaire had learned his Newtonian physics and celestial mechanics with assistance from an able mathematician and physicist, the Marquise du Chastellet. The "divine Emily" wrote her own study of Newtonian science. Even more important, she produced a French translation, published with a commentary in 1756/1759, of the whole of Newton's Principia. The "editor" supplied an introduction commending this translation, which he declared to be far superior to the English translation by Andrew Motte (1729). It is even better than Newton's own Latin text, he declared, because the Marquise had clarified certain passages where Newton's own text was uncertain. Voltaire added, in his "historical preface" to the translation: "We have seen two wonders: one, that this work has been composed by Newton; the other, that it has been translated and clarified by a woman." In the Age of the Enlightenment, it was generally agreed that the Newtonian philosophy should be known and understood by everyone. There were books written to help people understand Newtonianism at almost every level of readership. One of them, written in Italian by Francesco Algarotti, was ismfor theLadies.It was translated into English and was reprinted again and again. In those days ladies presumably didn't commonly have the advantage of formal education and could not read Newton directly. But Algarotti proved they too could learn the principles of 41
called II Newtonianismo per le dame, or NewtonianIsaac Newton's Philosophy, written almost two
the Newtonian philosophy. Some other expositors conceived that the Newtonian principles could most easily be taught to non-scientists if they were illustrated William by experimental demonstrations. Whiston and J.T. Desaguliers were the pioneers in organizing public lectures on Newtonian science based on experiments. In all these different ways the principles of Newtonian science and the basis of the Newtonian philosophy spread to all levels of thinking men and women. So great was the general admiration for Newton and his achievement that few would have disagreed with the sentiment expressed in that famous couplet written by Alexander Pope: Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night. God said, Let Newtonbe! and All was Light. But, as everyone knows, science is by nature cumulative and progressive. There are always new revolutions and the constant introduction of radically new scientific ideas which negate established thought. Even so fundamental a work as Newton's could not stand forever without any alteration. In our own century, Newton's work has had to be revised, extended, and rewrittenprimarily by Albert Einstein. We can express poetically the new theme of Newton and Einstein by adding a couplet of the twentieth century to the famous eighteenth-century lines of Alexander Pope. The addition by J.C. Squire makes a quatrain for our time. God said, 'Let Newton be!' and all was light. It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho,
Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo. Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
I. Bernard Cohen is Victor S. Thomas Professor Emeritusof the History of Scienceat Harvard Univerwas presented at the 1678th sity. His communication Stated Meeting, held in Cambridgeon March 11, 1987 An expandedversionof this communication will appearas an articlein the Harvard Library Bulletin, December1987 42

The Newtonian Scientific Revolution, Bernard Cohen

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The Newtonian Scientific Revolution, Bernard Cohen

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The Newtonian Scientific Revolution and Its Intellectual Significance Author(s): I.

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