Newton, page 22
Although Saint-Simon never pursued this early plan, he did continue his life-long search for a principle of ‘universal gravity . . . the sole cause of all physical and moral phenomena’. In contrast with the emphasis other writers placed on the stability and order that Newton had brought to the universe, Saint-Simon perceived a world riven by conflict and tension. For him, the laws of nature mirrored fundamental oppositions between the governed and the governors, the poor and the rich, the peasantry and the landowners. As his writing became increasingly erratic, he strongly attacked Newton and his philosophy but formulated a dialectical model of progress, in which geniuses such as Descartes and Newton alternately used different methodologies to effect a continual spiral of scientific advance.63
At the same time as Saint-Simon was elaborating what he called his gravitational morality, Fourier was developing an ‘Analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attractions and repulsions’ based on the primordial force of ‘passionate attraction’. Fourier later claimed that, like Newton beneath the apple tree, inspiration struck when he was eating an apple in a Paris restaurant. But although he often cited Newton as a semi-divine authority, he never explicitly spelled out the precise details of his complicated theory of universal unity.
Fourier’s version of a Newtonian aether was a harmonizing fluid that bonded people together into concordant groups. Strongly influenced by Ledoux’s Parisian architecture, Fourier rejected the large open spaces symbolizing Newtonian equality. Instead, he designed buildings intended to provide a strongly structured environment for his ideal communities, comprised of people chosen for their complementary profiles of passionate attraction. Fourier prescribed a highly regimented life in an ordered environment run with monastic regularity (somewhat contradicting his advertised ideals of voluntary cooperation). According to him, this collaborative, harmonious regime would result in an explosive flowering of French intellect. Since talent is universally distributed, he wrote (echoing Turgot), there were potentially 37 million mathematical geniuses matching the calibre of Newton.64
Fourier regarded Newton’s gravitational model as a sub-set of his own grand theory. Just as Fourier and Saint-Simon had initially worshipped a semi-divine Newton, so too Fourier’s admirers made him the leader of a utopian cult. In the frontispiece of an 1845 journal, Jesus, flanked by classical philosophers, ‘offers his hand to the supreme inventor of modern times, to the man who has discovered the law of the kingdom of God . . . the sublime thinker . . .’65 This was of course Fourier, not Newton, who stands behind him staring blankly at an astronomical model. Although unflattering, this image of Newton illustrates his dual iconic role in France. He personified rationality, and he originated the law-like approach to the physical world that governed research into biological and social development.
During the 1830s and 1840s, Fourier and Saint-Simon’s most influential inheritor was Auguste Comte, the self-proclaimed father of sociology. Like those two earlier utopians, Comte used the Newtonian system of a law-governed physical universe as a model for the progress of science and society. According to his secular Religion of Humanity, the dead attain immortality through their influence on subsequent generations, and he designed a positivist calendar with ritualized days of commemoration. Comte canonized the world’s 558 greatest people by grouping them into thirteen months of four weeks each (some days were named after two secular saints to allow for leap years and women).
Comte’s calendar was heavily loaded in favour of French contributions to progress. Even though Newton was shown in capital letters, the secular equivalent of a Sunday, the philosophy and science months were called Descartes and Bichat. In England, scientists were almost unanimously hostile to Comte’s small sect of adherents, yet despite tiny membership figures hovering around 100, they profoundly affected Victorian thought. Frederic Harrison, the most fervent believer of the English positivist faith, preached his evolutionary vision that the human race was developing towards transcendent unity. He explained that writers were wrong to single out Newton for special attention, since ‘the History of Science is a fundamental part of the History of Humanity, and the life of no man, however great, should be treated thus’. But hero worship proved hard to avoid, even when it had travelled back to England via a circuitous French route. Despite his warnings about secular sanctification, Harrison called the Comteans’ London meeting place Newton Hall.66
7
MYTHS
And sitting in his night-gown in his chamber – some say, often with but one leg in his inexpressibles! – even till afternoon – calculating, unable to resist the sudden mathematical thought that would dart through his mind as soon as he awoke – who would not pity the fair one that might have happened to become his wife?
Thomas Cooper, Oration at the City of London
Mechanics’ Institute (1850)
Most people know very little about Newton’s physics, but they do know that he watched an apple fall from a tree. Newton, quipped an advertising agent seemingly unembarrassed by painful puns, is the ‘British physicist linked forever in the schoolboy mind with an apple that fell and bore fruit throughout physics’.1 Newton’s apple has become an international emblem of scientific achievement, featured in ephemera as diverse as Gary Larson’s cartoons, postage stamps, home tapestry kits, and publicity material for Japanese engineering. In the courtyard of India’s new Institute of Astronomy at Pune, a stone Newton gazes at an apple on the ground as though it had fallen from the banyan tree above him. With the help of a protective shield and a strong helium light, a cutting from the Woolsthorpe apple tree has managed to survive the climate. When it produced two apples, the tree became a pilgrimage centre for tourists from Bombay, over 300 kilometres away.2
Shortly after the First World War, the poet Alfred Noyes published The Torch-Bearers, a quasi-religious epic designed to restore England’s spiritual values. Noyes aimed to show that the natural truth and beauty of the universe are revealed by science, ‘a unity of purpose and endeavour – the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries’. William Whewell, one of Newton’s most dedicated propagandists, had earlier made this Platonic vision of scientific progress a favourite model for self-congratulatory scientists. In his three volumes of verse, Noyes romanticized this celebratory version of history by portraying scientific heroes – Copernicus, Galileo and Newton – as semi-divine Promethean torch-bearers. Painting the past as a linear success story implicitly suggests that science is preordained for a future of continuous advance. This focus on milestones of achievement converts methodical, collaborative research into a gripping adventure tale.
Noyes envisaged Newton watching the moon ‘burn like a huge gold apple in the boughs’ above him, and he explicitly paid tribute to the symbolic power of mythical tales:
Or did he see as those old tales declare
(Those fairy-tales that gather form and fire
Till, in one jewel, they pack the whole bright world)
A ripe fruit fall from some immortal tree
Of knowledge, while he wondered at what height
Would this earth-magnet lose its darkling power?3
We shall never know for certain whether Newton was inspired by watching a falling apple, but this story’s factual truth is less important than its symbolic importance. Myths operate on several levels. The world’s oldest myths concerned mysterious gods who lived in another world, yet embodied role models designed to reinforce the hidden codes of behaviour bonding human societies together. For his own allegorical moral tale, Noyes chose the genre of epic, which had first been introduced in classical times. Rejecting traditional depictions of fabulous creatures, Greek and Roman poets portrayed male heroes with prodigious capacities and virtues, thus providing superhumans who could be more feasibly emulated. Biographies of real yet unusual individuals also contained anecdotes that acquired mythical significance. In third-century Greece, Diogenes Laertius’s Lives, Teachings and Sayings of Classical Philosophers combined biography, doctrine and gossip, a format that strongly influenced Renaissance scholars. For the early Christians, legendary accounts of saints’ lives illustrated how their virtuous characters enabled them to relive the life of Christ. Noyes depicted Newton and his other scientific heroes as secular saints to revive a war-shattered society.4
Although Newton had himself originated the apple story, it was scarcely known until the early nineteenth century. Isaac Disraeli (father of the future Prime Minister) sarcastically added a decorative touch, asserting that the apple had fallen directly on to Newton’s head and knocked his phrenological organ of causality. In the Comic History of England, the 1840s equivalent of 1066 and All That, the Punch cartoonist John Leech gently mocked the alleged moment of inspiration (Figure 7.1). By then, although cartoons still commented pungently on scientific controversies, they had lost their earlier savage edge (Figure 6.3).5 Newton was never the victim of cruel satires, and this was one of his first public exposures as a figure of fun.
As was first said about Einstein, the appearance of cartoons signifies that a genius has become a legend. Caricaturists rely on exaggerating features by which their subject is already instantly recognizable, but they also contribute to fashioning a famous figure’s public image. Newton’s apple has become an iconic attribute like St Catherine’s wheel or St Jerome’s lion. Paralleling religious imagery, the apple serves both to identify Newton and to conjure up well-known parables of his achievements.6
But such symbols constantly change and acquire new meanings. During the eighteenth century, Newton’s most important attribute was the comet of 1680, but its significance was later eclipsed by the return of the 1682 comet named after Halley. Similarly, Leech’s cartoon refers to two Newtonian features that were familiar to Victorian readers but are now largely forgotten – his dog and his pipe. In our own time, the falling apple carries great allegorical power, yet whether or not the story is true seems relatively unimportant. In contrast, when this anecdote first started to gain prominence in the early nineteenth century, it was certainly not regarded as trivial. On the contrary, protagonists hotly contested its veracity.
Newton’s apple holds much in common with other romanticized episodes, such as Archimedes’ shout of ‘Eureka’ from his bath, James Watt’s childhood fascination with a boiling kettle, or Galileo’s observations of a swinging lamp in Pisa cathedral. Like them, Newton’s apple has come to symbolize momentous moments of scientific discovery, ones achieved through a genius’s flash of intuition. As Noyes understood, such quasi-historical details convert famous heroes into mythological characters who seem to live out society’s grand narrative themes. By structuring our perceptions of history and of reality, myths help to create, define and bond communities, most typically by giving them an origin. The falling apple has acquired mythical validity as the founding moment of Newtonian mathematical astronomy.
In his lines on Newton’s apple, Noyes posed an important question. Was Newton, as the falling apple myth suggests, instantaneously and divinely – almost magically – inspired by plucking the ‘ripe fruit’ of knowledge to reformulate the universe? Or – the less exciting version – were his theories the product of long and serious contemplation, as he lay ‘dreaming in his orchard . . . wonder[ing] why should moons not fall like fruit’? This problem lay at the centre of nineteenth-century debates about Newton and science. The fierceness of these discussions indicates that far deeper truths were at stake than whether the episode had actually occurred. The apple’s implications were central not only to academic controversies about the conduct of science and the nature of discovery, but also to broader questions about class, education and morality.7
Scientific knowledge does not simply diffuse outwards from a core elite to reach a wider public. When confronted with challenges to their own opinions, readers respond in different ways, which cumulatively and gradually alter the role that science plays and the types of question it asks. Scientific practitioners are influenced by cultural perceptions of science and its heroes, so that successful books, newspaper articles and – more recently – television programmes affect how science is itself conducted. Some scientists even claim that the media pull of Stephen Hawking, Newton’s modern equivalent of a national scientific hero, prevents them from being able to publish papers whose findings disagree with his. 8
Although we take for granted distinctions such as professional/ amateur or specialized/popular, during the nineteenth century these were still being defined. Numerous anecdotal accounts of Newton appeared, which reached ever-widening circles as the availability of cheap books and periodicals expanded. Authors, readers and texts interacted to transform public perceptions, and mythical tales about Newton’s life played a key role in shaping the ideological values of Britain’s burgeoning scientific disciplines. Different versions were frequently published in mass-produced publications as well as in biographies aimed at more specialized audiences. Because they were both designed and received in different ways, they yield valuable information about how Newton became a national hero as well as an icon of scientific genius.9
Reinterpretations of Newton’s life were not just ornamental flourishes but were laden with ideological import. Far from being merely amusing tales, anecdotes like the falling apple helped to determine what it means to be a scientist. Inconsistencies and absences cloud factual accounts of Newton’s own existence, but his life’s legendary reinterpretations had a very real impact on the subsequent course of science.
Trees of knowledge
At the end of the nineteenth century, a fictional ‘young lady of colour lately deceased at the age of 14’ described how ‘We were lying the other day on our back in our orchard, staring up into a streaked-apple tree, and thinking, as the apples fell, of little Isaac Newton and the curious upcomes after falls. From Newton’s apple tree our thoughts fell off to Darwin . . .’10 As society changes, so too do mythical associations. A modern writer would be unlikely to imagine such a train of thought in the mind of an American teenager, while Newton’s colleagues would have found it incomprehensible.
Newton originated this anecdote a few months before his death, as he sat reminiscing over a cup of tea in his Kensington garden with his younger friend William Stukeley. Although he could not have anticipated its future importance, he did later tell the same story to at least three other people. This repetition suggests both that he regarded it as significant, and that this man who was allegedly unaffected by public opinion – itself a common myth of genius – continued to be actively engaged in fashioning his posthumous image.
According to Stukeley,
the notion of gravitation . . . was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he [Newton] sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it . . . there is a power, like that we here call gravity, which extends itself thro’ the universe.11
Stukeley was particularly impressed that Newton should draw a parallel between an apple and the moon, thus linking an everyday event on earth with the motion of the planets through space. Because we have been brought up in a Newtonian universe, it is hard for us to recapture the significance of this imaginative leap. Many of Newton’s contemporaries still clung to Greek models of the universe, which sharply distinguished between the terraqueous globe and the celestial spheres carrying the stars and planets. By drawing an analogy between the falling apple and the circling moon in order to formulate a single law of gravitational attraction, Newton united the terrestrial and the celestial domains and mathematically welded the entire universe into a new structure.
Assiduous research has identified the tree in Newton’s Woolsthorpe garden as a Flower or Pride of Kent, now very rare but then a popular pear-shaped cooking apple.12 Since Newton had carefully studied the details of cider production, he was probably aware of this. However, the apple’s specific variety and the tree’s precise location are historically less interesting than the anecdote’s allegorical associations.
Three hundred years ago, an apple’s significance was very different from what it is today. Well versed in classical lore, Newton and his educated friends would all have known that in the first beauty contest it was Venus who won Paris’s golden apple. Branching trees had long provided a common image for the growth of human wisdom, and were often used by encyclopaedists to depict their classification systems. A falling apple immediately recalled the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, when the serpent persuaded Eve to tempt Adam with a fruit from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Celebrating the completion of the Westminster Abbey monument, a poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine described how Newton
. . . like Enoch, stood,
And thro’ the Paths of Knowledge, walked with God.
Evocatively combining the Garden of Eden with the landscaped avenues of Georgian estates, this anonymous author compared Newton with Enoch, who lived for 365 years, one for each day of the solar year.13
John Milton was one of the first writers who mentioned Adam succumbing specifically to an apple, a detail that may have developed because of confusion between two meanings of the Latin word malum – apple tree and evil. Enormously influential throughout the eighteenth century, Milton’s Paradise Lost was first published in 1667, the same year that Newton was secluded in his own earthly garden at Woolsthorpe, retreating like Epicurus from the demands of plague-ravaged Cambridge. Milton and Newton may also have been thinking of Hercules’ arrival in the garden of the Hesperides, when he laid down his globe to sit beneath a tree bearing golden apples, then slew the serpent twined round its trunk. Artists portrayed Hercules bowed under the weight of learning, accompanied by astronomers carrying dividers and an armillary sphere, two traditional symbols later associated with Newton himself.
