Newton, page 29
Newton may have regarded himself as a giant who stood on others’ shoulders, but new contenders for the position of outstanding genius would, in their turn, come to surmount him. During the twentieth century, the main competitors for Newton’s place were Einstein and Hawking. In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this intellectual trio chats amiably together over a game of poker. Hawking – who plays himself – replays the scene on major publicity occasions, including his visit to the US President. As the complex constellation of science, society and genius continues to evolve, the real-life ‘next generation’ of geniuses may well be computer experts. In Newton’s time, the ‘Man of Genius’ was held in far higher esteem than the ‘Man of Business . . . the dull, plodding Mind [that] fixes all its Attention on the single Point of growing rich’. But creative genius is no longer divorced from financial ambition. As electronic systems mushroom in importance, the world’s next great ‘Man of Genius’ may well be Bill Gates, that far from dull and plodding ‘Man of Business’ who – like Newton – became a legendary figure in his own lifetime.5
During the twentieth century, Newton was remembered and reinterpreted in new ways. The first threat to his supremacy came from Einstein, who found it advantageous to present himself as Newton’s opponent in a head-on confrontation between two intellectual giants. As Einstein and his colleagues consolidated his reputation, their manoeuvres affected not only the meanings of Newtonianism, but also the characteristics of genius. The second major attack was inspired by political interests, when dramatic Marxist reinterpretations of Newton’s activities provoked British historians into defending their national hero and reappraising the aims of scientific research. Yet a third onslaught on Newton’s conventional image was launched by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who shocked the world by insisting that Newton was not the first great scientist, but the last great magician.
As the years between us and Newton increase, he is becoming more than ever a legendary figure. His achievements are so remote that he no longer provides an accessible role model for physics students, yet his symbolic value survives unscathed. In 1999, the British government embarked on a drastic sale of its property. The National Physical Laboratory sold its buildings to a private purchaser, but the garden, which boasted an apple tree grown from a Woolsthorpe cutting, was not on offer. Even for a depleted Treasury, it seems that Newtonian national assets are just too valuable to lose.6
Like others who have passed into mythical realms, there can be no end to the Newtonian image-making process. Dalí’s sculpture (Figure 0.1), with which this book opened, illustrates this point. At one level, it is immediately astonishing that a Spanish surrealist should choose to make several statues of Newton. More symbolically, Dalí’s hollow figure forcefully conveys that Newton has become an emblematic hero, leaving admirers who know nothing about his actual life or science free to provide their own interpretations. New rituals are constantly developing to commemorate versions of Newton that never existed in reality, but which evoke conflicting visions of Britain’s heritage and of scientific genius.
Albert Einstein: a revolutionary genius?
Just as the falling apple became a legendary tale epitomizing Newton’s achievements, so too the heroic story of Newton’s own downfall became one of the fundamental myths surrounding Einstein’s life. In an international radio broadcast, George Bernard Shaw hailed him as Newton’s successor who had proved that ‘Newton’s theory of the apple was wrong.’ Emphasizing Newton’s Englishness, Shaw declared that Newton had created a wonderful universe ‘and established it as a religion which was devoutly believed for 300 years . . . [until] the whole Newtonian universe crumpled up and was succeeded by the Einstein universe’.7
In November 1919, newspapers throughout the world announced that a young professor from Berlin had unexpectedly triumphed over Newton by producing a daring new theory of the universe. With varying degrees of clarity, reporters explained how a ‘revolution in science’ meant that conventional ideas about space and time must be replaced by the exciting if incomprehensible postulates of general relativity. Einstein became internationally famous almost overnight, yet beforehand this ‘epoch-making’ experiment had seemed so insignificant that the New York Times had sent along their golfing correspondent to cover the story. Sporting and military metaphors converted an academic debate about abstruse cosmological concepts into a thrilling personal contest between two scientific champions.
In England, Cambridge physicists were immediately deluged by worried inquiries about this apparent defeat of Newton, hero of both the University and the nation. Ironically, the supposedly decisive observations stemmed from the findings of two British teams, recently sent abroad to record a total solar eclipse. Despite the Great War, planning had started two years earlier. Patriotic tensions exacerbated the suspicion with which many British scientists regarded Einstein and his theories, but one enthusiastic supporter was the prominent astronomer Arthur Eddington, who managed to avoid detention as a conscientious objector by leading an eclipse expedition to Africa.
According to Einstein, a ray of light travelling from a star towards the earth is bent if it passes very close to the sun, so that the star appears to be in a slightly different place from usual. Although Newton’s theories on their own have nothing specific to say on this subject, Eddington converted the eclipse measurements into a direct confrontation between Newton and Einstein by claiming that a small apparent shift in a star’s position would correspond to the Newtonian system, while a larger one would corroborate Einstein’s predictions.
Einstein was so convinced of the truth of general relativity that he regarded these tests as almost superfluous. Reprimanding one eminent physicist for staying up all night to hear the results, Einstein slept tranquilly, confident of the outcome. Eddington was also committed to obtaining the results he wanted. Problems with the weather and the optical instruments plagued both expeditions, but by carefully sifting through the ambiguous data, Eddington managed to salvage enough confirmatory evidence to declare triumphantly that Einstein was indisputably right.
Previously little known outside scientific circles, Einstein transcended wartime hostilities to become acclaimed all over the world as a scientific genius rivalling Newton himself. Within only a couple of years, he was being showered with honours and portrayed as ‘the new Columbus of science voyaging alone through the strange seas of thought’ – a deliberate reference to Wordsworth’s poetic description of Newton.
Einstein readily cooperated with demands to popularize his ideas, writing books as well as accepting countless invitations to give public lectures and attend fashionable dinner parties. An adept self-publicist, he supplied punchy aphorisms for journalists eager to explain relativity. ‘An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute,’ he quipped, ‘but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.’8
Like Newton’s Principia or Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Einstein’s relativity became a fashionable topic of conversation amongst people who had little real understanding of the basic concepts. Einstein’s idiosyncratic behaviour and appearance lent themselves to parody, and fuelled his identification as a genius. As he became a cult figure, artists, writers and musicians created resonances – sometimes rather spurious ones – between their own innovations and his revolutionary scientific changes. Through photographs and cartoons, Einstein’s shaggy hair, droopy moustache and rumpled clothes became instantly recognizable trademarks of this intellectual hero who – like Newton before him – embodied the power of reason.9
Einstein, like Newton, has become a legendary character whose achievements have acquired a mythical aura. Modern scientific historians deliberately echo Newton’s annus mirabilis in Woolsthorpe by describing 1905 as Einstein’s own miraculous year, when he published five extraordinary papers on a range of topics, including relativity. But just as the universe was not transformed overnight when Newton watched the apple fall, so too, Einstein’s articles were extremely influential but did not immediately give birth to modern physics. Accounts of instantaneous transformation are deceptive. Although he now enjoys singular fame, Einstein was just one of many researchers who contributed to the major changes in scientific understanding during the first decades of the twentieth century. Even the development of relativity theory, the topic nowadays uniquely linked with his name, spanned a long period and owed much to the work of other physicists and mathematicians. Far from being an instant success, Einstein’s ideas were hotly disputed and frequently modified, while some experimental tests of his general relativity theory that he suggested in 1915 were still being implemented in the 1960s.
Bertrand Russell, an early expositor of Einstein’s relativity, explained to his readers that even Newton himself ‘was not a strict Newtonian’.10 The theories and practices of so-called Newtonian science were very different from each other as well as being far removed from Newton’s own. Scientists had moved away from Newton’s focus on the forces between particles, and increasingly couched their theories in terms of energy. Starting from a Newtonian base, they introduced new ways of thinking about the world, such as electrical and magnetic fields radiating throughout space, the efficiency of engines and the cooling of the earth. Only a few years before Einstein’s annus mirabilis, scientists had been congratulating themselves on successfully elucidating the laws of nature. Future research would, they confidently judged, be a simple matter of tidying up the last few decimal places. The discovery of radioactivity abruptly shocked them out of this complacency, and it seemed that only disturbingly counter-intuitive theories could explain this new sub-atomic world.
Major revisions of Newtonian thought that had originated in the late eighteenth century developed in divergent directions. By the time that Einstein became a student, ways of explaining the world differed to the point of incompatibility, and the style of science you practised depended on where you lived. Like nations annexing colonies, commented one physicist, ambitious scientific communities were trying to extend their power. To Einstein’s colleagues, it seemed that presenting him as the lone inventor of relativity could enhance the reputation of the departments where he worked. Glossing over the divergences between different approaches to the universe, propagandists bracketed them together as classical Newtonian science. This strategic move enabled them to convert Einstein into the sole author of a revolutionary theory that had overturned the world of physics.11
Einstein himself staked his claim more cautiously. Often paying tribute to Newton’s genius, throughout his life he insisted that ‘No one must think that Newton’s great creation can be overthrown in any real sense by this or by any other theory . . . what we have gained up till now would have been impossible without Newton’s clear system.’ This modest reverence for an intellectual ancestor brought advantages. By stressing that science is a collective, progressive enterprise, Einstein placed himself in an elite international community transcending barriers of time. He eulogized a Newton who dwelt in the ‘happy childhood of science’, thus subtly implying that he was Newton’s natural inheritor in the more complex world of modern adult science. For Einstein, Newton was an artist who delighted in his creative powers. His repeated adulation suggests that he too wished to be bracketed with Galileo and Newton, ‘the greatest creative geniuses . . . whom I regard in a certain sense as forming a unity’.12
Through highlighting his affiliation with Newton, Einstein implicitly distinguished his own ideas from those of his peers, and so contributed to forging his identity as the sole originator of relativity. From his earliest papers in 1905, Einstein and his contemporaries contrived to make the introduction of relativity a highly significant event. By emphasizing the theory’s novelty and impact, they reinforced their authority within their own institutions as well as amongst the international scientific community. By the time that Eddington set himself up as referee in a direct experimental confrontation between Newton and Einstein, theoreticians had already appointed Newton to be Einstein’s superseded opponent.
At the crossroads of science
Until the end of June 1931, British academics remained serenely unaware of another powerful attack that was about to be unleashed on Newton’s reputation. The International Congress of the History of Science and Technology may not appear a promising site for a revolution, yet some scenes that took place in London that summer sound as if they have been taken from a David Lodge novel. In one session, tempers became so heated that the chairman resorted to silencing a Soviet denunciation of Newton hero-worship by ringing a ship’s bell.13
At that time, history of science scarcely existed as an academic subject, and this Congress was only the second to be held. The discipline was so young that scholars had not yet coined the term ‘Scientific Revolution’, now a commonplace for describing the changes that took place between around 1550 and 1700. Science’s past was seen as continuous progress, a march towards truth in which men like Galileo and Newton handed on the torch of knowledge to their successors. According to the ideology of the early twentieth century, scientists operated in the realm of pure ideas and left mundane cares at the doors of their laboratories. This cosy model was about to be disrupted.
Only a few days before the conference was due to begin, Stalin surprised the Soviet Union as well as Britain by announcing the imminent arrival of a large delegation in London. Headed by Nikolai Bukharin, one of Lenin’s former advisers, the Soviets demanded that the schedule be rearranged to accommodate all their hastily prepared talks. The British organizers adamantly refused to cancel a day trip to the Newtonian shrine of Trinity College, but in compensation, within less than a fortnight the Soviet papers had been translated into English and published together as Science at the Crossroads. Astonishingly, the book was promptly favourably reviewed in the Spectator, a prominent conservative weekly.
The Soviets’ searing critiques of Western capitalism baffled and embarrassed most of the other delegates. Seventy years on, they make strange reading – dense, rhetorical lectures in which the concepts of dialectical materialism have been rendered into an English that is grammatically impeccable but terminologically alien. In retrospect, it was the contribution by Boris Hessen, Director of the Moscow Institute of Physics, that proved the most influential.
‘The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia’: even Hessen’s title seemed sacrilegious to most British listeners. Hessen poured scorn on the tradition of attributing progress to the personalities of individual great men. Deliberately focusing on Newton, the example par excellence of the historical approach he wanted to discredit, Hessen argued that the Principia was not the brain-child of an isolated scholar, but the product of seventeenth-century class struggle. As the feudal system disintegrated in the face of rising merchant capitalism, he explained, the path of scientific research was determined by the urgent demands of the emerging bourgeoisie for better communication systems, military equipment and industrial processes. Just as Newton had helped to create a new science for a new political age, so too, under a socialist regime, science would advance victoriously for the benefit of all humanity.
With brutal clarity, Hessen stated his intention to demolish the prevailing image of ‘Newton as an Olympian standing high above all the “earthly” technical and economic interests of his time, and soaring only in the empyrean of abstract thought’. Hessen’s analysis was far from simplistic. Subtly exploring the philosophical and theological attitudes of the period, he knowledgeably compared Newton’s concepts of space, time and matter with those of his contemporaries. Hessen portrayed an entirely new Newton, one who was deeply immersed in the technical and economic issues of his time. Thus he studied alchemy to improve metallurgy and coin manufacture, mathematics to help soldiers fire cannon more accurately, and hydrodynamics to design new canals and mine pumps.14
Like Bukharin, Hessen disappeared during the era of Stalinist repression, but his erudite Marxist study prompted radically changed accounts of the relationships between science and society, and played a vital role in the emergence of history of science as an academic discipline. Hessen’s provocative reappraisal of Newton’s Principia generated immense antagonism, but also converted eminent scientists. One of the earliest was Joseph Needham, now celebrated for his massive studies of Chinese science and technology, but then a practising embryologist. Needham urged future researchers ‘to do for the great embryologists what has been done so well by Hessen for Isaac Newton’.15
Following Hessen’s polemical lecture, some startling new versions of Newton appeared. Drawing strength from Hessen’s claim that capitalist entrepreneurs had inspired the scientific changes of the seventeenth century, British left-wing campaigners insisted that society would be revolutionized not by working-class activities but through the advancement of science. The most prominent spokesman for this view was the Marxist biochemist J. D. Bernal, who strongly influenced the social organization of science in Britain well into the 1960s. Deeply affected by the 1931 conference, Bernal made Newton and his peers not so much the inheritors of an intellectual dynasty extending back to the Greeks, as the beneficiaries of a recent bourgeois upsurge in trade and industry. According to him, Newton had a disastrously stultifying effect on science, but was ‘a forerunner of the French Revolution’ whose individualistic model had its greatest immediate impact on economic and political affairs.16
