>>It's time to put on our thinking caps and interpret the significance of what we've been
exploring! Unless it explains, history is trivial. Did you discover anything unexpected
this week that needs to be explained? In your brief introduction to Isaac Newton, you encountered
many different, sometimes contradictory explanations. Interpretations of Newton have varied immensely
over time, and continue to be disputed even today.
One way to interpret Newton casts him as the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution.
Newton's optics, including his reflecting telescope, prism experiments, and theory of
colors, solidified in the public mind the picture of Newton as an experimental scientist.
Newton's Principia, entitled the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, represented
the triumph of the mathematical approach to physics earlier championed by Galileo. From
his three laws of motion, Newton deduced on the one hand, Galileo's law of free fall,
and on the other hand, Kepler's laws of celestial motion. Thus, Newton integrated the physics
of motion near the Earth with the motion of the heavens in a single universal theory of
gravitation. Newtonian physics provided the basis for modern physics and astronomy until
the arrival of Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics in the early 20th century.
Something like this is the standard narrative of the Scientific Revolution. It is a beautiful
and compelling story, and well worth exploring. Yet historians are keenly aware of the multitude
of other stories the standard narrative forgets to tell. In this light, consider how Betty
Jo Dobbs, a pioneering historian of Newton's alchemy, emphasized the integrated character
of Newton's investigations across a wide variety of disciplines.
Dobbs wrote: "Blinded by the brilliance of the laws of motion, the laws of optics, the
calculus, the concept of universal gravitation, the rigorous experimentation, the methodological
success, we have seldom wondered whether the discovery of the laws of nature was all Newton
had in mind. We have often missed the religious nature of his quest and taken the stunningly
successful by-products for his primary goal. But Newton wished to look through nature to
see God, and it was not false modesty when in old age he said he had been only like a
boy at the seashore picking up [shells] while the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered
before him.... Newton's goal was a unified system of God and nature."
Now that we have reached the end of our whirlwind journey in the history of science from antiquity
to Newton, it is worth our time to pause and look backward as well as forward. In addition
to the standard, forward-looking narrative of the Scientific Revolution, we can see reflected
in Newton so many of the backward-looking stories we have followed throughout the semester.
Near the beginning of the semester, in our study of ancient Mesopotamian astronomy, you
read a characterization of Newton by the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes purchased
a host of Newtonian manuscripts devoted to alchemy and theology, long forgotten because
they did not fit in with the standard narrative.
Shocked by the significance of these topics for Newton's achievement, Keynes wrote: "Newton
was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of
the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual
world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather
less than 10,000 years ago."
According to Dobbs and Keynes, then, Newton would be the epitome of Janus, the god of
two faces, the god of doorways and passages, the god who looks simultaneously both forward
and backward. The scientific traditions we discovered in the far reaches of antiquity,
though scarcely recognizable to a modern scientist, have not been left behind now that we have
reached Newton. And from Newton, in the sequel to this course, we might trace the history
of science to modern times. What is the most significant thing you have learned about Newton
this week? How does what you have learned about Newton throw light on the previous history
of science? Do you see implications from our study of science to the age of Newton for
our understanding of science after Newton? What is the most significant implication of
what you have learned in this course? What is your interpretation?