Yeah he’s sort of viewed as the founding father of
physics basically, you can’t really get a much bigger
deal than that for a physicist or an astronomer, he really
was the man who invented the whole subject.
He’s a big deal because he’s the first person to actually
use mathematics and develop mathematics so that you
could create a theory, work out the consequences and
compare with the experiment. So, for example, his three
laws can be expressed mathematically, turned into
equations and then you find out that the planets go
round in ellipses with the sun at, one of the focuses, foci
of the ellipse.
Sir Isaac Newton is thought to be one of the greatest
scientists of all time, has contributed a lot to the field.
He developed calculus; he invented a reflecting telescope that was made from a mirror instead
of a lens.
He’s sometimes credited with having invented the
reflecting telescope, which isn’t true. In fact, lots of
people had sort of played around with them, even
Galileo the first person to use one astronomically, had
actually played around trying to make telescopes out of
mirrors. But Newton’s great genius is that he actually
built a practical one, one that actually worked.
What Newton did was incredible, and a lot of the things
that he came up with are the basis of understanding. For
example, when he was a student, there were light
beams going through the shutters of his window and he
put it into a prism and showed that light split into a
spectrum and as a result of that he could explain why
rainbows came about. He was able to turn the mathematics and do the experiments so as to
analyse the natural world in a way nobody had done
before.
But he was a bit of a strange character; he wasn’t an
extrovert; he didn’t really get along with people very
well.
I’ve read that he had a couple of nervous breakdowns;
he was a very, very sensitive person. So when the
calculus, his mathematics came up, he and Leibniz both
invented complementary aspects to it. And they didn’t,
he couldn’t see that Leibniz works on the integral
calculus was complimentary to his work on the
differential calculus. He just wanted to rubbish Leibniz
all his life and so it was as competition and he was very
arrogant and aggressive about things like that.
Also with Robert Hook, who was a wonderful experimentalist, and wrote the standard treatise
on optics, he was an enemy as far as Newton was
concerned and he would try to do anything to damage
Hook’s reputation. So he wouldn’t have been a nice
colleague to have.
One of the things that Newton is most famous for is
saying that, you know, if he’s seen further than anyone
else it was only because he was ‘standing on the
shoulders of giants’ and this was always viewed as a
self-deprecating remark that he was showing respect to
those who had come before him. More recently, it has
been suggested, that he was actually just having a go at
Hook who was famously very short. And so there are
aspects of him that he was a little bit strange, he was
not necessarily a particularly nice man, he was
incredibly secretive, he would keep stuff hidden away for
years and years just because he was afraid that other
people were going to steal his ideas.
But he was a scientist through and through and he used
himself to experiment with a lot of different projects, so
when he was working with lenses and mirrors and
optics, he actually wondered why our eyes are such
sophisticated lenses and so he actually took an ice pick
and kind of probed behind his eye to figure out how it
worked so well. Kind of gross, I hate that story.
Isaac Newton’s a fascinating character because he’s
famous for writing the Principia Mathematica, which
certainly changed the face of physics. But Newton wrote
more about theology and prophecy and alchemy than he
ever did about science and mathematics. And that’s the
extraordinary thing, and Newton had very, very
eccentric theological views, views about Christianity.
Isaac Newton also liked to look at the sun to see how
that affected your eyes. Of course as children we all
hear ‘don’t look at the sun too long because you’ll go
blind.’ Well he did actually look at the sun for quite a
long time and then he remarked in his journal that he
saw the image of the sun in his eye while he was
sleeping, or while he was going to sleep even, for about
three days. So it definitely does damage to your eye,
believe it.
But Newton also rejected the traditional Christian view
that God is not just an individual, that God is a
community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we call
that the Trinity: three persons in one God. And Newton
rejected the view of the church that God is Trinity. It’s
ironic because Newton was a fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, so in his very working environment the
institution that he worked for was dedicated to a
doctrine, a teaching, in which he himself did not believe.
Well when I first came to Nottingham, I lived way out in
Lincolnshire and somebody told us that his house was at
Woolsthorpe, near Colsterworth, and we drove out there
and I got the wrong Woolsthorpe, there are two out
there. Eventually we found the right one and in those
days, this is over thirty years ago, the house was owned
by somebody and you had to go at a certain time and
she would open the door for you and you could go round
and see all the traces he’d left behind because he got
his compasses and he’d scratched pictures of the
Cathedral in Grantham on the wall. So I remember that
vividly.
Gradually this aura came to settle around Newton that
he was the holder of secrets and the Principia was, as it
were, this was Newton’s scripture. And Newton himself
fostered this, this reputation for being some sort of
prophet of God and he did write under some pseudonyms, one of which was the pseudonym
IEHOUAS SANCTUS UNUS, Jehovah the name of God, the
Holy One, which he believed was an anagram of the
Latin version of his own name, ISSAACHUS NEUUTONUS
- IEHOUAS SANCTUS UNUS.
I thought a manor house would be a big Elizabethan manor, but it’s actually a small pokey little
place, it’s not much bigger than an ordinary semi. Only on
one floor, or maybe two floors, it wasn’t that grand.
I mean think of the Da Vinci Code today and Dan Brown,
I mean there is nothing new in all that, is there
something we are not being told? It’s a bit like a
conspiracy theory, and can we get underneath it all? And
just as Newton thought he was trying to decode the
Universe, the mind of God, by this mathematics, so he
thought there were all other codes all over the place,
including his own name and anagrams that needed decoding to see what they revealed. So knowledge
had to be prized, prized open to get the secrets
and only the very clever, only the wise, could really find
out exactly what was going on in the mind of God.
He was, you know, he had all the trappings of a genius
in the sense that as well as being incredibly smart and
coming up with incredibly innovative ideas, he also
clearly had his eccentricities as well.
Would you give him a job here?
I think, hmm, that’s a good question, I wonder how he
would succeed in, in academia today? I don’t know is
the short answer. A lot of the things that these
eccentricities the way he tended to rub people up the
wrong way, the fact that he didn’t publish things, he hid
them away for years at a time, you know in academia
today, the way you succeed is by getting your ideas out
there and by publishing things and showing, you know,
showing your, your peers your fellow scientists, what
you are doing. And his approach to science and keeping
stuff very much to himself and not wanting to share with
people really wouldn’t work terribly well in the way that
science works today.
He was really quite phenomenal in his prime and later
on he dabbled in alchemy and all sorts of things and got
into religious arguments. He was a very strange and
complicated person. Not the sort that you want to go
down the pub with.
I’d go to the pub with him!
And then you’d start arguing in your Australian way to
wind him up and see what you could get out of him for a
video for Sixty Symbols.
If I could make a video of Isaac Newton, Roger, I
wouldn’t be sitting here with you. LAUGHS
Quite, quite!