MARY AND JOHN GRIBBIN

Inventing The Future

Isaac Newton

Humble Beginnings
  On Christmas Day 1642, the first year of the English Civil War, a tiny baby was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. Little Isaac Newton was so small that, as the man himself wrote later, he would have fitted into a 'quart pot'. He was not expected to survive.
  Despite the poor outlook, Newton lived, but he did not have the happiest start in life. His father, a farmer, had died three months before Isaac was born and, when he was three years old, his mother remarried. Her new husband, Barnabus Smith, wanted nothing to do with the boy, so Isaac was sent off to live with his elderly grandparents.
  It was a miserable time. Torn away from his mother and with no brothers or sisters to play with, Newton became a lonely and reclusive child. He developed a burning hatred for the stepfather who had taken his mother away, and a few years later he would make a list of his 'sins' that included 'threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them'.
 It was probably an empty threat but just mulling over this unpleasant revenge would have given Newton some sort of satisfaction.
  Although Newton's grandparents were kind, they were old and not used to young children, so they decided to send him away to school - a move that unwittingly did Newton (and science) a huge favour. It was very unusual for a boy from his background to go to school in those days. Indeed, if Newton's father had lived, Newton would most likely have followed in his footsteps and become an illiterate farmer.

Books and Bullies
  Newton was lonely at school, being extremely quiet, thoughtful and studious. He didn't join in with the games being played by the other boys, preferring to be alone or talk with the girls, and he became a prime target for school bullies. However, despite his quiet nature, Newton had a seething temper when roused. Once, when he was picked on by a larger boy, he beat his opponent so hard during the ensuing fight that the bully ran away. This outburst of temper - and his victory over a boy bigger than himself - meant that the other boys never tried bullying him again.
 But violence wasn't the only way that Isaac got his own back on bullies and the country people around him that he never liked. He terrified the superstitious locals and mystified his fellow pupils by sneaking out on dark nights to fly a hand-made kite that had a bright paper lantern attached to it. This also caused one of the earliest ever recorded UFO scares!
  But, at the age of sixteen, his mother decided he was needed to look after the farm.
  When Newton was eleven, his stepfather died and he went back to live.
  It was only because he was such a disaster that his mother eventually let him go to university. A family contact called Humphrey Babington had heard how clever Newton was and recommended him for a place at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Fellow. An ecstatic Newton started university in 1661, the year after Charles II was restored to the throne. As Newton only had £10 a year from his mother to live on, he had to work as Babington's servant (or subsizar) to live. But since his master was hardly ever there, there was very little work to do.

University Challenge
  There were only two universities in England in Newton's day. Oxford was probably the best place in the world to study science in the 1660's. But although Cambridge had once been one of the best universities (when it was founded in the thirteenth century), by Newton's time it had declined so much that it was, by the standards of other European universities, a backward place. At that point only a third of all the students who entered the university left with a degree, even though the only requirement for graduating was just to stay there for four years - you didn't have to be bright or hard working, you just had to be there!
  From what we know of Newton's life at Cambridge it seems that he had a miserable first year there. He had no friends and lost himself in solitary reading.
  Incredibly, there was no teaching of science at Cambridge, so whatever Newton learned he learned alone, and through his own efforts. He worked obsessively hard, a solitary thinker deep in his books. In fact, he worked so hard that he soon knew more than his professors. Rather like Archimedes, he was so devoted to study that he would forget about everything else. He would stay up all night reading books, even forgetting to eat. And, like Archimedes, when he did venture outside his rooms he could often be seen, deep in thought, drawing mathematical diagrams on the path with a stick.

Escaping the Plague
  By 1665 Newton had graduated and was planning to stay in Cambridge when the plague struck. The great plague, which eventually wiped out much of London's population, affected most of Europe in the 1660s and spread to many cities in Britain. In Cambridge, so many people fled from its horrors that the university had to be closed down temporarily and many students moved out to the surrounding villages, accompanied by their tutors. But as Newton worked entirely alone, and already had his degree, he decided to return home to Lincolnshire. It was a full two years before he would return to Cambridge in 1667. It was then, and particularly in 1666, that Newton did most of the scientific work for which he is now famous. He worked out his ideas about light and colour (starting from Hooke's book) and it was at this time he had his famous row with Hooke. He worked out the mathematical technique calculus, and he developed some of his revolutionary ideas about gravity. He even invented a new kind of telescope. But he didn't tell anyone.
  Unlike the famous story, Newton didn't start thinking about gravity because an apple fell on his head. But he did see an apple falling from a tree, and just as importantly, he saw the moon in the sky above the apple tree. This set him thinking about the force that pulled the apple down from the tree and he wondered if that same force could also reach all the way from the Earth to the moon. He eventually proved this to be the case and, as you'll see later, the discovery of this 'universal law' would change the way people thought about the world forever.

A Change of Mind
  Back in Cambridge, Newton was doing rather well. He became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667 and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics two years later, with a decent income of £100 a year. All this meant that he could, if he wanted, spend the rest of his life in the college, studying anything he wanted. But, inexplicably, after everything he had achieved (remember, by this time he had thought up all his important scientific ideas) Newton more or less gave up science and instead turned to a new interest - alchemy, the highly unscientific process of trying to make gold from base metal. If it hadn't been for the encouragement of a fellow scientist, he might never have let the world know about his amazing discoveries.

A Man of Influence
  Newton finally came out of his shell after he had a visit, in Cambridge, from a young astronomer, Edmond Halley, in 1684. Halley had been having a friendly argument with Hooke and Christopher Wren, back in London, about planetary orbits. By then everybody knew for sure that the planets moved round the sun in elliptical orbits. The three men guessed that there must be some influence or force, from the sun that was pulling on the planets to keep them in their orbits. But what kind of force?
  Halley, Hooke and Wren had each worked out by themselves that any such force would have to obey something called an inverse square law. This sounds complicated but 'inverse' just means 'one over', and 'square' just means multiplying a number by itself. In other words; when a planet is twice as far away from the sun it feels one-quarter as much pull, when it is three times further away it feels one-ninth as much pull, and so on.
  All three men wondered if gravity might be the inverse square force that was influencing the planets. But they couldn't prove it. And they didn't know if the force of gravity was the only way that planets were kept in their orbits. So Halley went to Cambridge to ask Newton for his help.

Inventing the Future © Mary and John Gribben, 2004. Published by the Penguin Group.