Caltech historian Mordechai Feingold, a specialist in the history of 17th- and 18th- century science, is curator of the Newton exhibit currently on display at the Huntington Library in San Marino. The show, which brings together a treasure trove of rare documents and artifacts relating to the life and legacy of the great scientist, debuted earlier this year in New York City, and will remain at the Huntington through December 2005.

The Newtonian Moment Arrives for Caltech Historian

By Mark Wheeler

There is an anecdote about Sir Isaac Newton—a true one—about the time he stuck a knife in his eye. Naturally it was all in the interest of science: Newton was studying the properties of light, and as he later wrote, “I took a bodkin [a type of dagger] and put it between my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could, & pressing my eye with the end of it (so as to make the curvature in my eye) there appeared several white, dark and coloured circles. . .”

The bizarre description goes on, and when considered in the context of his other peculiarities—his written confession about “Threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them,” his reputation for aloof arrogance, his lifelong interest in alchemy (a popular medieval pursuit that, among other things, sought to transmute base metals into gold)—it’s led some to argue that Newton, in addition to being a brilliant scientist, was mad as a hatter.

Of course this is the man who discovered the law of universal gravitation and planetary motion, invented calculus, and proved that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors. What does it matter if people think he was crazy?

It matters, says Caltech’s Mordechai Feingold, because it “presents a distorted picture of the remarkable man that Newton actually was. Some people would indeed like to think that Newton was not a man of reason, but of madness and alchemy,” says the professor of history. “And there are indeed some anecdotes about him not eating, not sleeping, his hair staying unkempt.” Most of those examples, he says, stem from a single 18-month period when the protean scientist was writing his most important work, the Principia Mathematica. “Eighteen months,” says Feingold, “does not
reflect his whole life.

“Certainly Newton had his eccentricities,” he adds, “and he was a complex person. It’s difficult for us to conceive of someone with that kind of mind, a mind that thinks in different terms than you and I.

“So he wasn’t like us, but he wasn’t a dejected, solitary, raving lunatic. He was like many professors at Caltech!” he laughs.

Feingold should know. Besides being a Caltech professor himself, he is one of the world’s foremost Newton scholars, “engrossed” with the man (as he puts it) for some 15 years. It was not, however, his original intent to become expert in all things Newton. Feingold’s area of expertise is 17th- and 18th-century science, and, as he quickly discovered, “you can’t read anything about the science revolution of that time without Newton’s influence being evident.”

The key fact to appreciate about Newton, says Feingold, is that his influence extended far beyond his seminal work in physics to permeate all aspects of modern culture. It is this Newtonian diffusion that has interested Feingold, who has spent the last two years of his life researching, designing, and curating two exhibits about Newton’s science and its impact on our world. The first went on display for several months last year at the New York Public
Library before moving, in a two-part format, to San Marino’s Huntington Library this past spring. Part I, entitled All Was Light, ended in June and showcased Newton’s science revolutions. Part II, The Newtonian
Moment, opened July 23 and highlights the enormous impact that Newton has had on modern culture. The show runs through December 2005. Feingold also wrote a book, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture, to accompany the exhibits, and has published several papers about one of the most famous scientists in the world.

The Israeli-born Feingold’s original interest wasn’t science but political history. He grew up in Yeruham, a small town located in the desert of Israel’s “deep south,” as he puts it, during the 1960s, when Israel fought the Six Days’ War with its Arab neighbors and subsequently annexed the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. It was a tumultuous time, and Feingold developed an early passion for history, wanting to understand the context of the events swirling around him. The first person in his family to attend college, he did his undergraduate work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before earning his doctorate in modern history at Oxford.

It wasn’t until he attended a lecture on science history in the 1970s that he became interested in that topic. “It turned out that the past in science was much more interesting to me than the history of politics,” he says. And that, in turn, led him to Newton.

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642. His father had died before he was born, and the sickly, scrawny child was raised by his mother, but only until the age of three, when she remarried and left him in the care of his grandparents. Mother and son were not reunited until Newton was eight, after the death of her second husband. No doubt this had an effect on Newton. “I presume he was bitter,” says Feingold. “Wouldn’t you be?”

Whatever Newton’s dysfunctional family relationships, they certainly did not interfere with his rise to prominence as a scientist. He burst onto the scene toward the end of the scientific revolution, which historians roughly peg as taking place in the years between 1500 and1700. “When Newton came to the scene the scientific revolution was well under way,” says Feingold. “He came after Galileo, Kepler, Descartes—a time when there was already a new conception of the world in the making.”

Newton was 45 when he rocked the scientific circles of his day with the 1687 publication of the Principia Mathematica. “It is the monumental treatise that unified celestial and terrestrial mechanics under a single law—universal gravitation—and charted the course of physics for some two centuries,” says Feingold. As he writes in his book, one of Newton’s greatest contributions was the “establishment of the physical sciences on the secured foundation of mathematics.”

Newton changed science forever, Feingold says, transforming the realm of scientific thought and inquiry from one based largely on hypothesis and faith to one grounded in empirical evidence. He reinvented science as the kind of knowledge people wanted to bring to other disciplines. The Newtonian search for rational, universal principles shaped the development of ideas in virtually all fields, including history, psychology, metaphysics, and literature. “Everyone wanted to be the Newton of their field,” says Feingold. “Adam Smith wanted to be the Newton of economics; David Hume wanted to be the Newton of moral philosophy.”

In 1704, 17 years after the Principia, came Newton’s second seminal work, The Opticks, which contained Newton’s revolutionary theories regarding light and colors. In it he described how passing a beam of white light through a prism dispersed it into the many colors of what is known today as the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was in pursuit of these insights that Newton stuck that bodkin in his eye, and repeatedly stared at the sun through a telescope until he injured his eyes so badly that he had to stay in a dark room for several days before regaining his vision.

Even if people didn’t understand Newton’s science—and most didn’t (“Newton boasted he’d made the Principia purposely difficult in order to stave off ‘smatterers’ in mathematics,” says Feingold), by early in the 18th century Newton had achieved almost iconic status in Europe. This kind of intellectual hero worship—the scientist as popular idol—was, Feingold says, unprecedented in human history. People quickly realized Newton was something quite unique. “By the beginning of the 18th century, he had become Einstein-like in how people saw him, some sort of legend.”

As Newton’s insights began to percolate through all levels of Western European society via lectures, plays, written materials, the design and development of new scientific instruments, and even art, “his ideas took on many different forms, sometimes vulgarized in popular culture,” notes Feingold. Busts of Newton began to appear everywhere, from public places to people’s parlors.

Newton’s laws of gravitation were particularly prone to popularization, says Feingold. “People played with these ideas,” he says. The protagonist in Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies reasons on one occasion that when lovers are first together their attraction is infinite; but after “eight Days Absence Love becomes sixty four Times less than it was the first Day, and according to this Proportion it must soon be entirely obliterated.” Says Feingold, “That’s what I call the vulgarization; it doesn’t make any sense if you understand what his principle was about. But that’s how his ideas were often conveyed.”

Another Newton-inspired invention that became popular by the mid-1700s was that of wonderful, mechanical models of the solar system. Called
orreries, they were turned by a crank and depicted the relative size and motion of heavenly bodies. “It was science that could be visualized and made intelligible to much broader audiences,” says Feingold.

One of Newton’s biggest fans was the 18th-century French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who popularized the physicist and his work. Voltaire spread the story of how Newton’s legendary eureka moment in an apple orchard led him to propose the law of universal gravitation. Feingold doubts the tale is true, and suspects that it is more along the lines of the yarn about George Washington and another fruit tree. Newton, he says, was known more for perseverance and sheer hard work than he was for flashes of inspiration.

Not everyone was enamored of the new Newtonian universe. The Romantic poets, for one, preferred “mysteries and emotions to laws and reason,” says Feingold. The poet Shelley excoriated Newton as the chief culprit who had “decomposed the rainbow,” while the mystic poet and artist William Blake lamented that “single vision that had deadened nature.”

Feingold admits that Newton did not possess the world’s most attractive personality. He had a running conflict with another eminent British scientist, Robert Hooke, who had proposed his own theory of light, formulated a theory of planetary motion, and proposed the inverse square law of gravitational attraction (and introduced the term “cell” into biology). After one debate about optics, says Feingold, Hooke wanted to make peace. Newton responded to this overture with a letter, in which he credited Descartes’s contribution to optics, acknowledged Hooke’s own, valuable contribution, and confessed that if he, Newton, saw further than others into Nature’s mysteries, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

For centuries, people have interpreted this as evidence of Newton’s humility, says Feingold. “Only problem is,” he says, “Hooke was somewhat deformed. So if you tell a hunchback you stood on the shoulders of giants, it’s not a compliment. It’s a dig.

“Newton was arrogant,” says Feingold, “but it was because he knew he was the purveyor of the truth in so many domains that he was unwilling or unable to listen to any objections or criticism. And he was willing to defend his ideas nearly to the end. He lived a long time and was basically able to bury his opposition.

“So yes, he was a difficult person, but we make exceptions for difficult people with a talent.”

Another side of Newton came to light in 1936, when a metal trunk of his previously undiscovered notebooks was purchased at an auction by the economist John Maynard Keynes. The papers revealed Newton’s lifelong interest in alchemy and theology.

Since that time, some historians have played up this side of Newton, placing as much emphasis on his eccentricities as his science. Feingold, however, is not among them. “For Newton, alchemy was the precursor to chemistry. What he wanted to understand were the principles, maybe even a unified principle of matter. To him it wasn’t mystical or religious, it was an empirical science. He applied to it the same kind of rigorous, methodical understanding of fact, and what constituted evidence, as he did to physics and optics.”

The debate rages on, and, as the curator of a bicoastal, widely publicized Newton exhibit, Feingold has placed himself squarely in the center of it. But the controversies swirling around Sir Isaac haven’t swayed Feingold from his love of science. In particular he is fascinated by how much science has permeated our lives and our culture, and how little most of us understand about how it works, “not unlike people in Newton’s day.” As an example, he points out that cars and computers have completely changed our lives, yet most of us don’t have a clue what’s under the hood of either. He perceives danger in this, worrying that citizens and politicians will make crucial decisions concerning science and technology with no factual basis or understanding, “leading to lunacies like what’s going on in Kansas,” where the board of education will decide later this year whether to include the teaching of so-called Intelligent Design (a variant on creationism) as part of the science curriculum.

Feingold retains his fascination with Newton. “It is humbling to be in the presence of a genius,” he says. He is now collaborating with his Caltech colleague Jed Buchwald, the Dreyfuss Professor of History, on a book about Newton’s interest in chronology; that is, the science of ordering historical events.

“In Newton’s day,” he says, “chronology was a pivotal battleground upon which theologians and scholars waged heated debates. Newton argued that it was common among ancient nations to inflate their antiquity.” Because Newton thought the Hebrews were the first to acquire the attributes of a civilized society and of a political nation, says Feingold, he believed it necessary to revise the chronologies of the ancient kingdoms so that their advent toward civilization would follow that of the Hebrews—and thereby
conform to the narrative of holy scripture, which seemed to offer the most authentic account of world history. Newton was certain that his revisionist dating would “make chronology suit with the course of Nature, with Astronomy, with Sacred History, with Herodotus . . . and with itself.”

“Jed and I are the first to do this,” says Feingold. “And I’m sure our research will lead to many other important discoveries. Newton is constantly enriching, and his scholarship is a never-ending story.”