Newton does the math
By Ann Finkbeiner |
March 27, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
LONDON before the mid-1600s was a general calamity. The streets were full of thieves, murderers and human waste. Death was everywhere: doctors were hapless, adults lived to about age 30, children died like flies. In 1665, plague moved into the city, killing sometimes 6,000 people a week. In 1666, an unstoppable fire burned the city to the ground; the bells of St Paul's melted. Londoners thought that the terrible voice of God was "roaring in the City," one witness wrote, and they would do best to accept the horror, calculate their sins, pray for guidance and await retribution.
In the midst of it all, a group of men whose names we still learn in school formed the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. They thought that God, while an unforgiving judge, was also a mathematician. As such, he had organized the universe according to discernible, mathematical law, which, if they tried, they could figure out. They called themselves "natural philosophers," and the ideas behind the Royal Society would flower into the Enlightenment, the political, cultural, scientific and educational revolution that gave rise to the modern West.
This little history begins Edward Dolnick's "Clockwork Universe," so the reader might think the book is about the Royal Society and its effects. But the Royal Society is dispatched in the first third of the book, and thereafter, the subject is how the attempt to find the mathematics governing the universe played out in the life of Isaac Newton.
The math of the time could deal with a changeless, ideal world - consider the principles of geometry - but not with motion. Throw a stone, what is its path? Watch a comet, where is it going? Newton invented the math of motion, calculus, the way of answering how fast, how far, how high? Then Newton used his calculus to show how an apple is pulled to the earth and how the earth pulls the moon into an orbit, and how these pulls are the same as the sun's on the planets. And this universal pull, this gravity, everywhere operates on the same math: the greater the masses of the bodies and the closer they are together, the stronger the pull.
Dolnick's book is lively and the characters are vivid. But the story feels disjointed. For instance, you're never quite sure why, having just read about the Pythagorean theorem, you're now reading about Johannes Kepler. The story has also been told already and often, and you have to wonder what drew the author to it. Maybe the attraction was the history of the math; the author has an advanced degree in the subject and explains it with clarity and fizz. Another attraction must have been the thundering change that began in 1660. To go from sinful "curiositas" to productive "curiosity," from blind acceptance to open-eyed inquiry, from asking, "Why?" to answering, "How?" - this change, of all the world's revolutions, must surely be the most remarkable.
In the midst of it all, a group of men whose names we still learn in school formed the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. They thought that God, while an unforgiving judge, was also a mathematician. As such, he had organized the universe according to discernible, mathematical law, which, if they tried, they could figure out. They called themselves "natural philosophers," and the ideas behind the Royal Society would flower into the Enlightenment, the political, cultural, scientific and educational revolution that gave rise to the modern West.
This little history begins Edward Dolnick's "Clockwork Universe," so the reader might think the book is about the Royal Society and its effects. But the Royal Society is dispatched in the first third of the book, and thereafter, the subject is how the attempt to find the mathematics governing the universe played out in the life of Isaac Newton.
The math of the time could deal with a changeless, ideal world - consider the principles of geometry - but not with motion. Throw a stone, what is its path? Watch a comet, where is it going? Newton invented the math of motion, calculus, the way of answering how fast, how far, how high? Then Newton used his calculus to show how an apple is pulled to the earth and how the earth pulls the moon into an orbit, and how these pulls are the same as the sun's on the planets. And this universal pull, this gravity, everywhere operates on the same math: the greater the masses of the bodies and the closer they are together, the stronger the pull.
Dolnick's book is lively and the characters are vivid. But the story feels disjointed. For instance, you're never quite sure why, having just read about the Pythagorean theorem, you're now reading about Johannes Kepler. The story has also been told already and often, and you have to wonder what drew the author to it. Maybe the attraction was the history of the math; the author has an advanced degree in the subject and explains it with clarity and fizz. Another attraction must have been the thundering change that began in 1660. To go from sinful "curiositas" to productive "curiosity," from blind acceptance to open-eyed inquiry, from asking, "Why?" to answering, "How?" - this change, of all the world's revolutions, must surely be the most remarkable.
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