The Danish Peace Academy

SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

John Avery
H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen

Chapter 7 THE AGE OF REASON

Descartes

Until the night of November 10, 1619, algebra and geometry were separate disciplines. On that autumn evening, the troops of the Elector of Bavaria were celebrating the Feast of Saint Martin at the village of Neuberg in Bohemia. With them was a young Frenchman named René Descartes (1596-1659), who had enlisted in the army of the Elector in order to escape from Parisian society. During that night, Descartes had a series of dreams which, as he said later, filled him with enthusiasm, converted him to a life of philosophy, and put him in possession of a wonderful key with which to unlock the secrets of nature.

The program of natural philosophy on which Descartes embarked as a result of his dreams led him to the discovery of analytic geometry, the combination of algebra and geometry. Essentially, Descartes’ method amounted to labeling each point in a plane with two numbers, x and y. These numbers represented the distance between the point and two perpendicular fixed lines, (the coordinate axes). Then every algebraic equation relating x and y generated a curve in the plane.

Descartes realized the power of using algebra to generate and study geometrical figures; and he developed his method in an important book, which was among the books that Newton studied at Cambridge. Descartes’ pioneering work in analytic geometry paved the way for the invention of differential and integral calculus by Fermat, Newton and Leibnitz. (Besides taking some steps towards the invention of calculus, the great French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665), also discovered analytic geometry independently, but he did not publish this work.)

Analytic geometry made it possible to treat with ease the elliptical orbits which Kepler had introduced into astronomy, as well as the parabolic trajectories which Galileo had calculated for projectiles. Descartes also worked on a theory which explained planetary motion by means of “vortices”; but this theory was by no means so successful as his analytic geometry, and eventually it had to be abandoned. Descartes did important work in optics, physiology and philosophy. In philosophy, he is the author of the famous phrase “Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think; therefore I exist”, which is the starting point for his theory of knowledge. He resolved to doubt everything which it was possible to doubt; and finally he was reduced to knowledge of his own existence as the only real certainty. René Descartes died tragically through the combination of two evils which he had always tried to avoid: cold weather and early rising. Even as a student, he spent a large portion of his time in bed. He was able to indulge in this taste for a womblike existence because his father had left him some estates in Brittany. Descartes sold these estates and invested the money, from which he obtained an ample income. He never married, and he succeeded in avoiding responsabilities of every kind. Descartes might have been able to live happily in this way to a ripe old age if only he had been able to resist a flattering invitation sent to him by Queen Christina of Sweden. Christina, the intellectual and strong-willed daughter of King Gustav Adolf, was determined to bring culture to Sweden, much to the disgust of the Swedish noblemen, who considered that money from the royal treasury ought to be spent exclusively on guns and fortifications. Unfortunately for Descartes, he had become so famous that Queen Christina wished to take lessons in philosophy from him; and she sent a warship to fetch him from Holland, where he was staying. Descartes, unable to resist this flattering attention from a royal patron, left his sanctuary in Holland and sailed to the frozen north.

The only time Christina could spare for her lessons was at five o’clock in the morning, three times a week. Poor Descartes was forced to get up in the utter darkness of the bitterly cold Swedish winter nights to give Christina her lessons in a draughty castle library; but his strength was by no means equal to that of the queen, and before the winter was over he had died of pneumonia.

Newton

On Christmas day in 1642 (the year in which Galileo died), a recently widowed woman named Hannah Newton gave birth to a premature baby at the manor house of Woolsthorpe, a small village in Lincolnshire, England. Her baby was so small that, as she said later, “he could have been put into a quart mug”, and he was not expected to live. He did live, however, and lived to achieve a great scientific synthesis, uniting the work of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes.

When Isaac Newton was four years old, his mother married again and went to live with her new husband, leaving the boy to be cared for by his grandmother. This may have caused Newton to become more solemn and introverted than he might otherwise have been. One of his childhood friends remembered him as “a sober, silent, thinking lad, scarce known to play with the other boys at their silly amusements”. As a boy, Newton was fond of making mechanical models, but at first he showed no special brilliance as a scholar. He showed even less interest in running the family farm, however; and a relative (who was a fellow of Trinity College) recommended that he be sent to grammar school to prepare for Cambridge University.

When Newton arrived at Cambridge, he found a substitute father in the famous mathematician Isaac Barrow, who was his tutor. Under Barrow’s guidence, and while still a student, Newton showed his mathematical genius by inventing the binomial theorem. In 1665, Cambridge University was closed because of an outbreak of the plague, and Newton returned for two years to the family farm at Woolsthorpe. He was then twenty-three years old. During the two years of isolation, Newton developed his binomial theorem into the beginnings of differential calculus.

Newton’s famous experiments in optics also date from these years. The sensational experiments of Galileo were very much discussed at the time, and Newton began to think about ways to improve the telescope. Writing about his experiments in optics, Newton says:

“In the year 1666 (at which time I applied myself to the grinding of optic glasses of other figures than spherical), I procured me a triangular prism, to try therewith the celebrated phenomena of colours. And in order thereto having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in the window shuts to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might thereby be refracted to the opposite wall.”

“It was at first a very pleasing divertisment to view the vivid and intense colours produced thereby; but after a while, applying myself to consider them more circumspectly, I became surprised to see them in an oblong form, which, according to the received laws of refraction I expected should have been circular.”

Newton then describes his crucial experiment. In this experiment, the beam of sunlight from the hole in the window shutters was refracted by two prisms in succession. The first prism spread the light into a rainbow-like band of colors. From this spectrum, he selected a beam of a single color, and allowed the beam to pass through a second prism; but when light of a single color passed through the second prism, the color did not change, nor was the image spread out into a band. No matter what Newton did to it, red light always remained red, once it had been completely separated from the other colors; yellow light remained yellow, green remained green, and blue remained blue. Newton then measured the amounts by which the beams of various colors were bent by the second prism; and he discovered that red light was bent the least. Next in sequence came orange, yellow, green, blue and finally violet, which was deflected the most. Newton recombined the separated colors, and he found that together, they once again produced white light.

Concluding the description of his experiments, Newton wrote:

“...and so the true cause of the length of the image (formed by the first prism) was detected to be no other than that light is not similar or homogenial, but consists of deform rays, some of which are more refrangible than others.”

“As rays of light differ in their degrees of refrangibility, so they also differ in their disposition to exhibit this or that particular colour... To the same degree of refrangibility ever belongs the same colour, and to the same colour ever belongs the same degree of refrangibility.” “...The species of colour and the degree of refrangibility belonging to any particular sort of rays is not mutable by refraction, nor by re- flection from natural bodies, nor by any other cause that I could yet observe. When any one sort of rays hath been well parted from those of other kinds, it hath afterwards obstinately retained its colour, notwithstanding my utmost endeavours to change it.”

During the plague years of 1665 and 1666, Newton also began the work which led to his great laws of motion and universal gravitation. Referring to the year 1666, he wrote:

“I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the moon; and having found out how to estimate the force with which a globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler’s rule of the periodical times of the planets being in a sesquialternate proportion of their distances from the centres of their orbs, I deduced that the forces which keep the planets in their orbs must be reciprocally as the squares of the distances from the centres about which they revolve; and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them to answer pretty nearly.”

“All this was in the plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded mathematics and philosophy more than at any time since.”

Galileo had studied the motion of projectiles, and Newton was able to build on this work by thinking of the moon as a sort of projectile, dropping towards the earth, but at the same time moving rapidly to the side. The combination of these two motions gives the moon its nearly-circular path.

From Kepler’s third law, Newton had deduced that the force with which the sun attracts a planet must fall off as the square of the distance between the planet and the sun. With great boldness, he guessed that this force is universal, and that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a gravitational force which is directly proportional to the product of the two masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Newton also guessed correctly that in attracting an object outside its surface, the earth acts as though its mass were concentrated at its center. However, he could not construct the proof of this theorem, since it depended on integral calculus, which did not exist in 1666. (Newton himself invented integral calculus later in his life.)

In spite of the missing proof, Newton continued and “...compared the force requisite to keep the moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the earth’s surface, and found them to answer pretty nearly”. He was not satisfied with this incomplete triumph, and he did not show his calculations to anyone. He not only kept his ideas on gravitation to himself, (probably because of the missing proof), but he also refrained for many years from publishing his work on the calculus. By the time Newton published, the calculus had been invented independently by the great German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716); and the result was a bitter quarrel over priority.

However, Newton did publish his experiments in optics, and these alone were enough to make him famous.

In 1669, Newton’s teacher, Isaac Barrow, generously resigned his post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics so that Newton could have it. Thus, at the age of 27, Newton became the head of the mathematics department at Cambridge. He was required to give eight lectures a year, but the rest of his time was free for research.

Newton’s prism experiments had led him to believe that the only possible way to avoid blurring of colors in the image formed by a telescope was to avoid refraction entirely. Therefore he designed and constructed the first reflecting telescope. In 1672, he presented a reflecting telescope to the newly-formed Royal Society, which then elected him to membership.

Meanwhile, the problems of gravitation and planetary motion were increasingly discussed by the members of the Royal Society. In January, 1684, three members of the Society were gathered in a London coffee house. One of them was Robert Hooke (1635-1703), author of Micrographia and Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, a brilliant but irritable man. He had begun his career as Robert Boyle’s assistant, and had gone on to do important work in many fields of science. Hooke claimed that he could calculate the motion of the planets by assuming that they were attracted to the sun by a force which diminished as the square of the distance.

Listening to Hooke were Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the designer of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the young astronomer, Edmund Halley (1656-1742). Wren challenged Hooke to produce his calculations; and he offered to present Hooke with a book worth 40 shillings if he could prove his inverse square force law by means of rigorous mathematics. Hooke tried for several months, but he was unable to win Wren’s reward.

Meanwhile, in August, 1684, Halley made a journey to Cambridge to talk with Newton, who was rumored to know very much more about the motions of the planets than he had revealed in his published papers. According to an almost-contemporary account, what happened then was the following:

“Without mentioning his own speculations, or those of Hooke and Wren, he (Halley) at once indicated the object of his visit by asking Newton what would be the curve described by the planets on the supposition that gravity diminished as the square of the distance. Newton immediately answered: an Ellipse. Struck with joy and amazement, Halley asked how he knew it? ‘Why’, replied he, ‘I have calculated it’; and being asked for the calculation, he could not find it, but promised to send it to him.”

Newton soon reconstructed the calculation and sent it to Halley; and Halley, filled with enthusiasm and admiration, urged Newton to write out in detail all of his work on motion and gravitation. Spurred on by Halley’s encouragement and enthusiasm, Newton began to put his research in order. He returned to the problems which had occupied him during the plague years, and now his progress was rapid because he had invented integral calculus. This allowed him to prove rigorously that terrestrial gravitation acts as though all the earth’s mass were concentrated at its center. Newton also had available an improved value for the radius of the earth, measured by the French astronomer Jean Picard (1620-1682). This time, when he approached the problem of gravitation, everything fell into place.

By the autumn of 1684, Newton was ready to give a series of lectures on dynamics, and he sent the notes for these lectures to Halley in the form of a small booklet entitled On the Motion of Bodies. Halley persuaded Newton to develop these notes into a larger book, and with great tact and patience he struggled to keep a controversy from de- veloping between Newton, who was neurotically sensitive, and Hooke, who was claiming his share of recognition in very loud tones, hinting that Newton was guilty of plagiarism.

Although Newton was undoubtedly the greatest physicist of all time, he had his shortcomings as a human being; and he reacted by striking out from his book every single reference to Robert Hooke. The Royal Society at first offered to pay for the publication costs of Newton’s book, but because a fight between Newton and Hooke seemed possible, the Society discretely backed out. Halley then generously offered to pay the publication costs himself, and in 1686 Newton’s great book was printed. It is entitled Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), and it is divided into three sections.

The first book sets down the general principles of mechanics. In it, Newton states his three laws of motion, and he also discusses differential and integral calculus (both invented by himself). In the second book, Newton applies these methods to systems of particles and to hydrodynamics. For example, he calculates the velocity of sound in air from the compressibility and density of air; and he treats a great variety of other problems, such as the problem of calculating how a body moves when its motion is slowed by a resisting medium, such as air or water.

The third book is entitled The System of the World. In this book, Newton sets out to derive the entire behavior of the solar system from his three laws of motion and from his law of universal gravitation. From these, he not only derives all three of Kepler’s laws, but he also calculates the periods of the planets and the periods of their moons; and he explains such details as the flattened, non-spherical shape of the earth, and the slow precession of its axis about a fixed axis in space. Newton also calculated the irregular motion of the moon resulting from the combined attractions of the earth and the sun; and he determined the mass of the moon from the behavior of the tides.

Newton’s Principia is generally considered to be the greatest scientific work of all time. To present a unified theory explaining such a wide variety of phenomena with so few assumptions was a magnificent and unprecedented achievement; and Newton’s contemporaries immediately recognized the importance of what he had done.

The great Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens (1629-1695), inventor of the pendulum clock and the wave theory of light, travelled to England with the express purpose of meeting Newton. Voltaire, who for reasons of personal safety was forced to spend three years in England, used the time to study Newton’s Principia; and when he returned to France, he persuaded his mistress, Madame du Chatelet, to translate the Principia into French; and Alexander Pope, expressing the general opinion of his contemporaries, wrote a famous couplet, which he hoped would be carved on Newton’s tombstone:

“Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night.

God said: ‘Let Newton be!’, and all was light!”

The Newtonian synthesis was the first great achievement of a new epoch in human thought, an epoch which came to be known as the “Age of Reason” or the “Enlightenment”. We might ask just what it was in Newton’s work that so much impressed the intellectuals of the 18th century. The answer is that in the Newtonian system of the world, the entire evolution of the solar system is determined by the laws of motion and by the positions and velocities of the planets and their moons at a given instant of time. Knowing these, it is possible to predict all of the future and to deduce all of the past.

The Newtonian system of the world is like an enormous clock which has to run on in a predictable way once it is started. In this picture of the world, comets and eclipses are no longer objects of fear and superstition. They too are part of the majestic clockwork of the universe.

The Newtonian laws are simple and mathematical in form; they have complete generality; and they are unalterable. In this picture, although there are no miracles or exceptions to natural law, nature itself, in its beautiful works, can be regarded as miraculous.

Newton’s contemporaries knew that there were other laws of nature to be discovered besides those of motion and gravitation; but they had no doubt that, given time, all of the laws of nature would be discovered. The climate of intellectual optimism was such that many people thought that these discoveries would be made in a few generations, or at most in a few centuries.

In 1704, Newton published a book entitled Opticks, expanded editions of which appeared in 1717 and 1721. Among the many phenomena discussed in this book are the colors produced by thin films. For example, Newton discovered that when he pressed two convex lenses together, the thin film of air trapped between the lenses gave rise to rings of colors (“Newton’s rings”). The same phenomenon can be seen in the in the colors of soap bubbles or in films of oil on water. In order to explain these rings, Newton postulated that “..every ray of light in its passage through any refracting surface is put into a transient constitution or state, which in the progress of the ray returns at equal intervals, and disposes the ray at every return to be easily transmitted through the next refracting surface and between the returns to be easily reflected from it.”

Newton’s rings were later understood on the basis of the wave theory of light advocated by Huygens and Hooke. Each color has a characteristic wavelength, and is easily reflected when the ratio of the wavelength to the film thickness is such that the wave reflected from the bottom surface of the film interferes constructively with the wave reflected from the top surface. However, although he ascribed periodic “fits of easy reflection” and “fits of easy transmission” to light, and although he suggested that a particular wavelength is associated with each color, Newton rejected the wave theory of light, and believed instead that light consists of corpuscles emitted from luminous bodies. Newton believed in his corpuscular theory of light because he could not understand on the basis of Huygens’ wave theory how light casts sharp shadows. This is strange, because in his Opticks he includes the following passage:

“Grimaldo has inform’d us that if a beam of the sun’s light be let into a dark room through a very small hole, the shadows of things in this light will be larger than they ought to be if the rays went on by the bodies in straight lines, and that these shadows have three parallel fringes, bands or ranks of colour’d light adjacent to them. But if the hole be enlarg’d, the fringes grow broad and run into one another, so that they cannot be distinguish’d”

After this mention of the discovery of diffraction by the Italian physicist, Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618-1663), Newton discusses his own studies of diffraction. Thus, Newton must have been aware of the fact that light from a very small source does not cast completely sharp shadows!

Newton felt that his work on optics was incomplete, and at the end of his book he included a list of “Queries”, which he would have liked to have investigated. He hoped that this list would help the research of others. In general, although his contemporaries were extravagant in praising him, Newton’s own evaluation of his work was modest. “I do not know how I may appear to the world”, he wrote, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Huygens and Leibniz

Meanwhile, on the continent, mathematics and physics had been developing rapidly, stimulated by the writings of René Descartes. One of the most distinguished followers of Descartes was the Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens (1629-1695).

Huygens was the son of an important official in the Dutch government. After studying mathematics at the University of Leiden, he published the first formal book ever written about probability. However, he soon was diverted from pure mathematics by a growing interest in physics.

In 1655, while working on improvements to the telescope together with his brother and the Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, Huygens invented an improved method for grinding lenses. He used his new method to construct a twenty-three foot telescope, and with this instrument he made a number of astronomical discoveries, including a satellite of Saturn, the rings of Saturn, the markings on the surface of Mars and the Orion Nebula.

Huygens was the first person to estimate numerically the distance to a star. By assuming the star Sirius to be exactly as luminous as the sun, he calculated the distance to Sirius, and found it to be 2.5 trillion miles. In fact, Sirius is more luminous than the sun, and its true distance is twenty times Huygens’ estimate.

Another of Huygens’ important inventions is the pendulum clock. Improving on Galileo’s studies, he showed that for a pendulum swinging in a circular arc, the period is not precisely independent of the ampli- tude of the swing. Huygens then invented a pendulum with a modified arc, not quite circular, for which the swing was exactly isochronous. He used this improved pendulum to regulate the turning of cog wheels, driven by a falling weight; and thus he invented the pendulum clock, almost exactly as we know it today.

In discussing Newton’s contributions to optics, we mentioned that Huygens opposed Newton’s corpuscular theory of light, and instead advocated a wave theory. Huygens believed that the rapid motion of particles in a hot body, such as a candle flame, produces a wavelike disturbance in the surrounding medium; and he believed that this wavelike disturbance of the “ether” produces the sensation of vision by acting on the nerves at the back of our eyes.

In 1678, while he was working in France under the patronage of Louis XIV, Huygens composed a book entitled Trait´e de la Lumiere, (Treatise on Light), in which he says:

“...It is inconceivable to doubt that light consists of the motion of some sort of matter. For if one considers its production, one sees that here upon the earth it is chiefly engendered by fire and flame, which undoubtedly contain bodies in rapid motion, since they dissolve and melt many other bodies, even the most solid; or if one considers its effects, one sees that when light is collected, as by concave mirrors, it has the property of burning as fire does, that is to say, it disunites the particles of bodies. This is assuredly the mark of motion, at least in the true philosophy in which one conceives the causes of all natural effects in terms of mechanical motions...”

“Further, when one considers the extreme speed with which light spreads on every side, and how, when it comes from different regions, even from those directly opposite, the rays traverse one another without hindrance, one may well understand that when we see a luminous object, it cannot be by any transport of matter coming to us from the object, in the way in which a shot or an arrow traverses the air; for assuredly that would too greatly impugn these two properties of light, especially the second of them. It is in some other way that light spreads; and that which can lead us to comprehend it is the knowledge which we have of the spreading of sound in the air.”

Huygens knew the velocity of light rather accurately from the work of the Danish astronomer, Ole Rømer (1644-1710), who observed the moons of Jupiter from the near and far sides of the earth’s orbit. By comparing the calculated and observed times for the moons to reach a certain configuration, Rømer was able to calculate the time needed for light to propagate across the diameter of the earth’s orbit. In this way, Rømer calculated the velocity of light to be 227,000 kilometers per second. Considering the early date of this first successful measurement of the velocity of light, it is remarkably close to the accepted modern value of 299,792 kilometers per second. Thus Huygens knew that although the speed of light is enormous, it is not infinite.

Huygens considered the propagation of a light wave to be analogous to the spreading of sound, or the widening of the ripple produced when a pebble is thrown into still water. He developed a mathematical principle for calculating the position of a light wave after a short interval of time if the initial surface describing the wave front is known. Huygens considered each point on the initial wave front to be the source of spherical wavelets, moving outward with the speed of light in the medium. The surface marking the boundary between the region outside all of the wavelets and the region inside some of them forms the new wave front.

If one uses Huygens’ Principle to calculate the wave fronts and rays for light from a point source propagating past a knife edge, one finds that a part of the wave enters the shadow region. This is, in fact, precisely the effect which was observed by both Grimaldi and Newton, and which was given the name “diffraction” by Grimaldi. In the hands of Thomas Young (1773-1829) and Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788-1827), diffraction effects later became a strong argument in favor of Huygens’ wave theory of light.

(You can observe diffraction effects yourself by looking at a point source of light, such as a distant street lamp, through a piece of cloth, or through a small slit or hole. Another type of diffraction can be seen by looking at light reflected at a grazing angle from a phonograph record. The light will appear to be colored. This effect is caused by the fact that each groove is a source of wavelets, in accordance with Huygens’ Principle. At certain angles, the wavelets will interfere constructively, the angles for constructive interference being different for each color.) Interestingly, modern quantum theory (sometimes called wave mechanics) has shown that both Huygens’ wave theory of light and Newton’s corpuscular theory contain aspects of the truth! Light has both wave-like and particle-like properties. Furthermore, quantum theory has shown that small particles of matter, such as electrons, also have wave-like properties! For example, electrons can be diffracted by the atoms of a crystal in a manner exactly analogous to the diffraction of light by the grooves of a phonograph record. Thus the difference of opinion between Huygens and Newton concerning the nature of light is especially interesting, since it foreshadows the wave-particle duality of modern physics.

Among the friends of Christian Huygens was the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz was a man of universal and spectacular ability. In addition to being a mathematician and philosopher, he was also a lawyer, historian and diplomat. He invented the doctrine of balance of power, attempted to unify the Catholic and Protestant churches, founded academies of science in Berlin and St. Petersberg, invented combinatorial analysis, introduced determinants into mathematics, independently invented the calculus, invented a calculating machine which could multiply and divide as well as adding and subtracting, acted as advisor to Peter the Great and originated the theory that “this is the best of all possible worlds” (later mercilessly satirized by Voltaire in Candide). Leibniz learned mathematics from Christian Huygens, whom he met while travelling as an emissary of the Elector of Mainz. Since Huygens too was a man of very wide interests, he found the versatile Leibniz congenial, and gladly agreed to give him lessons. Leibniz continued to correspond with Huygens and to receive encouragement from him until the end of the older man’s life.

In 1673, Leibniz visited England, where he was elected to membership by the Royal Society. During the same year, he began his work on calculus, which he completed and published in 1684. Newton’s invention of differential and integral calculus had been made much earlier than the independent work of Leibniz, but Newton did not publish his discoveries until 1687. This set the stage for a bitter quarrel over priority between the admirers of Newton and those of Leibniz. The quarrel was unfortunate for everyone concerned, especially for Leibniz himself. He had taken a position in the service of the Elector of Hanover, which he held for forty years. However, in 1714, the Elector was called to the throne of England as George I. Leibniz wanted to accompany the Elector to England, but was left behind, mainly because of the quarrel with the followers of Newton. Leibniz died two years later, neglected and forgotten, with only his secretary attending the funeral.

The Bernoullis and Euler

Among the followers of Leibniz was an extrordinary family of mathematicians called Bernoulli. They were descended from a wealthy merchant family in Basle, Switzerland. The head of the family, Nicolas Bernoulli the Elder, tried to force his three sons, James (1654-1705), Nicolas II (1662-1716) and John (1667-1748) to follow him in carrying on the family business. However, the eldest son, James, had taught himself the Leibnizian form of calculus, and instead became Professor of Mathematics at the University of Basle. His motto was “Invicto patre sidera verso” (“Against my father’s will, I study the stars”).

Nicolas II and John soon caught their brother’s enthusiasm, and they learned calculus from him. John became Professor of Mathematics in Gröningen and Nicolas II joined the faculty of the newly-formed Academy of St. Petersberg. John Bernoulli had three sons, Nicolas III (1695-1726), Daniel (1700-1782) and John II (1710-1790), all of whom made notable contributions to mathematics and physics. In fact, the family of Nicolas Bernoulli the Elder produced a total of nine famous mathematicians in three generations!

Daniel Bernoulli’s brilliance made him stand out even among the other members of his gifted family. He became professor of mathematics at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersberg when he was twenty-five. After eight Russian winters however, he returned to his native Basle. Since the chair in mathematics was already occupied by his father, he was given a vacant chair, first in anatomy, then in botany, and finally in physics. In spite of the variety of his titles, however, Daniel’s main work was in applied mathematics, and he has been called the father of mathematical physics. One of the good friends of Daniel Bernoulli and his brothers was a young man named Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). He came to their house once a week to take private lessons from their father, John Bernoulli. Euler was destined to become the most prolific mathematician in history, and the Bernoullis were quick to recognize his great ability. They persuaded Euler’s father not to force him into a theological career, but instead to allow him to go with Nicolas III and Daniel to work at the Academy in St. Petersberg.

Euler married the daughter of a Swiss painter and settled down to a life of quiet work, producing a large family and an unparalleled output of papers. A recent edition of Euler’s works contains 70 quatro volumes of published research and 14 volumes of manuscripts and letters. His books and papers are mainly devoted to algebra, the theory of numbers, analysis, mechanics, optics, the calculus of variations (invented by Euler), geometry, trigonometry and astronomy; but they also include contributions to shipbuilding science, architecture, philosophy and musical theory!

Euler achieved this enormous output by means of a calm and happy disposition, an extraordinary memory and remarkable powers of concentration, which allowed him to work even in the midst of the noise of his large family. His friend Thi´ebault described Euler as sitting “..with a cat on his shoulder and a child on his knee - that was how he wrote his immortal works”.

In 1771, Euler became totally blind. Nevertheless, aided by his sons and his devoted scientific assistants, he continued to produce work of fundamental importance. It was his habit to make calculations with chalk on a board for the benefit of his assistants, although he himself could not see what he was writing. Appropriately, Euler was making such computations on the day of his death. On September 18, 1783, Euler gave a mathematics lesson to one of his grandchildren, and made some calculations on the motions of balloons. He then spent the afternoon discussing the newly-discovered planet Uranus with two of his assistants. At five o’clock, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, lost consciousness, and died soon afterwards. As one of his biographers put it, “The chalk fell from his hand; Euler ceased to calculate, and to live”. In the eighteenth century it was customary for the French Academy of Sciences to propose a mathematical topic each year, and to award a prize for the best paper dealing with the problem. L´eonard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli each won the Paris prize more than ten times, and they share the distinction of being the only men ever to do so. John Bernoulli is said to have thrown his son out of the house for winning the Paris prize in a year when he himself had competed for it. Euler and the Bernoullis did more than anyone else to develop the Leibnizian form of calculus into a workable tool and to spread it throughout Europe. They applied it to a great variety of problems, from the shape of ships’ sails to the kinetic theory of gasses. An example of the sort of problem which they considered is the vibrating string.

In 1727, John Bernoulli in Basle, corresponding with his son Daniel in St. Petersberg, developed an approximate set of equations for the motion of a vibrating string by considering it to be a row of point masses, joined together by weightless springs. Then Daniel boldly passed over to the continuum limit, where the masses became infinitely numerous and small.

The result was Daniel Bernoulli’s famous wave equation, which is what we would now call a partial differential equation. He showed that the wave equation has sinusoidal solutions, and that the sum of any two solutions is also a solution. This last result, his superposition principle, is a mathematical proof of a property of wave motion noticed by Huygens. The fact that many waves can propagate simultaneously through the same medium without interacting was one of the reasons for Huygens’ belief that light is wavelike, since he knew that many rays of light from various directions can cross a given space simultaneously without interacting. Because of their work with partial differential equations, Daniel Bernoulli and L´eonard Euler are considered to be the founders of modern theoretical physics.

Political philosophy of the Enlightenment

The 16th, 17th and 18th centuries have been called the “Age of Discovery”, and the “Age of Reason”, but they might equally well be called the “Age of Observation”. On every side, new worlds were opening up to the human mind. The great voyages of discovery had revealed new continents, whose peoples demonstrated alternative ways of life. The telescopic exploration of the heavens revealed enormous depths of space, containing myriads of previously unknown stars; and explorations with the microscope revealed a new and marvelously intricate world of the infinitesimally small.

In the science of this period, the emphasis was on careful observation. This same emphasis on observation can be seen in the Dutch and English painters of the period. The great Dutch masters, such as Jan Vermeer (1632-1675), Frans Hals (1580-1666), Pieter de Hooch (1629- 1678) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), achieved a careful realism in their paintings and drawings which was the artistic counterpart of the observations of the pioneers of microscopy, Anton van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke. These artists were supported by the patronage of the middle class, which had become prominent and powerful both in England and in the Netherlands because of the extensive world trade in which these two nations were engaged.

Members of the commercial middle class needed a clear and realistic view of the world in order to succeed with their enterprises. (An aristocrat of the period, on the other hand, might have been more comfortable with a somewhat romanticized and out-of-focus vision, which would allow him to overlook the suffering and injustice upon which his privilages were based.) The rise of the commercial middle class, with its virtues of industriousness, common sense and realism, went hand in hand with the rise of experimental science, which required the same virtues for its success.

In England, the House of Commons (which reflected the interests of the middle class), had achieved political power, and had demonstrated (in the Puritan Rebellion of 1640 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688) that Parliament could execute or depose any monarch who tried to rule without its consent. In France, however, the situation was very different.

After passing through a period of disorder and civil war, the French tried to achieve order and stability by making their monarchy more absolute. The movement towards absolute monarchy in France culminated in the long reign of Louis XIV, who became king in 1643 and who ruled until he died in 1715. The historical scene which we have just sketched was the background against which the news of Newton’s scientific triumph was received. The news was received by a Europe which was tired of religious wars; and in France, it was received by a middle class which was searching for an ideology in its struggle against the ancien régime.

To the intellectuals of the 18th century, the orderly Newtonian cosmos, with its planets circling the sun in obedience to natural law, became an imaginative symbol representing rationality. In their search for a society more in accordance with human nature, 18th century Europeans were greatly encouraged by the triumphs of science. Reason had shown itself to be an adequate guide in natural philosophy. Could not reason and natural law also be made the basis of moral and political philosophy? In attempting to carry out this program, the philosophers of the Enlightenment laid the foundations of psychology, anthropology, social science, political science and economics.

One of the earliest and most influential of these philosophers was John Locke (1632-1705), a contemporary and friend of Newton. In his Second Treatise on Government, published in 1690, John Locke’s aim was to refute the doctrine that kings rule by divine right, and to replace that doctrine by an alternative theory of government, derived by reason from the laws of nature. According to Locke’s theory, men originally lived together without formal government:

“Men living together according to reason,” he wrote, “without a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature... A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature and the use of the same facilities, should also be equal amongst one another without subordination or subjection...”

“But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence... The state of nature has a law to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”

In Locke’s view, a government is set up by means of a social contract. The government is given its powers by the consent of the citizens in return for the services which it renders to them, such as the protection of their lives and property. If a government fails to render these services, or if it becomes tyrannical, then the contract has been broken, and the citizens must set up a new government.

Locke’s influence on 18th century thought was very great. His in- fluence can be seen, for example, in the wording of the American Declaration of Independence. In England, Locke’s political philosophy was accepted by almost everyone. In fact, he was only codifying ideas which were already in wide circulation and justifying a revolution which had already occurred. In France, on the other hand, Locke’s writings had a revolutionary impact.

Credit for bringing the ideas of both Newton and Locke to France, and making them fashionable, belongs to Francois Marie Arouet (1694- 1778), better known as “Voltaire”. Besides persuading his mistress, Madame de Chatelet, to translate Newton’s Principia into French, Voltaire wrote an extremely readable commentary on the book; and as a result, Newton’s ideas became highly fashionable among French intellectuals. Voltaire lived with Madame du Chatalet until she died, producing the books which established him as the leading writer of Europe, a prophet of the Age of Reason, and an enemy of injustice, feudalism and superstition.

The Enlightenment in France is considered to have begun with Voltaire’s return from England in 1729; and it reached its high point with the publication of of the Encyclopedia between 1751 and 1780. Many authors contributed to the Encyclopedia, which was an enormous work, designed to sum up the state of human knowledge. Turgot and Montesquieu wrote on politics and history; Rousseau wrote on music, and Buffon on natural history; Quesnay contributed articles on agriculture, while the Baron d’Holbach discussed chemistry. Other articles were contributed by Condorcet, Voltaire and d’Alembert. The whole enterprise was directed and inspired by the passionate faith of Denis Diderot (1713-1784). The men who took part in this movement called themselves “philosophes”. Their creed was a faith in reason, and an optimistic belief in the perfectability of human nature and society by means of education, political reforms, and the scientific method.

The philosophes of the Enlightenment visualized history as a long progression towards the discovery of the scientific method. Once discovered, this method could never be lost; and it would lead inevitably (they believed) to both the material and moral improvement of society. The philosophes believed that science, reason, and education, together with the principles of political liberty and equality, would inevitably lead humanity forward to a new era of happiness. These ideas were the faith of the Enlightenment; they influenced the French and American revolutions; and they are still the basis of liberal political belief.

Chapter 8: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

Suggestions for further reading

1. Phillip Bricker and R.I.G. Hughs, Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., (1990).
2. Zev Bechler, Newton’s Physics and the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution, Kluwer, Dordrecht, (1991).
3. Zev Bechler, Contemporary Newtonian Research, Reidel, Dordrecht, (1982).
4. I. Bernard Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution, Cambridge University Press, (1980).
5. B.J.T. Dobbs, The Janus Face of Genius; The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought, Cambridge University Press, (1991).
6. Paul B. Scheurer and G. Debrock, Newton’s Scientific and Philosophical Legacy, Kluwer, Dordrecht, (1988).
7. A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton, Adventurer in Thought, Blackwell, Oxford, (1992).
8. Frank Durham and Robert D. Purrington, Some Truer Method; Reflections on the Heritage of Newton, Columbia University Press, New York, (1990).
9. John Fauvel, Let Newton Be, Oxford University Press, (1989).
10. René Taton and Curtis Wilson, Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, Cambridge University Press, (1989).
11. Brian Vickers, English Science, Bacon to Newton, Cambridge University Press, (1989).
12. John G. Burke, The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton, University of California Press, (1983).
13. A.I. Sabra, Theories of Light from Descartes to Newton, Cambridge University Press, (1991).
14. E.N. da Costa Andrade, Isaac Newton, Folcroft Library Editions, (1979).
15. Gideon Freudenthal, Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton, Reidel, Dordrecht, (1986).
16. Henry Guerlac, Newton on the Continent, Cornell University Press, (1981).
17. A.R. Hall, Philosophers at War; the Quarrel Between Newton and Leibnitz, Cambridge University Press, (1980).
18. Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator; Isaac Newton and his Times, Free Press, New York, (1984).
19. Lesley Murdin, Under Newton’s Shadow; Astronomical Practices in the Seventeenth Century, Hilger, Bristol, (1985).
20. H.D. Anthony, Sir Isaac Newton, Collier, New York (1961).
21. Sir Oliver Lodge, Pioneers of Science, Dover, New York (1960).

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