I just got around to screening the November 15, 2005, PBS NOVA production of Newton's Dark Secrets.
First, I should get a couple of topics out of the way. I rarely mention Newton's supposed invention of calculus (Leibniz probably had precedence, but Newton's Principia is such a comprehensive example of calculus, it's hard for Leibniz' priority to stand). It's a little abstruse to begin with, but to me, calculus is a mathematically rigged up geometry that allows empiricists to impose their own concepts on reality rather than being a simple tool to measure reality. In describing moving systems, we are creating models. Used as a description of how actual models work, for instance, how air flows around a wing in a wind tunnel, calculus is a useful form of communication, a self-correcting language of the trial and error process of inventing technology. When it comes to explaining the motion of the planets, well, I'm reminded of the cover of At the Gates of the Citadel, which uses actual measurements of the sun's movements to compute the differences in time it takes for the Earth to move between the winter and summer solstices and the summer and winter solstices. Although this figure is almost two days, and clearly shows Kepler's law to be an inaccurate description of reality, the empirical response, to the extent there is one, is that the actual difference is more like a little under a day, and that, of course, is a small enough margin of error to validate Kepler's laws. However, the empirical time distance is determined by, you guessed it, applying calculus to the movement of the planets, including incorporating Kepler's law, essentially imposing on reality a mathematical system that reflects the unexamined assumptions of the users.
The next thing I'd like to note is Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, which I have mentioned several times in these columns, but actually haven't given due credit. The NOVA program asserts that Newton invented the telescope and kept it as a toy until it was discovered by a friend and brought to London where it was welcomed, as it should have been, as a revolution in telescope design. Newton, ever involved in prismatic studies, recognized the distortions produced by the Galilean telescope to be the result of the edges of the lenses working as prisms. Newton, at a young age, reasoned that using mirrors would eliminate the problem, and the telescope he invented is essentially the telescope we use today. You simply can't take that away from him.
Other than that, although NOVA sugarcoated it, the picture of Newton that emerges is pretty much the picture of Newton that appears in these columns with the exception of the reverence accorded to Celestial Mechanics, the description of which compels me to write this column on the program. Newton comes across as a religious fanatic who believed in the literal presence of God as the driving force of the solar system (and with God doing all the moving, of course, who needs to explain the forces that cause motion). He was an avid alchemist, although this is the program's dark secret, one that was supposedly unknown until the 30s when that paragon of Government control over the economy (and private investment profit), John Maynard Keynes, bought Newton's papers at auction and began to decode them. It may have been a dark secret to the 20th Century, but it sure wasn't to the 17th Century, where the secret world of the alchemists was populated by well-known public figures who hid behind flimsy pseudonyms. To believe that a society to which Robert Boyle and Newton belonged was secret to any but the general public is absurd. How does anyone in their right mind think Lord Montague engineered Newton's elevation to run the mint other than his renown as an alchemist during a time Montague was introducing reserve banking in England, a banking system that created paper money many times over the value of the gold backing it? The myth, that an introverted, criticism shy, Cambridge professor had the administrative skills to carry out the ongoing recoinage is laughable and the assertions that the recoinage could not have been accomplished by someone who rarely became involved in anything but trapping counterfeiters, is mere hagiography.
The program also gives passing reference to the Newton Hooke controversy over light and the fact Newton didn't dare take over the Royal Society, again with Montague's influence, until Hooke died. However, every time Hooke is mentioned, a caricature of his face was flashed on the screen. Newton, whose vainness had him standing for many portraits throughout his life, had all likenesses of Hooke destroyed after he took over the Royal Society, so we really don't know what Hooke looked like (although a recent biographer claims to have come across one).
The one fact I wasn't aware of that was brought out by the program started with a reference to a library in Jerusalem that contained a very curious document. On a manuscript leaf, Newton had computed the exact date that the world would come to an end. Later in the program, this manuscript leaf seemed to lose its importance as it turned out Newton spent countless hours throughout his life computing and recomputing this date. He was obsessed with it, as was he obsessed with his vast collection of bibles he pored over for clues as to how the universe operates.
As to his obsession with alchemy, well, that was just an early interest in chemistry, or maybe not, maybe it was his search for active principles. What are active principles? Let's cover the explanation Newton uses to describe the orbits of planets first. And for this gem, I'm going to use the description provided by one of the programs enthusiastic scholars (I'm beginning to think the basic principle of scholarship is, if you don't know the answer or you're otherwise totally clueless, make something up).
So here's Newton's genius. He was able to contemplate the fact that objects fall on Earth by sitting under an apple tree, the apocryphal fantasy he made up late in his life, acknowledged as such in the program. He's looking at the moon and he's thinking about an apple falling and he realizes that the same thing that is making the apple fall is keeping the moon in orbit. Now at this point, I would say, hmmm, is the apple orbiting, is the moon falling, can you take a bite out of the moon, do we bay at an apple, but let's pass that one by.
So, Newton's starting assumption was, if the moon wasn't moving in its orbit, it would be falling to the Earth just like an apple falls to the Earth (when it isn't orbiting the Earth).
Does Newton then ask, what is causing the moon to move in its orbit? Why, absolutely not. He's already made up a law to explain that, objects moving in a straight line will continue to move in a straight line unless a force acts upon them to change that motion. Well, Mr. Newton, he wasn't knighted when he scribbled out the theory, what set the moon moving in a straight line? Why God, of course. But that's beside the point. Now we get into the nuts and bolts.
Unbeknownst to the program's producers, it was Tartaglia, not Galileo, who shot cannonballs down a field to determine what elevation, 45ºs, would send the cannonball the furthest. Believe it or not, Newton's genius was to place Tartaglia's cannon on an imaginary mountain that stretched high above the atmosphere and to then start shooting off his cannonballs. The first cannonball has a low charge and simply comes out the end of the cannon and rolls down the mountain. The second cannonball has a stronger charge and it makes it to the end of the mountain before it drops to Earth. The third goes a little further with an additional charge and this keeps going until the cannonball makes it halfway around the Earth. You can see the geometry here that Newton then imposed his calculus on to come up with Kepler's perfectly elliptical orbits.
The program's graphics show the cannonball going further with each additional charge until I thought it was going to come back around and knock the cannon off the mountaintop. But not this cannonball. It went right through the cannon to establish a perfect orbit around the Earth. Too big a charge, of course, and the cannonball would fly off somewhere in a straight line. When the scholarly empiricist gets to this point, he's practically shaking with the genius of Newton. See how he analogizes the moon to a cannonball, he says, it's genius. Newton connected the heavens with the Earth below, unified our understanding of the basic forces at work in the universe.
Let's see, now. Cannonball. Moon. What do they have in common? According to Newton, they both moved. Got to be the perfect analogy, except for one small fact. There's a big old nasty cannon filled with big old nasty gunpowder pushing the cannonball. Where's the cannon pushing the moon? What's the analogy? There is no analogy.
The next statement is de rigour for empirical scientists whose theoretical nonsense doesn't form the basis for any of the technology in our existence, but whose continued existence depends on the unceasing claim that all of our technology is the result of their theoretical nonsense, that our houses are lighted because empirical science determined light was a wave. The excited empiricist concludes with the statement that Newton was so accurate, his computations are used in space travel today.
Well, his computations might very well be used in space travel today, but they resulted in numerous misses of the moon, many lost Mars missions, and heaven knows how much orbital junk lost in unknown paths around the Earth. The only thing that keeps a satellite in orbit is constant attention. The only thing that keeps interplanetary probes on target is constant attention in the form of course correction teams that use photographs taken from the probe along with the direction and timing of radio signals to determine where the heck the probe really is, correcting its course periodically to get it to where they want it to go.
Any theory that purports to tie the motion of the moon to gravity has to account for the cause of the moon's motion. If it doesn't, it's simply a senseless theory, meaningless. The moon isn't an apple because it isn't falling to the Earth and a cannonball isn't the moon because it has an identifiable force producing its motion. The two forces acting upon it determine the course of the cannonball, the momentum it receives from the cannon's discharge and the force of gravity. At any point it its flight, it is obeying the only law of motion that exists, it is in balance with the forces acting upon it. As the power of the cannon's discharge is overcome by gravity, the cannonball starts to drop to the ground, where the ground puts a final end to its forward momentum. All matter comes to rest with respect to the forces acting upon it. No law of motion can assume motion because to do so is to ignore the forces acting upon what is in motion. The only way we can determine why something is moving is to determine the forces with which it is at rest.
Only the dumbest among us, read empirical scientists, would believe that the planets have momentum that they derived in an ad hoc way 5 billion years ago, but wait. The empiricist would say, hey we don't believe that, we know it, and when we ask how do you know it, they answer, well, the planets are still moving aren't they?
The planets are all moving with respect to one another, but they are all at rest with respect to the forces acting upon them. See column 03-05. Those forces obviously include gravity. But for the planets, and the moon for that matter, to move in a circular orbit, there has to be another force acting upon them. The job of science is to figure out what that force is, to determine what the forces are that produce the movement in our reality, not only the force that causes the planet to orbit, but the force that causes the apple, and the cannonball, to drop.
Which brings us back to Newton's alchemy and his active principles. As the scholars in the program note, Newton has discovered the deepest secret of the universe, and while he has put it in a book that few can understand, everyone knows that something miraculous has been done. But what was this thing called gravity? Newton wanted to know, and that's why he pursued his alchemical experiments throughout his life. Of course, the program conveniently forgets to mention that the goal of alchemists was first to turn base metals into silver, then gold, then into the philosopher's stone, which was a fine white powder that accorded its possessor the power of both invisibility and, get this, weightlessness. What more logical pursuit for a guy trying to figure out what gravity is than to turn lead into gold? Hey, it's better than taking the Baconian course of collecting observations, inducing concepts, testing those concepts, collecting more observations in the process through which the concepts could be modified to better reflect reality. The Baconian course is precisely the course empirical science claims Newton, and all empirical science, pursues, which is a simple matter of projection, imputing the opposite of what your doing on yourself, and what your doing, producing crank notions, on your opposition.
In alchemy, active principles are the forces of nature. Alchemists observed these forces, and the invisibility of their causes, and concluded that they were the result of spiritual influence. Newton, wanting to be more concrete about it, viewed these forces, including gravity, as operated by the Spirit of Nature. Thus, gravity was an active principle perceived as attraction. To remove the spirit part of the equation into a more factual realm, Newton said the divine hand of the creator who maintained the ebb and flow of the universe guided the Spirit of Nature.
Can't get much more concrete than that, can we? Unless you want to spend some time and effort actually thinking and analogizing. See column 02-05.
So, we live in a world where our technology, the technology that will determine whether we survive or die depending on how accurately it reflects reality, is dictated by a reality produced by analogizing a cannonball's known motion to the unknown motion of the moon and concluding that gravity is a force of attraction produced by God's regulation of the ebb and flow of the universe.
We're in peachy shape, aren't we?
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com