The Professor of my late 50s college writing class was fond of repeating on a daily basis, that if we wanted to learn how to write, we had to learn how to read. Read, read, read, he admonished. This was still a time of education, when diagraming English sentences was a required course, if you missed three classes, you were out of the course, and if you failed to graduate within five years of matriculation, you were out of college for good. The generation of the 60s, with their unlimited class cuts, their elimination of grades and their ability to graduate without endangering their naturally elevated intelligence, moved away from reading as a learning process. The same thing happened in England in the middle of the 17th Century, only the reason was not the hopes of an impending revolution, the reason was the result of an actual revolution, the rise of Cromwell and the beheading of Charles I.
Hooke was born in the middle of the 1630s while Newton came along in the early 1640s so that both of their educational experiences were shaped by the tumult of the times. What schools taught and how they taught it was defined by the political disputes of the day. Ideas were dangerous. Both Newton and Hooke, who came from modest backgrounds, benefited from this situation. Retreating from ideas, schools concentrated on teaching languages and mathematics. Reading either Newton's or Hooke's writings of the time would lead one to believe that the educated in England were basically illiterate. They couldn't spell, they had difficulty forming sentences, they couldn't succinctly put thoughts into writing. Each of their progress through the educational system was the result of their natural talents when it came to mathematics, and in the then current language of science, Latin.
Newton, dour and introverted, clung desperately throughout his life to his beloved Mathematics and Latin. Hooke, however, having spent the formative years of his childhood on the balmy and prosperous Isle of Wight, had a marked creative quality in his personality that made him both gregarious and voluble. An artistic perfectionist to the extent that he could render architectural plans in sufficient detail to lead to ready construction, he was also remarkably clever with his hands, making his way through educational establishments simply from his ability to precision manufacture the scientific devices the expanding interest in scientific pursuits demanded. As such, he was among the group of influential youths who, during Cromwell's reign, met informally to address the scientific issues of the day, the same group that, upon the unexpected ascension to the throne of Charles II, created, with his patronage, The Royal Society, England's premier scientific organization.
The Royal Society was established at Gresham College in London, while Newton operated out of Cambridge, miles to the north, and in the 17th Century, out of the immediate scientific loop. Thus, during the early years of the Society, Hooke could be considered an insider and Newton an outsider. Newton's introduction to the Society was his presentation of a novel telescope, which received widespread acclaim. This success emboldened him to propose his theory of colors, that white light was made up of all the colors of the rainbow. Newton's view of light implied that light was a particle, possibly Newton's only correct assumption about reality, but this implication ran afoul of the then current (and apparently forever) thinking that light was a wave, and Hooke took dispute with Newton on his theory of colors, souring Newton toward the Royal Society, Hooke, London, and probably mankind in general.
Hooke had no inkling of how that relatively minor dispute would spread Newton's dourness into his own, covering a lifetime of achievements with one of Newton's petty responses when he ascended to absolute power over the scientific establishment, the destruction of any likeness of Hooke within Newton's reach.
The fact that the architects of the British Scientific revolution of the late 17th and early 18th centuries did not read denied them of the pleasures of Sir Francis Bacon, who was in total eclipse at the time. Bacon taught that the goal of science is to uncover the hidden causes of motion, that because we would never be able to know precisely what those hidden causes were, we had to collect facts and produce theories, that once a theory was produced, we had to continually revise the theory as new facts arose. His teachings were the antithesis to the notion that the universe operated by hidden laws that had to be uncovered, that science was not the process of continually seeking out the nature of the hidden forces that control the motions of our existence, but rather a process of seeking out the laws that controlled the operation of the universe.
Following Bacon's view, we need to describe the causes of motion. Under the notion that the universe operated by immutable laws, which at the time were thought to be put in place by God, we don't have to describe the causes of motion, we just have to describe the motion.
It's hard for the average person to realize just how ignorant people like Newton and Hooke were of actual reality. They didn't read, they talked among themselves, and these talks produced consensus ideas which, when accepted, became law. The abysmal ignorance of empirical science today, where it not only can't describe the current forces that cause the planets to rotate on their axes and orbit or the force that makes an object drop, but denies that those forces exist other than as an historical artifact or a property of something else, rests on the mistakes these unlearned men made three hundred years ago, mistakes that were encoded into unchallengeable laws of the universe, laws, at the time, created by God, but with God now dead, laws that simply live on with no author.
The dispute between Hooke and Newton that started, at least to Hooke, with a minor dispute over the nature of light, a dispute that had been simmering for half a century, erupted a decade later after a conversation that Hooke had with his great friend, Sir Christopher Wren and Newton's great friend, Edmund Halley of comet fame. The conversation goes back to Tycho Brahe's monumental error in concluding that the moon and Mars speeded up and slowed down, rather than traveling different distances at uniform rates (See 10/23/04 column, Time Equals Rate Times Distance).
Kepler, as a youth, had noticed that if you construct a triangle that contained the orbit of Mars, the triangle's points pretty much defined the orbit of Jupiter. This led him to believe that God had designed the solar system according to geometric principles. When plain geometry produced no results for the orbits of the rest of the planets, Kepler turned to solid geometry, nesting various shapes one within the other to define the movement of the solar system. Throughout all this primeval ignorance, he kept returning to the orbit of Mars as the key to his theories. Brahe had the notebooks recording decades of the motion of Mars, and thus the only thing that stood between Kepler and universal fame was Brahe. Once Kepler got his hands on the notebooks, he spent years attempting to figure out what the orbit of Mars really was.
And here we once again run into the abysmal ignorance of the people who made the absurd laws upon which rest the foundations of empirical science. For thousands of years, science thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that everything orbited around the Earth. When it came to a question of how everything orbited the Earth, it was not a question of what caused the movement, it was a question of whether the orbits were perfect circles or not. The conclusion was, that the Creator of the universe could make nothing that wasn't perfect, so the orbits were indeed perfect circles. When Copernicus put the sun in the center of the Solar System, with the Earth orbiting the sun, no one bothered to question whether the Earth's orbit was or was not a perfect circle. The only thing that could exist in the heavens was perfect, and thus the Earth's orbit was assumed to be a perfect circle.
Kepler, with his mania for geometric forms, struggled with Brahe's decades of observations in the face of the perfect circle assumption, a perfect circle, after all, being in Kepler's acceptable geometric forms. What he found, after years of arduous work, was not a perfect circle. If not a perfect circle, then what? Well, it looked like a perfect ellipse. But God would not create a perfect ellipse without that ellipse having some other perfection. After all, Kepler, while he didn't agree with Brahe's conclusion that the Earth was the center of the universe, still believed his conclusion that the moon and Mars speeded up and slowed down in their orbits. If this was so, then they had to speed up and slow down perfectly. The only way they could speed up and slow down perfectly if is they did so in accordance with a God given law, and that law, on a geometric basis, had to be, as the planets speed up, they move closer to the sun. As they slow down they move further away from the sun. Closer meant smaller areas, further meant bigger areas. Thus, the faster the planet went, the closer it was, but the more area it swept out. The slower the planet went, the further it was, and the less area it swept out. Thus, a planet has to sweep out identical areas in identical times.
Kepler's Law of planetary motion is the law astronomers use to measure the motion of the planets, and when a planet deviates from that law, astronomers don't look to see if the law is wrong, after all, it is a law, they look to see what is causing the deviation. One of the features of the law was the fact that it had the planet falling toward the sun, speeding up in the process and falling away from the sun, slowing down in the process. This is patently absurd in reality because the sun, as noted in the above cited column, is only .025 off center, which means nothing but comets fall toward it. Further, the planets would be falling toward the sun during each half of their orbits and away from the sun during the other half, so if the sun did have the effect of causing the planets to speed up and slow down, it would be equal on both sides of the orbit and wouldn't result in the uniform speeding up and slowing down that that Kepler's rubber band effect implies.
Nonetheless, by locking the motion into a law that had the planets sweeping out equal areas in equal times, Kepler pretty inadvertently built the inverse square law for falling objects into the planetary motion because the areas swept out are computed by using the radius squared, the radius being the distance to the sun, or the distance toward which the planet is supposedly falling.
Hooke, with his mathematical background, picked up on this fact, and in his discussions with Wren and Halley, suggested that if a mathematical relationship could be shown between the rate at which an object fell, a reflection of the measurement of gravity, and Kepler's Law, then a conclusion could be made about the nature of the planet's motion, that it was being affected by the same gravity that caused objects to drop. The three proposed a modest award to any mathematician who could work up the proof.
Halley, on a later trip up to Cambridge, mentioned the problem to Newton, who claimed to have already worked out the proof. When asked for it, Newton, hedged, taking about a decade to produce it. That proof, of course, was his deeply flawed Theory of Universal Gravitation, written in Latin so people couldn't read it, and actually, unread these many centuries, its flaws having been covered over with absurdities even more crippling to humanity than its flaws. The Theory's primary conclusion is that God put everything in motion in straight lines, that God produced gravity as a property of everything, and thus everything changes that straight-line motion into curved motion, in the case of the planets, the orbits we find them in. In short, in one fell swoop, Newton assumed away the cause of all motion in the universe, making the motion of planets the result of God, now the historical swirling mass of gas, and the motion of falling objects a property of the objects themselves.
Word of Newton's synthesis, for that is what it was, a theoretical synthesis that connected falling objects on Earth with the motion of the planets in space, made its rounds in the coffee shops and parlors of society, and Hooke, of course, wanted credit for his contribution to the theory. Newton, who had agreed to put some names in one of the books of his primary work on the subject, immediately removed Hooke's name, producing all sorts of invective against Hooke's presumptuousness at laying claim to anything. This is one of Newton's more polite comments about the situation, but it goes to the very core of the Baconian/Newtonian split, Bacon's common sense acknowledgement that the stuff we make up has to be continually revised as new facts come to light with the Newtonian fantasy that we can make up the laws of the universe, and then conform the universe to those laws regardless of any facts that subsequently arise to dispute those laws. Newton commented, in the prose that is normal for the scientific figures of the time: "Now is this not very fine? Mathematicians that find out, settle & do all the business must content themselves with being nothing but dry calculators & drudges & another that does nothing but pretend & grasp at all things must carry away all the invention."
In short, anyone that comes up with concepts is thinking on the toilet and anyone that takes concepts and use mathematics to turn them into universal law is, if not God, at least pretty close. Newton acknowledges Hooke's contribution, he just claims it's no contribution.
The dispute arose immediately upon Newton's presentation of his Principia to The Royal Society for publication. The dispute caused such a division, that Halley had to maneuver himself into a position of authorizing publication, and then in fact pay for the publication of the work himself. Halley had more than ample motive by this time. Newton had become more than the dour hermit of Cambridge that he had been. His niece had met and bedded a young Cambridge student, Charles Montagu. He and Newton attempted to set up a society to compete with the Royal Society at Cambridge, and failed. Montagu then produced a much heralded eulogy to Charles II, and in the tumult following the King's death, and James II's attempt to bring Catholicism back to the throne, signed the fateful 1688 letter that brought William of Orange to England as William III.
From that point, it was clear sailing for Newton because Montagu, the Earl of Halifax, became William's advisor in all matters monetary. Montagu was how Newton ended up as Master of the Mint with the power of life and death over anyone he thought to be counterfeiting, a post from which he had people painfully put to death clear into the 1720s, and it was Montagu who provided Newton with the power to take over The Royal Society, the goal of both after their failed Cambridge attempt.
The juicy part of this takeover, however, was that, as long as Hooke was rattling around in his quarters at Gresham College, Newton simply didn't dare. The first thing he did after taking over The Society upon Hooke's death, other than removing Hooke's portrait and installing a mace for use as his gavel, was to have The Society publish his Theory of Colours.
The dispute did much to legitimize Newton, whose basic theory of gravitation was flawed in so many ways that questions of the most minor nature could puncture it. With everyone's eyes on the dispute with Hooke, the theory was assumed to be the universal answer to all the questions of the cosmos.
The joke was, however, on us. Because it closed off for three centuries any inquiry into the nature of the forces that control our everyday existence, and continues to do so today, we exist in a sort of technological perversion, where we expend all of our efforts in overcoming forces we know nothing about, and none of our efforts in attempting to understand the nature of the forces we are overcoming.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com