I'm making my way from the execution to the Mint. Watching executions is not particularly my cup of tea. However, in doing a full background on Isaac Newton for my interview, I felt I should get a taste of his work. As Master of the Mint, he spends many hard hours physically interrogating suspected counterfeiters and when, in the dungeons of the Mint, one finally breaks down, he is immediately sentenced to be drawn and quartered by Mr. Newton.
I'm told Mr. Newton is quite efficient in his prosecution of counterfeiters, even fitting himself out in rough garb and trolling the bars in the seedier parts of town in the hopes of capturing one red-handed. The outcome, as I have just witnessed, where a man is hanged, his entrails cut out and burned while he is still alive, then his arms and legs pulled off while he is still conscious and finally what's left of his torso is hung up until he expires, well, that's really a site you don't want to see before eating.
Mr. Newton agreed to meet me in his spacious offices at the Mint and I was ushered in immediately upon my arrival. The man, known more for his excellent work in the field of Alchemy, the art of turning base metals such as lead into precious metals such as gold and silver, than for his scientific theories, has a dour nature. For some reason, he has a Mace on his desk. This is one of those deadly items authority wields to maintain control over unruly people at meetings. I took the implication seriously and had no plans to be unruly in the least, although my questions might be of a nature to ruffle Mr. Newton's feathers.
As Mr. Newton had just taken over the Presidency of the Royal Society and had the Society publish his work Opticks, I thought I might start the interview dealing with his theory of colors.
TRS: You've just published your theories about light in the new volume, Opticks. I seem to remember you first proposed your theory of colors to the Royal Society some three decades ago. Why is the society just now getting around to publishing it?
IN: I spent all the interim years working on universal gravitation, so I have to admit I've neglected light all that time.
TRS: If I understand it, you claim white light is made up of all colored light and is ordered the way it emerges from a prism. Is that correct?
IN: Precisely.
THS: Didn't the recently departed Robert Hooke disagree with that conclusion?
IN: Mr. Hooke was of the opinion I had not sufficiently demonstrated the truthfulness of the statement. I have now done so.
THS: How did you do that?
IN: I analogized light to musical chords and the truthfulness of the statement becomes self-evident for those with sufficient intelligence to understand my clarity.
THS: There has been speculation light is not a particle as you claim, but a wave and the colors are waves of differing heights. [The canon of time travel ethics prevented me from pointing out to Mr. Newton that light is part of a broader electromagnetic spectrum, the part that we can visibly see, and that it would be extraordinarily incredible if the few frequencies visible to the human eye were somehow bundled together into a single master frequency which only broke out into colors when entering a prism. Mr. Newton would have answered, ignorant of evolution, that the eye didn't evolve to see the spectrum, God created the spectrum to match his creation of the eye and therefore it was not inconceivable that the small portion of the spectrum the eye could see was different from the rest of the broader spectrum.] How does analogizing light to music notes demonstrate white light is made up of all colors?
IN: It's simple. The notes of a chord end up making a single note in harmony and that single note in harmony is made up of individual notes, just as white light is made up of individual colors.
THS: In your view of nature, how does matter demonstrate color? Why are some things green and other things blue or red?
IN: Color appears in nature in circular format from red through violet and thus we see that format as color.
THS: So the fact that colors can be ordered in a color wheel proves that light is ordered the way it emerges from the prism? [Again, time travel ethics prevented me from pointing out to Mr. Newton that while a man named Young proved to the satisfaction of his colleagues that light was a wave rather than a particle a century further on, Young did not disagree with Mr. Newton about his notion that white light was made up of all colored light and light is ordered the way it comes out of the prism. Both of these notions resulted in massive 20th Century ignorance. First, by incorrectly ordering light, Mr. Newton sent technology experimenters on wild goose chases when it came to things like blue lasers and LEDs and even color receptors in digital cameras (see column 11-05). In addition, the absurd notion that white light is made up of all colors resulted in a 20th Century science that believes not only the visible portion of the spectrum is different from the broad range of frequencies of which it is a part, but that colors result when light is absorbed by an object rather than when it is reflected by physical matter, the reflection changing the frequency of the light in accordance with the physical composition of the matter.] I can see why you might be led to believe that white light contains all colors, but I still don't see why you would think it is ordered the way it comes out of a spectrum.
IN: I don't educate ignoramuses.
TRS: Moving on, your understanding of light as a particle, doesn't this derive from the methodology you used in your attempt to prove that gravity was proportional to and a property of matter?
IN: Attempt, you say. Attempt? [I watched cautiously as he fingered the Mace.] I prove that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter because I can compute the amount of matter in the Earth and the moon.
TRS: How do you do that?
IN: I take the volume of the Earth, which is mathematically computable, and I take the volume of the moon, which is also mathematically computable, and I uniformly fill both with identical particles, the particles that make up everything in the universe. From there it is a relatively simply task to compute how much gravity the Earth produces and how much gravity the moon produces. Then, when I know that, I have an equation that will tell me what the force of gravity's effect on the moon should be.
TRS: So you assume the Earth and the moon are uniformly made up of identical particles. Have you considered density, that some matter is denser than other matter and therefore is not uniformly made up?
IN: Density does not enter the equation. It has been demonstrated that no matter how dense, or how heavy, an article is, gravity affects it the same way when it is falling in a vacuum. We are talking about the Earth and the moon, which exist in a vacuum.
THS: But if light is a particle, and light travels from the sun to the Earth and the moon, then space can't be a vacuum. [This time Mr. Newton actually picked up the Mace.] Well, what exactly do you do after you compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon?
IN: Ah, yes. Well, once I get the amount of gravity that is in the Earth and the moon, I know that gravity diminishes inversely with the square of distance so I can compute how much gravity is affecting the moon's course through space.
TRS: What is that course?
IN: The moon would be traveling in a straight line if it weren't being pulled into a circle by the Earth's gravity.
TRS: How do you know that the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for the force of gravity?
IN: [Mr. Newton took a Gold Guinea out of his waist pocket and began to spin it on the desktop.] That's a law. I put it right up in the front of the Principia.
TRS: I think Mr. Hooke made a comment on your laws. You took facts that were well recognized, an object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts upon it, the application of force will change the motion of an object, and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and snuck in one of your own devise, that an object in motion will stay in motion until a force acts upon it. Didn't you add this to well-recognized facts concerning motion in order to make the claim that the moon would be traveling in a straight line but for the force of gravity you were attempting to prove existed?
IN: [Spinning the Guinea against the flat side of the Mace.] I don't make laws. God makes laws. I just uncover those laws. Are you telling me an object traveling in a straight line wouldn't continue to travel in a straight line until some force causes it to change that motion?
TRS: That sounds reasonable, but where in reality does an object travel in a straight line? I mean, it's obvious why an object will stay at rest. It's being held to the Earth by gravity. But why would an object be traveling in a straight line?
IN: Because that's the way God made the universe.
TRS: Well, where, then, does it get its motion from?
IN: God, of course.
TRS: How does it maintain its motion?
IN: [Mr. Newton's hand hovered over the Mace as the coin spun in front of it.] God comes back periodically and refreshes the motion in the moon.
TRS: So after you compute the amount of gravity in the Earth and the moon, what do you do with it?
IN: As I was about to say, once I have that computation, then I compute how much inertia the moon has. I do this simply by volume. Then when I know how much inertia the moon has, I make an independent calculation how much gravity it would take to change the moon's straight-line motion into the circular motion that we find in reality. If the amount of force it takes to put the moon in a circular orbit equals the amount of gravity that exists between the Earth and the moon, then I have mathematically proven that gravity is a property of and proportional to the matter producing it.
TRS: So you made all these calculations and they balanced. The amount of gravity the Earth and the moon produce equals the amount of gravity it would take to change the moon's straight-line motion into the orbit we measure?
IN: Well, no, not quite. But that doesn't prove anything. You see, there's too much gravity. The moon would have long since crashed into the surface of the Earth.
TRS: So you didn't prove that gravity was a property of and proportional to the matter that was producing it.
IN [Mr. Newton was twirling the Mace in has hand as fast as the coin was spinning.] No, no, no. We now know as a result of my mathematical computations that gravity is a property of and proportional to the matter that is producing it. We can't see that the backside of the moon is a big crater, which accounts for the discrepancy, or that the moon is full of caves, which also accounts for the discrepancy. There's no doubt that gravity is a property of and proportional to the matter that produces it. [Mr. Newton arose with what looked like a smile on his dour face and came around the desk.] I'm going to have to terminate this interview. [He patted my on the shoulder.] I'll be seeing you soon.
With that, he ushered me out of the room. As I was leaving, a Mint guard stopped me and demanded that I empty my pockets. Doing so, I was shocked to see the Guinea Mr. Newton had been spinning in my possession. The guard picked it up and bit it. "Ah," he exclaimed. "Counterfeit. You're in for it now."
I won't go into what happened next, but I certainly didn't admit to Mr. Newton, even under torture, that his harebrained theory not only failed for the Earth and the moon, it failed for every single planet in the solar system. Nonetheless, an adoring scientific community reached Mr. Newton's own conclusion, that gravity as a property of and proportional to the matter that produced it was a given, and it could be used to compute how much matter actually existed in the planets, something that could never be demonstrated, clouding to the human race forever an objective analysis of the mechanics of the production of gravity and the ensuring benefits such an analysis would produce.
NOTE: Newton's penchant for trolling bars for counterfeiters he could then interrogate and send what was left of to a horrible death is well-documented, most of his biographers dismissing it as an unexplainable quirk. However, because his theories were never proven, he used his position at the mint to demonstrate to potential critics what could be the result of criticism. As far as Newton's belief that God came back regularly to keep the planets moving, he at least required a current force. Today's empiricists simply ignore current force for the motion of the planets, assigning motion to momentum obtained some five billion years ago. God, momentum, not much difference. As to his obsession with alchemy, while alchemy is popularly thought to be the art of turning lead into gold, it is actually the search for the purification of a white powder that in Newton's time was thought to confer powers of biblical proportions. Newton's period of madness, widely attributed to the inhalation of mercury fumes during is alchemical experiments, was actually grief over a broken love affair with Nichols Fatio de Duillier
As to his relationship with Robert Hooke, he was afraid of him and did not use his contacts to seize The Royal Society until Hooke's death. Hooke was an extremely talented experimenter, one of the first to identify fossils, and was the one who came up with the suggestion that led to Newton's Principia (see column 05-05). Newton had himself installed as President of The Society upon Hooke's death, a result of his close friendship with the powerful Lord Montagu, who was Newton's niece's lover, and immediately removed Hooke's portrait, virtually eliminating his visage from history. When Newton died, The Royal Society immediately removed Newton's mace, which had been an embarrassment to them for decades. Halley, of comet fame and the royal astronomer, was one of the men present when Hooke came up with the idea of equating the inverse square law of gravity with Kepler's inherently inverse square laws of planetary motion, but his loyalties lay with Newton. Newton pestered Halley until he, Newton died, to remeasure the orbit of the moon to bring it into alignment with his theory.
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