Chapter Three

The ways of Nature

are mysterious

3.1 That a concept as fundamental as the structure of the solar system and the motion of the planets had been questioned, found wanting and replaced, heralded an era of scientific investigation and theorization that continues unabated to this day. It led to the inauguration and expansion of dozens of new fields of scientific inquiry which in turn brought about a gradual transformation in Man’s understanding of his relation to Nature, and so laid the basis of the modern environmental movement.

3.2 It would be another mathematician, Kepler, who supplied the reasoning that escaped Copernicus all his life: that the orbits of the planets were slightly elliptical. And combining their work with unprecedentedly precise telescopic observations Galileo synthesized this new vision of the solar system in two great books “Dialogue on the Two Chief systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican” and “Discourses on Two New Sciences” published in 1633 and 1638. These “two books made available to all educated men ideas which only a few had grasped earlier in the century. At almost the same time the English physician William Harvey demonstrated the circular motion of the blood around the body and the function of the heart in promoting this process. The errors of ancient and medieval science were revealed, and a great scholarly edifice was broken down. All the old certainties, derived from the teachings of Aristotle, Ptolemy and Galen, were abandoned, and the whole of Creation had to be investigated and understood afresh.” [The Man who knew too much].

3.3 The Royal Society was founded in London in 1660 to do just that, and their first curator of experiments launched two frenetic decades of public performances of experiments into just about anything that could be measured and demonstrated, including but not limited to proving Jupiter rotates, establishing the freezing point of water as the standard zero on glass thermometers (i.e. before the work of  Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1724) and Anders Celsius (1742), publishing a landmark study of microscopic observations – ‘Micrographia’, arguing that fossils demonstrate the ancient history of earth and that species have gone extinct.  But Robert Hooke’s hectic public scientific performances were to be eclipsed entirely by the private, concentrated, profound study of his rival.

3.4 In 1686 Isaac Newton published “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” ‘a mathematically quantified account of gravitation that embraced terrestrial and celestial phenomena alike.  In doing so he demolished the Aristotelian bifurcation of the universe into two realms, one above and one below the moon, and established a physical basis for the Copernican universe.  The thoroughness and assurance with which he accomplished this task were such that his theory came to be regarded, for more than two centuries thereafter, as something close to the receive word of God.”  Richard Westfall, who published “Never at rest” in 1980 now widely regarded as the definitive scholarly biography of Newton, confessed in the preface:

3.5 “The more I have studied him, the more Newton has receded from me.  It has been my privilege at various times to know a number of brilliant men, men whom I acknowledge without hesitation to be my intellectual superiors.  I have never, however, met one against whom I was unwilling to measure myself, so that it seemed reasonable to say that I was half as able as the person in question, or a third or a fourth, but in every case a finite fraction.  The end result of my study of Newton has served to convince me that with him there is no measure.  He has come for me wholly other, one of the tiny handful of supreme geniuses who have shaped the categories of the human intellect, a man not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow beings.” Newton completed the revolution begun in “De Revolutionibus” not simply by showing a new way of viewing the world, but by demonstrating three simple laws of Nature which governed all the infinite complexity of motion visible to man, and which could be tried, tested and proved, by anyone, anywhere, anytime.  Whilst Mr. Westfall, and pretty much every scientist since his time, acknowledge the immensity of Newton’s achievement, Newton himself felt his work was just a beginning, as he writes in his preface: 

3.6   “for all the difficulty of philosophy seems to consist in this – from the phenomena of motions to investigate the forces of nature, and then from these forces to demonstrate the other phenomena..   In the third book we give an example of this in the explication of the System of the World; for by the propositions mathematically demonstrated in the former books, we in the third derive from the celestial phaenomena the forces of gravity with which bodies tend to the sun and the several planets.  Then from these forces, by other propositions which are also mathematical, we deduce the motions of the planets, the comets, the moon and the sea.  I wish we could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles; for I am induced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by some causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled towards each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other; which forces being unknown, philosophers have hitherto attempted the search of nature in vain; but I hope the principles here laid down will afford some light either to this or some truer method of philosophy.”

3.7 Newton inspired generations of scientists to explore "the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles": to explore, find, measure, describe and record every detail, and think upon what they found, and thereby perhaps to discover new laws as fundamental to the motion of all things as his.

Continue Reading  Chapter Four