Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer by White Michael

Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer by White Michael

Author:White, Michael [White, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780007392018
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-02-20T00:00:00+00:00


Figure 11. Newton’s representation of the comet’s elliptical path.

What role did alchemy play at this stage of Newton’s reasoning? He never stopped experimenting, but interspersed periods observing comets and calculating their trajectories with a devotion to the furnace as intense as ever. And from this direction came the final clue.

During the 1680s the notion of attraction and repulsion was still seen as ‘occult’ – it implied that some kind of force was operating at a distance without the involvement of an observable medium or mechanism. Descartes’s mechanical philosophy still prevailed, which described gravity as arising from the behaviour of clusters of matter and spinning vortices acting like whirlpools within the ether (which was visualised as an invisible, weightless, neutral medium pervading all space and facilitating all action).

By now Newton had rejected many aspects of Descartes’s mechanical theory, including his notions of gravity. But, despite this, he had begun the 1670s with a traditional view of the ether as a corporeal medium which was intimately involved in the way in which some form of ‘force’ maintained planetary motion. He was sure that gravity was not a simple mechanical process – a process in which matter pushed upon other matter in the way of a whirlpool, as Descartes would have it – but he could not offer a viable alternative theory.

As a result of the work he conducted on comets, and of his discoveries prompted by the dispute with Hooke at the end of 1679, by the early 1680s Newton was gradually approaching an alternative to Descartes’s theory. By the time he completed his masterwork, the Principia, he had completely rejected the traditional image of the ether in favour of gravity operating by ‘attraction at a distance’ (which perhaps required some ill-defined form of ethereal medium as facilitator – a medium via which this mysterious force, gravity, could operate).

But then, as the 1680s progressed, the role of the ether became less and less important to Newton and the concept of what the alchemists called ‘active principles’ took on far greater importance and led him to a radical reassessment of how gravity operated. This change in perception was perhaps the most important step in Newton’s development of universal gravitation. One Newton scholar has gone so far as to say that Newton could not have visualised attraction at a distance had it not been for his alchemical work.30

The concept of active principles is an ancient one, rooted in hermetic tradition, though alchemists understood it in typically iconoclastic ways. Some believed that matter and spirit were interchangeable and imagined what they called a ‘Universal Spirit’. Others held that matter and spirit were quite separate but that spirit could ‘act upon matter’.

Henry More, Newton’s mentor during his early career at Cambridge, wrote of a ‘Spirit of Nature’ which could act upon matter without interchanging with it, describing it as of ‘great influence and activity in the nascency [origin] as I may so call it, & coalescency of things [the form of things]: And this not only



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