Revising Newton’s legend, and more
ISAAC NEWTON IS A GIANT of science. His three laws of motion are in every introductory physics book. Schoolchildren are taught the story of his eureka moment under an apple tree. There are hundreds of books about him.
John and Mary Gribbin set out to bring to our attention the history of two lesserknown 17th century scientists whose lives and work overlapped with Newton’s: Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley. Their accomplishments were not only great in their own right but foundational for Newton’s work. The authors argue they have been at best overlooked and at worst the victims of Newton’s petty politicking.
“If I have seen further,” Newton famously said, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That statement, from a letter he wrote to Hooke in 1675, gets uncomfortably unpacked by the diligent Gribbins, upending the popular conception of what Newton actually accomplished.
“What has come down to us as Newton’s theory of gravity should really be known as the Hooke-newton theory of gravity,” they write, concluding a few pages later: “Comparing these almost contemporaneous accounts, the modern reader is left in no doubt who was the forward-looking scientist with great insight, and who was the backwardlooking mystic with a head filled with magical mumbo jumbo.”
Such strong words to describe the man credited with laying the foundations of classical mechanics make for a tense but rewarding read.
On the one hand, cognitive science has repeatedly demonstrated our inclination to be suspicious of a narrative that contradicts preconceived notions. Readers might find themselves scouring the pages for reasons to doubt that it happened quite like the authors say.
On the other hand, their account is really convincing.
Halley’s accomplishments, detailed at length here, are less revolutionary than Hooke’s but his life and efforts are still compelling. Born into wealth, Halley (pronounced ‘hawley’) funded and carried out the first survey of the southern skies. He was commissioned as a captain without ever joining the Royal Navy, and sailed further south than anyone had previously. He “walked under water” in a diving bell, calculated the acreage of England’s counties, was a friend of Peter the Great and (possibly) worked as a British spy in the Adriatic.
The argument for his inclusion here is less that Newton deliberately undermined him but that his life is so fascinating it is a shame he is not known for more than the prediction of a comet (which was itself an impressive feat of calculation and observation).
Robert Hooke is a different matter. Born on the Isle of Wight in 1635, he was a strange, sickly and solitary child, orphaned at 13 with little money. Despite that, largely because of his intellect, he gained entry to London’s Westminster School, alongside John Locke and Christopher Wren, where he began his studies in mathematics and ‘mechanicks’, and then Oxford University. There he studied under some of the first people to conduct scientific experiments. He spent nearly a decade at Oxford, becoming a fixture of the Royal Society, founded in 1660. At the prompting of his mentor, Robert Boyle, he carried out some of the first experiments with vacuums.
By 1664 Hooke had been appointed curator of experiments for the Royal Society. By the end of the decade he held a number of positions and professorships that allowed him to spend most of his time on scientific experiments and architecture. He invented an early version of the sextant, played a significant role in the rebuilding of London following its great fire of 1666, and developed what is now known as Hooke’s Law. The breadth of his activities and experiments, from the microscopic to the astronomical, are fascinating, but it is his claim to the theory of gravity – coming up with the inverse
“WHAT HAS COME DOWN TO US AS NEWTON’S THEORY OF GRAVITY SHOULD BE KNOWN AS THE HOOKE- NEWTON THEORY.”
square law of gravitational pull, according to the authors – that deserves extra attention.
Newton’s story of what inspired his theory of gravity is well-known. In 1666 the 23-year-old, sitting in the garden of his family home, observed an apple fall from a tree (in the popular retelling the apple actually hits him on the head but that’s a later embellishment). Why, he wondered, did the apple fall straight down? In that moment, he realised there must be a gravitational force between the Earth and all matter.
Gribbin and Gribbin take a dim view of the veracity of Newton’s claims, which do not appear in any contemporaneous accounts, and doubt the credit given to him for coming up with the idea of gravitational pull.
He published his work on gravity two decades after the legendary apple encounter. The authors document the scientific work in England during these decades through extensive correspondence and notes from the Royal Society’s archives, as well as through Hooke’s meticulous diary.
By 1679, while Newton had “given up” scientific studies, Hooke was discussing gravitational pull and ellipses in London. It wasn’t until the pair exchanged a series of combative letters that Newton returned to mathematics to prove someone else’s idea. When he published his magnum opus, the
in 1687, Newton spitefully left out all mention of Hooke.
“By the time he came up with the apple story, Newton was an old man and the plague year was a distant memory (and, of course, Hooke was dead),” Gribbin and Gribbin conclude.
Newton was a brilliant mathematician but a cantankerous and jealous man. He used his head for numbers to prove something a better visionary had first glimpsed, and he declined to offer any credit to the “shoulders”. It is impossible to come away from the book without feeling a little disillusioned with Newton’s legacy, but it is a fair trade to get the real story of the birth of a scientific idea.