Merry Newtonmas 2013

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said, 'Let Newton be'  and all was light.

Alexander Pope

Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, the year that Galileo died.  For most people, Newton is famous for his Three Laws of Motion.  Beyond that, those with additional education know him for creating the Calculus to prove his theories of celestial and terrestrial mechanics. In addition Newton invented the reflecting telescope as a result of his experiments with light.  And he also proved the general case for the Binomial Theorem (“Pascal's Triangle”). He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge, where he had been a professor of mathematics.  He served as president of the Royal Society of scientists. Few people except numismatists know him to have been the Warden and Master of the British Royal Mint for thirty years.  He had himself sworn as a justice of the peace so that he could pursue and prosecute counterfeiters.  Any one of those achievements would have made him important to us today. That he accomplished all of that - and more - set Sir Isaac Newton apart even from the geniuses and polymaths recorded by history.

Newton's Reflecting Telescope

 Newton’s colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.

Yr humble servant Ic Newton

The Cambridge Digital Library, Newton’s Papers.

The full story of Newton’s tenure at the Mint is told in Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson.  Professor Levenson’s narratives in this book have the inclusive force of videos.  He puts you on the teeming streets of London, inside the sweat and smoke of the Mint, down the dank alleys and into the rowdy, bawdy taverns where criminals swap and wager.

The First Newtonmas?

 “Celebration of Newtonmas can be traced back to 1890. An 1892 issue of Nature records it thus (on page 459): 

At Christmas 1890, or Newtonmas 248, for the first time, the members of the Newtonkai, or Newton Association, met in the Physical Laboratory of the Imperial University, to hear each other talk, to distribute appropriate gifts, and to lengthen out the small hours with laughter and good cheer. The Society has no President : a portrait of the august Sir Isaac Newton presides over the scene.” (http://jdebp.eu./FGA/newtonmas.html)

In 1982-1984 I was recording “Community Commentaries” for WKAR-AM/FM in East Lansing.  One holiday season, I built up the imagery of a little boy born in a small village across the sea who would grow up to bring light to the world.  When I quoted the poet's eulogy, I emphasized the word Pope - and then announced that Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year that Galileo died.  Since then, over the years, I have sent out Newtonmas cards to my friends.  I also posted Newtonmas greetings to Usenet newsgroups for numismatics and physics. 

Middlesex 1793 Half Penny Token
"Payable in London Bristol & Lancaster"

Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society has been celebrating Newtonmas for about 25 years.  Richard Dawkins touted Newtonmas in 2007. Blogging for the New York Times on December 23, 2008, Olivia Judson suggested that we capitalize on the change in calendars since Newton’s birth.  When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in the United Kingdom and its colonies in 1752, Newton’s birthday moved from December 25 to January 4.  Pointing to the fact that Christmas runs until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, Judson suggested celebrating Newtonmas for ten days.  In 2009, Newtonmas was a scene in The Big Bang Theory.

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Merry Newtonmas 2012

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642.  Sworn as a justice of the peace, while Master and Warden of the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton circulated in disguise among criminals to pursue counterfeiters. 

The English crown turned to him to save the Royal Mint. Even when they were not corrupt - which they usually were - the Mint officials were unable to solve the basic problem of creating and maintaining a system of money that worked. A stern Protestant, deeply religious, and moralistic in the extreme, Newton cleared out the criminal element and gave England a reliable monetary system.

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) is intended for a general readership, yet rests on an extraordinary foundation of careful scholarship.  Thomas Levenson teaches science journalism at MIT.  He has been granted several awards for his PBS documentaries. Levenson delivers to print the videographer’s impact of sight and sound.  You walk down the alleys and into the pubs where Isaac Newton investigated crimes against the Mint of which he served as warden and later master.

For William Chaloner, counterfeiting coins was only one craft in a wider enterprise.  In the language of the day, Chaloner called his swindles “funning.” He funned the Mint with counterfeit coins and the Bank of England with fake paper.  When his counterfeit notes were discovered, he turned informant, not only avoiding prosecution and prison, but being granted £200 in reward. 

Whether Newton’s career as a detective and prosecutor is “unknown” is putative.  His work at the British Royal Mint is less often taught.  Biographer Isaiah Berlinksi called the last thirty years of Newton’s life “uninteresting.” Numismatists feel differently; and Levenson acknowledges the works of Sir John Craig who published 50 years ago. Craig’s articles draw on the same sources as Levenson’s book: Newton’s papers, the biography of Chaloner, Chaloner’s own petitions and letters.  It can be no other way.  Facts are immutable. 

However, Levenson is a television writer. He lays out a lively series of establishing shots, and pan-and-zoom vignettes that sketch and detail the events spotlighting the intellectual and emotional development of the man easily nominated as both the greatest scientist and the last sorcerer.  This combination of unflinching pursuit of difficult truths bulwarked by a stellar disregard for other people made Newton the perfect prosecutor.

Clearly Newton’s opposite, the counterfeiter William Chaloner erroneously considered himself Newton’s equal.  A runaway apprentice whose first lawful skill was making nails, Chaloner found in London a quantum mechanical probabilistic cloud of moral relativity whose potentials suited his self-indulgence. 

For the modern legalist, the salient question is the propriety of Chaloner’s trial and conviction.  No London grand jury would issue an indictment.  So, Newton went to Middlesex, a different jurisdiction, like going to Baltimore for a crime committed in Atlanta.  (Newton went jurisdiction shopping on at least one other occasion.) Levenson admits that much of Newton’s evidence would not stand in court today.  Our modern experience with wrongful convictions throws a harsh light on legality of the conviction. 

Supporting the prosecution’s claims, we have only the confessions and accusations that Newton compiled. Yet, those folios are decidedly incomplete, as we know that many were burned.  Levenson leaves the main narrative to establish a historical context for the use of torture in interrogation, a subject of some immediacy to us.  Newton could not resort to such extreme methods, but the actual tactics of Isaac Newton’s interrogations are lost because the documents were burned.

Merry Newtonmas 2011 (with bibliography) here.

  

Merry Newtonmas!

The Birth of Modernity

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

God said, let Newton be! and all was light."

A little boy born in a small village across the sea would grow up to bring light to the world. 

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year that Galileo died.  Newton is perhaps best remembered for his work in physics, the Three Laws of Motion and his Law of Gravity.  To prove his physics, he invented the calculus.  He also invented the reflecting telescope.  His work in optics showed that white light is composed of colors.  This laid the foundation for the wave theory of light, though he advocated for light being a particle.  Newton demonstrated vector arithmetic.  He delivered an algorithm for conveniently computing square roots.  He offered an original proof for the Binomial Theorem (also called “Pascal’s Triangle”).  His image appears on coins and bank notes, which is appropriate since he was Master and Warden of the Mint, rescuing Britain’s money from looming disaster.  Sworn as a justice of the peace, he circulated in disguise among criminals to pursue counterfeiters.  He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge.  He was president of the Royal Society, England’s crown chartered association for scientists.  Alone, any of Newton's achievements would have left his imprint in history.  Together, they give shape to a complex and powerful intellect. 

Middlesex token 1792

Today, we ignore his religious writings, the extent of which actually eclipsed his scientific production.  His heretical Arian beliefs foreshadowed modern Unitarianism, but he swore under oath to be a Trinitarian so that he could teach at Cambridge. 

Newton’s colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.  

Newton's Reflector built by Himself

Newton’s many biographers illuminate different aspects of his life.  To Richard S. Westfall, he was “never at rest.”  Michael White called him “the last sorcerer” a soubriquet first suggested by John Maynard Keynes.  Newton did bring his alchemical knowledge to the Mint to test the gold plate for coinages; and he also conducted time-and-motion studies to improve efficiency.  But David Berlinski closed his story when Newton was appointed to the Mint, calling the last 30 years of his life “uninteresting.”  Yet that is where MIT professor of science journalism, Thomas Levenson, begins his narrative.  Richard P. Feynman once sought to treat his students to a complete demonstration of Newton’s proof of Kepler’s Laws and found that he could not: thanks to the calculus, we have forgotten much geometry. 

The fundamental industrial technology we take for granted is possible only because of Newton.  Moreover, his work launched the Enlightenment, offering a rational and experimentally-testable explanation for both celestial and mundane motion.  This suggested that all natural phenomena, including human events, could be understood by the same scientific method.   

Merry Newtonmas, everyone!
The Zebrowskis are part of small, but apparently growing, number of atheists, skeptics and other nonbelievers who make merry over Newton’s contributions to science and math—the discovery of gravity, the invention of calculus and the first reflecting telescope, to name a few.
Religion News Service 12/16/2011 here.

SOURCES

Berlinski, David. Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World. New York: Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Craig, Sir John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: University Press, 1946.

Craig, Sir John. "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters."  Notes and Records of the Royal Society (18), London: 1963.

Craig, Sir John. “Isaac Newton - Crime Investigator,” Nature 182, (19 July 1958), pages 149-152.

Keynes, Milo. “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society (49), London: The Royal Society, 1995.

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist (Boston;New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 336 pp. $25

Marotta, Michael. “Merry Newtonmas,” Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coins, Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 11:49:41 GMT

Marotta, Michael. “Sir Isaac Newton: Warden and Master of the Mint” http://sites.google.com/site/washtenawjustice/numismatics/sir-isaac-newton

Newman, E. G. V. "The Gold Metallurgy of Isaac Newton." The Gold Bulletin Vol 8. No. 3, London: The World Gold Council, 1975.

Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, Perseus Books, 1997.

www.experiencefestival.com/newtonmas

www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/, The Newton Project, Professor Rob Iliffe Director, University of Sussex, East Sussex - BN1 9SH

www.royalmint.com/museum/newton Web site pages of the British Royal Mint.