History of Science - 5
History of Science - 5.
Robert Hooke.
John Flamsteed.
Edmond Halley.
Issac Newton.
The three scientists who established the scientific method, at the end of the 17th century,
were Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and Issac Newton.
Newton was a loner, who worked in isolation and established the profound truth,
that the universe works on mathematical principles.
Hooke was a gregarious and wide ranging scientist, who came up with a dazzling variety of new ideas.
He established the Royal Society as an archetypal scientific society.
His misfortune was to incur the enmity of Newton, and to die before Newton.
This gave Newton a chance to rewrite history, which he did very effectively.
Hooke was born in 1635.
He was a sickly child, and not expected to live.
Till the age of 7, he lived mostly on milk, milk products and fruits.
However he was physically active.
At the age of 16, he developed a malformation of his body.
Because of his ill health, his education was neglected.
When it seemed that there was a chance of him surviving, his father gave him the rudiments of education.
When a painter visited his place, Hooke realised that he could paint.
He started copying any painting he could find.
He thought that he could become a professional painter.
His father died, when he was 13 years old.
With an inheritance of 100 pounds, he was sent to London to be an apprentice for the artist Peter.
He decided he could learn painting by himself.
Instead of becoming an artist he used the money for an education at Westminster school.
He also learnt to play the organ.
He secured a place at Christ church college in Oxford as a Chorister.
One of his contemporaries was Christopher Wren, who had a keen interest in science.
To make his ends meet, he worked as a servant to wealthier undergraduates.
He became Robert Boyle’s chief paid assistant and lifelong friend.
Hooke was responsible for the success of Boyle’s air pump.
He also worked with chemical and astronomical works with Boyle.
He came up with an idea of a pocket watch regulated by a balance spring.
However negotiations to patent it, broke down.
He did not reveal the secret of his idea which died with him.
He gave one of his watches to King Charles 2, who was very pleased.
In the early 1660’s, he got a job with the Royal Society, as a curator of experiments.
Another person Henry was appointed as administrative secretary in the Royal Society.
Henry was fluent in several European languages.
He communicated by letters with scientists all over Europe.
He got on well with Boyle, but took a dislike to Hooke.
Hooke received a meagre salary from the Royal Society, because the society was short of funds.
He was kept financially afloat by the generosity of Robert Boyle.
In 1655, he became the professor of geometry at Gresham college,
a post that he retained for the rest of his life.
In 1665, he published his greatest work, ‘Micrographia’.
Unusually for that time it was written in English.
It reached a wide audience.
It was significant in opening the eyes of people to the small scale world.
The microscope at that time consisted of very small convex lenses, the size of pinheads,
mounted in strips of metal, and held close to the eye.
They were like powerful magnifying glasses, which could magnify 200 to 300 times.
Hooke improved the compound microscope, using two or more lenses.
Hooke’s book contained scientifically accurate drawings, of what he saw through the microscope.
The book marked the time, when microscopy came of age, as a scientific discipline.
The most famous microscopic discovery, was the cellular structure of slices of cork.
The pores that he saw were not cells.
He gave the name cell, which biologist later used for actual cells.
He described among other things, the structure of feathers, the butterfly’s wing,
and the compound eye of the fly.
He correctly identified that fossils were the remains of once living animals or plants.
This was quite far sighted.
Till then it was believed that the rocks were stones, which mysteriously resembled life.
Hooke recognised that there were major transformations in the surface of the Earth.
He said parts of Earth which were below the sea, are now land,
and mountains have been turned into plains, and plains into mountains.
Hooke studied the nature of coloured patterns, produced by thin layers of material.
He suggested it was caused by some form of interference between light reflected,
from the two sides of the layer.
He investigated the coloured rings of light produced when two pieces of glass meet at a slight angle.
Interestingly now they are known as ‘Newton’s rings’.
Hooke’s ideas about light were based on wave theory.
He suggested that the waves might be transverse, not the push pull waves of compression,
envisaged by Huygens.
He concluded that both burning and respiration involved something from the air being absorbed.
This came very close to discovering oxygen, which was actually discovered a century later.
He said heat arose in a body from the motion or agitation of its parts.
This was almost two centuries ahead of his time.
He invented the clock face type of barometer, a wind gauge, an improved thermometer,
and a hygroscope for measuring moisture in the air.
He was the first scientific meteorologist who discovered the link,
between changes in the atmospheric pressure and the weather.
He also made some astronomical observations.
He was a strong believer in science based on experiments.
Several factors conspired to prevent Hooke from building on his achievements, described in Micrographia.
The first was his position as secretary in the Royal Society.
He carried out experiments in the weekly meetings, read out papers by Fellows,
who were not present, and described new inventions.
This was an addition to the full course of lectures he was giving at Gresham College.
Shortly after the publications of Micrographia, there was a plague in London.
Like many others, Hooke retreated from London to the country side.
Hooke was distracted from his scientific work, following the fire of London in 1666.
He along with Christopher Wren were responsible for the rebuilding of most of London.
In 1666, he presented a paper to the Royal Society,
where he discussed the motion of planets around the sun,
in terms of an attractive force exerted by the sun on the planets, to hold them in orbit.
He compared it with a ball and string which was whirled around.
He suggested that celestial bodies have a gravitating power towards their centres.
His second proposal, was that all bodies in simple motion will continue to move in a straight line,
till they are affected by some force, to move in a circular or elliptic orbit.
His third proposal, was that the gravitative forces are more powerful, if they are nearer.
The second proposal of Hooke, is now known as Newton’s first law of motion.
He later rectified his third proposal,
that gravity is proportional to the square of the distance between objects.
Hooke never married, but had several relationships with maid servants.
In 1676, his niece aged 15 became his mistress.
He was devastated when she died in 1687.
1687 was the year in which he had a dispute with Newton.
In 1678, he came up with a well known discovery of law of elasticity which bears his name.
It is a sad fact of history, that many of his more dazzling achievements,
were forgotten or attributed to others.
Hooke died in 1703.
In 1704, Newton published his epic work on light and colour, ‘Opticks’.
He deliberately delayed it for 30 years, waiting for Hooke to die.
Newton’s hostility to Hooke dated back to early 1670’s, when he was a professor at Cambridge.
Newton completed his undergraduate studies in Cambridge.
He then became a fellow of Trinity college in 1669.
He then became the Lucasian professor of mathematics.
Newton studied the nature of light using prisms and lenses.
He split white light into rainbow colours, then recombined them to make white light.
This proved that white light was just a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow.
He designed and built a reflecting telescope that did not have coloured fringes,
around the edges of the images seen through the telescope.
His telescope was demonstrated to the Royal Society in 1671.
Newton was immediately elected as a fellow.
He presented to the Society a comprehensive paper on light and colours.
Newton favoured the corpuscular theory of light, unlike the wave model favoured by Huygens and Hooke.
He became interested in light after reading Hooke’s Micrographia, but he did not acknowledge it.
This is probably why the coloured rings observed by Hooke is called Newton’s rings.
Hooke was miffed for not receiving his due credit.
Newton had the highest opinion of his own abilities,
and had very low regard for other scientists.
He got tired of defending his work, from critics, with lesser intellectual ability.
The personality clash between Newton and Hooke, went on for 4 years.
The Royal Society insisted on a public reconciliation.
Newton and Hooke exchanged letters of reconciliation.
This is when Newton made the famous reference to ’Standing on the shoulder of Giants’.
By mentioning Giants, Newton was possibly insulting Hooke, who was a small man with a twisted back.
Newton was nasty, and always harboured grudges.
Newton went into a shell, and stoped reporting his scientific ideas.
It was only by the cajoling of Edmond Halley,
he produced the most influential book in the history of science.
Halley was born in 1656.
His father was a prosperous business man, and landlord.
He married his mother, just seven weeks before he was born.
His father was able to provide Halley the best available education.
He studied in Oxford university.
Halley was a keen astronomer even when he joined Oxford.
He arrived in Oxford with a telescope and a sextant.
His mother died in 1672, and his father married again.
In 1674, the Royal Society wanted to establish an observatory, to match one at Paris.
At that time there was a problem in finding the longitude during sea journeys.
King Charles 2 decided that as a seafaring nation, Britain needs to have a solution to this.
The observatory built in Greenwich hill, became a project of the crown.
Flamsteed was appointed as the astronomical observator.
Flamsteed started to work in 1676, when he also was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Halley began a correspondence with Flamsteed, when he was an undergraduate in 1675.
The two became friends, though they fell out later.
Halley visited Flamsteed and assisted him with observations of lunar eclipses.
Flamsteed published papers on planetary orbits, occultation of Mars by the moon, and a sunspot.
Flamsteed primary tasks was to make an accurate survey of the northern skies,
using a modern telescope.
This was to improve the observations made by scientists like Tycho, who used older telescopes.
Halley wanted to do something big, and he decided to survey the southern skies.
His father supported him, and gave him an allowance of 300 pounds a year.
This was three times Flamsteed’s salary.
The king arranged a free passage for Halley, with an East India Company.
They went to the Island of St. Helena, in 1676, a southernly British position.
Halley who was 20 years old abandoned his degree studies.
Halley published his catalogue of the southern stars in 1678.
He earned the title of ’Our southern Tycho’, from Flamsteed.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Halley observed the transit of Mercury across the face of the Sun.
This provided a way to calculate the distance to the Sun.
But the observations were not accurate enough to provide a definitive result.
On the recommendation of the King, he was awarded an M.A., though he did not complete his degree.
He was now on equal terms, with Boyle, Hooke, Flamsteed, Wren and Pepys.
Because of its potential importance for navigation, accurate star positions was of key importance,
in the late 17th century.
There was a German astrologer called Hevelius who was making observations using open sights.
He stubbornly refused to use the more modern telescopic sights, because of his rigid mindset.
Halley visited him to check his astronomical data.
He initially endorsed it, and later withdrew the endorsement,
saying that telescopic sights are more accurate.
Halley for sometime was generally having a good time, with his father’s money.
In 1680 a bright comet became visible.
It was a prominent object in the night sky, clearly visible from London and Paris.
At this time Halley went on a European tour and met many eminent mathematicians.
Halley married in 1682, to Mary Tooke.
The couple had three children.
Halley carried out detailed observations of the moon, to help in finding longitude.
This would require 18 years time, which is the time for the moon to complete one cycle of its wanderings,
against the background stars.
Halley’s father died in 1684, without leaving a will.
His wealth was considerably reduced by the extravagance of his second wife.
There was an expensive legal battle between Halley and his step mother, over the estate.
His financial situation was that, he had to give-up his Fellowship in the Royal Society,
and became a paid clerk to the Society.
Halley became involved in what is now regarded as the most important publication,
in the history of science, Newton’s Principia.
In 1684, the idea of an inverse square law of attraction behind the orbits of planets was not new.
It goes back to 1673, when Huygens calculated the centrifugal force, of an object in a circular orbit.
Hooke and Wren discussed these ideas with Newton.
In 1677, the three Fellows agreed that the centrifugal force pushing the planets outwards from the Sun,
must be inversely proportional to the squares of the distances from the Sun.
For the planets to stay in the orbit they must be attracted by the Sun by an equivalent force,
which cancelled out the centrifugal force.
Proving this mathematically was tremendously difficult,
using the techniques available to them at that time.
Halley and Wren admitted that the task was beyond them.
Hooke told him that he could derive all the laws of planetary motion, from the inverse square law.
Wren offered Hooke 40 shillings if he could produce the proof in two months.
Hooke failed to produce the proof.
Halley visited Newton in Cambridge in 1684,
where he discussed planetary motion and the inverse square law.
It was this meeting that led to Newton to write the Principia.
This established his image as the greatest scientist who ever lived.
But almost everything he described in that book, had been done years before,
and kept hidden from public view, till the meeting in 1684.
Newton came from a farming family.
They had no pretensions to intellectual achievements.
Newton’s grandfather had inherited farmland.
He prospered so much from his farming, that he was able to purchase the manor of Woolsthorpe.
He gained the title of Lord of the Manor.
Robert Newton and his son Isaac Newton never learnt to read or write.
Isaac Newton married Hannah, in 1642.
Six months after the wedding Isaac died, leaving Hannah pregnant with a baby.
The baby was christened Isaac after his late father.
Newton was born in 1643, which was exactly 100 years after the publication of ’De Revolutionibus’.
In 1645 Newton’s mother remarried, and Newton was sent to live with his maternal grandparents.
This separation at a tender age, scarred him mentally for life.
Hannah’s new husband was a 63 year old widower.
One of the conditions of the marriage was that Newton should live away, from the new matrimonial home.
Newton spent 8 formative years as a solitary child, in the care of elderly grand parents.
The grand parents were more dutiful and strict, rather than particularly loving towards him.
The negative implication of this was that Newton remained a solitary individual, who kept to himself,
and made very few close friends.
If his father had lived, he might not have got an education,
and would probably have become a farmer like his father.
Newton returned to his mother’s house when he was 10, and his mother’s second husband passed away.
At the age of 12, he was sent to grammar school, and had to stay with another family.
Newton was a good student, and also had an unusual ability as a model maker.
He had a decent education mostly in Latin and Greek classics.
Newton’s mother expected him to take over the family farm, when he was old enough.
In 1659, he was taken out of school, and sent to the family farm.
Newton was more interested in books, which he took out to read in the fields,
instead of looking after his livestock.
He was fined several times for allowing his animals to damage other farmers crops.
Hannah’s brother who was a graduate, persuaded her to send Newton to college.
In 1660, Newton went back to school, to prepare for admission to Cambridge.
In 1661, when he was 18 years old, he joined Trinity college in Cambridge.
It was usual at that time for young gentlemen around 14 years old to enter the university with a servant.
Newton did not have a servant, since his mother gave him an allowance of only 10 pounds a year,
which she thought was a waste of money.
This was in spite of the fact that her own income was more than 700 pounds a year.
Newton had to work as a servant to other students.
This work could be unpleasant like emptying out chamber pots of the master.
Newton seems to have had a miserable time in Cambridge.
In 1663, he became friendly with Wickins, and they decided to share a room,
which they did for next twenty years.
It is likely that, Newton was a homosexual, but there is no definitive proof,
except that he had close relationships only with men.
Newton ignored the Cambridge syllabus and read the works of Galileo and Descartes.
In 1660’s Cambridge was nowhere compared to Oxford in academic excellence.
Aristotle was still taught by rote.
Cambridge education was more suited for a priest or a bad doctor.
In 1663 Lucas endowed a professor of mathematics in Cambridge.
This was the first scientific professorship in the university.
The first Lucasian chair of mathematics was occupied by Barrow, who was previously a professor of Greek.
It was during 1663 to 1668, Newton did most of his work for which he is now famous.
He invented the mathematical technique known as calculus.
His work on gravity led to the publication of Principia.
In 1664, Newton won a scholarship, with the influence of a family friend.
The scholarship brought him a small income, and removed the stigma of being a servant.
In 1665, he got his B.A.
He got his M.A. in 1668.
Newton threw himself body and soul into whatever project was at hand.
He would forget to eat or sleep while studying or carrying out experiments.
During his study of optics he gazed at the sun for so long, that he nearly went blind.
He poked his eye to study the coloured images that resulted from it.
The same obsessiveness was there in his many disputes with Hooke and Leibintz.
Leibintz was the other independent inventor of calculus.
Calculus makes it possible to calculate, from a known starting position, things that vary as time passes,
such as the position of a planet.
Newton and Leibintz developed calculus, providing scientists in subsequent centuries,
an essential tool for modern science.
Sometime after Newton graduated, the university was closed in 1665, to avoid the plague.
Newton’s great insights into calculus, and his investigation of gravity started at this time.
It is not clear when the apple incident, if it occurred, happened,
but it was during this time, when he was 24, that he was highly inspired.
Newton told the story that he saw an apple fall from a tree,
and wondered whether if the influence of the Earth’s gravity could extend to the top of the tree,
it might extend all the way to the moon.
He then calculated the gravitational force, would fell off one over the square of the distance,
from the centre of the Earth.
It is possible that Newton told this story, to imply that he knew the inverse square law by 1666,
long before any discussion with Halley, Hooke and Wren.
Newton was good at rewriting history in his own favour.
Actually the inverse square law emerged much more gradually than his story suggests.
By the time he was thirty, Newton had almost completed his work on light and calculus.
But gravity took a back seat, as Newton found a new passion in Alchemy.
Over the next twenty years Newton devoted far more time to Alchemy, than to any other scientific work.
In 1667, Newton was elected to a minor fellowship at Trinity.
This became a major fellowship in 1668, when he got his M.A.
The fellowship involved making a commitment to orthodox religion.
Newton was an Arian.
He was not prepared to swear on oath, that he believed in the Holy Trinity.
This was yet another reason for Newton to be secretive and introverted.
In the 1670’s Newton developed another passion - carrying out detailed studies of theology.
Newton was also embroiled in the dispute with Hooke, over the theory of light.
This culminated in the ‘shoulders of giants ‘ letter in 1675.
Newton was more concerned with his future position at Cambridge, than being polite to Hooke.
In 1674, Hooke published a treatise, where he outlined that the orbital motion of the moon,
comes from the tendency of the moon to move in a straight line,
plus a single force pulling it towards Earth.
Newton, Huygens etc., still talked about ‘the tendency to recede from the centre’.
Hooke introduced the idea,
of what we now call ‘action at a distance’-gravity reaching across empty space,
to tug on the moon and the planets.
Hooke wrote to Newton, asking for his opinion, on this idea.
Newton was reluctant to get involved.
Newton and Hooke exchanged several letters related to the subject.
This led to Newton being inspired in 1680, to prove that an inverse square law of gravity,
requires the planets to be in elliptical or circular orbits.
He also implied that comets should follow elliptical or parabolic paths around the Sun.
With Halley’s encouragement, Newton published a paper in 1684, spelling out the inverse square law.
In 1687, he published the epic 3 volume Principia Mathematica.
This laid the foundation of the whole of physics.
It spelt out the implication of the inverse square law of gravity, and the three laws of motion.
This describes the behaviour of everything in the universe.
When Hooke saw the manuscript, he complained to Newton, that he was not given enough credit.
Newton reacted by removing all references to Hooke.
What Newton achieved, was the realisation that the world works on essentially mechanical principles,
and not in accordance with magic, or the whims of capricious gods.
Of course Newton and others believed that, God was the architect of the whole thing.
Newton opened the eyes of scientists to the fact, that the fundamentals of the universe is simple,
and understandable, in spite of the surface complexity.
The publication of the Principia marked the moment when science came of age,
as a mature intellectual discipline.
In 1687, Newton had stoped being a scientist.
At the age of 45, he seemed to have lost his affection for philosophy.
Though his publication of Opticks was at the beginning of the 17th century, it was an old work.
It was held back, waiting for Hooke to die, so that he would not claim any credit for it.
Newton’s later work had very little direct bearing on science.
King James II succeeded his brother in 1685.
He tried to extend Catholic influence over Cambridge university.
Newton was one of the nine Fellows to oppose this.
James was replaced by William of Orange in 1689, in the so called Glorious revolution.
Newton became one of the two members of parliament, sent to London, by the university.
When parliament was dissolved in 1690, Newton did not stand for re-election.
He threw himself into his alchemical work, in 1690.
He had a nervous break down, in 1693.
In 1696, he became the warden of the Royal Mint.
He effected a major recoinage, and cracked down on counterfeiters with ferocity,
and coldblooded ruthlessness .
The punishment was usually hanging.
Newton became a magistrate to ensure this.
He then became a master of the mint, which was the top most post.
He became a member of parliament again in 1701.
When William II died, in 1702, parliament was dissolved.
William was succeeded by Anne, who ruled for 12 years.
She knighted Newton in 1705, to encourage voters to support them.
Newton lost the re-election.
Newton’s knighthood was not for science, but for political opportunism.
Hooke died in 1703.
Newton kept away from the Royal Society as long as Hooke was there.
Newton was elected president of the Royal Society after Hooke died.
He published Opticks in 1704.
Newton managed the Royal Society with meticulous attention to detail for the next 20 years.
He moved the Royal Society to a larger premises in Crane court.
During the move, portraits of scientists had to be moved to the new premises.
The only one that was lost, was that of Hooke, never to be seen again.
It was Hooke who made the Royal Society work.
Newton moulded it into a leading scientific society in the world, for more than 2 centuries.
Newton did not mellow with age and fame.
He became a rich man.
His house in London was looked after by his niece, Catherine.
Catherine was a great beauty, and an excellent house keeper.
She was acquainted with a person called Halifax, who became the Prime Minister under George 1.
He left her 5000 pounds in his will.
This was a generous amount for that time.
When Newton aged 85, died in 1727, he left 30000 pounds for his 8 nephews and nieces.
Catherine received more than this from Halifax.
Halley was the next scientist after Newton.