BBC_Isaac Newton The Last Magician
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00:00I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like
00:20a boy playing on the seashore, amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble
00:26or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered
00:33before me.
00:39Isaac Newton is considered by many to be the greatest genius of all time.
00:46His virtues proved him a saint and his discoveries might well pass for miracles.
00:54He was revered as a scientific demigod in his own lifetime.
00:58Now the keenness of a sublime intellect has allowed us to penetrate the dwellings of the
01:03gods and ascend the heights of heaven.
01:08If anybody was a genius, then Newton was.
01:14Newton revealed the nature of light, allowing us to explore the universe.
01:22He enabled us to calculate motion and predict change.
01:29He distilled the force that unites the whole universe into a precise mathematical formula,
01:35the universal law of gravity.
01:40Newton is celebrated as the rational genius who propelled us out of medieval darkness
01:46and into the enlightenment.
01:50But Isaac Newton was also a complex, difficult and secretive man.
01:57He wasn't communicative.
01:58He didn't want to work with anybody else.
02:01He was easily offended.
02:03Spiteful and swayed by those who were worse than himself.
02:08In vulgar modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic.
02:14Newton's deepest obsession would only be revealed 200 years after his death.
02:20An occult world of heretical religion and alchemy.
02:25There is a vital agent diffused through everything in the earth, a mercurial spirit, extremely
02:34subtle and supremely volatile.
02:39Newton's secret obsessions would transform the way we understand the universe.
02:47Newton was not the first of the age of reason.
02:50He was the last of the magicians.
03:03In 1705, Sir Isaac Newton was 63 years old and a pillar of the British establishment.
03:11He had just been knighted.
03:13He was recognised across Europe as the master of the enlightenment.
03:18He did not suffer from self-doubt.
03:21He rather liked to think of himself as the new messiah, the sort of scientific Christ
03:29who was bringing a new kind of knowledge to save the world.
03:34This messiah had a low opinion of lesser mortals.
03:39I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
03:47Newton's estrangement from humanity began from the moment he was born at Woolsthorpe
03:52Manor, Lincolnshire, on Christmas morning, 1642.
03:59When I was born, I was so little they put me in a court pot, and so weakly they did
04:04not think I would live.
04:07I was a little fellow.
04:11The 1640s were the most tumultuous decade in English history.
04:16The English Civil War left one in ten men dead.
04:21King Charles I was beheaded.
04:26Oliver Cromwell's puritanical government waged war against Catholicism in the monarchy.
04:33Bubonic plague was rampant.
04:37People genuinely believed the world was coming to an end.
04:42This time of chaos and upheaval marked Newton for life.
04:49Newton craved certainty.
04:53All of Newton's work is about finding certainty, finding the truth and the things that you
05:01can absolutely believe in.
05:05His home was anything but a haven.
05:09His father died a few months before he was born.
05:14He was then rejected by his mother.
05:17She abandoned him to start another family when he was three years old.
05:23Newton grew up in tune with the Protestant spirit of the age, anti-Catholic, Bible reading
05:29and introspective.
05:32He made a list of childhood sins written in code.
05:36The list begins innocently.
05:39Making pies on Sunday night.
05:43Making a mousetrap on thy day.
05:46Squirting water on thy day.
05:51Then a darker side is revealed.
05:54Striking many.
05:56Punching my sister.
05:59Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.
06:06He was so obsessive.
06:07He was a man who lived his entire life inside his head and that's how he did what he did.
06:12You look at the papers he left behind and there are millions of words of scribbling.
06:18They are not words written to impress anybody.
06:21They're not words written for publication.
06:23They're words written because that was how Newton thought.
06:26That's what he did.
06:29The 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes was fascinated by the man behind the scientific
06:36legend.
06:37Geniuses are peculiar.
06:40The uneasiness, the melancholy, the nervous agitation.
06:44In vulgar modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic.
06:52Newton relied on no one but himself.
06:58He has almost a sort of visceral dislike of following other people.
07:03He has a very strong belief in his own originality.
07:10As a schoolboy, Newton's innovative mind was already at work.
07:15He decided to invent his own way to tell the time.
07:21Newton turned the attic into a giant astronomical clock.
07:25It was like a sundial.
07:29He plotted the sun's movement every 15 minutes as it moved across the walls of his room.
07:38He could go into any room and he could tell what time it was by looking at the shadows
07:42on the walls.
07:44Light, space and time were already his playthings.
07:53Newton's teenage notebooks mentioned no friends.
07:57But they reveal his efforts to find his own answers to practical problems.
08:02Like alleviating wind.
08:07Steep horse dung, especially stoned horse, in ale.
08:14Then take it out, strongly express the juice and drink it.
08:26But Newton's fertile mind was almost stifled before it could flourish.
08:33His estranged mother pulled him out of school when he was 17 to run the family farm.
08:39His mother intended he should apply himself to the management of the estate, but his genius
08:45could not brook such an employment.
08:48Newton was the most useless manager of a farm you can possibly imagine.
08:52And it was his mother's brother who suggested that Newton was too good, too talented to
08:58be kept away from his destiny, which was university.
09:04Isaac was soon packed off to Trinity College, Cambridge.
09:11He was drawn to natural philosophy, the study of the physical world, what we now call science.
09:22In the late 17th century, when Newton was a student, science was not held in any particular
09:31esteem at all.
09:33There was no degree in science, there was no career in science.
09:37Science hadn't so far produced any useful results.
09:44Newton's professors taught Aristotle's concept of gravity and levity.
09:51They would have said, an apple has some gravity, and how do we know?
09:55Because it has a tendency to fall down.
09:58They would have said, fire and smoke have levity because they rise to the heavens.
10:03That's what Aristotle taught them.
10:06But Newton was ready to reject 2,000 years of scientific orthodoxy.
10:13He thought and believed that what other people wrote was wrong.
10:18It's as if he believed, even at this early period, he's 21, he's 22, that he was destined
10:25to be the person to reform natural philosophy.
10:30Newton only believed what he could prove himself.
10:36Natural philosophy should not be founded on metaphysical opinions.
10:41Its conclusions can only be proved by experiment.
10:47He wanted to know everything.
10:49He had an insatiable curiosity.
10:53He was handed this interesting, complicated world, and he could almost see the gears turning,
11:00and he wanted to figure them out.
11:05By 1664, aged only 21, Newton devised a curriculum for himself.
11:13There were 45 topics that obsessed him for the rest of his life.
11:18He called them certain philosophical questions.
11:23Of time and eternity, of the sun and planets and comets, of air, of meteors, of atoms,
11:36of density, of vacuum, of reflection, of attraction magnetical, attraction electrical, of light,
11:51of colors, of heat and cold, of gravity and levity, of vision.
12:03Newton was obsessed by the mysteries of vision and light.
12:08He went to extraordinary lengths to examine the mechanics of how the eye works.
12:14I looked upon the sun in a looking glass with my right eye, and then turned my eyes into
12:19a darker corner of my chamber, and winked to observe the impression made and the circles
12:24of colours which encompassed it, and how they decayed and at last vanished.
12:30He's trying to work out how much of what we see is due to the will, so to our mind,
12:36and how much of it is due to what there is in the outside world.
12:39In a few hours' time, I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look upon no bright
12:44object.
12:45I only saw the sun before me.
12:48I could neither write nor read.
12:51To recover the use of my eyes, I shut myself up in my darkened chamber for three days.
13:00Newton was prepared to risk blindness to ensure his findings were correct.
13:07In his notebooks, there are some wonderful diagrams of him putting a bodkin, which is
13:12a long toothpick, as close to the back of his eye as he could get.
13:16If I twixt my eye and the bone as near to the back of my eye as I could, and pressing
13:22it with the end of the bodkin, there appeared several bright, dark circles of colours.
13:29What he's doing with the eye experiments is trying to work out how much the imagination,
13:34what he calls the will or the fancy, contributes towards vision.
13:41Newton's mathematical mind was driven to search for bigger answers to ever-bigger questions.
13:52In 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague swept through England, killing 100,000.
14:05Newton took refuge in his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor.
14:13More isolated than ever, he continued his compulsive questioning.
14:21I didn't realise there were certain problems, mostly motion and falling objects, that you
14:27just couldn't solve with the classical mathematics.
14:33He invented the means to compute virtually any rate of change.
14:40The moon's path around the earth.
14:45The growth pattern of a spiral shell.
14:51The trajectory of a projectile fired from a cannon.
14:57A new type of mathematics was born, calculus.
15:05Calculus is used today in every branch of the mathematical sciences and engineering.
15:12Every time you have a changing quantity, say for example, the acceleration on a car, how
15:18much petrol is being injected into the engine, there's a changing quantity there, so you
15:23have to use calculus.
15:27Without the least help or instruction from any person, he laid the foundation of all
15:32his discoveries before he was 24 years old.
15:40Newton was now the world's leading mathematician, but no-one else knew it.
15:45He kept his great inventions to himself.
15:49Instead, he started an entirely new set of experiments, this time with light.
16:00In August 1665, Sir Isaac bought at Sturbridge Fair a prism to try some experiments on Descartes'
16:07book of colours, and when he came home, he made a small hole in the window shutters.
16:14It darkened the room.
16:17The celebrated phenomena of colours.
16:20Having darkened my chamber and made a small hole in my window shutters to let in a convenient
16:25quantity of the sun's light, I placed my prism at its entrance, that it might be refracted
16:31to the opposite wall.
16:32It was a very pleasing divertisement to view the vivid and intense colours produced.
16:42For centuries, white light was considered the purest form of energy in the universe,
16:48a symbol of God's power.
16:54Newton was about to prove that white light was not pure.
17:01Everybody knew that if you let sunlight shine through a prism, the prism divides it into
17:06a spectrum of colours.
17:09What they didn't know was what happens next if you put a second prism into a piece of
17:16the beam.
17:20Newton showed that the colours of the spectrum could not be split any further.
17:26They were elemental.
17:28White light was composite.
17:32Newton saw right away that white itself is not pure.
17:37White light is a mixture.
17:43Newton had shattered one of the most fundamental beliefs of his time, with demonstrable proof.
17:52Before Newton, a prism was just a toy.
17:55Now he had made it into a tool that would transform the study of our world, and outer
18:02space.
18:0490% or more of our knowledge of the universe has come from collecting light from the sky
18:12and stars and planets, and splitting it effectively through a prism.
18:19They can tell us about the composition of planetary atmospheres, or the composition
18:25of stars.
18:26They can tell us about the rotation rates of planets.
18:29All of that derives from Newton's looking at the colours.
18:39And yet, Newton still seemed destined for obscurity.
18:43He showed no interest in publishing his findings, and seemed to despise the acclaim it could
18:48bring.
18:51I do not see what is desirable in public esteem, were I able to acquire and maintain it.
18:57It would only increase my acquaintance.
18:59The thing I achieved is studied to decline.
19:06Newton's reclusiveness was about to be shattered, thanks to his obsession with light, and a
19:11practical little invention.
19:16By the mid-1660s, telescopes were simple tubes, up to 20 feet long, using a series of lenses
19:24to magnify the image.
19:26Newton tried a radical new approach.
19:32The reflecting telescope uses mirrors inside a much shorter tube, so that the beam of light
19:41is bent often enough that the lenses can be much closer together.
19:47That's wonderful.
19:48Now you can take it on board a ship, and indeed you can carry it around the country.
19:55Newton was extremely proud of his telescope.
19:59I made it myself.
20:03If I had waited for others to make my tools and things for me, I would never have made
20:09anything.
20:10Newton's reflecting telescope was only six inches long, yet it was as powerful as Lenz
20:15telescopes ten times the length.
20:19It was totally portable, and ready to revolutionise navigation.
20:25The telescope and the clock are what is needed to tell you where you are at sea.
20:33And until GPS, it was still the way that it was done if you were on a sailing ship.
20:43In 1671, Newton's mathematics don, Isaac Barry, finally brought Newton to the attention
20:50of the world's first scientific organisation, the Royal Society in London.
20:59Its members included great minds of the time, such as Christopher Wren and astronomer Edmund
21:06Halley, as well as a fair few eccentrics.
21:13They are a collection of gentlemen and nobility, and what they are interested in covers the
21:18spectrum from the ludicrous to the high-powered.
21:23They are interested in looking at their own sperm, which they found completely fascinating,
21:29and I'm sure they went away and tried it at home.
21:32You have Edmund Halley writing a paper on cannabis.
21:37You have how to develop a better apple, and how to wash your laundry, and how to deal
21:43with the gout.
21:46You're in a world of magical mystery, nonsense and science all mixed up together.
21:55There is nothing that is off-limits for the early Royal Society.
22:02Newton's compact telescope was a hit.
22:05The man who lived in his head was hailed by the Royal Society for what he had made
22:09with his hands.
22:12Newton was delighted.
22:14I was surprised to see so much care taken about securing an invention of mine, for which
22:22I had hitherto had so little value.
22:29Newton was accepted into the Royal Society in January 1672, and he finally published
22:36his findings from the prism experiments as his Theory of Light and Colours.
22:43Newton was in no doubt about the importance of his work.
22:47My theory of light and colour is the oddest, if not the most considerable, detection which
22:52has been made in the operations of nature.
23:01Newton's paper would now have to be reviewed by the curator of experiments at the Royal
23:05Society, Robert Hooke.
23:10Hooke was a highly respected natural philosopher and inventor, famous for his drawings of insects,
23:16lice and houseflies, as seen through his homemade microscope.
23:22Hooke would rule on the credibility of Newton's Theory of Light and Colour.
23:29I have perused Mr Newton's discourse about colours and refractions, and I was not a little
23:36pleased with the niceness and curiosity of his observations.
23:42But as to his hypothesis of solving the phenomena of colours thereby, I confess I cannot see
23:51yet any undeniable argument to convince me of the certainty thereof.
23:57Robert Hooke peer-reviewed it and said it was worthless.
24:02I don't think Newton ever forgave him for that, and actually I've been peer-reviewed.
24:09You do never forgive the person who rejected your paper.
24:14Am I bound to satisfy you?
24:17It seems you've thought it not enough to make objections, unless you could also insult me
24:23for my ability to answer them.
24:27He's very, very quick to defend his intellectual property, and he does it in a knee-jerk way,
24:33I think, with people like Robert Hooke.
24:38There's certainly an element of paranoia that derives, I think, from his own self-belief.
24:46Newton regretted having ever permitted his paper to be published.
24:51I find from what little use I have made of the press that I shall not enjoy my former
24:55serene liberty till I have done with it.
24:58I intend to be solicitous no further.
25:02Every time anybody criticised him, any time anybody dared to disagree with him, he went
25:07into retreat.
25:08I told the Royal Society that I was busy in some other subject, some business of my own.
25:19His deepest instincts were profound shrinking from the world, a paralysing fear that his
25:25thoughts, his beliefs, his discoveries would be exposed to the criticism of the world.
25:36Newton withdrew back inside his mind.
25:40Locked in his Cambridge rooms, he became a virtual hermit for the next 12 years.
25:49The work he produced there was considered so dangerous that it would be locked away
25:56for two centuries.
25:59This was his deepest obsession.
26:03It lay waiting in the dark until, like some mythical dragon, Isaac Newton's secret
26:10could be released back into the world.
26:17A bunch of impoverished English nobility needed to raise some money and started selling papers
26:25that had been sitting in storage for centuries.
26:31In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes bought some of Newton's secret papers at auction,
26:39one great mathematician admiring another.
26:44Sotheby's was auctioning the stuff off, and Keynes was righteously horrified.
26:50I mean, this is, excuse me, but it's England's birthright, and the idea that these very important
26:56and revealing papers were going to go into private hands kind of disgusted him.
27:05What he found revealed an utterly different Newton, not the rational scientist we thought
27:12we knew.
27:14What Newton does in a very, very large project, beginning in the late 1670s, is he goes back
27:19to as many classical sources as he can find, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldean,
27:27and he reads into them the idea that these people knew about Newtonianism.
27:35Newton alleged that these ancient cultures had always known that the Earth and comets
27:40travel round the sun.
27:42They understood God's power, the invisible force that shaped the universe.
27:50And now he would too.
27:52He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last
27:58great mind that looked out on the visible world with the same eyes as those who began
28:03to build our intellectual inheritance 10,000 years ago.
28:12Newton believed he'd been put on Earth to reveal these great truths to humanity.
28:20I think there's something extremely arrogant and ambitious about how Newton sees himself.
28:26He sees himself in a lineage that goes from Noah to Moses to Christ and ends in himself.
28:34Newton believed that these ancient civilisations all shared one scientific religion.
28:43That first religion was the most rational of all others, until the nations corrupted
28:47it.
28:51Newton was convinced he'd found the source of the corruption.
28:57He believed something that most Christians, whether they're Protestant or Catholic, would
29:01find deeply reprehensible, disgusting, probably even worse than atheism.
29:09Newton denied that God was a trinity.
29:14There is one God, the Father, ever-living, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, the maker
29:22of heaven and earth, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.
29:33This went beyond even the most radical Protestantism.
29:38This was heresy.
29:41But Newton had studied the Bible more thoroughly than any scientific question.
29:48And he concluded that false texts had been inserted into the Bible in the fourth century
29:54to assert Christ's divinity.
30:01Anti-Trinitarianism was illegal.
30:03It was outlawed in principle.
30:05You could be put to death for it.
30:08This was a dreadful secret that Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life.
30:16Newton concealed more than heresy.
30:19He was also following a mystical quest that went back to the Greeks and Egyptians.
30:25The study of alchemy.
30:31The search for the divine ingredient that could not only turn lead into gold, but give
30:37the power of life itself.
30:44Newton was searching for the philosopher's stone.
30:48This was the vital substance that, if introduced into a chemical potion, could turn that from
30:56just a lump of metal into something alive.
31:02There is a vital agent diffused through everything in the earth, a mercurial spirit, extremely
31:08subtle and supremely volatile, which is dispersed through every place.
31:16The idea that you could have God's power, the power of life and death, distilled into
31:25a substance made it seem so dangerous that it had to be illegal.
31:35Fires scarcely went out night or day.
31:37He sitting up one night and I another till he had finished his chemical experiments.
31:45Newton was always precise.
31:48He meticulously recorded his results, even when pursuing the magical goals of alchemy.
31:55Today we call it the scientific method.
32:00He was most accurate, strict and exact.
32:05What his aim might be, I was not able to penetrate into, but his pain, his diligence
32:15made me think he was aiming for something beyond the reach of human art and industry.
32:28He was not just a crazy, obsessive alchemist.
32:31He was the peerless alchemist of Europe.
32:34There was no better alchemist.
32:39Newton's alchemical studies inspired him beyond even his scientific abilities.
32:45His intuition led him to describe a seemingly magical transformation that would only be
32:51understood 200 years later.
32:55The changing of bodies into light and light into bodies is very conformable to nature,
33:02which seems delighted with transmutation.
33:11This transmutation anticipated Albert Einstein's great breakthrough in physics in 1905.
33:18Mass and energy are interchangeable.
33:23Or as Einstein puts it, E equals MC squared.
33:33Actually it does sound very like Einstein.
33:34I mean, he is exactly saying that body and light, they are interchangeable in the same
33:39way that mass and energy are interconvertible or interchangeable.
33:44So Newton is saying, you know, all the things in the world can be transformed into everything
33:49else.
33:52Newton's quest for transformations is now at the heart of modern physics and chemistry.
34:00Alchemy is at the root of today's practical magic.
34:08By being open to ancient wisdom, Newton was able to go beyond the thinking of his own
34:13time and into the future.
34:18The documents in the trunk finally reunited the two sides of Newton's genius.
34:26It was centuries before history of science could tolerate a Newton who did both alchemy
34:35and astronomy.
34:37That's why it looks as if he's a fractured figure.
34:41It is actually that the alchemical works were buried, literally hidden from view.
34:48We imagine that there's a clear line to draw between Newton the scientist and rationalist
34:55and Newton the mystical theologian, but he was only one man.
35:04In 1684, Newton was just an obscure academic hiding from the world.
35:15Newton's wilderness years, his 12 years of studying alchemy, come to a sudden stop with
35:22a chance visit from Edmund Halley, the astronomer from London.
35:31In 1684, I came to visit him in Cambridge.
35:35I asked him what he thought the curve would be described by the planets, supposing the
35:40force of attraction toward the sun to be reciprocal to the square of the distance from it.
35:46So Isaac replied immediately, it would be an ellipse.
35:52I was struck with joy and amazement.
35:54I asked him how he knew it.
35:55Oh, why, he said, I've calculated it.
35:58I asked him for his calculation without any further delay and he promised to redo it and
36:03send it to me.
36:05Well, Halley was agog by this.
36:08He had actually said that if you could understand why the planets moved, you would have perfected
36:14astronomy.
36:15That would be it.
36:16Subject finished.
36:17Full stop.
36:18Go home.
36:19All the great minds of the day were trying to explain the movements of the planets.
36:26From Christopher Wren to Newton's old adversary, Robert Hooke.
36:32He was particularly intrigued to do this because Robert Hooke couldn't.
36:39So here was an opportunity to prove once and for all who was the best mathematician.
36:46He sometimes would take a turn or two around his garden, suddenly stood still, turned about
37:04and back up the stairs like Archimedes with a Eureka and began writing at his desk while
37:12standing without drawing a chair to sit down.
37:17Now I was upon this subject, I would gladly know the bottom of it before I published my
37:22papers.
37:25Newton worked relentlessly for over two years, drawing on everything he had ever discovered.
37:33He's not so much content with coming up with possible explanations.
37:39He wants THE explanation.
37:43I kept the subject constantly before me till the first dawnings opened slowly, little by
37:50little, into the full and clear light.
38:01The result was a mathematical way to predict how forces affect movement.
38:08Newton's three laws of motion.
38:12Every body continues in its state of rest or in uniform motion in its right line unless
38:18it is affected by an external force.
38:23This change in motion is in proportion to the external force and is made in the direction
38:28of the straight line in which that force is impressed.
38:33To every action there is always a pose and equal reaction.
38:38Mutual action of two bodies upon each other are always equal and directed to contrary
38:42parts.
38:50These three laws managed to explain the mechanics of how virtually everything moves.
39:01Newton realised there was another, invisible element involved that kept the planets orbiting
39:07the sun.
39:10From his alchemy, he was quite comfortable with the idea of spirits pervading space,
39:18influencing things without contact.
39:21And he transmuted those ideas into one of forces.
39:27He introduced that these forces acted at a distance, across space, between all things.
39:36The sun attracts Jupiter and the other planets.
39:40Jupiter attracts its satellites and for the same reason.
39:45All planets act mutually, one upon the other.
39:52Newton's masterstroke was realising that the same force that attracted the planets to one
39:57another also existed on Earth.
40:03It is now established that this force is gravity.
40:18Newton's search for a vital agent, a single magical force that runs through the universe,
40:26had finally been fulfilled.
40:33Newton had combined mysticism and mathematics to prove that a single power affects every
40:40object in the universe.
40:48Gravity pulls a raindrop to Earth and a river to the sea, carving the Earth as it flows.
40:59Gravity holds the sea to the Earth and the moon and the sun pulls the Earth into tides.
41:08Gravity makes the moon go round the Earth and the Earth go around the sun.
41:19Just one of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
41:27Just one more galaxy going round with the 200 trillion stars of the Virgo supercluster.
41:35All of it held together by gravity.
41:43Why do I call him a magician?
41:46Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret
41:52which could be read by applying pure thought to mystic clues which God had laid about the
41:58world.
42:00A sort of philosopher's treasure hunt.
42:06There are two kinds of geniuses.
42:08There are ordinary geniuses and there are magicians.
42:12An ordinary genius is someone who, once you understand what they've done, you say, oh,
42:17okay, if I were just a lot smarter I could have done that.
42:21But a magician is someone who, even after you see what they've done, even after you
42:26understand it, you think, it's a complete mystery.
42:30And Newton was a magician.
42:34He was somebody who seemed to pull ideas out of nowhere.
42:41Isaac Newton finally published his magnum opus in 1687.
42:47Five hundred pages of densely packed words, diagrams and calculations.
42:52The mathematical principles of natural philosophy.
42:56The Principia.
43:06The few people who could understand Newton's maths were in raptures.
43:13A divine treatise exalting human reason to such a pitch by this utmost effort of the mind.
43:22Newton's precise calculations gave the world a way to predict the motion of virtually everything.
43:29Comets and eclipses were no longer omens of doom.
43:33They could be accurately forecast.
43:36Tides could be explained.
43:40The forces holding up buildings could be worked out and weight distribution computed.
43:47Eventually, aeroplanes could be designed and rockets launched.
43:53All due to the ability to calculate forces and motion.
44:00The Newtonian age had arrived.
44:05But publication also brought controversy.
44:09Once again from Robert Hooke,
44:11who claimed he was the originator of the theory of universal gravitation.
44:19I conceived that discovery of the cause of celestial motions
44:24to which Mr Newton, nor any other mathematician,
44:28I conceived that discovery of the cause of celestial motions
44:32to which Mr Newton, nor any other, has any right to claim.
44:37I now conceive it to be one of the greatest discoveries yet made in natural history.
44:44It's true that Hooke was working on the same thing,
44:47and Halley was interested in all of these.
44:50The knowledge that all these other people were working on it
44:53was a part of what made it possible for him to discover what he discovered.
44:59Newton was prepared to admit that he built on other people's work,
45:04but not the work of people like Hooke.
45:07If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
45:14Some believe this was really a cutting reference to Hooke's short stature.
45:23Newton was not interested in sharing credit for his discovery.
45:27He rejected Hooke's claim,
45:29and said that Hooke was too poor a mathematician
45:32to even understand the calculations involved.
45:37He does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things.
45:41He should rather excuse himself by reason of his inability.
45:47Those properties of gravity, which I myself first discovered
45:51and showed to this society many years since,
45:55Mr Newton has done me the favour to print and publish as his own inventions.
46:03Interest has no conscience.
46:08Hooke's reputation never recovered.
46:13And he was soon eclipsed by Newton's fame.
46:17Newton's time had come.
46:20The Age of Enlightenment was in its glory, and he was famous.
46:25Even his extreme Protestantism was more acceptable
46:28under the new King William of Orange.
46:32Newton became a Member of Parliament for Cambridge in 1692.
46:39But Newton revealed nothing to the public.
46:43But Newton revealed nothing about his alchemy.
46:47Instead, he began to popularise his ideas,
46:51starting with gravity.
46:55The apple.
46:57I was musing in the garden when it came to mind
47:00that the power of gravity, which brought an apple from the tree to the ground,
47:04was not limited to a certain distance from the earth.
47:07This power must extend much further than was usually thought.
47:12Why not as high as the moon, I said to myself?
47:15And if so, that must influence her motion.
47:20The story caught on,
47:22and soon became better known than the science that inspired it.
47:28Did it actually happen?
47:30We only have Newton's word for it.
47:32He told the story four times shortly before he died,
47:36so for the majority of his life, he never mentioned it.
47:42Eventually, the apple was shown falling on Newton's head,
47:46like a moment of divine inspiration.
47:51It's become a scientific myth.
47:53It frames, it governs how we think about science.
47:57We really like to think that there's great geniuses
48:01who suddenly are inspired by God.
48:05But just as the world began to recognise his genius,
48:09Newton retreated once again.
48:14Somewhere about his 50th birthday,
48:16he suffered what we would now term a severe nervous breakdown.
48:21Sleeplessness, melancholia, fear of persecution.
48:28The cause of his death was a man who had lost his mind.
48:33The cause of his mental collapse
48:35remains the greatest mystery of his life.
48:39Theories abound.
48:42The particular breakdown or collapse, or whatever it was, of 1693,
48:48it does coincide with a period when he's corresponding with Robert Boyle
48:54about some very specific alchemical experiments,
49:00and it does involve close-up use of a lot of mercury.
49:05It may be that part of the reason for his breakdown
49:09was that he realises that he cannot urge the alchemical work to fruition,
49:15that perhaps there's nothing in this after all.
49:22It may also be that Newton had not been as solitary as is commonly believed.
49:30It is absolutely no coincidence that shortly before he had the so-called breakdown,
49:38his friendship with a young man called Fatio de Dullier, a Swiss mathematician,
49:43broke off and de Dullier went back to Switzerland
49:47and Newton hardly ever saw him again.
49:50Whereas before that, for the space of a year or two,
49:52they'd been writing to each other and staying in each other's houses
49:56for protracted periods of time.
49:58So it seems quite clear to me that there was a very strong emotional bond between them.
50:07Newton never married, nor is he known to have had any relations with women.
50:12He began to imagine that his friends were mocking him.
50:16He writes to John Locke letters that lead Locke to think that Newton's mind is deranged.
50:23Sir, being of the opinion that you endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means,
50:31I was so much affected with it that when someone told me you were sickly and would not live,
50:36I answered it were better if you were dead.
50:41He'd lost, in his own words, the former consistency of his mind.
50:45He never again concentrated after the old-fashioned or did any fresh work.
50:54Three years later, he packed up his papers and left Cambridge.
51:01Newton was about to perform his strangest transformation.
51:06The hermit and academic became a man of power.
51:13In recognition of his international fame,
51:16he was awarded a position at the heart of the establishment
51:20as Warden of the Mint at the Tower of London.
51:27Newton also took his place at the top of the scientific elite.
51:34He becomes President of the Royal Society at the end of 1703,
51:38and then within the scientific world, pretty much within Europe as well,
51:42he becomes the dominant intellectual figure, the dominant scientific politico.
51:47And this power that he has brings out the nastiest side of his personality.
51:56Robert Hooke had died earlier that year.
52:00Newton seemed determined to obliterate his rival's place in history
52:04and ensure his own.
52:12One of the first things he did when he became President
52:15of the Royal Society was to donate his own portrait.
52:19And this was also the time when Robert Hooke's picture went mysteriously missing.
52:29Nobody has ever been able to find a portrait of Robert Hooke.
52:32No portrait exists.
52:34So there's no proof, but it's a bit suspicious.
52:40Newton promoted his supporters,
52:42and crushed the doubters.
52:45He also demanded deference.
52:48He ordered the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, to supply him with data.
52:54A complete catalogue of the fixed stars
52:56should be composed by observations to be made at Greenwich,
52:59and the duty of your place is to furnish such observations.
53:04Your speedy compliance is expected.
53:06He treated Flamsteed shabbily.
53:09He wanted the data.
53:11Flamsteed thought, I'm the Royal Astronomer.
53:14Don't just use me. Collaborate with me.
53:17You know, you can see how Flamsteed's feelings would have been heard.
53:21He called me all the ill names he could think of.
53:25I put him in mind of his passion,
53:27and asked him to govern it and keep his temper.
53:30This made him rage.
53:32This made him rage worse.
53:34I soon perceived that he planned only to force me to comply with his will
53:38and flatter him and praise him as Dr Halley did.
53:44Flamsteed makes Newton out to be a psychopath
53:49who was intent only on getting idolaters.
53:53And one has to say that Flamsteed has captured something of Newton's
53:59Psychopath and genius.
54:03Visionary and misanthrope.
54:07Revered scientist and lonely old man.
54:12Isaac Newton lived out his final years as an autocratic civil servant.
54:18Master of the mint and president of the Royal Society.
54:23He was a man of his word.
54:25Master of the mint and president of the Royal Society.
54:30He revised some of his earlier work but produced little new.
54:35The storm of his genius had blown itself out.
54:41On Saturday, March the 18th, 1727,
54:45Newton made his final retreat into himself.
54:49Aged 84, he slipped into a coma.
54:53That evening he grew weaker and all Sunday was quite insensible.
54:58He seemed to be quiet and free from pain.
55:02On Monday the 20th at one in the morning, he died.
55:18Isaac Newton was buried in Westminster Abbey
55:21with unprecedented pomp and ceremony.
55:25He became a new kind of national hero.
55:28The scientific genius.
55:33For such a lonely, isolated guy,
55:35he did achieve an unparalleled measure of fame
55:40for someone who was merely an intellectual.
55:44He had a state funeral.
55:46No one had had a state funeral before
55:48who had no noble connections or artistic achievements,
55:53whose achievements were purely in the realm of the mind.
55:59Over the next 200 years,
56:01Newton's fame as the titan of rationalism grew.
56:06Thanks in part to the conspiracy by his admirers
56:09to safeguard that reputation.
56:19All his manuscripts were bundled up
56:21and they were put into two large trunks.
56:23And from time to time during the 18th and 19th centuries,
56:26people who were writing about Newton
56:28would go and rummage through these two trunks.
56:31And whenever they found anything to do with alchemy
56:34or anything to do about religion,
56:36they shoved it back into the trunk
56:38because they thought that might damage Newton's reputation.
56:48When John Maynard Keynes uncovered them in 1936,
56:52Newton's passion for alchemy was revealed.
56:56Newton the magician
56:58had been buried under his fame as the scientist.
57:02Keynes realised that Newton was much more complex a man
57:05than history had allowed.
57:09He has become the sage and monarch of the age of reason.
57:13The Sir Isaac Newton of orthodox tradition.
57:17Newton, whose secret heresies had been the study of a lifetime.
57:25Isaac Newton, scientist and magician,
57:29always asked the big questions.
57:32Questions we still haven't answered.
57:37We still don't know what is the nature of life.
57:41What is the difference between me when I'm dead and me when I'm alive?
57:45We don't really have an answer to that question.
57:47We still don't really know what light and gravity
57:50and electricity and magnetism are.
57:52We've got mathematical equations that can describe them.
57:56But the natural philosophical question,
57:59why are they there? What are they?
58:01How does gravity operate?
58:03I don't think we really have the answers to those big questions.
58:07Maybe the most important thing to remember about Newton in the end
58:13is that he did not think he had finished anything.
58:16He did not think he had solved a problem for all time, any problem.
58:21He thought he had opened a door
58:24and that people would continue to walk through it.
58:36I do not know what I may appear to the world.
58:39To myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,
58:45amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble,
58:49prettier shell than ordinary,
58:51while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
58:57With innovations and inventions shaping our future,
59:00you can see the Tomorrow's World Horizon special now on the BBC iPlayer.
59:05Up next on BBC Two, questions inspired by the jungle on QI.
59:26.