sheep to break the stubbs of 23 of loes [loose?, meaning unenclosed] furlongs’. On top of this, he was obliged to pay 1s. on each of two further counts, ‘for suffering his swine to trespass in the corn fields’ and ‘for suffering his fence belonging to his yards to be out of repair’.25
Following this, Hannah decided that her son should be supervised by a servant from the household who would look after him and give the boy proper instruction. Predictably, the idea failed because Newton quickly turned the situation to his advantage, allowing the servant to do all the work while he sloped off to read or to pursue other interests.
Each Saturday, Isaac set off dutifully with the servant to Grantham to sell the farm produce and to purchase supplies for the following week. Arriving at the Saracen’s Head, the inn in Westgate, he would instruct the servant to continue with the business of the day while he went off to visit Mr Clark at his shop in the High Street.
What drew Newton there was a collection of books that Clark had acquired from his recently deceased brother, Dr Joseph Clark, the usher (assistant teacher) of King’s School. The apothecary himself was interested in the collection, but had little time to read. Perhaps Newton had offered to catalogue the books in exchange for the chance to read them; be that as it may, somehow he managed to persuade Clark to allow him to spend almost all of each Saturday in the back room behind the shop in solitary bliss studying texts on physics, anatomy, botany, philosophy and mathematics – his first real exposure to these things. From Bate’s The Mysteries of Nature and Art Newton had discovered the elements of experimentation and practical skills – lessons he would never forget but would employ both as an orthodox scholar and in his role as alchemist. But here were texts by greater writers and natural philosophers. We do not know for sure the contents of the library, but it is safe to assume a scholar such as Dr Clark would have collected the works of the great names of the past and perhaps the more controversial figures of the day, and it is likely that Newton now first discovered Francis Bacon and René Descartes, Aristotle and Plato, acquiring a fuller and more useful education than he could possibly have gained within the narrow confines of the school curriculum.
Word of Isaac’s truancy soon reached two different parties involved in the argument over his future. Hannah heard of her son’s antics through the complaints of the servant, and Henry Stokes discovered how his ex-pupil was showing admirable determination not to fall under his mother’s yoke. Stokes had tried to dissuade Hannah from taking Newton away from school but had been unsuccessful. Now, hearing how Isaac was doing everything he could to foil his mother’s efforts, Stokes decided to try again.
Initially, nothing changed. Despite the irritation caused by her son’s behaviour, Hannah would not listen to suggestions that he should pursue an academic career and desert the farm. To be fair, Hannah was herself poorly educated and could not have appreciated the world of learning that Isaac took to so naturally. To her, the only thing that mattered was the management of the estate: it was the source of their prosperity, and she could not understand what her son could possibly gain by attending university. She had already lost two husbands and was expected to maintain a farm, run a household and look after three young children. She could not bear to lose Isaac too.
But, after Stokes appealed to her a second time, she realised she could hold Isaac back no longer. (Her decision was no doubt sweetened by Stokes’s offer to remit the standard charge of forty shillings paid to the school by the parents of all boys who came from beyond the town.26)
Stokes then talked to William Ayscough (who had probably influenced Hannah’s change of heart and was himself a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge), and probably to Humphrey Babington, a relative of the Clarks and a fellow at Cambridge University. Together they smoothed the way for Isaac’s admission, and by the autumn of 1660 the young man was back in Grantham preparing for Cambridge.
Helped by those around him who understood his desire to learn, Isaac now, for the first time, found himself completely content. Throughout his childhood and teenage years he had constantly been pulled in different directions. At school he clashed with the teaching tradition on the one hand and his contemporaries on the other. He eventually found his true nature not from the comfort of others or through the small accomplishments of orthodoxy, but in the discovery of a larger world beyond the confines of his upbringing. By 1660 he had passed the threshold and entered the world in which he would flourish.
Chapter 2 The Changing View of Matter and Energy
If God created the world, where was he before the Creation? … Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. Mahapurana (India, ninth century)
What is matter, and how does it move? These are questions that have occupied the thoughts of physicists from ancient times to the present day, and they were fundamental queries for Isaac Newton.
Our modern view is based upon the rather exotic world of quantum theory, but for most everyday purposes the way in which we manipulate matter and energy relies upon rules and systems discovered between Newton’s lifetime and the present century. For many historians of science, Newton’s ideas about how matter behaves and how energies and forces operate can be seen as a watershed in the development of physics. Indeed, some perceive his work as making possible the Industrial Revolution. Newton provided a focus: he was an individual scientist who drew together the many threads that led from ancient times to his fathering of modern empirical science (a study based upon mathematical analysis as well as experimental evidence). Behind Newton lay some 2,000 years of changing ideas about the nature of the universe; his great achievement was to clarify and to bring together the individual breakthroughs of men like Galileo, Descartes and Kepler and to produce a general overview – a set of laws and rules that has given modern physics a definite structure.
The ancient Greeks were the first to record their ideas about the nature of matter, and we know of several different schools of reasoning. The two most important for our purposes are the teachings of Aristotle and the ideas of a rival theory – the atomic hypothesis of Democritus.
The Greek philosophy that prevailed up to Newton’s time was that traditionally attributed to Aristotle – the notion of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. The alternative was the ideas of Democritus, born some seventy-five years before Aristotle, in 460 BC, who taught that matter is made up of tiny invisible parts, or atoms. Because Aristotle and Plato both largely disapproved of Democritus’s atomic theory, however, it was almost completely ignored from Aristotle’s day until its partial revival during the seventeenth century.
The first person to formulate the idea of the four elements was actually a Sicilian philosopher named Empedocles, some half-century before Aristotle’s birth, but the idea was refined and made popular by Aristotle. It is thought that the concept first arose from watching the action of burning. For example, when green wood is burned, the fire is visible by its own light, the smoke vanishes into air, water boils from the wood, and the remaining ashes are clearly earth-like. This gave rise to the idea that everything in the universe is composed of different proportions of these four fundamental elements – an idea which became the foundation of Aristotle’s work in natural philosophy that was handed down to future generations.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira in Chalcidice. The son of the physician to Philip, King of Macedon, he later became the pupil of Plato and, in middle age, the teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote a collection of tracts that were not only influential in his own time but whose rediscovery in an incomplete form by European scholars during the thirteenth century heralded a return to learning and the earliest emergence of the Renaissance. Those most relevant to his thoughts on natural philosophy (what by the eighteenth
