Newton on the Beach: Principia Mathematica

Stanford University

it is a great pleasure and privilege to

introduce Simon Schaffer professor of

History of Science in the department of

history and philosophy of science at

Cambridge and this year's Harry Camp

Memorial lecturer Schaffer without a

doubt is one of the most respected

accomplished and exciting historians of

science working today his best known

work is leviathan in the air pump Hobs

boil and the experimental life

1985 co-authored co-authored with Steven

shapen this work is a land Mark in the

development of the social and cultural

approach to the history of science

dominant today and in particular it aims

to give a social historical and

political analysis of the rise of

experimental science as typified by Bo's

canonical experiments with the air pump

to this end shapen and Schaffer

investigate less well-known contemporary

alternatives to Bo's interpretations of

such experiments especially those of

Thomas Hobs and show in particular how

boils eventual Triumph was inextricably

connected with the political challenges

of restoration

England Hobbs as shapen and Schaffer

were the first to emphasize was thus

simultaneously a central political

theorist of the restoration and a key

figure in the development of

experimental

science their book has been universally

regarded ever since as to quote Owen

Hanway simply one of the most original

enjoyable and important books published

in the history of Science in recent

years shapen and Schaffer were awarded

the prestigious Dutch arasmus prize for

contributions to the humanities in

2005 Schaffer's own work however ranges

much more widely including the history

of Newtonian astronomy and Newtonian

natural philosophy experimental

instrumentation Darwin and other topics

in Victorian science medicine time

machines and Computing machines and most

recently the role of scientific

instruments in Naval and Maritime

Pursuits I cannot even attempt to

summarize Schaffer's wide ranging

production comprising some 120 and

Counting articles and books instead I

will briefly touch on two of my

particular favorites both relevant to

his ongoing interest in the history of

Newtonian astronomy and natural

philosophy first I cannot resist

mentioning his early 1978 paper the

Phoenix of nature fire and evolutionary

cosmology in Wright and Kant which

provides a novel perspective on Emanuel

kant's early contributions to cosmology

by comparing kant's work in detail with

that of the Englishman Thomas Wright it

is well known that Kant first derived

his ideas on the Milky Way galaxy from

Wright's earlier work but no one before

Schaffer attempted a detailed comparison

of WR and K paying particular attention

to wri's later unpublished manuscripts

in this way in particular Schaffer

uncovers a further conceptual element

that was necessary to transform the

static Newtonian cosmology stably

maintained by the direct action of God

into a truly evolutionary account of the

formation of galaxies and nebuli namely

the unique element of fire the matter of

heat which provided a crucial active

agency within matter

itself but perhaps the most important of

Schaffer's contri utions to Newtonian

studies so far is his 1989 paper Glass

Works Newton's prisms and the uses of

experiment this paper is another

landmark in the new contextualist

approach to the history of experiment

represented by Leviathan and the air

pump but applied this time to a rather

more ambitious case Newton's famous

experimentum Cruis demonstrating

according to Newton the composition of

sunlight out of simple homogeneous color

raised distinguished by their differing

degrees of refrangibility as evidenced

by different angles of refraction after

going through the

prism Schaffer provides an extremely

careful and thorough deconstruction of

the transparent self-evidence this

experiment was supposed to possess

appealing in particular to Newton's

early manuscript lectures beautifully

illustrating how the prism first became

an experimental instrument and how

doubts and unclarities concerning the

details of Newton's preparation and

manipulation of his prisms then needed

urgently to be

overcome indeed the question of who had

the most suitable prisms Newton or his

critics continued to complicate the

issue until well after the publication

of Newton's Optics Schaffer's paper to

the best of my knowledge is the richest

historical analysis of Newton's

experimentum Cruis that has yet

appeared today however Simon Schaffer

has a still more ambitious Target

Newton's mathematical principles of

natural philosophy I eagerly await what

he has to say on the subject of Newton

on the beach the information order of

prinkipia

Mathematica thank you very

much well first of course I'm

extraordinarily grateful and honored by

the invitation to give this year's Harry

Camp lectures here in Stanford nothing

is more terrifying than an inductive

series which includes EP Thompson and

Edward SED and Anthony Grafton and

Claude Levy Strauss of which I am

supposed to be the next

term I'm also very honored indeed to be

delivering lectures under the rubric of

the concept of the dignity and worth of

the indiv indidual and I'll try to show

in today's lectures in today's lecture

and

Wednesday's um that some of the work at

least that I want to address with you

addresses also that concept certainly

there's a connection between what I want

to say this evening and the concept of

the dignity and worth of the individual

because my talk focuses on an exemplary

in individual Isaac Newton and it

attempts to address the nature of his

individuality I begin with this

citation which in a strange way is from

Newton I don't myself believe that

Newton ever said this but it is the

second most famous thing Newton ever

said the most famous thing Newton ever

said he certainly wrote

that stuff about shoulders and

Giants which Robert Merton so

brilliantly analyzed and I wish Merton

had analyzed this too because then my

task would have been much easier than it

is let me read it out I know not how I

may seem to the world says Newton but as

to myself I seem to have been only like

a boy playing on the seashore and

diverting myself in now and then finding

a smoother Pebble or a prettier shell

than ordinary whilst the great ocean of

Truth lay all undiscovered before me now

there are several reasons I won't bore

you with them why Newton couldn't

possibly have said that the most obvious

is that it's

poetic and it's literally poetic The

Source text is Milton's Paradise

regained that great um meditation on the

good old cause the imagery of a boy

playing with shells is taken from the

conversation between Christ and Satan

about the worthlessness so Christ holds

of Greek philosophy Greek philosophy

according to Milton's Christ is like a

boy playing on the seashore diverting

himself with

shells but my concern here is not with

the Poetics of this remarkable

self-description there is by the way

another reason why Newton couldn't

possibly have said this it's

modest rather my concern is with a much

more brutal biographical fact which is

that Newton never was on the seashore

and he never saw the ocean he saw no

Tides save along the temps he never used

the moon to navigate at sea he had no

obvious interest in shells he was no

great traveler he spent his entire life

between Lincolnshire Cambridge and a

number of London houses pubs and offices

in fact as far as I've been able to

ascertain it's the sort of thing we

social constructivists do he is known to

have been on a boat only once and that

was with Christian hkin going up River

from Westminster to Hampton Court in

summer 1689 to try and get a

job so this is a man who in many ways

did not

move as my colleague Rob iff has shown

there was a very direct connection

between this ingeniously worked image of

seclusion and authority and the

religious and cosmological program that

Newton espoused the wars of the learned

so Newton held were due to making public

what should be secreted and the Affairs

of a corrupt state and church were

poisonous for the pursuit of

Truth in other words nowhere and yet

strangely everywhere and indeed nowhere

therefore everywhere this Newtonian

Solitude allowed a kind of imitatio Dei

an imitation of

God this was massively reinforced as

many of you will know of course in the

iconography of the Newtonian project let

me just run through some of that

iconography in a

Cavalier and Barbarian way this is the

first and most important printed image

of Newton it's the frest piece of the

first English version of prinkipia which

was printed in London two years after

Newton's death and it shows newon

communing with an angel in heaven to

whom he reveals and from whom he learns

the truths of celestial physics and that

image is played on again and again from

then on throughout the AL claron

in Jan Batista paton's

magnificent uh allegory to the memory of

s Isaac Newton which I've discussed

elsewhere um in my work that Michael

treated so generously in the

introduction on Newton's prism

experiments what you see here is the

crucial

experiment standing instead of Newton

who is nowhere to be seen in this image

Newton's ashes are in that n

and the Ancients gorp at his Triumph but

he's

absent and even when he's not absent as

here in Louis bou's magnificent project

of the 1780s for a senat in memory of

Sir Isaac Newton just to give you an

idea of the scale for those of you who

haven't seen Pete greenway's Masterpiece

the belly of an architect these are fur

trees that's the size of the of the

project and there again Newton's tomb

Solitude and cosmology welded

together this image barely needs a gloss

Blake's magnificent image of

1795 an image of

catastrophic solitude but Solitude and

withdrawal nevertheless and finally my

favorite George Sha's project of 1839

tragically never built um to construct a

kind of Boule esque Monument over

Newton's house in Kensington um so this

is a this is a street in Kensington and

this is what would have been built over

it had sha had his way what's that

iconography about it's about Solitude

and

immobility and the iconography of

Newton's Solitude and immobility of

course must seem all the more striking

because his program launched in the mid

1680s and under revision for the next

three decades so evidently mastered a

global creation involving the heights of

Tides the lengths of pendulums positions

of comets and moons the tales of

well-traveled Mariners and missionaries

and Merchants and mercenaries and I

couldn't think of anybody else whose

name begins with n the Divine Newton

then could describe how bodies acted on

each other instantly and at age

distance precisely because he could act

instantly and at a distance without any

mediation but immediate action at a

distance is not sadly a plausible

historical nor sociological principle so

my aim briefly here is to use this

figure of the Newtonian individual the

Newtonian solitary to examine the

emergence and workings of of other

systems of knowledge in early modern

natural philosophy his prinkipia must

stand as the Glorious testimony to the

achievement of a putatively cloistered

analyst of the mathematics of motion The

Telltale remark about the playful Beach

coma and the ocean of Truth helps

underwrite I believe the notion that

nothing like testimony or reportage or

trust or storytelling

can ever play a consequential role in

the Newtonian Triumph nor perhaps if one

follows the huian lesson about the

emergent necessity of permanent Sciences

could it play such a role in any

successfully completed analytical

science so part of the provocation of my

project is a desire to put Newton back

on the beach where he

belongs and part of it is to analyze

what recent Scholars have called the

information order in which his

Masterpiece was

produced the contrast in iconography

needs perhaps a little emphasis so

here's the contrasting case um this is a

magnificent image from Hanover uh of lib

knits choosing between the ancient and

the modern philosophy a task which as

you see for the enlightenment must take

place on your own you can't make that

choice in company and the contrast is

between this notion of epicurian

withdrawal and the extraordinary

mobility of a figure like liit those are

liet's journeys during his lifetime and

the the contrast with Newton is

extremely marked I mean on this map

Newton moves basically in a small circle

around

London so that's the kind of contrast

which I want to make something of the

contrast between those kinds of

displacements and the way in which

scholarship focuses on the extreme

Solitude withdrawal and individuation of

Newton working uh alone in Trinity

College in Cambridge in these rooms next

to Ren's Chapel

okay so that's the premise in every

sense now what do I mean by information

order such that prinkipia Mathematica

could possess

one well as many of my colleagues in the

history of Science and several people in

this room have shown us Long Range

Systems that allowed the accumulation of

facts and commodities were decisive

aspects of the knowledge order of this

period in her brilliant analysis is of

what she calls the information

ceremonies of the old regime the

historian Michelle Fogle shows how

control over the production of

information was surrounded with complex

rituals where the state's power was both

dramatized and reinforced Larry Stewart

has demonstrated Beyond dispute the

entanglement of Newtonian natural

philosophy with the commercial and trade

Revolutions of Georgian Britain and he's

pursued these inside into the newly

globalized trade networks Britain's

Empire then established these historians

and others have brought out the spatial

the political the commercial dimensions

of early modern knowledge regimes and of

course L shinger recent edited

collection with Claudia Swan on Colonial

botany does precisely that for a vast

area of the natural historical

Enterprise information for these studies

is a term designed to capture something

somewhat more broadly shared and less

challenged than formalized knowledges so

I want to invert in some sense an

intuitive contrast to which we might too

hastily subscribe it seems to me

information might be helpful here

because it inverts a received hierarchy

information let me push this paper boat

onto to the ocean of truth would be the

commonly taken for granted rather less

disputed and less disputable material

knowledge would look more mutable its

status certainly more debatable so one

of the historians whose work I'm

absolutely drawing on here Chris Bailey

sorry sir Christopher Bailey um

historian of um Britain and India has

pointed out that in early modern society

I'm quoting from him the information

order was

decentralized consisting of many

overlapping knowledge rich

communities okay now within the

information order there were what Peter

Burke has called information

Brokers their names are very familiar to

us as protagonists of the knowledge

regime which matters for newtonianism

bacon Merc sen harlib rodo colber

Oldenburg lietz Sloan and they

functioned in an information order which

sometimes called itself the Republic of

letters in which there was print

Commerce and stock investment news books

subscription systems and

encyclopedias and the reason why we

might want to attend to these

information orders is that they were

themselves part of the nent iconography

through which early modern societies

represented Global networks and again I

will in a barbarian fashion run through

a series of Fairly familiar images Each

of which would deserve a Harry Camp

lecture to

itself Yost Aman's magnificent allegory

of trade made for antp in the late 1500s

with an image of the world and the City

of antp the Fountain of trade the arms

of the guilds and each of the crafts of

the city the noble families and their

coats of arms an entire representation

of an information and Commercial order

athanasius Kira's great Jesuit horoscope

of

1646 um which represents a Global

Network in a way that my friend Bruno

lur can only dream

of since for each Jesuit base there is

um a sundal shown which allows the

calculation of universal and local time

and yet organized in our Boreal and

hierarchical form or this image again

very familiar from um Samuel peress

hutus postumus uh which organizes the

Protestant and English project as a

providential revelation of a vast

history of Naval networking extending

from Noah's Arc to Francis Drake and

everything in

between and then the single most

familiar representation of the global

basis of knowledge the uh iconography

that Francis Bacon ripped off from the

hapsburg programs of of Spanish

Conquest I show these because I just

want to remind us of the

self-consciousness in the culture that

we're trying to characterize of the

globalized forms through which

information was accumulated extracted

distributed exchanged and judged that's

important for my argument but alongside

what we might call the sublime of

information orders there is of of course

the satire of information orders

sorry so this print by vaslav holla

great Bohemian uh draftsman made in 1642

when's Last holla the world is governed

by opinion takes exactly the same

thematics and inverts it information and

intelligence is subversive it's

unreliable as the events of the south

sea Bubble Show there's an information

catastrophe in Newton's period and that

catastrophe hinged on the difficulty of

paing reliable from unreliable knowledge

information and intelligence were

unstable and hard to judge think for

example of the contrast between the work

of Dutchmen such as Kemper who reported

the most biz

facts about Japanese religious

ceremonies and the pseudo formosan

George psalmanazar Who reported that his

alleged home the island of Formosa

hosted ghastly rituals of infant

sacrifice and cannibalism this was what

was called paper fuel that was the

phrase for newsbooks and coffee houses

so take this example this is um the

alphabet of the language of Formosa

according to the uh pseudo foros George

salmanazar he was in fact where in

174 a uh aenor born lapsed Jesuit who

pretended to be from Taiwan and arrived

in London in the summer of 1704 was

introduced of course to the president of

the Royal Society Isaac Newton and

immediately published a history and what

we might Now call ethnography of the

island of Formosa including its

alphabet and a map of where it is all

this was

fake but that was not obvious and

especially it was not obvious to English

academics salmanazar was immediately

given a job as a lecturer in foros at

the University of thank goodness

Oxford but one had to discriminate

between this represent

entation and this

one which is also a map of Japan and the

islands to the east of Japan and you'll

recognize it as the fronti piece of

volume three of guler's

travels and this which is scher's map of

Japan dedicated to Sahan Sloan president

of the Royal Society in succession to

Newton and londoners were asked to judge

whether this representation of a

Japanese priest is less or more

plausible than Salon aar's

representation of a foros one I show you

these then to remind us that not only

were information orders fundamental for

the accumulation of knowledge but they

were simultaneously recognized as being

the source of chaos catastrophe and

difficult

judgment now in tracing these net

networks of trade and knowledge in their

regulative work it seems to me we need

first to follow the suggestions of

recent historians of the process Hal

Cook Steve Harris and others in his

provocative analysis of the interaction

between Dutch Merchant Enterprise and

natural history cook rightly points out

to us how Collective and creditworthy

accumulation of goods and information

characterized the Dutch economic system

and its knowledge regime too inventory

investment the invention of Maintenance

Technologies as he calls it of storage

and classing and warehousing were

simultaneously systems of knowledge

accumulation and systems of world making

soal rightly argues whether in libraries

or Gardens pharmacies or museums

similarly Steve Harris uses the career

of the Dutch East India Company

alongside those of the Spanish and of

Jesuit longrange knowledge networks to

show us the ways in which travel

expropriation and accumulation provided

both the social modes of existence of

the early modern capitalist system and

the knowledge regime of crucial

institutions bluntly credit was after

all how these goods were got and

accumulated and how they were defined as

Goods and this was the period precisely

this period when credit moved easily

between being the name of a fiscal

virtue the positive side of a bank

account that's how Daniel defo invents

the term in the 1710s and 20s and the

trustworthiness of a knowledge claim

too so having established ways in which

information orders were both fundamental

and vulnerable we need to turn I think

precisely to Newton's rather

idiosyncratic

predicament and I say

idiosyncratic because here I want to

emphasize how

pervasive the gap between Newton's

project and what I've just been talking

about has been in historiography that

seems very striking to me as we will see

so even Steve Harris's otherwise

brilliant exploration of long range

corporations in the networking of early

modern knowledge regimes draws this

distinction what Steve does in his

magnificent article is to invite us to

map the provenance of all the

constituents of an early modern

scientific text so think of an early

modern scientific text now draw lines

from every fact claim and every object

and every image to their source and you

will have mapped the global trade

Network so what Harris is telling us is

that there was an unprecedented early

modern explosion in mobility and this is

what helped make the knowledge regime of

the period and then he draws a contrast

he draws a specific contrast

between the vast extent of as example

Nehemiah Gru mum sotis regales in other

words the catalog of the Museum of the

Royal Society which would extend across

the globe given what was present in that

Museum and what Steve imagines to be the

quote very small region of the globe

traced by the provence roots of Newton's

prinkipia and he's wrong about that even

Homer nods by relocating Newton's

Masterpiece one can correct the errors

of an historiography which draws such

harsh distinctions between as it were

the successive presidents of the Royal

Society between Newton and the

naturalist H Sloan between natural

philosophy and curiosity between

astronomy and natural history so let me

leap forward to to

Newton what I've done

here because I'm weird is to plot on a

map of the Voyages of Robinson cruso

which was which accompanied the second

edition the 1727 edition of defoe's uh

story um the data points in the third

book of Newton's prinkipia the Third

Edition of which came out in the same

month as Robinson cruso so the green

blobs are places where stuff happens

that Newton describes in the

prinkipia and the line this line is

Robinson kuso's travels around the world

and I want to begin with this map when

thinking about Newton simply to show you

almost aidic toally the global

distribution of the prinkipia

Mathematica read as text it is as though

this work which is clearly fundamental

paradigmatic for the mathematical

principles of natural philosophy can

also be read not instead it must also be

read as a text in Natural History that's

my claim if we uh increase the focus a

bit this is a map of three kinds of

data which Newton uses in prinkipia

Mathematica the red blobs are

observations of the heights of

Tides the blue blobs are observations of

the position of comets and the green

blobs are observations of the length of

a pendulum that beats at the rate of 1

second per beat we'll see in a moment

why that might be an interesting

parameter but what I want to point out

here is that this is the Atlantic

triangle Newton is absolutely relying on

the work of the middle passage on the

work of the royal Africa company and on

the work of the comp de Sagal so that

the movement between the Atlantic

literal the transatlantic trade and and

the tobacco colonies in New England is

the system on which Newton's data mainly

relies and one needs to think that

partly when one is trying to make sense

of what Newton does in the third book of

the

prinkipia the final book the third book

as it now is the third volume of the

prinkipia is a book of assays of degrees

and seconds and miles and inches and

observers and experimenters and readers

splendidly the third volume which is

called the system of the world was first

introduced and significantly so to make

the prinkipia more

popular I love that fact unlike the

preceding material on the laws of motion

that Newton feared quote may have

appeared dry and Barren unquote this

book the system of the world demanded

detailed assays of information from a

very wide range of observers It Was

Written in just under 12 months during

uh the period up to the end of

1685 in the room that I showed you

earlier and it was I quote to

demonstrate the frame of the system of

the world composed in a popular method

that it might be read by many unquote

Newton's first editor Edmund hle naval

officer drunk Tory astronomer reckoned

in June 1686 in a letter to Newton that

quote the application of this

mathematical part to the system of the

world is what will render it acceptable

to all and much advanc the sale of the

book

unquote so what was Newton doing here he

was applying the geometrical principles

of unresisted motion under Central

forces to planets moons tides and comets

and therefore it was in this book that

Newton faces the problem of handling

others

numbers numbers made by astronomers and

Jesuits hor diu professors

academicians Sailors and it was this

book that Drew attention when his second

editor the genial Roger coats began to

rework the entire program between

179 and

173 Newton and coats concerned with

geographical knowledge were also

concerned with assessing observers

credit especially their reports of where

comets were how High the sea Rose and

how pendulums responded to the force of

gravity since the rate at which a

pendulum beats they reckoned is a good

measure of how strongly an object is

being pulled by the Earth they called

this problem marvelously for me the

French

dilemma because of the variation between

different measures of pendulum lengths

reported by Frenchmen

so it's suggestive to me at least that

this final book raises so clearly issues

of trust and credit and Global

Information and reader response and what

I want to do very quickly now is to run

through the three cases that I've mapped

on this Atlantic chart first the tides

so here is the text of the first

proposition of the third book on the

tides to find the force of the Moon

which raises the

sea and you immediately see what Newton

is doing in this text what he wants is

to have a good value for the force of

the Moon and of the sun L and S you can

probably just see that which is the

force that they're exerting When the

tide is at its

highest and when they pull in opposite

directions in which case one has lunar

minus soul and from that one could get

the ratio of the tide raising power of

the moon to the ti raising power of the

Sun and that would allow one to

calculate the precession of the

equinoxes and a whole range of other

variables that matter but in order to

get the ratio of the highest observed

tide to the lowest observed tide you

have to trust men like Samuel stury and

Samuel cpress Sam cpress in Plymouth Sam

stery in

Bristol are they reliable

observers

no this is Samuel

stury who looks very reliable it seems

to me in this

image and this is his tide book the

Mariners Magazine with its Splendid

frontis piece and this is the book that

Newton and H and coats analyze for the

trustworthiness of their tidal data

stury writes about how he's measured the

tides but above all who he's talked to

he's visit Ed marshes where and I quote

the sea being kept out with great Earth

walls that it do not at high water

overflow the level and the inhabitants

livelihood depending most on sheep they

are as you may believe they have reason

to be very Vigilant and observant at

what times they are most in danger of

having their animals

drowned and I find them generally agreed

by their constant observations and

experience dearly bought both for them

and their

sheep that their times of danger are the

beginning of November and of February

and it's on this basis that stury

reports in late

1668 on the crucial data for Newton

about the time and height differences

between the highest and lowest Tides

reporting his observations as around

about 45 ft so that number 45 becomes

the crucial number in Newton's

prinkipia Newton didn't only rely or

discuss however questions of the ratio

of the lunar to the Solar Force he also

for the first time in history produced

numerical models of what's called tidal

interference the most spectacular

example of that takes place in the Gulf

of ton kin um and it was observed by the

English because tonin was one of the

most important trading bases of the East

India Company the mouth of the red river

that flows down from Hanoi into the Gulf

of ton kin experiences not two but one

tide a day and the height of that tide

varies sinusoidally with the position of

the Moon Newton engage in a

virtuoso mathematical analysis of how

that could be and why using the

superposition of different tidal flows

around Islands on the southern China

Coast what was his data source his data

Source was an American a Boston Mariner

called Francis Davenport who as I've

mapped here was in the East Indies as a

pilot for p i l o t a pilot for the East

India

Company he came back to London in

1685 and brought with him reports of

this tidal Marvel and that's why Newton

analyzed it but his s course there were

two problems with this data for Newton

one Davenport's Source was to quote his

book The subtle tonin pilots who

exaggerate the shifts of Tides only to

prevent their being kicked out of

employment wherein yet with safety the

best of them all cannot be wholly relied

on so what Davenport was saying is there

is this title Strang this Marine

monstrosity but don't trust it because

it's actually an exaggeration by pilots

who know they'd otherwise be

sacked secondly Davenport was in London

because he was on trial he was on trial

because he was helping a pirate with the

marvelous name of Siamese

white who was based at mgee here and had

organized the complete destruction of

the East India Company base there so

Davenport's reputation was to put it

mildly dodgy a newspaper which Newton

collected describes Davenport thus this

vile rich on Whose evidence the company

have so much depended is one of the most

notorious Rogues in nature and so

esteemed by all honest men that have

ever had the unhappiness ever to have

been concerned or acquainted with him

unquote not for the last time of course

a dubious report from the Gulf of tonin

by an ugly American had to be checked

for its

creditworthiness Edmund Hy sorry that

dates me a veteran of the East India

company's ships and thus Newton had to

depend on what this V wretch said and

they analyzed his numbers in great

detail while glossing in manuscript the

way in which they were analyzing his

credibility we see very similar kinds of

analysis in the case of Newton's work on

comets I will not go into detail here we

can discuss this after if you wish

Newton's informants about cometary

position

were ideally required to have made

remarkably accurate observations of

cometry positions because Newton's

project was again

unprecedentedly to analyze the eliptical

Paths of comets on the basis of

observations of a single Transit so here

Newton is analyzing the comet of the

great Comet of November 168

through March of

1681 using observations from Winthrop in

Boston in New England from Planters in J

in the on the Jamaican slave plantations

and from his Kinsman Arthur stora who

grew tobacco on the patuk Cent river

near Hunting Creek in Maryland on the

Virginia border to whom he'd sent a

rather fine telescope with which to make

precisely this kind of observation

Newton turned himself into a center of

calculation this is a drawing by Newton

of one of his colleagues um descriptions

of the Comet over King's College Chapel

that's a Newton drawing of King's

College Chapel this is the kind of

incoming data that Newton was working on

but he was

also having to use images like this so

this is an AS rological image of the

same Comet and as Lorraine daston and

others have taught us it's an image

which talks about the superstitious

belief in cometry eggs weird Stones

impressed with images when comets

Transit and Newton had to analyze this

image for the numerical positions which

um was a challenge and a half he also

did Newton organized what we might call

comet

Journeys he sent Edmund Hy into the

Baltic to visit hius and toward towards

Italy simply to gather reliable cometary

numbers this is not the image of Newton

that we normally think of then this is

not the isolated cloistered and

sequestered figure of tradition rather

this is a man or organizing a global

large scale Information

Network finally let me turn to the

question of the length of

pendulums as I've said this was the most

crucial data with which Newton was

working in the final book of the

prinkipia because the length of a

pendulum clock that beats regularly

seconds as it beats measure me es so

Newton was innovatively arguing the

force of gravity at that point and

Newton reckoned that because of

gravitation the Earth is figured oblate

like this in other words like a pumpkin

rather than like a melon and therefore

second pendulums should be made shorter

nearer the equator because the force of

gravity near the equator is weaker

and these are the numbers with which

Newton was working these are the numbers

generated principally by the French

slave system by the French plantation

system this is the French problem the

French problem is do these numbers those

in blue appear in the first edition of

the prinkipia those in red are added in

the second and third do these numbers

justify the inference that that pendulum

clocks must be shortened when you get

nearer the equator that's a matter of

testimonial analysis of

assaying so for example hk's observation

of his seconds pendulums in denh in the

ha has the length of a second pendulum

is 3' 82 in that of reishe Jean ree at

cayen very near the equator has a

seconds pendulum of length 3' 7 in and 7

20ths of a line so that looks good but

many of these numbers look bad and as

Nicholas duu has pointed out in a very

important recent article analyzing the

observation of the comp de Sagal de and

the eminent minim Observer Louis foer

these numbers don't fit with the

Newtonian model at all in Paris the

chief French astronomer Cassini simply

denied that there is a variation in the

length of pendulums that beat seconds he

saw did Cassini this range of numbers as

an entirely local and contingent uneven

fact uh related principally to tropical

heat on which the French have always

been experts

and on the force of the

Wind on which perhaps they've also

always been

experts however what Newton did was as

you might expect to take the hens and

reishe observations this is the frontis

piece the Magnificent vignette of R's

astronomical and physical observations

made on the aisle of cayen very

seriously and to reject all the

others what does he say say in his gloss

on these questions this disagreement

must arise from the errors of The

Observers from the dissimilitude of the

internal parts of the Earth the height

of mountains the different temperatures

of the air and the

untrustworthiness of these kinds of

Travelers Newton makes a uhuh don't even

think about it

cool um these this is Louie foer's

observation of an animal one finds in

the River Plate in the Rio Plata it's a

magnificent fully folded out plate that

Newton had in his copy of foer's

observations and it's annotated sickest

in other words it's like

this Newton used the incredibility of

these kinds of sto stories to

undermine the trustworthiness of the

observations the minim was making about

the length of his clock in other words

and

finally in all sorts of ways all right

logout is timed up good

excellent finally what Newton is doing

in collaboration with his editors with

men like Hatley and coats with a vast

number of

informants is to make a judgment of an

information order of a global scale and

it seems to me that if we take that kind

of system of newtonianism

seriously we have a much more accurate

account of where Newton is when he's

forging the Masterpiece that is the

prinkipia here's my coder

at the period when Newton was writing

prinkipia in its first edition he was as

we now know extremely well also drafting

increasingly lengthy descriptions of

heaven and of the New Jerusalem in his

now well-known manuscripts interpreting

the apocalypse and the day of judgment

and there's a passage which has always

fascinated me in Newton's writings where

he Des describes the Heavenly city and

what it is like and what it will be like

to live there and this unlike the

statement with which I began is

ipsissima verba this is Newton

describing

Heaven as the planets remain in their

orbs he writes in

1685 so may any other bodies subsist at

any distance from the earth and much

more will beings who have the power of

self motion move where they will place

themselves where they will and continue

in any region of the heaven whatsoever

whatever there to enjoy the Society of

one another and by their Messengers or

angels to rule the Earth and Converse

immediately with the remotest

regions and to have thus the liberty or

Dominion to move through the whole

heavens and the choice of the happiest

places for Abode seems to me a greater

happiness than to be confined forever to

any one place that's a better

description of the Newtonian project

than that image of the boy and the

shells on the beach thank you

thank you Simon um sorry I don't have a

level here Simon has kindly agreed this

may not be on to answer questions and

Matthew tw's and I have uh cordless

microphones because this room is

extremely dead so uh we will call

roughly on people on Alternate sides of

the room by passing them the mics so if

you'll put your hands up when you want

to ask questions we'll give you the

wherewithal please don't try to ask a

question without the mic it just doesn't

work in this room so uh Matthew do you

want to start on the other side

questions uh thank you we we talked uh

uh uh in the afternoon about uh

the the sagales man coming from the

river MH and uh we bring some

knowledges uh in in Britain I would like

don't say more about that yeah say more

about that right thank you um Okay so

what I what this version of the

talk embarrassingly omits of course is

what this kind of information order

would have seemed like to informant

that's to say agents treated as

informants within this system I've given

you an extraordinarily Cent

repal picture of the information order

which Newton H and code developed they

are the analysts so here's an example

which I think is familiar but I also

think is very important of an agent

whose Pathways clearly intersect with

the information order that I've

described but for whom things must have

seemed very different his name as far as

the English was concerned um was Solomon

IBN

jalah um he was uh from

uh the Sagal Valley he was born

presumably in the middle of the

1670s he was taken as a slave from the

French slaving base at g to martinque in

the

1690s and then liberated and ends up in

London in 1698 where he lived for 15

years and his work in London was to act

first of all as a translator and then as

an agent and then as a collector for

Newton and for sahans Sloan Newton's for

S Sans SLO Newton's successor as

president of the Royal Society the most

eminent naturalist of the age and um

jalah was clearly an absolutely

indispensable translator into mediary

and interpreter for a large number

initially of slones and then magn ently

for uh in initially and briefly for

Newton and then much more extensively

for Sloan not only in terms of

collecting judging and assaying objects

in cabinets that Sloan would purchase or

assess or buy and then display at his

house in Chelsea but also I think

fascinatingly which is one of the things

we were talking about earlier um he was

a translator he would Translate Arabic

texts as well as those from the West

African literal and then in the 1720s by

which time we can estimate he must have

been in his uh 60s he returned to the

Sagal through Gare he was taken there on

an English ship of the royal Africa

company and acted for the next decade as

an agent for English collectors and then

he's lost to history after that it's an

extraordinary career it's been well

documented by number of extremely

eminent africanist

historians but what I think it reminds

us of is that I wanted to stress for us

the way in which the Atlantic triangle

the system of extermin ism and

exploitation which is also a system of

commodity circulation and knowledge

accumulation has as information Brokers

traveling around it not just and perhaps

not even mainly the kind of protagonist

that I've been describing in my talk I

think that's the possibility that's

raised there and what we were talking

about before the show started earlier to

today was the necessity to begin

exploring European archives especially

the Anglo French archives clearly and

this has begun to be done of course by

several people here as well as

historians who've worked much more

seriously on this than I have but to use

those archives to recover and

reconstitute information orders as they

would have seemed out with the kind of

networks that Newton and Sloan were

themselves manipulating and I think

that's a very important reminder of what

sorts of imbalances were in play in the

kind of assay of knowledge that we've

been discussing this evening so thanks a

million for that now what's the story

about how the quote about the boy on the

shore got attributed to Newton okay the

check is in the post I'm so glad you

asked me that

um

okay this is a statement which first

appears in any written form at all 18

months after Newton's death in the

conversation book of uh

gossipy slightly eccentric Oxford

journalist if it's not anachronistic to

use that word um and and he was

collecting material for a biography of

Newton so he keeps a diary which is

essentially a a conversation book in

other words records of remarks people

have made about Newton remarks that

Newton himself has made overit to dictor

table talk and so on and so forth and

it's immediately attributed to

Newton then it's printed for the first

time in a book by the absolutely

remarkable jackaby

Freemason and uh Globe Trotter Andrew

ramsy in a book called a plan of

education for a young prince which was

printed in

1732 and already the sentence has

changed I mean within a few years right

the sentence is now so listen carefully

please as Sir Isaac Newton

said all the discoveries mortals can

make are like those of a child on the

borders of the sea that has only cracked

some Pebbles and opened some shells to

see what is in them while there lies

Beyond him a boundless ocean of which he

has no idea so that looks a little more

plausible to me because it's whatever

else it is it's not

modest right um nor particularly poetic

I mean the grammar is already collapsed

and the source text there is no longer

so clearly Paradise regained but clearly

one Corinthians we now see through a

glass Darkly but then face to face I

mean that's what Ramsey is doing with

this text and that's the version that

then became canonical right so that it's

that version that appears for example in

donjuan in Byron's donjuan in David

Brewster's Memoirs of the life of Newton

in the 1830s and so on and so on and so

on all the way up to and including its

magnificently tortuous reappearance in

wordsworth's Prelude um uh looking forth

from my okay this is a challenge looking

forth from my room at night I could see

the chapel where the statue stood of

Newton with his prism and his silent

face the marble index of a solitary mind

voyaging across oceans of Truth

alone right so the Fortuna of this text

is absolutely fascinating it seems to me

which is one of the reasons why I'm glad

you answer

question

there this is fascinating um and what I

find fascinating

is looking at the mathematics

through a social context in the way

you're doing it so seeing the prinkipia

as a text to Natural History is your

claim only for the third book or how far

does your claim go oh right okay uh no

the claim is not only for the third book

I think the I mean for the claim to have

legs it has to embrace the whole project

right otherwise I think it doesn't work

right on the contrary we would be

reinstalling precisely the contrast that

your work and Paula's work and you know

Ben Schmidt's work and so on has been

trying to overcome I mean we would

actually perversely have reinforced that

distinction first you do the analysis

then you find it out right um what

matters there is the conjunctural

analysis of the way in which the

prinkipia is put together as project and

there it seems to me historiographically

I'm now going to go into deep obscure

mode okay we have to go back to what Tom

whide taught us a gen generation ago

about how the prinkipia was made and

that's the second part of this paper um

what Tom Whiteside great historian of

Newtonian the great historian and editor

of Newtonian mathematics showed us a

generation ago in an article in 1970

which is still not read enough called uh

before the prinkipia is that there is no

material in Newton in the manuscript

before the summer of 1684 that remotely

resembles anything substantial that one

finds in the prinkipia Mathematica

that's an extraordinarily remarkable

claim the analogy would be say with the

composition of the Origin of Species it

is as if the 1844 Species book and the

notebooks of 1837 and 8 when Darwin

comes back from the Beagle Voyage don't

exist that they' never been written as

though Darwin had put together the great

argument as he calls it in the 18 months

before the summer of 1858 when Alfred

Russell Wallace horrifyingly announces

uh his paper on the law of species

indefinitely to depart from their type

now that's the story about Newton

however that the entire project is put

together in 30 months more or less

without any substantial reflection on

the problem

now if that's true and I believe that

it's true then the project to develop a

rational mechanics of unresisted

motion the forging of the notion of

centripetal force which is his neologism

there is no such thing as the word copal

before uh September of 1684 happens in

step with the material that I've been

describing here if that were not so this

argument would be rivetingly interesting

but actually pretty weak the reason I

think the argument can be made strong is

that the data accumulation and assaying

is happening at the same time as the

forging of the basic building blocks of

what we now see in the second half of

book one and the first half of book of

what is now book two that is to say on

unresisted and resisted motion and those

and the the three building blocks are um

the area law is a is a

clock the um Kepler systems can be

generalized to universal gravitation

which is an extraordinary and

counterintuitive thought since Kepler

systems should be autonomous for them to

be um accurate and finally perhaps most

importantly um you can derive the

inverse Square law from the data and you

can derive the data from the inverse

Square law which is an extremely radical

claim

indeed all of that must be being put

together at the same time as the data is

being analyzed and then what we have

from 1685 onwards is a separation right

these are actually teased apart into a

Trea is called the motion of bodies and

a treat is called the system of the

world which as I said is initially

written in popular discursive form right

and then it has to be recast for reasons

it would be too complicated to go into

so I think that's a very long way of

saying

yes yeah I have a question about the

creditworthiness of informance um I was

wondering what would you say made

particular numbers acceptable or

unacceptable to Newton um it sounded

like uh it wasn't their Providence I

mean it sounded pretty clearly like it

wasn't where who they were coming from

but then in that case if it was just

whether or not they fitted with his

theory then creditworthiness doesn't

really enter in so that's my question I

think that's an extremely interesting

question um I think three things are

going on to be quicker one Providence

does matter a lot right um immediate

empirical acquaintance is very very

important as Criterion of assay but

judging the immediacy of empirical

acquaintance is itself a judgment on

testimony right that's a very obvious

but perhaps you know easy to miss point

so were you really there um and it may

not be the numbers then I mean the

quantitative assays which are being

judged but the utility of this Provence

is being judged in in exactly the way

that Scholars have recently made us

familiar with right so there's there's

that

point so a very good number from someone

who where it's extraordinarily unlikely

that they themselves have immediate

acquaintance isn't isn't a usable number

and one can show that I mean I I showed

that in a number of cases the second

point which is again a very obvious

point is that um I wanted to show you

the way in which he's actively trying to

recruit data this is not a passive

isolated Center of calculation who

simply relies on what can be gathered by

bricolage in a small Market town in the

East Midland right there is an active

program from 1684 through 1687 and even

more so for the second edition much more

so for the second edition with codes so

1704 on to 1711 and 1713 to bring data

in right and the third argument is I

think the causes the Kus belly here now

because uh as you will know very very

well um the the dominant canonical way

of reading these crues in the third book

was given to us by the late professor

Westfall in an extraordinary article

called Newton and the fudge Factor first

published in American scientists where

what Sam did was to show exactly how

much manipulation Newton was engaging in

on the face of the page at least on the

face of the drafts that that we've got

in these cases in the case of

observations of the speed of sound and

so on right and I'm much moved I mean of

course I'm much moved by westfall's

analysis because he's the master of

those that know about Newton

however what I think one should say

about that is not the the the of Quasi

denunciatory tone in which that article

is written but to notice something

completely fundamental which Steven

Stigler and others have pointed out

which is that Newton has no concept of

error that's the point right if two

numbers are going I mean if one number

is going to be evidence for a

theoretically derived number they must

be identical to any number of sign

significant figures otherwise they are

not evident right and that presses on

the testimonial relation enormously

right so the 9 over5 you know 45 or

there or thereabouts is going to become

very quickly in the calculation a number

in six significant

figures right so you you move from Sam

stury talking to some sheep farmers in

Bristol to you know 9 over five and then

9 and 23 over 5 and an eighth and then

and so on and so on right so it's the

way in which we don't have a concept of

reasonable agreement here that I find

the most interesting thing to think

about and Jed bookal and mo fold are

working exactly on this problem now so I

understand um which is you know Way

Beyond my capacity which is to try and

write this is what we have to do coming

back to londa's point with what we need

and we don't have amazingly for early

modern exact Sciences yet is it seems to

me a reasoned history of the notion of

agreement we don't have that yet right

we don't know yet quite and we will when

Jed and mo do this what counts as

agreement between two numbers I mean go

through those Avalanches of new

numerical tables from Galileo and the

Jesuits through hook and boil to Newton

what what is going on there right and

we've never really done that which is

extraordinary it seems to me right even

Kay who founded this project never did

that right rather for K this was simply

a story of the end of the regime of APPA

pre that's how he puts it but we we need

something much more than that

for more please visit us at stanford.edu