Science Secrets Page 8

  One phrenologist argued that a specific part of the brain handles weight, and that the corresponding facial bump, along the eyebrows, mapped the individual's ability to analyze mechanical forces. He commented: “It is particularly large in the mask of Sir Isaac Newton: the falling of the apple attracted the attention of this organ, and led the philosopher into a train of thought, which resulted in developing the true theory of gravitation. If the organ had been small in his head, the falling of the apple would never have excited in his mind such a train of thought.”45 Allegedly, the apple could not inspire anyone who did not already have an acute physical propensity for the analysis of weights.

  In 1870, an article in the Phrenological Journal remarked on the “happy moment” when Newton observed an apple fall, and conceived the law of gravitation; and, the “happy moment” when Ben Franklin sent up his kite to bring down electricity; comparing these to the “happy moment” when Franz Joseph Gall, as a schoolboy, noticed that boys with big eyes were better at memorization than him, and that actors too had the same trait, and thus he realized that features of heads correspond to abilities—founding later the science of phrenology.46 In 1897, the Phrenological Journal duly quoted D'Israeli's account about Newton, perhaps with humor.47 Soon, another writer joked that a phrenologist might well say that the apple, guided by the goddess Minerva, had struck Newton exactly on the right bump.48

  Was Newton really inspired by a falling apple? Because the evidence is inconclusive, various writers choose whichever stance on the story seems preferable to them: true, partly true, or false. For example, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss dismissed it: “The story of the apple is too simple,” he said, “one can believe whether the apple fell or remained, that thereby such a discovery was delayed or accelerated, but the business is really as follows: a stupid, pushy man once came to Newton, to ask him, how he had arrived at his great discoveries. But then Newton realized that he faced a childish mind, and wanting to get rid of the man, he answered: that an apple fell on his nose, whatever, the man left satisfied by that, completely enlightened.”49 Notice that Gauss, too, freely proceeded to invent additional details and to presume some certain knowledge. Such variations of the story of Newton's apple are worthwhile because although they do not portray the past, they enable us to glimpse aspects of the person who tells the tale.

  The story has evolved in various directions. In a 1997 book, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, Michael White argued that Newton, working in physics in general and gravity in particular, was greatly influenced by alchemy. Accordingly, White said that the story of the apple “was almost certainly fabricated by Newton to disguise the truth,” he argued that the apple story is “at least an exaggeration designed for a specific purpose—almost certainly to suppress the fact that much of the inspiration for the theory of gravity came from his subsequent alchemical work.”50 It suits White's narrative to interpret Newton's story as a cover-up, a disguise for the alleged narrative that White seeks to support. Notice the repeated expression “almost certainly,” an exaggeration to camouflage what there would be much more appropriate: with no certainty. Another writer, renowned historian A. Rupert Hall, claimed that Conduitt had learned the story about the apple from his wife, Catherine, Newton's niece.51 But there is no evidence to that either. And there are other similar examples.

  I do not know whether Newton's original apple story is true. But at least we have it from the old man himself. Plus, there is much more evidence in support of the apple story than other stories that are widely repeated, such as that Pythagoras discovered the arithmetic of music, that Galileo dropped objects from the tower of Pisa, or that Darwin was inspired by finches. Regardless of its truth, the story became an attractive hook that moved many people to meditate about scientific creativity; not a bad thing at all.

  Whatever happened to Newton's apple tree? Legends produce relics. After Newton died, his estate and possessions were divided among his four half-nephews and four half-nieces, the grandchildren of his mother and of Reverend Smith. Before dying, Newton gave some lands to members of the Conduitt family, and he bequeathed his estates at Woolsthorpe and Sustern to John Newton, whose great-grandfather was Isaac's uncle. Just five years later, in 1732, John Newton sold the manor house and grounds at Woolsthorpe to Thomas Alcock who next sold it to Edmund Turnor the following year. Subsequently, generations of the Turnor family kept the property. Almost a century later, in a biography of Isaac Newton published in 1831, David Brewster reported what happened to a tree in the Woolsthorpe property: “The celebrated apple tree, the fall of one of the apples of which is said to have turned the attention of Newton to the subject of gravity, was destroyed by wind about four years ago; but Mr Turnor has preserved it in the form of a chair.”52

  The square chair is now in a private collection. Later, in Brewster's more extensive biography of Newton, published in 1855, he omitted mentioning the chair and instead added a footnote that relayed a different account: “We saw the apple tree in 1814, and brought away a portion of one of its roots. The tree was so much decayed that it was taken down in 1820, and the wood of it carefully preserved by Mr. Turnor.”53

  Two accounts by Brewster: in one the tree was knocked down by wind in 1827, and turned into a chair; and in the other, the old tree decayed and was taken down in 1820, the wood carefully preserved.

  In any case, Augustus De Morgan wryly commented: “One particular tree at Woolsthorpe has been selected as the gallows of the apple-shaped goddess: it died in 1820, and Mr. Turnor kept the wood; but Sir D. Brewster bought away a bit of root in 1814, and must have had it in his conscience for 43 years that he may have killed the tree.”54

  Additional details in the history of Newton's apple tree have been painstakingly traced for decades by Richard Keesing.55 Before Brewster wrote about the tree, another Edmund Turnor published a single footnote line about it, in 1806. He merely noted that “The apple tree is now remaining and is showed to strangers.”56 That was eighty years after Newton's death. Some years later, a boy who went to school at Lincolnshire reportedly saw the apple tree after it was knocked down by a storm. This account was written by William Walker, who wrote about his father, the boy Richard Walker (born in 1807):

  My father told me that while he was at school there, there was a very severe storm of wind one night, and that in the morning news came that Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree had blown down at Woolsthorpe. The school master, Mr. Pearson and several of the boys at once set off for Woolsthorpe, where Sir Isaac's house was, and which is not far from Stoke, and just on the Lincolnshire side of Belvoir Castle. When they arrived there they saw the old apple tree lying on the ground. It had been propped up all round for many years, and every effort had been made to preserve it. My father said it lay there, having by the force of the wind, blown over its props. He said that he did not know by what authority Mr. Pearson acted, but that he obtained a saw from somewhere and sawed a good many logs of wood from the branches. My father got one of these pieces, which he always kept as being a most interesting relic. Various friends and other people often tried to induce my father to part with this, but he always refused, as he prized it very much indeed.57

  In 1912, William Walker gifted this account, along with his father's small log, to the Royal Astronomical Society in London.

  Researching the history of the tree, Keesing notes that he has found some drawings of the broken-down tree, one apparently from 1816, another dated 1820, and a third with no date. Keesing conjectures that there was only one apple tree in Newton's garden (whereas there were many in the orchard), and that therefore that was the famous tree. However, a drawing of Newton's manor house, by William Stukeley, sketched in 1721, shows no tree where a later drawing shows an apple tree.

  Meanwhile, Brewster's pieces of wood were apparently lost. Reportedly, he gave a few pieces of the tree to J. D. Forbes, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Forbes passed the relics to his son, George Forbes, who later recounted:

>   The writer inherited from his father (Professor J. D. Forbes) a small box containing a bit of wood and a slip of paper, which had been presented to him by Sir David Brewster. On the paper Sir David had written these words: “If there be any truth in the story that Newton was led to the theory of gravitation by the fall of an apple, this bit of wood is probably a piece of the apple tree from which Newton saw the apple fall. When I was on a pilgrimage to the house in which Newton was born, I cut it off an ancient apple tree growing in his garden.” When lecturing in Glasgow, about 1875, the writer showed it to his audience. The next morning, when removing his property from the lecture table, he found that his precious relic had been stolen. It would be interesting to know who has it now!58

  Keesing found that in 1840, a Charles Turnor claimed that he had taken some grafts from Newton's apple tree (but had it not died almost a century earlier?) and had cultivated “two thriving apple trees” from it. It is not known what happened to those trees, but by 1937, a Christopher Turnor (then owner of Woolsthorpe Manor) claimed that there was a scion of Newton's apple tree at Belton Park. Keesing writes: “Subsequently a scion of this tree was grafted at the Fruit Research Station at East Malling and it is from this material that most of Newton apple trees planted worldwide come.”

  In 1977, in his quest to find what happened to the tree, Richard Keesing visited Woolsthorpe, hoping to take a photograph of the manor house that would resemble an old drawing that showed the apple tree: “I was walking backwards composing the scene from the Turnor drawing through the viewfinder of a camera when I found myself lying upon my back. Regaining my feet I looking round and was amazed to find that I had fallen over what appeared to be the tree illustrated in the drawing. Even now the memory of the event is disorienting for I recall the confusion of not knowing whether I was in the year 1820 or 1977.”59

  Comparing his photograph with Charles Turnor's drawing of 1820, Keesing concluded that the images were so similar that the present tree is none other than an outgrowth from a piece of the 1820 trunk that had fallen after the storm. In 1997, Keesing conjectured: “I would like to suggest that the prone hollow trunk which is rooted at each end and is today still growing at Woolsthorpe Manor is the prone branch of the tree drawn by Charles Turnor in 1820, and is one and the same tree which was identified from which Newton saw an apple fall in the year 1665/6. If this is the case, the apple tree must now be about 350 years old.”

  While this account contains uncertainty, Keesing's doubts seemed to have diminished by 2010. Without citing any new evidence, he claims in a website of the Department of Physics of the University of York: “Despite all their efforts to prop the aged tree up, it blew down in a storm in 1816. Some branches were removed but the major portion of the tree was left and re-rooted. The surprising fact is that this tree is still growing at Woolsthorpe Manor today and now must be over 350 years old.”60

  It must be? Some apple trees become very decrepit after 60 years. Some others have been reported to live 100 or even 200 years. But 360-plus? Despite Keesing's sympathy for his favorite tree at Woolsthorpe, there is no evidence that that was the tree. Like many other people, he sought to find something, for decades, and to his satisfaction at least, he found it. The tree that is absent from a drawing of 1721, the same old tree that had badly decayed and was torn down in 1820, the same old tree that was “destroyed” by storm winds in 1827 (or perhaps eariler), miraculously is now alive, and is more than 350 years old.

  First it ended up as a chair, then pieces of its roots were allegedly preserved, then pieces of its branches, then living grafts, and today, there are descendants of Newton's tree in many places: There's one on the lawn to the right of Great Gate of Trinity College Cambridge, there's another at the University of York, and another by the Babson College Library in Massachusetts, and so forth. The apples produced by these trees are of a rare variety known as “Flower of Kent,” they are somewhat pear shaped, flavorless, and colored red with streaks of yellow and green.

  The latest destination for the tree is beyond planet Earth, outer space. The Royal Society archives granted permission to British-born astronaut Piers Sellers to take a valuable piece of their collections on a space mission. A news article by the Royal Society reported that “The section of wood, taken from the original tree that inspired Newton to formulate his theory of gravitation” would be taken on a NASA mission to space; and Sellers commented: “We're delighted to take this piece of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree to orbit. While it's up there, it will be experiencing no gravity, so if it had an apple on it, the apple wouldn't fall.”61 Another astronaut, described the space shuttle Atlantis as “the single most incredible machine humanity has ever built.”62 And in May 2010, it took a piece of old wood into space.

  4

  The Stone of the Ancients

  IN 1657, Oswald Crollie referred to alchemy as follows: “This visible and invisible fellowship of Nature is that golden chaine so much commended, this is the marriage of heaven and riches, these are Plato's rings, this is that dark and close Phylosophy so hard to be known in the most inward and secret parts of Nature, for the gaining whereof Democritus, Pythagoras, Apollonius, &c. have travelled to the Brachmans and Gymnosophists in the Indies, and to Hermes his Pillars in Æegypt.”1 By contrast, chemists later viewed alchemy in the same way that astronomers viewed astrology—as an irrational, ancestral fraud. Galileo and Kepler used astrology to gain money from wealthy patrons, though they both had secret reservations against it. It had more validity than Galileo imagined, as Kepler rightly reasoned that some things in the heavens do affect life on Earth: the moon does cause the tides. Alchemists believed that metals, too, were linked to the heavenly bodies. Some believed that dull metals were diseased but could be cured, perfected. They thought that metals live and grow in the depths of Earth, and they sought the elusive occult “seed,” the so-called Philosophers' Stone, that would allegedly transmute “diseased” dull metals into perfect gold.2 Alchemists sought this mysterious red powder in order to concoct a drinkable gold that would give health, extend life, and allow the alchemist a closer communion with God. They worked in basements and caves, with animal skeletons hanging overhead, stirring molten metals over fires and cooking smelly substances that would supposedly sweat and salivate and grow. They veiled their findings in secrecy, cloaked in mythical imagery.

  Some alchemists honestly worked to unravel the secrets of nature, but they too wrote in cryptic, allegorical terms. For example, consider the following lines: “The wind is the bath of the Sun and the Moon, and Mercurius, and the Dragon, and the Fire that succeeds in the third place as the governor of the work: and the earth is the nurse, Latona, washed and cleansed, whom the Egyptians assuredly had for the nurse of Diana and Apollo, that is, the white and red tinctures. This is the source of all the perfection of the whole world.”3 Such fancies seem to lie quite some distance away from science.

  The main works of alchemy were said to be ancient, written by a mysterious author known as Hermes Trismegistus (“three times great”), a legendary mixture of the Greek god Hermes (Mercury) and the Egyptian god of wisdom. And alchemists were secretive, like the cult of Pythagoras. Hence, throughout the centuries, some seekers of alchemical knowledge increasingly suspected that Pythagoras, who allegedly visited Egypt, had been privy to such secrets. Since historians already have often written about alchemy by focusing on the figure of Hermes, I will now analyze the history of transmutation partly in regard instead to the legendary Pythagoras. For a long time, the transmutation of the elements seemed to be a secret or a myth.

  In the poem Metamorphoses (ca. 8 CE), Ovid told the story of Midas, King of Lydia, who received a drunken old satyr captured by peasants. Midas treated the satyr hospitably and entertained him for ten days and nights. On the eleventh day, King Midas returned the satyr to the young god Bacchus, the satyr's foster son, who in turn offered to grant Midas one wish, “which was pleasing, but futile, since he was doomed to make poor use of his reward. ‘Make it so
that whatever I touch with my body, turns to yellow gold,’ he said. Bacchus accepted his choice, and gave him the harmful gift, sad that he had not asked for anything better.”4 King Midas was overjoyed by the gift, at first, turning twigs and stones to gold. But then he was horrified to find that his food also turned to gold, wine and water too. He fled in misery, hating his gift, thirsting and starving in despair. And “justly, he is tortured by the hateful gold. Lifting his shining hands and arms to heaven, he cries out: ‘Father, Bacchus, forgive me! I have sinned. But have pity on me, I beg you, and save me from this costly evil!’ The will of the gods is kindly. Bacchus, when he confessed his fault restored him,” by sending him to a foaming river to wash away his sin. Hence, Midas came to hate wealth, and he stayed in the woods and caves. Yet he remained dull-witted and foolish, destined to hurt himself again.5