Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Michael White
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with such large sums his nervousness shows in a note beside this transaction: ‘to be paid on Friday’.11
Newton was never a big-time loan shark, but by the end of his second year business was flourishing and he kept it up until he became a man of independent means two years later. Quite how he started in business is unclear. Bearing in mind his own precarious financial position when he first arrived at Trinity, one can only assume he took a risk by making a short-term loan and then began to realise the potential of the venture.
A short time later, things began to improve on other fronts. Eighteen months after arriving at Trinity, Newton managed to change room-mate. John Wickins, the son of the Master of Manchester Grammar School, entered Trinity as a pensioner early in 1663 and met Newton towards the end of his first term. Sadly, aside from a few comments about Newton’s hypochondria and brief descriptions of his work patterns, Wickins, who lived with Newton for over two decades (until he gave up his fellowship in 1683), left little record of their close association.12 The most detailed recollection that he passed on to his son Nicholas in old age was a brief description of his first meeting with Newton, in 1663:
My Father’s intimacy with him came by mere accident. Father’s first chamber-fellow being very disagreeable to him he retired one day into the walks where he found Mr Newton solitary & dejected. Upon entering into discourse they found their cause of retirement the same & thereupon agreed to shake off their present disorderly companions & chum together, which they did as soon as conveniently they could & so continued as long as my father stayed at college.13
Wickins’s reticence in discussing what must have been one of the most important relationships of his life is odd. He and Newton separated in 1683 under a cloud, and, despite Wickins living for another thirty-six years, the two men never met again.
So, who exactly was John Wickins, and what was the nature of his relationship with Newton? From the story of their introduction, it is clear they must have been of similar temperament. Both were unhappy with their ‘disorderly companions’ and each quickly saw a kindred spirit in the other. Their staying room-mates for the next twenty years (including a move in 1673 to rooms in Great Court) is evidence of their closeness.
Wickins also became Newton’s assistant. He regularly transcribed experiment notes and helped set up apparatus and monitor investigations. Their rooms became a live-in laboratory, at first strewn with documents and simple home-made optical instruments but later crowded with furnaces and bottles of chemicals. Wickins eventually became a clergyman, married and had a family. Shortly after his departure, Newton sent him a parcel of Bibles to be distributed to his flock in the village of Stoke Edith, near Monmouth. The only other correspondence occurred some thirty years later, when Wickins wrote to ask his erstwhile room-mate for a further donation of Bibles and attempted to start a friendly exchange. Newton duly sent the Bibles but brushed off any subtle overtures of Wickins by ending his letter with the rather curt ‘I am glad to hear of your good health, & wish it may long continue, I remain … Newton’.14
For all the attempts that have been made to find clues in the meagre correspondence between the two men, the strongest evidence for an acrimonious break lies in the fact that Wickins neither wrote a word about Newton nor related more than a scrap of anecdote about their time together. When, soon after Newton’s death in 1727, Robert Smith, Plumian Professor of Natural History at Cambridge, wrote to Nicholas Wickins requesting information about his father, he was told that John Wickins had long considered collecting together everything in his possession related to Newton but had done nothing about it. This would not have been a difficult task, because all Nicholas Wickins could pass on to Smith were three short letters transcribed into a notebook, five other notes concerning mundane financial matters, and the anecdote describing their first meeting.
Fortunately, much more is known of Newton’s academic life as an undergraduate. As at other great seats of learning throughout Europe, the curriculum at Cambridge was based almost exclusively upon the teachings of the Greek masters – especially the ideas of Aristotle, with which Newton would already have been familiar from his reading at the Clarks’. Throughout his first year he attended his lectures conscientiously, but he was already beginning to question the validity of classical ideas.
Like many of the more conscientious students, he had been following the latest philosophical developments and was reading ‘fashionable’ philosophers, such as Descartes and Galileo, whose works were gradually becoming available in England. As a result, sometime in early 1663, Newton underwent a radical change of approach. During a lecture, while making meticulous notes on Aristotle’s teachings, mid-page he stopped abruptly. Then, after leaving dozens of pages blank, he wrote at the top of a fresh page, ‘Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae’ – ‘Some Problems in Philosophy’. Beneath this he wrote, ‘Amicus Plato, amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas’ – ‘I am a friend of Plato, I am a friend of Aristotle, but truth is my greater friend.’15
This collection of ‘Quaestiones’ – or the Philosophical Notebook, as it is sometimes called – marks the point at which Newton stepped away from tradition and began to question what he was taught. He began by creating forty-five headings in the notebook – topics concerning the nature of the universe which he would attempt to investigate and answer. These included ‘Of Water and Salt’, ‘Attraction Magnetical’, ‘Of the Sun Stars & Planets & Comets’ and ‘Of Gravity & Levity’. In some cases nothing has been written under the heading, but elsewhere there is a paragraph or two of neatly written text, while some headings are followed by lengthy discourses.
Like his schoolboy exercise books, these undergraduate notebooks contain questions and attempts at answers taken from the works of well-known natural philosophers. In many places the arguments are then dissected and questioned further. Sometimes a section of text is followed by a piece composed by Newton in which he seems to be addressing the quoted author and asking him questions directly or drawing attention to things that do not appear clear. In this way, Descartes and Boyle come under scrutiny along with the antiquated philosophies of Aristotle.
An example is a piece under the heading ‘Of Water and Salt’ which involves an early hypothesis to explain the ebb and flow of the sea, later explained by Newton in Proposition XXIV of Book II of the Principia, first published some twenty-four years later:
To discover whether the Moon pressing the atmosphere causes the flux of the sea, take a tube of about 30 inches filled with quicksilver or else take a tube with water which is so much longer than 30 inches as the quicksilver is weightier than water & the top being stopped the liquor will sink 3 or 4 inches below it leaving a vacuum (perhaps). Then, as the air is more or less pressed without by the Moon so will the water rise or fall as it does in a weatherglass by heat or cold.16
At this stage of his career Newton could offer no explanation for this, but he analyses it in terms of what others say. Can the movement of the quicksilver be explained by the theories of Aristotle, who would declare that the substance is merely trying to find its place in the world? Or is Descartes closer to the truth: is the rise and fall of the surface of the quicksilver due to the movement of particles and ether bearing down upon it, creating vortices within the liquid?
Elsewhere there are speculations based upon thought experiments. Under the heading ‘Of Gravity & Levity’ Newton wrote:
Try to discover whether the weight of a body may be altered by heat or cold, by dilatation or condensation, beating, powdering, transferring to several places or several heights, or placing a hot or heavy body over it or under it or by magnetism, whether lead or its dust spread abroad, whether a plate flat-ways or edgeways is heaviest.17
Although these inquiries seem to us to have obvious answers (why, for example, should an object weigh different amounts if it is laid flat or edgeways?), no one