“THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE; Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and The Birth of the Modern World”
A Novel written by Edward Dolnick (scientist and author of the Forger’s Spell)
A Book Review Written by Bernadette Kaguitla
(I highly recommend this to science geeks out there and to those who love history and science)
The book takes place in Europe around the 16th century, where hard and soft sciences, technology, mathematics are so primitive and were astrology, alchemy and divinity are commonplace. The book is a documentary type novel that focused on the development of the human’s knowledge of the heavens and nature along with confusions and conventions that have merely affected it. During that century there’s no such thing as “scientists” only “natural philosophers” which refers to people who study how the universe is constructed and how the natural world works. The belief on a supernatural creator is very commonplace that time that every scientific discovery, equation, irregularity in nature or any unexplainable phenomena was always made associated with Him.
Edward Dolnick, a former science writer at The Boston Globe, tells the amazing story of England that started from the plague that outnumbered its population to the foundation of Royal Society in 1660.
Superstitious belief, substantial faith on a supreme being, quackery, fire, epidemic, theft, barbaric medieval punishment, theologians, dichotomies, primitive knowledge, lack of patency that leads to competition and debates on who made greater discoveries and mathematics, meteors and stars approaching the Earth, ignorance and reluctance to new ideas and discoveries and persistence to conventional ones, common-sense, practical reasoning and confusions are some of the most prevailing topic of conflicts in the novel. Some of the founders of the Royal Society include influential figures such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke.
In this book, I have witnessed a lot of debating views on nature including the one between the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the Bible on the heliocentric model of the solar system, another from the Greek philosopher Aristotle and Italian astronomer Galileo Galilee on the nature of moving objects, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz on the true originator of Calculus. Copernicus remained silent with his theory of the moving earth not until when his friends managed to publish his work, De Revolutionibus. I was astounded by the great stories of Galileo and his telescope, Antoine van Leeuwenhoek’s and Robert Hooke’s independent invention of the microscope. Galileo’s telescope looked like: This telescope with which Galileo first observed the moons of Jupiter are on display at the Museo di Storia Della Scienza in Florence, Italy.
It was powerful enough to explore the skies. He found that the moon wasn’t a perfect sphere, but had mountains, whose heights he could estimate from the shadows they cast. He discovered four moons circling the planet Jupiter. He also found that the Milky Way was made up of many more stars than anyone had thought and that Venus had phases. As a result, Galileo argued that Earth and other planets actually circled the sun. Galileo and the English philosopher Francis Bacon founded the scientific method independently.
Within a year of Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton was born. In 1665, at the age of 23, he synthesized a new vision of the universe and completely demolished the Aristotelian theory of motion, Newton developed his famous three laws of motion with which the first law was a restatement of Galileo’s idea. Dolnick called it The Era of Geniuses, the period of time where humans are starting to decipher and decode the secrets of the universe and the natural world. Dolnick also frequently talked about other astronomers including Tycho Brahe. As a boy of 14 in Denmark, Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) observed an eclipse of the sun on August 21, 1560, and vowed to become an astronomer. He persuaded King Frederick II of Denmark to give him the island of Hven as the site for the finest observatory of his time using his huge astronomical instruments like the astrolabe and a sextant. The astrolabe and the sextant were included in the list of pictures above.
In this book, you could actually see the transition from Earth-Centred model of the Universe to the Copernican Heliocentric model of the cosmos, Ancient’s nature of being into Newtonian mechanics and physics of falling apples and Galileian, astrology to astrophysics, alchemy to chemistry…well Dolnick just tries how crucial it is for science to change, we see it all the time even up to this time: This book (The Clockwork Universe) enables the readers to travel back in time and explore the realm of the fundamental scientific foundation of the modern-day science that has been built and established in the Royal Society founded by the natural philosophers of that time including Rennes Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilee, Johann Gottfried Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton who was just exactly like the equivalent of Dr. Albert Einstein in the 19th century.. They have studied the heavens conceptually and quantitatively and their tough sleepless nights of scribbling equations resulted into the invention of new fields of study; mathematics and astrophysics that gradually discredited astrology, theology, and ancients’ misconception of the world. Dolnick said in the preface that his strong focus is largely on how the falling apple hitting Newton’s head has led him to think it like the satellites’ in the heaven orbiting its planet and planets orbiting its star eternally which results into his formulation of a universal principle, getting unveiled, in 1687, as the Universal Law of Gravitation.
Being like Einstein of that time, the publication of his law of gravity has overthrown the most popular theory of that time which came from the French Natural Philosopher; Rennes Descartes who thought of the universe as a giant machine like a clock, Descartes said, everything, even the orbits of planets could be explained simply as the physical interactions of parts of this machine but Newton had trouble accepting this view of nature.
Dolnick added, “Newton’s astonishing achievement built on the work of such titans as Descartes, Galileo, and Kepler, who themselves had deciphered paragraphs and even whole pages of God’s cosmic code. We will examine their breakthroughs and false trails, too. All these thinkers had two traits in common. They were geniuses, and they had utter faith that the universe had been designed on impeccable mathematical lines. What follows is the story of a group of scientists who sets out to read God’s mind.”
I think Dolnick made the book for everyone, he wrote it in simple language and he explains the concepts in philosophy, mathematics, and science in a way that an ordinary person can understand, so there’s no need to hesitate on reading this book if you're not so knowledgeable of scientific and mathematical concepts. I recommend this book to those who love history and sciences.
Fifty years earlier Galileo had built one of the first telescopes which used glass lenses to gather light from distant objects and focus it for the observer but this kind of telescope had a problem, its lenses break the light that passes through it into colors, it meant objects being observed would always have chromatic aberration. As a result, Newton designed a remarkably and radically different kind of telescope different to that of Galileo’s famous telescope wherein he abandoned lenses which he believed breaks white light into a spectrum of colors and substituted mirrors to gather and focus light from distant objects. Newton’s telescope was only 6 inches long but Newton bragged that it could MAGNIFY ABOUT 40 TIMES compared to Galileo’s. It was an instrument that has left its impact on astronomy ever since, our huge telescopes of today are built on this model, their gigantic versions of this little thing. These are the telescopes that you can find in NASA’s observatories and even in the Earth’s orbit which have been launch as artificial satellites to pore into the deepest parts of the cosmos.
Sixteenth Century is perhaps the greatest century of scientific inquiry and confusion. Dolnick has provided the readers the best yet understandable description of Newton’s masterpiece, the “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”
The “Principia”, is a 500-page work, which Sir Isaac Newton wrote in less than two years, Newton declares his intention to “demonstrate the frame of the System of the World” and proceeds to do so, explicating everything from the motion of the planets, moon, and tides to the path of comets and shape of the Earth, said one of the readers. Subramanian Chandrasekhar, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist whom one NASA’s observatory(the Chandra X-ray Observatory) was named after, studied the “Principia” in depth, tells Dolnick that normal scientists can imagine the discoveries of great scientists, even if they were too “stupid” to have thought of them first. “But I don’t think it’s possible for any scientist to imagine what it would have been like to be Newton,” he says.
I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation, they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. —Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
Nineteen centuries later, Galileo found the laws that govern falling objects on Earth. After he showed the way, the discoveries came in a flood. Rocks thrown in the air and arrows shot from a bow travel in parabolas, and comets and planets move along ellipses exactly as if a colossal diagram from Euclid had been set among the stars. The universe had been meticulously arranged, Galileo and Kepler and Newton demonstrated, and the arrangement was the work of a brilliant geometer. Then came an amazing leap. It was not simply that one aspect of nature or another followed mathematical law; mathematics governed every aspect of the cosmos, from a pencil falling off a table to a planet wandering among the stars. Galileo and the other seventeenth-century giants discovered a few golden threads and inferred the existence of a broad and gorgeous tapestry.
