Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jed Z. Buchwald is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. His books include The Zodiac of Paris: How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science (Princeton). Mordechai Feingold is professor of history at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture.

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"The reader of Buchwald and Feingold's long awaited book will learn not only about Newton the historian, but also about his theological, alchemical, mathematical, and astronomical work. The authors have something new to say about every facet of Newton's intellectual endeavor: about his peculiar way of working with numbers and data, his anxieties concerning evidence and testimony, his polemics with the English and the French erudites."--Niccolò Guicciardini, author ofIsaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method

"This erudite, elegant, and consistently fascinating book is a major contribution to both the history of scholarship and that of science. Buchwald and Feingold examine, in precise and illuminating detail, one of the least understood episodes in the long decline of the encyclopedic idea of learning: Isaac Newton's protracted and serious effort to reconfigure the chronology of the ancient world."--Anthony Grafton, author ofCardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer

"A tour de force. Buchwald and Feingold have produced an impressive study of a little known facet of Newton's career, which will surely generate considerable interest in the scholarly community.Newton and the Origin of Civilization traces out a convincing series of linkages between Newton's chronological studies and his more 'mainstream' pursuits."--William R. Newman, author ofAtoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution

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"The reader of Buchwald and Feingold's long awaited book will learn not only about Newton the historian, but also about his theological, alchemical, mathematical, and astronomical work. The authors have something new to say about every facet of Newton's intellectual endeavor: about his peculiar way of working with numbers and data, his anxieties concerning evidence and testimony, his polemics with the English and the French erudites."--Niccolò Guicciardini, author ofIsaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method

"This erudite, elegant, and consistently fascinating book is a major contribution to both the history of scholarship and that of science. Buchwald and Feingold examine, in precise and illuminating detail, one of the least understood episodes in the long decline of the encyclopedic idea of learning: Isaac Newton's protracted and serious effort to reconfigure the chronology of the ancient world."--Anthony Grafton, author ofCardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer

"A tour de force. Buchwald and Feingold have produced an impressive study of a little known facet of Newton's career, which will surely generate considerable interest in the scholarly community.Newton and the Origin of Civilization traces out a convincing series of linkages between Newton's chronological studies and his more 'mainstream' pursuits."--William R. Newman, author ofAtoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution

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Newton and the Origin of Civilization

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................................viiList of Tables.................................................................................xiAcknowledgments................................................................................xiiiIntroduction...................................................................................11 Troubled Senses..............................................................................82 Troubled Numbers.............................................................................443 Erudition and Chronology in Seventeenth-Century England......................................1074 Isaac Newton on Prophecies and Idolatry......................................................1265 Aberrant Numbers: The Propagation of Mankind before and after the Deluge.....................1646 Newtonian History............................................................................1957 Text and Testimony...........................................................................2228 Interpreting Words...........................................................................2469 Publication and Reaction.....................................................................30710 The War on Newton in England................................................................33111 The War on Newton in France.................................................................35312 The Demise of Chronology....................................................................38113 Evidence and History........................................................................423Appendix A Signs, Conventions, Dating, and Definitions.........................................437Appendix B Newton's Computational Methods......................................................441Appendix C Commented Extracts from Newton's MS Calculations....................................447Appendix D Placing Colures on the Original Star Globe..........................................464Appendix E Hesiod, Thales, and Stellar Risings and Settings....................................468Bibliography...................................................................................489Index..........................................................................................515

Chapter One

In 1583, the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger published his De Emendatione Temporum. There he examined the chronologies of Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, as well as those of Greece and Rome, arguing for an amended structure based in substantial part on antique reports that could be given astronomical significance, in particular eclipses, as well as on ancient calendars. Scaliger was hardly the only one to use astronomical evidence to date the past. Another Protestant, the theologian Heinrich Bünting, had employed eclipse reports with great technical proficiency in his Chronologia (1590). Scaliger and Bünting were followed by others in the seventeenth century who also relied on eclipses to date the past, including the Protestant Sethus Calvisius and the Jesuit Denis Petau (Petavius). Grafton calls such men "systematic" chronologers—their technical expertise plied to produce treatises on ancient and modern calendars and epochs, and so markedly different from "humanistic" chronologers, editors of ancient texts, and antiquarians. Calvisius, for example, remarked in 1605 that "historians frequently record eclipses, and they are often inserted into accounts of the deeds of kings and emperors, in such a way that they usually provide the most certain testimony both about the length of any given king's reign and the true course of events. Eclipses are of infallible certainty, and they can be dated and demonstrated by astronomical computation for any period."

Eclipse reports from antiquity certainly raised issues of accurate reportage and textual corruption, but they seemed not to require an interpretative framework. Eclipses are after all singular events that, it seemed, could be connected to chronology by means of the technical tools of astronomy that had become available with the publication of Erasmus Rheinhold's Prutenic Tables in 1551, which made use of the basic numerical parameters that Nicholas Copernicus had deployed in his 1543 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. The use of astronomy in matters chronological produced occasional antagonism, but the assimilation of singular human to singular celestial event apparently did not raise philosophical problems, at least among the technical chronologers. Even when a celestial event was granted portentous significance, its astrological meaning derived from its place in an established system of knowledge and not from its signaling a natural novelty. This raises the question of the relationship between natural and historical knowledge in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries, which, in turn, brings us to consider changes in the character of natural knowledge proper during this period—an extraordinarily large and complicated issue that has garnered considerable attention.

A great deal of historical work concerns the sense in which a specifically experimental form of knowledge emerged during the seventeenth century. It has been argued that until the last half of the century, experiment-based knowledge remained suspect. When it became respectable to glean information about nature from experiment, the argument continues, specific techniques had to be invented to make the process socially and (ipso facto) intellectually acceptable. Three distinct but related strands wind through this argument. First and foremost, how could artificially produced experiences become accepted as foundational for proper knowledge when traditional scholastic categories sharply distinguished between the natural and the artefactual? Second, artefactual knowledge is not merely non-natural (in the sense of not being produced by unaided nature); it is also singular and specific, referring to the results of particular interventions. That too is thought to conflict with scholastic tradition, according to which proper knowledge of nature must be founded on experiences that are universal and common. Finally, how did experimentally derived knowledge, grounded in particulars, become conjoined with mathematical demonstration when the scholastics had long considered that mathematics applied only to those sciences whose objects partook in their essence of geometric qualities?

There have been various answers to these questions, but in respect to the first two, all presume that there was in fact a broadly enforced barrier between the experiment and proper knowledge. Yet even if such a division existed among some scholastics—and the claim remains controversial—it hardly follows that the boundary was effectively policed everywhere before the mid-seventeenth century; it certainly was not. Historians of alchemy have for example demonstrated that practitioners regularly and unproblematically produced and worked with laboratory-generated knowledge, and that one of the prime examples used to illustrate the novelty of the "matter-of-fact" as a privileged item, namely Robert Boyle, derived a good deal of his approach from the alchemist George Starkey. Much of the difficulty in developing a full understanding of the emergence of widely pursued laboratory science may derive from concentrating on methodological prescriptions rather than on actual practice, which alone reveals what was being done; prescriptive pronouncements in contrast mostly uncover reactions to activity and not its generative sources.

Though experiment-based facts were not uncommon by the sixteenth century, and probably long before that, the question of how locally produced results could be incorporated into the foundations of knowledge systems inevitably arose—as they do to this day. Novelties always generate questions when they come into contact with an existing structure, however loosely built the system may be. An event of nature, whether generated in a laboratory or out of it, certainly occurs in time and place. It is also true that in mid- to late seventeenth-century England, "natural histories" were produced that recount specific events. However, many of these—such as Boyle's narratives concerning color of 1664—aimed to establish claims that, though limited in various ways, nevertheless transcended the place and time of their original production.

Consider the following example. At the beginning of the third part of his "history of colours," Boyle described an experiment performed on "October the 11. About ten in the Morning." He continued by providing a perfect example of an experiment specified in time, place, and circumstance. But it was done in the service of a claim that holds outside locality; Boyle did it in the first place "because that, according to the conjectures I have above propos'd, one of the most general causes of the diversity of colours in opacous bodies, is, that some reflect the light mingl'd with more, others with less of shade ... I hold it not unfit to mention in the first place, the experiments that I thought to examine this conjecture." Specifically local the experiments certainly were, but they were intended to be of a type that could be regenerated elsewhere.

In this respect, a historical event of the sort explored by chronologers is a very different kind of beast from knowledge about nature because it is inherently and inevitably singular: an event of history cannot be reproduced in other places and at other times unless it is taken to be exemplary of a type that transcends the specific event's locality. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE is unreproducible, but not simply because 49 BCE occurred only once; after all, Boyle's October 11 experiment also occurred just once. Rather, Caesar's incursion cannot be reproduced because the people involved and the technological, economic, political, environmental, psychological, and social circumstances irretrievably alter over time, whereas the character of the event is embedded in the complex specificities of its original occurrence. Boyle would in contrast assert that his October 11 experiment could be reproduced everywhere and by anyone—although perhaps with difficulty—precisely because he intended it to provide evidence for a locality-transcending claim. Natural events that occur without human intervention—which are of the sort that, to a pure-bred scholastic, are the only true products of nature—would constitute for Boyle an exception to the rule only in the sense that they might not be reproducible by human agency, though not because human actions might somehow step outside nature's course. Only divine interventions and spirits (in both of which Boyle firmly believed) could do that.

The differences between historical and natural events have consequences for evaluations of novelty. In Boyle's world, an experiment designed to substantiate a claim that does not work as expected may provide evidence against the claim and suggest alternatives to it. Laboratory novelties have locally transcendent meaning just because they may, or may not, support claims or suggest new directions. Historical events cannot provide surprises or point out new paths, which is to say that they cannot constitute proper novelties, unless they too are linked into a wider scheme of knowledge that gives them general significance. To return to the river-crossing Caesar, if we knew enough about the circumstances to fit this and subsequent events into a class of military endeavors, then we could say that the event's significance transcends its locus and time of production—in which case the event would be an exemplar within a broader system of knowledge.

The technical chronologers of the early modern period did not produce knowledge systems in anything like this sense. They developed instead systems of concordances and sequences that located events of human history in time by means of their simultaneous occurrences with particular astronomical events, usually eclipses. Put differently, the likes of Scaliger aimed to use their collections of happenings to establish chronologies and not to uncover or demonstrate general theories about history. Neither Scaliger nor Bünting were embryonic Giambattista Vicos, who did produce just that, odd and fantastic though Vico's scheme appears to twenty-first-century eyes.

It is precisely here that Isaac Newton, as a chronologer, differed programatically from his predecessors: he sought to use astronomical tools to mold singular events into a system for understanding ancient history, indeed for grasping the entire development of civilization—what's more, we shall see, a system that shared and exemplified the same evidentiary and argumentative structure deployed in his science. Consequently, Newton faced a new kind of problem—new, that is, in technical chronology. Historical remnants can be known of course only through the transmitted testimony of individuals whom no one living has ever met. Humanists had long developed methods for handling the inevitable results of corruption and fraud over the centuries. In Newton's chronological world, the chains of transmission ran back to a period before the very existence of written records in Greek, or at least to a period when Greek literacy was in its infancy, whereas the eclipses that the technical chronologers had used all derived from literate eras. More problematic still, the remnant testimonies that reached back to that pre-literate time did not concern precise astronomical events. They described instead characteristic, but comparatively inexact, features of the heavens, and they referred to them in words that required interpretation. For unlike eclipses, which become dates via the mathematics of astronomy, the features at Newton's disposal could not be easily transmuted into numbers. Most significant of all, even when Newton did effect his transformations, the numbers that emerged did not agree with one another.

Ultimately, Newton would produce from these discrepant numbers a determinate date that, if correct, would fundamentally alter all previous chronologies—and indeed would challenge contemporary understanding of the human past. That date did not emerge from just one among the numbers into which Newton had transformed ancient words, but from all of them together. This manufacture of harmony out of discord was not only new in historical chronology, but unprecedented in natural philosophy before Newton's own work in optics in the late 1660s and early 1670s. He alone had developed a method that not only permitted, but actually urged, the experimental production and subsequent amalgamation of discordant numbers—a method that directly informed Newton's historical chronology.

Newton's career spanned nearly seven decades, a period that witnessed profound changes in the many methods, techniques, conceptions, and practices that together constitute the late period of Early Modern mathematics and natural philosophy. He himself was responsible in several ways for a good number of these changes. So protean a career as Newton's, which continued to generate new results through the 1690s, can hardly be expected to exhibit a single continuous strand of development. Nevertheless, by the early 1670s the young Newton had developed the contours of method and technique, as well as a number of specific conceptions in optics and mechanics, and (especially) mathematics, that the mature scholar adopted, adapted, reworked, and deployed in subsequent decades. These several and disparate explorations were undertaken in the context of mid-seventeenth-century views concerning nature, mind, God, and the links among them. His own understanding of these matters evolved during his early years at Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in June 1661 at the age of eighteen and a half. Over the next half decade, the "solitary scholar" encountered a considerable amount of seventeenth-century learning, and he systematically set down many of his thoughts and textual extracts in a notebook, part of which he titled Questiones quaedam Philosophicae (Certain philosophical questions). Here we find the young Newton first grappling with issues which had gripped so many for the previous half century, often involving questions concerning the proper ways to generate reliable knowledge.

Questions of this sort have long been associated with Newton, for he is often thought of as having refused to admit "hypotheses," Unlike Hooke or Huygens—or that great world-maker Descartes—Newton is said to have remained extraordinarily wary of conjecturing explanatory structures that were not strongly connected to the empirical world. His most celebrated remark about "hypotheses" appeared for the first time in the General Scholium appended to the second edition of the Principia (1713), and remained unchanged in the third edition (1726):

I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induction. The impenetrability, mobility, and impetus of bodies, and the laws of motion and the law of gravity have been found by this method. And it is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth and is sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.

More has likely been written about this single passage than about anything else that Newton ever did. Yet only in the past few decades have scholars come to understand fully what Newton meant, and how his very public disdain for hypotheses connects with his experimental work and with his development of mathematical theory.

The roots of Newton's attitudes and methods in respect to experiments and hypotheses reach back to his years as a student at Cambridge; it was here that Newton evolved his own way to merge mathematical structure with experimental investigations—a way that, he would soon discover, was neither congenial nor fully comprehensible to many of his contemporaries. Here especially lie the origins of Newton's skepticism concerning human perception, as well as his concomitant attention to aspects of measurement that few at the time had probed. This attitude, together with the data-handling techniques to which it gave rise, had a profound impact upon Newton's manipulation of matters chronological and upon contemporary reactions to it.

The natural philosophy curriculum that the young Newton encountered at Cambridge in the early 1660s had for some time incorporated a great deal beyond the traditional structure of scholastic learning. The novice would begin with a comparatively short introduction to the elements of the Aristotelian system, but he would also soon be introduced to novel developments, such as the works of Pierre Gassendi. Shortly after arriving, Newton bought a bound book with blank leaves to record notes about his studies. This "Trinity notebook" is dated June 1661 on the front flyleaf. Newton began by inserting passages in Greek, with marginal headers in Latin, from Aristotle's Organon, and Poryphry's Isagoge. He continued with Johannes Magirus' Physiologiae peripateticae, a widely used compendium of scholastic material on causality, physics, and cosmology. The notes break off near the end of Magirus' fifth chapter, entitled "De meteoris apparentibus," and are followed by a very different set on astronomical matters, beginning with Galileo's estimate of apparent stellar diameters. The notes continue with Aristotelian ethics, also drawn from the Opera Omnia, and then the ethics of Eustachius of St. Paul. Newton's most extensive notes were on Daniel Stahl's Axiomata philosophica (1645), which is concerned exclusively with core Aristotelian topics such as act and potency, the typology of causes, agents, and patients, and so on. While Magirus' text, as its title suggests, concerns natural specifics, Stahl's provides the fundamental terms of Aristotelian metaphysics. The traditional material ends with Vossius' rhetoric.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Newton and the Origin of Civilizationby Jed Z. Buchwald Mordechai Feingold Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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