{"id":158179,"date":"2020-05-04T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=158179"},"modified":"2020-04-12T07:27:57","modified_gmt":"2020-04-12T06:27:57","slug":"standing-on-the-shoulders-of-solitude-newton-the-plague-and-how-quarantine-fomented-the-greatest-leap-in-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/05\/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-solitude-newton-the-plague-and-how-quarantine-fomented-the-greatest-leap-in-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cTruth is the offspring of silence and meditation.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the 1650s, the penumbra of plague slowly began eclipsing Europe. Italy fell first, soon Spain, then Germany, then Holland. From across the slender cell wall of the Channel, England watched and trembled, then cautiously relaxed \u2014 for about a decade, some divine will seemed to be shielding the country. But the world was already worshipping at the altar of commerce and the forces of globalization had already been set into motion \u2014 with England\u2019s economy relying heavily on trade, its ports bustled with ships carrying silk and tea and sugar from all discovered frontiers of the globe. Rats boarded the ships, fleas boarded the rats, bacteria \u2014 an almost-kingdom of unicellular organisms yet to be coronated, for the cell itself was yet to be discovered \u2014 boarded the fleas, which took to human flesh as soon as they debarked.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Ghost of a Flea c.1819-20 William Blake 1757-1827.
Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949<\/p><\/div>

<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And so, on Christmas Day 1664, a single plague death was reported in London. Another came in February, then another. \u201cGreat fears of sickness here in the City,\u201d the legendary diarist Samuel Pepys was writing by April. \u201cGod preserve us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

God was no match for the absence of a basic scientific understanding of biology and epidemiology. The deaths were swift, gruesome, and, soon, so voluminous that services ceased being held. Over the course of the summer, the death toll swelled tenfold, from hundreds to thousands per week. The infected were ordered not to leave their homes. Many were boarded in and left to die in isolation, an enormous cross painted on the outside of each plagued house. Plays, spectator blood sports, and other crowd gatherings were banned. Street vendors were banned from selling their wares, newsboys ceased crying and retreated indoors. An awful, alien silence came to blanket this capital of din. The universities closed.<\/p>\n

When Cambridge sent its students home, a young man obsessed with mathematics, motion, and light, whose illiterate father had died three months before his birth, who worshipped a \u201cGod of order and not of confusion,\u201d and who had begun his university studies by performing servants\u2019 work for wealthier students in exchange for tuition, bundled his prized books and headed back to his mother\u2019s farm.<\/p>\n

There, in solitude and isolation, as the plague continued its deadly sweep, Isaac Newton<\/strong> (December 25, 1642\u2013March 19, 1727) dreamt up the fulcrum that would dislodge humanity from the Dark Ages; there, the apple \u2014 real or apocryphal \u2014 fell, and in its shadow rose the revolutionary idea of gravity, which the young man envisioned as a force \u201cextending to the orb of the Moon\u201d all the way from the Earth, without \u201ccutoff or boundary.\u201d It was there, too, that he set out to compute that force, \u201crequisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth\u201d; in the act of computing it, as a necessity of that act, he invented calculus.<\/p>\n

\"isaacnewton\"<\/a>
Isaac Newton<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his excellent Isaac Newton<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a gold standard of biography and of storytelling bridging the scientific with the poetic, which also gave us the story behind the famous \u201cstanding on the shoulders of giants\u201d metaphor<\/a> \u2014 James Gleick writes of the young Newton\u2019s plague-driven return home:<\/p>\n

He built bookshelves and made a small study for himself. He opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book<\/a> he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this). The plague year was his transfiguration. Solitary and almost incommunicado, he became the world\u2019s paramount mathematician.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Newton<\/a>
Newton<\/em> by William Blake (Tate Britain)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the fortunate platform of a long life \u2014 he lived to eighty-four, more than double the era\u2019s life expectancy, his casket shouldered by dukes and earls \u2014 Newton would look back on his most intellectually fertile period of the plague years with the recognition that \u201ctruth is the offspring of silence and meditation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Complement this fragment of Gleick\u2019s indispensable Isaac Newton<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Tocqueville on stillness as a form of action<\/a> and the trailblazing 18th-century French mathematician \u00c9milie du Ch\u00e2telet, who popularized Newton\u2019s science, on the nature of genius<\/a>, then revisit Gleick\u2019s splendid reading of and reflection on Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s poem about the nature of knowledge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cTruth is the offspring of silence and meditation.\u201d In the 1650s, the penumbra of plague slowly began eclipsing Europe. Italy fell first, soon Spain, then Germany, then Holland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":158180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1829,1868,1169,553,1177,1908,1898],"class_list":["post-158179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-death","tag-fear","tag-inspirational","tag-isaac-newton","tag-plague"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}