ALPHABETICAL BRAIN™ VOCABULARY HUMANIST GALAXY OF SECULAR SCIENCE STARS EDWARD DOLNICK August 19, 2021 CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick. Harper/HarperCollins, 2011 (I-xviii, 378 pages, including 15 pages of illustrations, some in color) Quote = "How did the great scientific innovators of the Renaissance, including: Copernicus, Shakespeare, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Halley, Newton, Leibniz, Leeuwenhoek, Spinoza, Voltaire and others accomplish their breakthrough ideas in such difficult social and technical living conditions during the Renaissance? (Question asked by webmaster) Quote = "Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order. Historians would later not talk of the ‘Age of Genius,' but the ‘Age of Tumult', which would have seemed more fitting. In the tail end of Shakespeare's century, the natural and the supernatural were still entwined around one another. Disease was believed to be a punishment ordained by God. Astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology. And the sky was filled with demons and omens." (Paraphrased slightly by webmaster from Preface) Quote = "London was one of the world's great cities and a center of the new learning, but it was, in one historians words, ‘a stinking, muddy, filth bespattered metropolis.' Huge piles of human waste blocked city streets, and butchers added heaps of the ‘soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses' to the towering mounds. Ignorance made matters worse. The river barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage, to fertilize the fields. When Shakespeare and his fellow investors built the Globe Theatre in 1599, the splendid new building held at least two thousand people but was constructed without a single toilet." (By author Dolnick from Preface) Quote = "Over a century later, hygiene had scarcely improved. At about the time of Louis XIV's death in 1715, a new rule was put in place requiring that the corridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of feces once a week. No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desire. (‘Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.') [Footnote: The historian Jules Michelet described the Middle Ages as ‘A thousand years without a bath.'] "Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were almost-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies... On the public stage, all was crisis and calamity. Through the early part of the century, Germany had suffered through what would later be called the Thirty Years' War. The blandness of the name obscures the horror of a religious war where one raping, looting, marauding army gave way to another, endlessly, and where famine and disease followed close on the armies' heels." (By author Dolnick from Preface) BOOK OUTLINE Quote = "The universe is but a watch on a larger scale." by Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686 (vii) CHRONOLOGY (xiii-xiv) 1543 C.E. = Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which says that the planets circle the sun rather than the Earth [Sun Centric view of Solar System]. 1564 C.E. = Shakespeare born 1564 C.E. = Galileo born 1571 C.E. = Kepler born 1600 C.E. = Shakespeare Writes Hamlet 1609 C.E. = Kepler publishes his first two laws, about the paths of planets as they orbit the sun 1610 C.E. = Galileo turns a telescope to the heavens 1616 C.E.= Shakespeare dies 1618/1648 C.E. = Thirty Years' War 1619 C.E. = Kepler publishes his third law, which tells how the planets' orbits relate to one another 1630 C.E. = Kepler dies 1633 C.E. = Inquisition puts Galileo on trial. 1637 C.E. = Descartes declares "I think, therefore, I am," and, in the same book, unveils coordinate geometry. 1642/1651 C.E. = English Civil War 1642 C.E. = Galileo dies 1642 C.E. = Newton born 1646 C.E. = Leibniz born 1649 C.E. = King Charles I beheaded. 1660 C.E. = Official founding of the Royal Society. 1664/1666 C.E. = Newton's "miracle years." He invents calculus and calculates gravity's pull on the moon. 1665 C.E. = Plague strikes London 1666 C.E. = Great Fire of London 1674 C.E. = Leeuwenhoek looks through his microscope and discovers a hidden world of "little animals." 1675 C.E. = Newton becomes a member of the Royal Society. 1675/1676 C.E. = Leibniz's "miracle year." He invents calculus, independently of Newton. 1684 C.E. = Leibniz publishes an account of calculus. 1684 C.E. = Halley visits Newton at Cambridge. 1687 C.E. = Newton publishes the book, Principia, which describes "The System of the World" and "unveils... his theory of gravitation." 1696 C.E. = Newton leaves Cambridge and moves to London 1699/1722 C.E. = Newton and Leibniz, and supporters of both men, battle over calculus. Each genius claims the other stole his idea. 1704 C.E. = Newton publishes an account of calculus, after 30 years of virtual silence. 1705 C.E. = Newton knighted. 1716 C.E. = Leibniz dies (Newton continues fighting to claim calculus). 1727 C.E. = Newton dies. note = Numbers in parentheses refer to pages PREFACE = (xv-xviii) "Few ages could have seemed less likely than the late 1600s to start men dreaming of a world of perfect order. Historians would later not talk of the ‘Age of Genius,' but the ‘Age of Tumult', which would have seemed more fitting. In the tail end of Shakespeare's century, the natural and the supernatural were still entwined around one another. Disease was believed to be a punishment ordained by God. Astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology. And the sky was filled with demons and omens." (Paraphrased slightly by webmaster from Preface) "London was one of the world's great cities and a center of the new learning, but it was, in one historian's words, ‘a stinking, muddy, filth bespattered metropolis.' Huge piles of human waste blocked city streets, and butchers added heaps of the ‘soyle and filth of their Slaughter houses' to the towering mounds. Ignorance made matters worse. The river barges that brought vegetables to the city from farms in the countryside returned laden with human sewage, to fertilize the fields. When Shakespeare and his fellow investors built the Globe Theatre in 1599, the splendid new building held at least two thousand people but was constructed without a single toilet." "Over a century later, hygiene had scarcely improved. At about the time of Louis XIV's death in 1715, a new rule was put in place requiring that the corridors in the palace at Versailles be cleaned of feces once a week. No one bathed, from kings to peasants. The poor had no choice, and the wealthy had no desire. (‘Doctors explained that water opened the pores to infection and plague. A coat of grease and grime sealed disease away.') [Footnote: The historian Jules Michelet described the Middle Ages as ‘a thousand years without a bath.'] Worms, fleas, lice, and bedbugs were almost-universal afflictions. Science would soon revolutionize the world, but the minds that made the modern world were yoked to itchy, smelly, dirty bodies." "On the public stage, all was crisis and calamity. Through the early part of the century, Germany had suffered through what would later be called the Thirty Years' War. The blandness of the name obscures the horror of a religious war where one raping, looting, marauding army gave way to another, endlessly, and where famine and disease followed close on the armies' heels. England had been convulsed by a civil war. In London in 1649, a shocked crowd looked on as the royal executioner lifted his axe high and chopped off the king's head. In the 1650s plague swept across Europe. In 1665 it jumped the Channel to England. In the wings, the events that would reshape the world went on unnoticed. Few knew, and fewer cared, about a handful of curious men studying the heavens and scribbling equations in their notebooks. Humans had recognized nature's broad patterns from the beginning — night follows day, the moon waxes and wanes, the stars form their familiar constellations, the seasons recur. But they had noticed, too, that no two days were identical. ‘Men expected the sun to rise," wrote Alfred North Whitehead, "but the wind bloweth where it listeth.' If people referred to "laws of nature," they had in mind not true laws but something akin to rules of thumb, guidelines subject to exceptions and interpretation.' "Then, at some point in the 1600s, a new idea came into the world. The idea was that the natural world not only follows rough-and-ready patterns — but also exact, formal, mathematical laws. Though it looked haphazard and sometimes chaotic, the universe was in fact an intricate and perfectly regulated clockwork. From the cosmically vast to the infinitesimally small, every aspect of the universe had been meticulously arranged. God had created the World and designed its every feature, and He continued to supervise it with minute care. He had set the planets in orbit and lavished care on every one of a housefly's thousand eyes. He had chosen the perfect rate for the Earth's spin and the ideal thickness for a walnut's shell. Nature's laws were vast in range but few in number; God's operating manual filled only a line or two." "When Isaac Newton learned how gravity works, for instance, he announced not merely a discovery but a ‘universal law' that embraced every object in creation. The same law regulated the moon in its orbit round the Earth, an arrow arcing against the sky, and an apple falling from a tree, and it described their motions not only in general terms but precisely and quantitatively. God was a mathematician, seventeenth — century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key. My focus is largely on the climax of the story, especially Newton's unveiling, in 1687, of his theory of gravitation. But 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 set out to read God's mind." "The crucial belief of Isaac Newton and his fellow scientists was that God had designed the world on mathematical lines. All nature followed precise laws. The belief derived from the Greeks, who had been amazed to find that music and mathematics were deeply intertwined. Pythagoras is credited with being the first to find the connection [between the weight of a bell and the pitch of a glass which was] ‘one of the truly momentous discoveries in the history of mankind'." PART 1 — CHAOS (1-102) 1) London, 1660 (3-6) 2) Satan's Claws (7-12) 3) The End of the World (13-19) 4) "When Spotted Death Ran Arm'd Through Every Street" (20-24) note = The historian, Pepys, who wrote about London after the plague, is pronounced "peeps" (21) 5) Melancholy Streets (25-28) 6) Fire (29-33) 7) God at His Drawing Table (34-41) 8) The Idea That Unlocked the World (42-49 9) Euclid and Unicorns (50-57) 10) The Boys' Club (58-65) 11) To the Barricades! (66-71) 12) Dogs and Rascals (72-75) 13) A Dose of Poison (76-82) 14) Of Mites and Men (83-89) 15) A Play Without an Audience (90-96) 16) All in Pieces (97-102) PART 2 — HOPE AND MONSTERS (102-216) 17) Never Seen Until This Moment (105-113) 18) Flies as Big as a Lamb (114-119) 19) From Earthworms to Angels (120-125) 20) The Parade of the Horribles (126-128) 21) "Shuddering Before the Beautiful" (129-134) 22) Patterns Made with Ideas (135-139) 23) God's Strange Cryptography (140-144) 24) The Secret Plan (145-151) 25) Tears of Joy (152-156) 26) Walrus with a Golden Nose (157-161) 27) Cracking the Cosmic Safe (162-168) 28) The View from the Crow's Nest (169-176) 29) Sputnik in Orbit, 1687 (177-181) 30) Hidden in Plain Sight (182-186) 31) Two Rocks and a Rope (187-189) 32) A Fly on the Wall (190-193) 33) "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bareö" (194-199) 34) Here Be Monsters! (200-206) INSERT OF UNNUMBERED PICTURES (Between page 206 and page 207) 35) Barricaded Against the Beast (207-211) 36) Out of the Whirlpool (212-216) PART 3 — INTO THE LIGHT (217-320) 37) All Men Are Created Equal (219-224) 38) The Miracle Years (225-232) 39) All Mystery Banished (233-236) 40) Talking Dogs and Unsuspected Powers (237-243) 41) The World in Close-Up (244-252) 42) When the Cable Snaps (253-258) 43) The Best of All Possible Feuds (259-265) 44) Battle's End (266-270) 45) The Apple and the Moon (271-277) 46) A Visit to Cambridge (278-280) 47) Newton Bears Down (281-287) 48) Trouble with Mr. Hooke (288-292) 49) The System of the World (293-296) 50) Only Three People (297-300) 51) Just Crazy Enough (301-306) 52) In Search of God (307-313) CONCLUSION (314-320) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (321-322) NOTES (323-351) BIBLIOGRAPHY (353-360) ILLUSTRATION CREDITS (361-362) INDEX (363-378) Alchemy Aristotle Astronomy Galileo Bible Boyle Calculus Circle Clockwork universe Copernicus Darwin Descartes Disease Earth Einstein Ellipses Euclid Experimentation Falling objects Feynman Fire Force Freid Galileo = xm, xvm, 5, 93, 96, 97, 145, 159n, 169-79, 304-5 abstraction and, 198-99, 305, 342n 198 birth, xm, 169 character and personality, 169-70 clockwork universe and, 182-83 death, xm, 98 experiments with falling objects, 172-79, 178, 183-86, 184, 187-89, 200 God as mathematician and, 124, 125 infinity and matching technique, , 203-5, 204, 207, 207 Kepler and, 170 law of falling objects, 40-41, 172-79, 185-86, 186n, 189, 190 253-55, 276 law of pendulums, 183 Leaning Tower of Pisa and, 184, 187, 188, 244 mathematics and, 41, 95, 124, 132, 132 microscope and, 117-18 movement of the Earth and, 170, 172 music and, 183 new star and, 107 objective reality and, 94 planetary orbits and, 164 as mathematician, 39, 41, 121-25, 127, 132, 157, 294 miracles and, 311 Newton on, 273-74, 308, 310-13 new views of the universe and, 99 seeking through science, 132, 134, 144, 307-13, 320 seventeenth century rheology and, 10-12 world as God's riddle, 143-44, 146 169, 234, 320 Graham, Ronald, 229 graphs, 194 cannonball's flight, 213-14, 214 Cartesian coordinates, 194, 341n 193 Descartes and, 191-92, 194, 200, 212-13, Z13 Galileo's rule (d = 16 £2), 245 slope and, 212-13, 213 gravity baffling nature of, 301-6, 302n confirmation by Le Vernier, 315 God and, 310-13, 315, 316, 317 inverse-square laws and, 274-75, 279 moon and, xiv, 273-77, 276, 305 Newton's theory, xiv, xvii, 35, 36, 48 127, 229, 271-77, 276, 283-85, 294, 301-6, 315 as weak force, 304 Greece, ancient infinite as taboo, 201-2, 253 manual labor and utility, 40, 327n 40 mathematics in, 39-40, 42, 129, 135-39, 142, 143 music in, 129, 12911 order in the heavens and, 90-91, 91n God Graphs Gravity Greece, Ancient Halley Heisenberg Hooke Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Infinity Inquisition Inverse-square laws Jefferson Kepler Kuhn Laplace Laws of Nature Leeuwenhoek Leibniz Light London Mathematics Pythagorean theorem Medicine Microscope Moon Motion Music Newton,Issac Pascal, Blaise Pepys, Samuel Physics Plague Planets Plato Plutarch Principia by Newton Pyrthagoras Religion Royal Society of London Russell, Bertrand Sagan, Carl (111n) Science/Scientific revolution Scientific method Scientists Spinoza Stars Sun Telescope Time, as a variable Uncertainty principle Universe Vacuum chamber Vaccums Voltaire Watson, James Whitehead Witches Wren, Christopher Zeno Zeno's paradox Zero AUTHOR NOTES, SUMMARY, AND BOOK DESCRIPTION ABOUT THE AUTHOR = Edward Dolnick is the author of Down the Great Unknown and the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife near Washington, D.C. SUMMARY = The book is the fascinating and compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the men who made the modern world. A New York Times bestselling author presents the true story of a pivotal moment in modern history when a group of strange, tormented geniuses ? Isaac Newton chief among them ? invented science and remade our understanding of the world. BOOK DESCRIPTION = The book is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature's most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world. In the 1600s, when disease was considered a punishment from God and astronomy was still allied with astrology, the men of the Royal Society ? including Isaac Newton ? conceived of the universe as running like clockwork according to precise laws and thus launched modern science. Having won an Edgar for best true crime (The Rescue Artist), Dolnick can be expected to create an engrossing read. And science histories (e.g., Richard -Holmes's NBC Award winner, The Age of Wonder) are so hot. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. At the end of the 17th century ? an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London ? when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare's century, when the natural and the supernatural still twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new. These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws?a contradiction that tormented them and changed the course of history. EDITORIAL BOOK REVIEWS PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW = Bestselling author, Edward Dolnick [The Rescue Artist], focuses on the 17th century and the giants of early science-Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and particularly Newton and Leibniz, whose independent invention of calculus made it possible to describe the moving, changing world and opened up a literal universe of possibilities. Dolnick writes clearly and unpretentiously about science, and writes equally well about the tumultuous historical context for these men's groundbreaking discoveries: the English Civil War, the Thirty Years' War, and in 1665 and 1666 respectively, the Black Plague and the Great Fire of London. He also offers penetrating portraits of the geniuses of the day, many of them idiosyncratic in the extreme, who offer fertile ground for entertaining writing. Newton's feuds with Leibniz and Robert Hooke, other scientific titans of the day, are almost as famous as their discoveries. While Dolnick uncovers nothing new, he has a keen eye for vivid details in aid of historical recreation, and also has an affection for his subjects. which together translate into a light but informative read coming suitably on the heels of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. LIBRARY JOURNAL REVIEW = An engrossing read. Perhaps the most important thing a reader can take from this book is a sense of just how immense were the intellectual leaps that led to concepts like calculus and the theory of gravity. At first, it seems you're being taken in a completely different direction-nearly the first quarter of the book is spent on historical and cultural background to set the stage for subsequent revelations. Only later does Dolnick (The Forger's Spell; Down the Great Unknown) really begin to explore the work of the intellectual giants of this era. He returns frequently to their personal and religious motivations, highlighting especially the nearly lifelong rivalry between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Spinning his tale such that it seems to jump around almost at random, Dolnick nevertheless always has an interesting new insight to share, and the brief chapters enhance the feeling of a quick, fun read. VERDICT Those interested in the history of science or even just in exploring how the times in which someone lives shape his thought processes should find this volume fascinating. ? Marcia R. Franklin, MLIS, St. Paul. FROM BOOKLIST = For this narrative of the seventeenth century's scientific revolution, Dolnick embeds the mathematical discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz in the prevailing outlook of their time. God was presumed integral to the universe, so discerning how it worked was a quest as theological as it was intellectual. By directing readers to the deistic drive in their famous achievements, Dolnick accents what otherwise strikes moderns as strange, such as Newton's obsession with alchemy and biblical hermeneutics. Those pursuits held codes to God's mind, as did motion and, especially, planetary motion, and Dolnick's substance follows the greats' progress in code-breaking, depicting Kepler's mathematical thought process in devising his laws, Galileo's in breaking out the vectors of falling objects, Newton's and Leibniz's in inventing calculus, and Newton's in formulating his laws of gravitation. Including apt biographical detail, Dolnick humanizes the group, socializes them by means of their connections to such coevals as the members of the nascent Royal Society, and captures their mental coexistence in mysticism and rationality. A concise explainer, Dolnick furnishes a fine survey introduction to a fertile field of scientific biography and history. -- Gilbert Taylor. KIRKUS REVIEWS = A lively account of early science... Colorful, entertainingly written and nicely paced. REMEMBER ALWAYS: You Are Your Adaptable Memory! 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