Never at Rest

Never at Rest, by Richard Westfall.

Isaac Newton’s name appears many times in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. You can learn more about him in Richard Westfall’s wonderful book Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. As we all sit in quarantine because of the coronavirus pandemic, I thought you might like to read about Newton’s experience with the plague. Here is an excerpt from Never at Rest.

In the summer of 1665, a disaster descended on many parts of England including Cambridge. It had “pleased Almighty God in his just severity,” as Emmanuel College put it, “to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence.” Although Cambridge could not know it and did little in the following years to appease divine severity, the two-year visitation was the last time God would choose to chastise them in this manner [until 2020]. On 1 September, the city government canceled Sturbridge Fair [one of the largest fairs in Europe] and prohibited all public meetings. On 10 October, the senate of the university discontinued sermons at Great St. Mary’s and exercises in the public schools. In fact, the colleges had packed up and dispersed long before. Trinity [College, Cambridge] recorded a conclusion on 7 August that “all Fellows & Scholars which now go into the Country upon occasion of the Pestilence shall be allowed [the] usual Rates for their Commons for [the] space of [the] month following...” For eight months the university was nearly deserted…

Many of the students attempted to continue organized study by moving with their tutors to some neighboring village. Since Newton was entirely independent in his studies and had had his independence confirmed with a recent B.A. [Newton received his bachelors degree in August 1665],… he returned… to Woolsthorpe [the Newton family home]...

Much has been made of the plague years in Newton’s life. He mentioned them in his account of mathematics. The story of the apple [hitting him on the head, triggering the discovery of the universal law of gravity], set in the country, implies the stay in Woolsthorpe. In another much-quoted statement written in connection with the calculus controversy [a debate between Newton and Leibniz about who first invented calculus] about fifty years later, Newton mentioned the plague years again.

In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the Method of approximating series & the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series [the binomial theorem]. The same year in May I found the method of Tangents of Gregory & Slusius [a way of finding the slope of a curve], & in November had the direct method of fluxions [diferential calculus] & the next year in January had the Theory of Colours [later published in Opticks] & in May following I had entrance into [the] inverse method of fluxions [integral calculus]. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to [the] orb of the Moon & (having found out how to estimate the force with [which a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere) from Keplers rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in sesquialterate proportion [to the 3/2 power] of their distances from the center of their Orbs, I deduced that the forces [which] keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about [which] they revolve [the inverse square law]: & thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her Orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two Plauge years of 1665-1666. For in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention and minded Mathematicks & Philosophy [physics] more than at any time since.

 So what are you doing while stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic?