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| The idea that the bubonic plague woke the brilliance in Isaac Newton is both wrong and misleading. Photo: Oxford Science Archive / Getty |
On July 25,
1665, a five-year-old boy named John Morley, of the parish of the Holy
Trinity in Cambridge, England, was found dead in his home. When town
officials examined his corpse, they noted black spots on his chest, the
unmistakable mark of the bubonic plague. Morley was the first known case
and death from the disease in Cambridge that year: the signal that
London’s outbreak that spring had advanced to the city. Almost at once,
the townspeople raced to isolate themselves in the countryside. Among
those on the run: a young scholar of Trinity College named Isaac Newton.
Newton’s home, a farm called Woolsthorpe, lay about sixty miles north
of the university. Suitably distant from the nearest town, it was where,
in near total solitude, he would invent calculus, create the science of
motion, unravel gravity, and more. The plague created the conditions in
which modern science could be created. Or so the story goes.
Now, with the spread of the coronavirus imposing its own isolation, Newton’s miracle year is being touted as a model. This cheery piece in the Washington Post is typical of many articles circulating right now: “So if you’re working or studying from home over the next few weeks, perhaps remember the example Newton set.” Social media, naturally, has been more extreme. Get that novel written, or that screenplay, and, if you don’t, you should at least refocus your life and find your purpose. If not, you’ve failed the take-home epidemic exam. Newton could shift the universe. Shouldn’t we be able to organize our closets?
No. Partly because none of us, along with almost everyone in human history, will ever approach his level of achievement. But, more deeply, the idea that the plague woke the brilliance in Newton is both wrong and misleading as a measure of how well we apply ourselves during our own plague spring. The apple-falling-on-the-head element is part of the problem. There really was an apple tree across the lane from Newton’s front door; a little orchard still grows there. Newton himself, very late in life, told the story...
Doing the work was what mattered, and Newton did it as a student in Cambridge before the plague, he persisted at Woolsthorpe, and he kept going upon his return to college. He wrote much later, referring to the plague years, that he had been “in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks & Philosophy more than at any time since.” That prime lasted for half a decade at least. Newton was able to do what he did not because of where he happened to find himself during the plague but because of who he was—one of the handful of greatest mathematicians and natural philosophers of all time, who, for several years, was able to do almost nothing else with his time but think, reason, and calculate.
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Source: The New Yorker
