A Big Day In Science

December 10 is the date of the Nobel Prize award ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo.  No doubt the tailgate parties have already begun. 

But we're going to talk about something really important that happened on that date, long before Alfred Nobel started giving away medals and bags of money:  On December 10, 1684, Edmund Halley read a paper to the Royal Society.  It was called De Motu Corporum in Gyrum, by a reclusive Cambridge mathematician named Isaac Newton.

Newton's paper explained Kepler's laws of planetary motion in terms of a theory of gravity, in which gravitational attraction drops off in an inverse-square relationship.  The inverse-square law was an idea which was kicking around at the time -- Robert Hooke had proposed something similar, and so had Christopher Wren.  But Newton showed how to prove it from Kepler's observed laws of planetary motion, and tied it to Galileo's ideas about falling bodies.

What's really amazing is that Newton originally worked that out in 1666, while living at home in Woolsthorpe to avoid the Plague.  Having satisfied his own curiosity about gravity and the motion of the planets, he proceeded to sit on his results for nearly twenty years until Halley began the process of mining Newton's brain.  With Halley's assiduous prodding, Newton expanded De Motu into his masterpiece the Principia Mathematica.  That made him Europe's scientific superstar, a role which he apparently grew to enjoy.

Isaac Newton was quite possibly the most intelligent human being who ever lived.  To do his physical calculations he invented calculus.  (His version wasn't as useful as Liebnitz's, because Newton invented it for his own use, and most people aren't Newtons.)  In an appendix to the Principia he invented a sub-field of hydrodynamics, solely to disprove Descartes's ideas about the planets being moved by a kind of swirling vortex driven by the Sun's rotation.  His very difficult personality and battery of neuroses may simply have been the result of growing up and living in a world populated by people vastly stupider than he was.  A human child raised by chimpanzees would be terribly maladjusted by chimp standards.