The Clockwork Universe: Isaac newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick. Harper, $27.99, 400 pages.

Raleigh News & Observer & The Charlotte Observer

April 3, 2011

How scientific geniuses birthed the modern world

BY PHILLIP MANNING

On February 17 in the year 1600, the Dominican friar Giardano Bruno was taken from his cell, paraded through he streets of Rome, and burned at the stake. A metal spike was driven through his tongue to ensure his silence. His crime? The Inquisition had convicted him of, among other things, asserting that the Earth was only one of many worlds. Just over a century later, Isaac Newton was knighted by the queen of England for discovering the force that held those other worlds in orbit.
“Sometime between those two events,” author Edward Dolnick writes, “the modern world was born.” In this smoothly written history of the scientific revolution, he tells the stories of the key players and events that transformed society. This is well-plowed ground, but the author spices it up by pointing out a surprising twist in the way later scientists interpreted the progress made by their pioneering predecessors.
Dolnick begins by painting a picture of life in seventeenth century Europe. It was dark, dangerous, dirty and smelly. No one bathed. One historian described the Middle Ages as “a thousand years without a bath.” Yet, somehow, out of this miasma came the great minds that would set the world on a new course.
The temperaments of the three men who played starring roles in the scientific revolution were quite different. Johannes Kepler was an imaginative, creative mystic whose laws of planetary motion are still used by astronomers today.
Galileo Galilei was a brilliant, hard-nosed, argumentative thinker who cleared up centuries of misapprehension about the laws governing the speed of falling objects. He also used the newly invented telescope to show conclusively that the Earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, an idea that got him into big trouble with the Catholic Church.
The most prominent of these men was Isaac Newton, whom Dolnick describes as “the supreme genius of modern times but also a man so jealous and bad-tempered that he exploded in fury at anyone who dared question him.” His laws of motion and universal gravitation formed the bedrock of the scientific revolution.
As different as these men were, they had one thing in common: an unshakable belief in God. This conviction was typical for that day. Dolnick summarizes the seventeenth century as “a God-drenched era,” a time when “Atheism was literally unthinkable.” One biographer estimated that Newton’s religious notes numbered into the “millions of words,” far more than he wrote on scientific topics.
These men had little trouble reconciling their deeply held religious faith with the science they were developing. As Dolnick says, they took “their own deepest beliefs and assigned them to nature.” And their deepest belief was in the existence of God. In the minds of the men who ignited the revolution, scientific investigation was a way to understand the mind of God and honor His work. Their scientific descendants, however, reached a different conclusion.
As new generations of scientists probed the universe, they found that it ran even more smoothly than Newton and his contemporaries thought. In one the great ironies of science, the men who sought to honor God with their research ended up destroying Him in the minds of many of those who followed. These later generations concluded that the universe was a giant clock. Maybe God wound it up, maybe not. In any case, He certainly no longer played a role in keeping it running.
The French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace summarized the workings of the cosmos in his masterpiece “Celestial Mechanics.” After examining the book, Napoleon asked him why there was no reference to God in it. “I had no need of that hypothesis,” Laplace told the emperor.
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