Systems of the World

System of the World

All three of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion can be derived from Newtonian principles. Kepler’s laws were empirical, based upon the painstaking observations of Tycho Brahe. Newton’s laws were theoretical, rather simple mathematical abstractions from which all of Tycho’s measurements could ultimately be derived. From these laws, Newton wrote with undisguised pride in the Principia: I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

Later in his life, Newton presided over the Royal Society, a fellowship of scientists, and was Master of the Mint, where he devoted his energies to the suppression of counterfeit coinage. His natural moodiness and reclusivity grew; he resolved to abandon those scientific endeavors that brought him into quarrelsome disputes with other scientists, chiefly on issues of priority; and there were those who spread tales that he had experienced the seventeenth-century equivalent of a “nervous breakdown”.

However, Isaac Newton continued his lifelong experiments on the border between alchemy and chemistry, and some recent evidence suggests that what he was suffering from was not so much a psychogenic ailment as heavy metal poisoning, induced by systematic ingestion of small quantities of arsenic and mercury. It was a common practice for chemists of the time to use the sense of taste as an analytic tool.

Magic is my name. Photo: Elena

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. Bernoulli originally specified the deadline of six months, but extended it to a year and a half at the request of Leibniz, one of the leading scholars of the time, and the man who had, independently of Newton, invented the differential and integral calculus. The challenge was delivered to Newton at 4 p.m. on January 29, 1697. Before leaving for work the next morning, he had invented an entire new branch of mathematics called the calculus of variations, used it to solve the brachistochrone problem and sent off the solution, which was published, at Newton’s request, anonymously. But the brilliance and originality of the work betrayed the identity of its author. When Bernoulli saw the solution, he commented: “We recognize the lion by his claw. “ Newton was then in his fifty-fifth year.

The major intellectual pursuit of his last years was a concordance and calibration of the chronologies of ancient civilisations, very much in the tradition of the ancient historians Manetho, Strabo and Eratosthenes. In his last, posthumous work, “The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended,” we find repeated astronomical calibrations of historical events an architectural reconstruction of the Temple of Salomon a provocative claim that all the Norther Hemisphere constellations are named after the personages, artifacts and events in the Greek Story of Jason and the Argonauts; and the consistent assumption that the gods of all civilisations, with the single exception of Newton’s own, were merely ancient kings and heroes, deified by later generations.

All Gods are merely ancient kings and heroes defied by us. Image: Emotional Roller Coaster, Talking Emoticon. ©  Elena