In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise the protagonist and narrator, Jack Galdney, finds himself struggling to get a straight answer from his precocious teenage son, Heinrich.
“It’s going to rain tonight.” “It’s raining now,” I said. “The radio said tonight.”
[…] “Look at the windshield,” I said. “Is that rain or isn’t it?” “I’m only telling you what they said.” “Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.” “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present or future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Dogs can hear it. Other animals. And I’m sure there are sounds even dogs can’t hear. But they exist in the air, in waves. Maybe they never stop. High, high, high-pitched. Coming from somewhere.” “Is it raining,” I said, “or isn’t it?” “I wouldn’t want to have to say.” “What if someone held a gun to your head?”
The exchange is as infuriating as it is amusing and you can’t help but wonder where your sympathies should lie. On the one hand Heinrich is deploying tendentious po-mo deconstruction. Yet his father is a professor at the town’s liberal arts college where he founded the academic field of Hitler Studies, created in service of academic advancement, providing a stage for his own po-mo preoccupations.
I couldn’t help but think of White Noise as I recently read Joy Williams’ Harrow. If you put a gun to my head and told me to describe the book I’d say it reads like White Noise meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Describing the actual plot of Harrow makes describing the plot of White Noise seem easy. If there is a central conceit to the novel it is that there has been some kind of global environmental catastrophe — the titular “Harrow” — the details of which are only ever alluded to and described indirectly. The situation is stated most clearly towards the end of the novel.
Bouncing back from such historical earth-caused losses, humankind had become more frightened and ruthless than ever. Nature had been deemed sociopathic and if you found this position debatable you were deemed sociopathic as well and there were novel and increasingly effective ways of dealing with you.
None of this really reflects the nature of what awaits a reader in the book. So I will try again. We follow a teenager Khristen who is sent off to a mysterious school for gifted children, until “the Harrow” causes the school to be swiftly shuttered. Khristen goes in search of her mother and arrives instead at The Institute: a kind of eco-terrorist training camp for geriatrics who have decided to dedicate what remains of their lives to coordinated acts of revenge against the people who inflicted so much cruelty and damage on the natural world. Khristen eventually leaves the institute and in the final portions of the novel arrives in the bizarre courtroom of a twelve-year-old judge. I’ve skipped a great deal, but hopefully you get a sense of how resistant the book is to any kind of conventional narrative arc.
I might as well divulge another central conceit of the novel: Khristen’s mother holds the firm conviction that Khristen had briefly died and returned to life when she was a baby. None of the witnesses to the incident or the doctors who examined the child believe this happened. The baby just appeared to have momentarily stopped breathing. Yet this non-incident is returned and treated like it should hold a great deal of resonance. Later on there is much discussion of Kafka’s short story The Hunter Gracchus, which is obviously great fun if, like me, you’ve never read that particular story. But I am led to believe Gracchus’ own un-dead predicament should resonate with Khristen’s.
I should say that Joy Williams is very highly regarded as a writer and you can find plenty of evidence on the page of her skill as a prose stylist. Even if I spent most of the book waiting for it all to accumulate in some or any way, the scenes are nevertheless wildly inventive and individual lines can haunt you:
The fish was not rose-mole stippled and lovely but gray and gaunt as though it had lived its brief life in a drainpipe.
The poetic beauty of the initial description contrast powerfully with the bleak point at which the sentence ends. It is a knight’s move of a sentence, shifting trajectory somewhere along the way. A quick google search reveals that this “rose-mole stippled” business is lifted from a nature poem Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Which is all to say that there is a lot going on if you look carefully.
But is Harrow actually a good novel? I cannot help myself but channel the spirit of Heinrich Gladney: “Do you think Harrow was good?” “In what sense good? Good to all readers in all times and in all circumstances? Good on a first reading or on a rereading? Perhaps you want me to give an Amazon star rating, because to that I must outright object on aesthetic grounds.” “How about to you, today, when you read it.” “I feel like any serious art inevitably provokes complicated sets of emotions in me that resist easy reduction.” “So you did not enjoy it?” “‘Enjoy’ is too narrow a term to capture whatever virtues the artists was aiming for. I feel like giving a straight answer would serve to do nothing more that to open me up to being accused of exhibiting a lack of literary sophistication.” “Sounds like you are afraid that the book was good but that you were not able to appreciate it fully. Which would be awkward because lots of other people said it was great. Kirkus named it 2021’s best.” “I certainly managed to appreciate some of it.”
As an undergraduate, I was prone to wandering the university library, looking to some kind of literary distraction from whatever math assignment I was suffering to complete. One day pulled a worn paperback copy of Sexual Politics by Kate Millett off the shelf. It was not a book I had ever been assigned or recommended. I had no understanding or conception of what it might contain, aside from the vague possibility of feminism. But the title seemed provocative enough, so I read a few pages to get a sense. It was polemical and read like a response to an ongoing conversation that I was not party to. There was an account of the notorious and horrifying evening when Norman Mailer stabbed his then wife with a penknife. But as horrifying as that was to read, I had no idea who Norman Mailer was. (I later discovered that I had read maybe fifty pages of his biography of Lee Harvey Oswald while in high school before discarding it; I had been hoping for conspiratorial speculation).
What did capture my imagination, was the marginalia on the opening page of the text. As I recall, someone had taken issue with the author’s use of the default male pronoun, as if that was enough to discredit and undermine the integrity of all that followed. I did not get the impression that this was done from a viewpoint sympathetic to feminism, and was a very bold assertion to make so early on in the reading. This is what scholars term “hostile” marginalia.
From this initial salvo followed a whole chain of pencilled and biro-ed interjections and objections from subsequent readers, although who knows how much further than the opening paragraphs any of them made it through the text. In content alone, this was little better than the below-the-line comments that have become ubiquitous online. And to be fair, much worse than most of what in the tech space is called user generated content. But it felt fun and exciting to read for a few obvious reasons. The first being the irreverence of writing in the book itself. The second being the simple aesthetic appeal of seeing the back and forth written out in people’s own hand.
Much has been written about marginalia and its virtues. The rise of the e-reader was occasion for much thinking about what might be lost in a transition to digital. Sam Anderson, who has written much on the subject, writes here from the point of view of a practitioner (as opposed to my own as the voyeur):
One day in college I was trawling the library for a good book to read when I found a book called “How to Read a Book.” I tried to read it, but must have been doing something wrong, because it struck me as old-fashioned and dull, and I could get through only a tiny chunk of it. That chunk, however, contained a statement that changed my reading life forever. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked it up.
This hit home for me — it spoke to the little scribal monk who lives deep in the scriptorium of my soul — and I quickly adopted the habit of marginalia: underlining memorable lines, writing keywords in blank spaces, jotting important page numbers inside of back covers.
[…] Soon my little habit progressed into a full-on dependency. My markings grew more elaborate — I made stars, circles, checks, brackets, parentheses, boxes, dots and lines (straight, curved and jagged). I noted intra- and extratextual references; I measured cadences with stress marks. Texts that really grabbed me got full-blown essays (sideways, upside-down, diagonal) in the margins. I basically destroyed my favorite books with the pure logorrheic force of my excitement, spraying them so densely with scribbled insight that the markings almost ceased to have meaning. Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.
This belongs to a genre of advocacy for marginalia: looking to transforming passive readers into pencil wielding intellectuals deploying their critical judgements, droll asides, and tasteful underlinings. A closely related genre is more in my own voyeuristic camp, inspecting the great marginalia of the past. To my mind, the most significant marginalia lies in scientific discourse. An example: the journalist Arthur Koestler once dismissively referred to Copernicus’ On The Revolution as “the book that nobody read”, in his history of cosmology. In response Owen Gingrich titled a book with the offending quote as the title, in which he described his efforts to examine all surviving copies of On The Revolution from the 16th century. In the margins of these copies he found copious evidence that Copernicus’ opus was read very carefully indeed. Indeed, if you were to break into the offices of likely any practicing mathematician you will find preprints, with very wide margins, covered in scribbles testifying to the continuing engagement with tricky mathematical texts.
Back in the literary sphere the current king of marginalia has to be David Foster Wallace. While his posthumous reputation as a secular saint has been shattered, Infinite Jest continues to attract devoted readers. His personal library has entered the collection of the Ransom Center, and we’ve all been able to peer at the scans of the paperbacks he extensively and idiosyncratically annotated. More than anything else, these particular images illustrate else the purely aesthetic and textural appeal of marginalia.
But all of this commentary, to my mind, hasn’t acknowledged a more obvious truth about reader engagement with the printed word. Engagement is not always welcome, wanted, or virtuous. We do not tickled by the puerile and often hateful graffiti to be found in any high school textbook in the same way we are when we discover DFW added galsses, fangs, and a mustache to DeLillo’s author photo. Nor do we treat the posts of an unmasked sock puppet account as being worthy of the same respect as the abuse that the “great artist” leaves in the margins of their private library.
The digital age has transformed marginalia into a public performance, and if you abandon the fixation on the codex itself (to my money, still a robust and preferable reading technology) you can find much engagement and innovation, but frequently not among the artists we admire, valorize, and maybe aspire to.
“Fisking” is the practice of taking a text that you find particularly egregious and writing a rebuttal by quoting the text, likely in its entirety interspersed in-line with your debunking, criticism, and abuse. It takes its name from the British journalist whose reports from the Middle East were an early and frequent target of the conservative bloggers who pioneered this innovation. Whatever its roots, it is the logical digital evolution of hostile marginalia. What shifted the paradigm was the ability to instantly copy, paste, and then start writing the commentary. It’s the kind of thing that happens when there are no editors around and your audience seems to appreciate open insults.
The term still gets used, but mostly in conservative circles. There used to be a Wikipedia page that subsequently got removed. Fisk’s Wikipedia page used to mention it, but no longer. There is a dictionary definition, at least. Fisking does not have the same champions as marginalia. Nor the same caliber of practitioner. It also has to be said that the people who coined the term may not have appreciated all the possible associations the term might conjure.
Pile ons, ratios, and dunkings are nothing more than hostile marginalia done in public, en mass. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, and certain things are better done in the privacy of one’s own home. Editors offer a valuable service, and writing is often the process of working out what you think, rather than just responding in the moment. What can be an exciting insight into someones inner life — their unfiltered response as they read a novel — maybe shouldn’t become a model for public discourse. What made those glimpses so interesting, was how fleeting and how precious they could be. And let’s not over-think the thrill of seeing what a writer’s actual handwriting was like.
A “serious writer” might not like to think of themselves as being in the business of children’s entertainment. Yet our most profound reading experiences frequently occur when we are young. In my own experience, there was a powerful frisson, not easily replicated, in reading a book or comic that strayed into some new and adult territory that had, up until that point, remained uncharted. These readings were engaging in ways that they could never be again, especially when returned to as an adult.
For a long time — to my mortal frustration — I browsed my local library’s limited offerings of comic books and repeatedly passed over Niel Gaiman’s Sandman. Even when I learned that these were critically acclaimed the artwork remained, to my eyes, far removed from what I was looking for in a comic. (Conversely, I browsed Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, felt the immediate need to read it). When I finally read Sandman (or at least the collected editions in the school library), I found the stories powerful in an unexpected way. Even the once off putting art offered something new. But much of this effect was lost as an adult when I started reading the entire series from start to finish.
It is perplexing to me that more writers and artists do not aspire to have their works read by such audiences. Yet at the very same time, it is clear that many are are trying to recreate that same quality of wonder for an adult audience, with confounding results. I don’t know how else to explain the DC Snyderverse, Disney’s Star Wars reboot, or modern Dr Who, other than as adults trying to recreate what they experienced as teenagers in comics, cinemas, or TV.
Comics are a particularly interesting, in terms of their actual readership, because the situation is in fact very different that you might expect. To judge on the strength of sales figures and the implied readership, the modern (American/English language) comic book industry is not dominated by Marvel and DC superhero comics. While tent-pole superhero movies are dominant in the cinemas, their star has fallen in their native medium. The most widely read comic books are graphic novels are written, marketed, sold, and almost exclusively read by a young adult audience.
Sales figures for books are notoriously difficult to measure; there are many different kinds of sales, including the direct market and digital. There is also something almost political about the way best-sellers are measured, with The New York Times even having its own secret source metric for producing its own best-seller lists. But this article from 2021 on graphic novel sales, for all its caveats, makes a good case for the overall picture. Scholastic and Viz are the biggest graphic novel publishers. Viz, contrary to all received wisdom about English speaking audience’s disinterest in fiction in translation, has no problem selling Manga to young people. Scholastic sells young adult books to school kids, often directly, within schools themselves via their book-fairs.
Depending on your exact definitions of intended audiences, it appears that each and every one of the top 20 is intended for children or middle readers. It won’t be until #22 that you can find a comic intended for a different audience ( “Strange Planet”, a collection of webcomics), and if you are looking for a “Marvel / DC-style” comic, you are not even in the top fifty. “Watchmen” finally shows up at #57 – after that the next aimed-at-adults superhero comic is “Harleen” way the heck down at #144. The earliest Manga in the charts are “My Hero Academia” at #18, the first one aimed at adults would appear to be… well, depends who you ask? I tend to think that “Demon Slayer Kimetsu No Yaiba” (#33) is probably rated “T”, so next after that would be Ito’s “Uzumaki” at #34.
The true titan of Scholastic’s graphic novel output is Raina Telgemeier whose autobiographical opus Smile covered her high school experience when she underwent dental reconstruction after an accident. I first heard about her work here:
The New York Times has a good profile in which you can even see the process by which she writes, pencils, and inks her comics.
“Raina single-handedly created the market for middle-grade graphic memoir,” said Saylor, who is now the publisher of Graphix. “There was a common trope at the time that girls didn’t read comics and that was a boy thing, so the market wasn’t catering to girls and women.”
For my part I have recently made my own amateur foray into (very young) children’s books. In honour of my nephew’s birthday I wrote my own knock-off Mr Men book. It’s the first comic I have drawn in many years, and the first that I have done entirely digitally (using a very basic wacom tablet). Like they always say, it is not as easy as it looks. My big takeaway is a reminder of how much of the creative process is work. I suspect I broke a fair number of the rules for writing for children. Some things make complete sense to children and little sense to adults. It is hard to know what will capture an imagination.
Subscribing to the New Yorker can feel like being caught in the classic bind: having your wish granted, only to discover your wish is a curse. The curse in this case being that my New Yorkers pile up and I realize that I will never have the time to them all. I don’t even read them cover to cover. I skip the Goings On About Town; I only recently began to occasionally read a poem; I’m not sold on the Talk of the Town; and I rarely bother with the music, film, and TV critics because I don’t consume nearly enough of those three to make it worth my time. (Although the TV critic Naomi Fry is worth following on Twitter).
I started subscribing almost two years ago; an early pandemic decision justified to myself in part as a show of solidarity with the journalistic class. I intended to write out here a list of articles that I particularly enjoyed over that time, but the commentary grew, so I’m only presenting a handful.
Most of my physical New Yorkers are back in the UK, so I was only able to peruse the contents of the more modest stack that has grown since I finally made the move over the Atlantic. Even so, as I bookmarked articles that I had enjoyed, I noticed just as many that I had missed and fancied going back and reading.
There had been a great deal said about clear and concise writing, with Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English language is often brought up. It is pretty easy to accuse a writer of producing tortured sentences or old fashioned overwriting. But to my mind the real skill in writing is in discovering an interesting way of saying whatever it is that you hope to say. And “hope” really is the appropriate verb; even when you have clear sense of what you are trying to say, actually making it appear on the page is frequently, in my experience at least, the business of multiple revisions.
For a hundred and fifty years, when the Falkland Islands were a distant outpost of the British Empire, many men came from the Scottish Highlands to work as shepherds, and the islands are oddly similar to the Shetlands or the Isle of Skye—the bleak, rocky landscape; the blustery rain; the nearness of the sea—as though a piece of Scotland had broken off into the Atlantic and drifted eight thousand miles south, past Ireland, then Portugal, past Morocco and Mauritania and Senegal, down past the coasts of Brazil and Uruguay, and come to rest just a few hundred miles north of Antarctica. But here, on days when the air is very sharp and clear, people know that a floating iceberg must be close. And here there are penguins at the water’s edge: three-foot king penguins with egg-yolk bibs; squat rockhopper penguins with spiky black head feathers like gelled hair; whimsy-hatted gentoos. In March, as the plague was circling, the penguins had nothing to do. They were molting, so they couldn’t swim or eat. Molting, people said, was tiring and uncomfortable. The penguins stood about in crowds near the surf, backs to the wind, waiting for their feathers to fall out.
The whole article is extremely quotable, and it is easy to look at any given paragraph and feel like it captures the power of the whole piece. Of course, you keep on reading, and finding new paragraphs so it is easy to miss the cumulative effect. With non-fiction you can look for the seams: the facts, the quotes, all the raw material that the journalist turned up and then had to synthesize to arrive at the sentences that were eventually printed. When the writing is really good you begin to wonder if it was all just laid out like that by a particularly erudite source. Or maybe just the Holy Spirit. How else would you explain it?
For the first twenty years that Tim Blake was at Hill Cove, from the late fifties to the late seventies, the farm, like the other farms in the Falklands, was run on a system that had progressively been outlawed in Britain by legislation, the Truck Acts, which stretched back to the fifteenth century. The farmworkers rarely handled cash: they were paid in scrip, and had a credit account at the farm store in the settlement. At the end of the year, the farm manager would tell them how much money they had left after subtracting their purchases; he would pay their taxes for them and deposit what remained into a government savings account, or help them invest it. The manager might be the only local authority—he conducted marriages and assigned punishments; it was said that not long before Tim Blake came to Hill Cove a man there was fired for whistling. Because drinking could be a problem, especially in winter, when there wasn’t much to do, the farm store rationed sales of alcohol. When a man grew too old for farmwork, he had to retire, which meant that he had to leave his house on the farm and move to Stanley. But there was little for retired men to do in Stanley except go to the pub, and they often died soon afterward.
I found this article to be an impressive work of social history, taking what might seem to be an unremarkable subject, and making it into the most remarkable reading experience. If there hasn’t already been, there needs to be a serious study of American coverage of British affairs. There is no clearer indication of domestic deficiencies of a national media, than a keen outside eye.
I grew up being taken to English Country Houses — which I was largely bored and indifferent to, at least as a child. They would typically boast a fancy garden, a cafe, with a bit of history on the side. The instigating incident of Knight’s article, is the arrival of a relatively unusual tour group, consisting of mostly “older Carribbean women” to Dyrham Park, the quintessential English country house. This group was relatively unusual in that visitors to England’s country houses have been overwhelmingly white, and the tour, organised by a pair of filmmakers and researchers, Shawn Sobers and Rob Mitchell, was part of a larger effort to change that. But they weren’t quite prepared to walk in on a pair of statues of African slaves.
The National Trust, which was founded in 1895, relies on thousands of volunteers, mostly white retirees, to show visitors its properties. Dyrham Park has a roster of around a hundred and twenty. When Sobers and his group entered the Balcony Room, they came face to face with the slave stands and stood there, listening politely. “I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it was happening,” Sobers told me. “And the tour guide talked about every single thing in that room, you know, talked about everything for a good ten, fifteen minutes and not once mentioned it.” A rope cordons off most of the Balcony Room, so visitors stand on a narrow walkway, facing the stands. There is nowhere else to look. “There wasn’t even a kind of a, you know, ‘Yeah, we don’t know what those are. . . .’ There wasn’t even an explaining it away,” Sobers said. “They just acted as if they just weren’t there at all.”
The wealth that produced many of England’s country houses has its roots in Empire and slavery. The rest of the article details a national delusion and denial of its own history. As one person is quoted, visitors only want a nice day out.
Researchers of Britain’s colonial history also welcomed the charity’s decision to consider the legacies of slavery and empire alongside each other. For more than two centuries, the transatlantic slave trade coexisted with a busy period of expansion in other parts of the world, notably in Asia. Nonetheless, the subjects usually occupy distinct places in the public imagination—a splitting that has helped to preserve a thick vein of imperial nostalgia in Britain. A poll last year found that thirty-two per cent of British adults are proud of the Empire; among the other European countries surveyed, only the Dutch recorded a higher percentage. “There’s an interesting understanding of what slavery was and what the colonization of Asia was,” Olivette Otele, a history professor at the University of Bristol, told me. (Indenture, a form of bonded labor under which more than a million Indian workers were transported around the Empire, lasted well into the twentieth century.) Of Britain’s Asian conquests, Otele said, “You think about the fabric, you think about the grandeur, you think about the beauty, the jewelry. Most people think that it was prettier, in a way. Whereas slavery is Black bodies, transported and trafficked and all that. So they don’t want to link those histories, because it forces them to see the ugliness behind the Asian colonization as well.”
These country houses are important cultural institutions, due to all the history and culture that accumulated in and around them. I previously wrote here about Susan Dry’s book The Newton papers, which described how Newton’s writings unpublished writing resided forgotten for many years in one such house until the English aristocracy collapsed and the manuscripts became part of the subsequent fire-sale. It is not an exaggeration to say that The National Trust in England was a kind of cultural bailout of these houses, and the country’s estimation of itself. As this article makes clear, the bailout is also part of an ongoing cover-up.
Some issues of the New Yorker issues are complete home runs, and the issue The Dead Ship appeared in (the online and print titles are different) stands out as such in my mind. Alongside this alarming and utterly gripping story of a disaster waiting to happen, were articles on fusion energy, the true crime Fatty Arbuckle scandal from the golden age of Hollywood, and Gary Schteyngart’s describing the aftermath of his botched circumcision. But the ongoing situation of the F.S.O. Safer, moored in the Red Sea, just off Yemen, sticks with me the most.
The Safer’s problems are manifold and intertwined. It is forty-five years old—ancient for an oil tanker. Its age would not matter so much were it being maintained properly, but it is not. In 2014, members of one of Yemen’s powerful clans, the Houthis, launched a successful coup, presaging a brutal conflict that continues to this day. Before the war, the Yemeni state-run firm that owns the ship—the Safer Exploration & Production Operations Company, or sepoc—spent some twenty million dollars a year taking care of the vessel. Now the company can afford to make only the most rudimentary emergency repairs. More than fifty people worked on the Safer before the war; seven remain. This skeleton crew, which operates with scant provisions and no air-conditioning or ventilation below deck—interior temperatures on the ship frequently surpass a hundred and twenty degrees—is monitored by soldiers from the Houthi militia, which now occupies the territory where the Safer is situated. The Houthi leadership has obstructed efforts by foreign entities to inspect the ship or to siphon its oil. The risk of a disaster increases every day.
The article combines outright horror at the implications of the Safer sinking or exploding with bewilderment at what possible options exist and gripping insight into the world of international shipping and geopolitics. If the worst happens, we will all hear about it, if not immediately, then very soon afterwards when the consequences make themselves utterly evident. This article will no doubt be shared over social media all over again.
The beginning of the New Yorker’s history as an outlet for serious journalism is usually dated to the 1946 issue which was entirely devoted to John Hershey’s report on the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. At that point the US public had been subject to a PR campaign by the government, downplaying the possibility that there would be any lasting effects of radiation poisoning. The book the was produced from Hershey’s reporting would never go out of print. Reading Caesar’s article put me in mind of how those first readers must have felt, with the exception that I am reading the article before the terrible event has happened.
I recently finished The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel’s wonderful novel about a Ponzi scheme, international shipping, prestige hotels, guilt, and ghosts. One idea that she and her characters wrestle with is that of the “counter-life” — the life a person could have been living had they made a different set of decisions. To some of the characters their counter-lives begin to feel as real as their own, taunting them from afar. Those characters involved in a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme consider their counter-lives had they taken a different job, gone to the authorities, or fled the country when the jig was up.
I can’t be alone in occasionally dwelling on a particular set of my own counter-lives. I can identify many pivotal decisions I have made (none of them criminal), but being a mathematician I cannot help but wonder what kind of life or person I would be had I chosen a different academic discipline. If my mathematical education has dramatically shaped the person I am — which is not obvious at all — then the implications are even more profound than the professional life I would pursued or my material circumstances. I would see the world differently.
I might as well entertain the most radical possibilities. Of course, life would have been different if I had continued to study physics, or even more so if I’d gone off to art school. But it’s the Shimer Great Books School that really makes me think.
I was first introduced to Shimer College by Jon Ronson, writing back in 2014 after Shimer had been ranked bottom in a survey of America’s colleges. Ronson discovered that the college wasn’t bad, but suffered because its singular vision of education, lack of the usual accoutrements of American college life, and its very small size left it badly served by the survey metrics. The singular vision was a complete dedication to studying the canon of literature, otherwise known as the “great books”.
Textbooks about the great books are forbidden. That would be too easy. It is primary sources only here. Students can concentrate on humanities, or natural sciences, they can take electives in feminist theories, or Auden, or Zen masters, but it’s all great books and nothing else. There are no lectures. Each class takes the form of Socratic dialogue between the students, guided by a professor if necessary.
This is very much not how most higher education works. If the Shimer curriculum is to believed and understood at face value, they actually read Newton’s Principia, presumably with pre-Leibniz notation (but not it Latin, surely). They read Darwin’s Origin of the Species over a modern understanding of the science. And they read da Vinci’s Notebooks, which I’m not entirely certain has any kind of easy comparison. Engineering textbooks?
The real draw of a great books course is exposure to foundational texts of the humanities. Books that most of us know of principally through their reputations; books that are believed to be a bedrock of a well cultured intellect. Not having read these books niggles away at me, like a known dietary deficiency that I cannot get around to addressing.
I’m not the only one to have felt this way. Last year Naomi Kanakia wrote an incredible essay analyzing and deconstructing her own relationship to the canon. Having dedicated nearly a decade of her life to doing the reading in her own time she discovered that very few people, especially those with an ostensibly fancy education, had actually read any the great books. Kanakia explains that it is a myth that the elite — political, pedaligical, cultural — are well read in the Western canon:
Moreover, when intellectuals, particularly academics, bewail the cheapening of elite education, there’s an almost comical element to their complaint. For most of their histories, neither the Ivy Leagues nor the Oxbridge colleges were particularly known for the difficulty of their education. It’s impossible to overstate how easy it was to get into Harvard in the 19th century. If you were of the right background and had gone to the right secondary school, you would get in. The Greek and Latin requirements were merely class markers. No intimate understanding of the texts or dedication to scholarship was needed to enter.
This leads Kanakia to considering the classes of people who actually produced the “great books”, and who actually read them. Or didn’t read them.
A class can be literate even if it doesn’t produce notable writers, but the English and American elites also became renowned for their disdain for learning. Although a stint at Cambridge and Oxford continued to be seen as de rigueur for the English gentry, just as acceptance at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton was for their American counterparts, neither set was famed for their commitment to learning. Even among the well-off, fashionable set, it would be quite rare to find someone who remembered their schoolboy Latin or who could discourse with any sense of authority on the work of the ancients. Edith Wharton claimed that, although her childhood home was full of books, nobody ever read them — that in fact, to her knowledge, nobody in her extended family had ever read her own books. In In Search of Lost Time, Proust describes a high society that grudgingly allows entrance to literary figures, so long as they are witty and entertaining, but pays no attention to their works. Indeed, Marcel is shocked by how distant many writers are from the heights of the fashionable society they write about, and by how quickly a writer is dropped by high society if he starts to talk of intellectual matters.
Kanakia’s misapprehension was likely cultivated by certain partisans within the education system. In a recent New Yorker hatchet job, Louis Menand attacks the underlying premise of two newly released polemics decrying the state of liberal education and the general neglect of great books. As Menand notes, there is a long history of such discourse. Shimer college was itself founded on the principals of one such polemic: Robert Maynard Hutchin’s The Higher Learning in America.
That conflict is essentially a dispute over the purpose of college. How did the great books get caught up in it? In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.
(The emphasis is mine.) Indeed, there is an underlying hostility to precisely the kind of education I have received and benefited from.
The idea made its way into universities after 1900 as part of a backlash against the research model, led by proponents of what was called “liberal culture.” These were professors, mainly in the humanities, who deplored the university’s new emphasis on science, specialization, and expertise. For the key to the concept of the great books is that you do not need any special training to read them.
(I could argue that mathematical education predates anything like a “great books” education, but let’s ignore that rather appealing idea.)
So what benefit does an actual, honest to goodness, education in the great books actually offer? I discovered a recent PhD thesis from a former Shimer student, Jonathan Goldman, that seeks to address some version of that question. Conducting interviews with sixteen former students of the college from the sixties and seventies, he investigated the effect Shimer had on them. Certainly among those he interviewed the impact was very positive. They went on to graduate school, industry, and all kinds of other adventures, feeling well prepared and full of confidence. Whatever challenges they faced, they had no problem sitting down and doing the reading. The years in college were reportedly hugely rewarding — the holistic view of intellectual history, in particular. Their memories of college conform more strongly to what many of us hoped for from higher education, but maybe never quite attained.
Participants described their campus colleagues as being very smart, interesting, and always engaging. A few people felt that for the first time in their lives they were with students who were as smart as they were, if not smarter. Irv enjoyed being “surrounded by people who were smarter than I was … talking nonstop, they were just so excited.” Irene thought “the fact that it was small and yet there was a high percentage of very bright and interesting people there … was crucial.” Ian said, “a lot of the people who showed up at Shimer were very talented, they were creative, interested, and they have very active minds and they were—they had high IQs and were just smart.”
Particularly galling is the fact that those of us who haven’t enjoyed the benefits of the great books might not quite cut the mustard for them socially:
Participants discussed how their relationships at Shimer changed their perspectives about relationships after leaving school. Kathy said that she “never again found relationships as meaningful as at Shimer.” She added that Shimer “spoiled me for friendships.” Others felt that being around the people at Shimer set higher standards for future relationships. Olivia said that “I really can’t stand to be around people who are really ignorant” and that she likes “to have discussions with people about their ideas, and listen to what their ideas are, and challenge them, and have them challenge me, and talk about stuff.” Olivia said that people with whom she talks “can’t just arbitrarily say something and not be able to defend it.” Others discussed wanting only friends who are able to carry on a meaningful and rational conversation.
Unfortunately, I likely wouldn’t even understand their jokes.
The participants described Shimer people as having a different way of looking at things and Riley cited an adage popular among some Shimer alumni that “Shimer people don’t have to explain jokes to other Shimer people.” Carol said that being at Shimer “helped learning to work with lots of different people who think differently.” Zoe said that after leaving school, she would talk to people and I might then reference whatever the topic, social topic that was going on. Whether it was about cities and war or different things, poverty or something and then I might mention an author or subject I had studied, and people would respond to that as if it was unusual. I thought it was what we did. It was everyday conversation at Shimer or with people from Shimer, it wasn’t a big deal. I started realizing that is something of interest to other people and … things that were ordinary at Shimer were extraordinary elsewhere. She also noted that one person told her that she “talk[ed] in metaphors.”
These shared jokes and mutual understanding seems to be the upshot of what being unusually well read means. So while our elites do not actually bear the benefits of a liberal education we believed them to possess, the graduates of a weird little college (and a handful of others which also offer their own variation) have the actual goods.
Not that I am falling over myself to work my own way through the reading list. There is a great deal to be said for engaging with the contemporary. Or to put it another way, if I was busy reading through the canon, I likely would never have got around to The Glass Hotel.
The biographer of Isaac Newton is in an unenviable position. Usually the writer thrives on the access they can get to their subject — their writings, correspondence, contemporaneous accounts. But in Newton’s case, the biographer is cursed with too much material. Newton’s unpublished writings form an extensive body of work spanning an impressive and embarrassing array of interests; from science and mathematics, to alchemy and heretical theology, Newton was a compulsive note taker. Susan Dry’s The Newton Papers gives a careful account of how these papers managed to escape their fate languishing forgotten in one of England’s aristocratic estates, and into the hands of scholars who could read and make sense of them. Or so they hoped. The writings were so extensive, that they were impossible for any individual to meaningfully absorb. The hope that a definitive or comprehensive view of Newton might be revealed revealed itself to be futile. Dry even concludes that the endeavor is fundamentally misguided.
The first two Newtonbooks I wrote about here took two distinct strategies to avoid the trap presented. James Gleick’s Isaac Newton took the light touch, providing a readable biography that was blessed with being selective in what it presented to a reader. Thomas Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter focused on a lesser known chapter of Newton’s life — his role as Warden of the Royal Mint. Levenson’s book was blessed with seeing Newton out in London, interacting with the world, and thus managed the feat of stepping far enough back from the man that we could begin to see him more fully in his time and place. What emerged was a far more interesting portrait than one man being the turning point of history.
Levenson’s most recent book, Money for Nothing, takes this a step further, to the point that we no longer have a “Newton book”. The real subject is the South Sea Bubble, the arrival of modern finance, and the connection to the “Scientific Revolution”. Newton’s significance, beyond having himself bought shares in the South Sea Company, is that he had developed the keenest understanding yet of the relationship between equations and the world that they could represent.
Ultimately, this mathematical insight is at the heart of modern physics, the science that Newton, more than any other single thinker, would create. It it’s simplest form, the idea is this: the full picture, the complete geometrical representation of all the available solutions to a system of equations, can be understood as all the possible outcomes for a given phenomena described by that mathematics. Each specific calculation, fed with observations of the current state of the whatever you’re interested in, the flight of a cannonball, the motion of a planet, how a curveball swerves, how rapidly an outbreak of the plague might spread, makes a prediction for what will happen next. In his twenties, working on his own, with almost no systematic experience of the study of the real world, Newton did not yet grasp the full power of the ideas implied by the way he had begun to think about the math. That would come in time. But what made his annus mirabilis so miraculous, was the speed and depth with which Newton forged the foundations of his ultimately revolutionary way of comprehending the world.
Money For Nothing, Thomas Levenson
Levenson explains that this was not the Ponzi scheme of capitalism that many claim it is. The value the South Sea shares was a measure of trust that the Treasury could reliably pay out in future. Even in these early days of state finance, there was an understanding that a state that was constantly borrowing could also be worthy and trusted creditor. The theory was that the size of the national debt as it stood was only important when considered against the future productivity of the nation. In principal, and indeed in practice, a nation that invested in itself would grow and develop economically, allowing itself to making good on future repayments.
The second advantage that the British government possessed was the inexorable passage of time. The funds it borrowed at any moment became bets on the nation’s economic life year over year. The wager was that the ongoing work of every new enterprise, each voyage, everything that Britons did to get and spend in the future, would create enough wealth to support the debts being incurred. The chancellor of the Exchequer didn’t have to treat every expense as a pay-as-you-go imperative. Whole nations, as London’s monetary thinkers has discovered, need not perform the virtues embodied in the very good advice to pay off a credit card balance in full every month. Rather, the task was to balance the needs of the moment with an analytical picture that could be drawn of Britain as a whole, all its getting and spending and accumulation, integrated over years to come.
Money For Nothing
Making this case can be divisive. Indeed many, such as Daniel Defoe, seem to have been divided within themselves about this development; on one hand despising the traders and stockjobbers who ran the secondary markets, while supporting the state borrowing that they enabled on the other. Many readers, if they were to correctly read the argument I believe the book is making, would probably object to it. The argument is that national debt and secondary markets for financial products are important, necessary, and work (except when they don’t). Making this argument can be as tricky as convincing someone of the merits of modern art or free verse. In the case of government borrowing and stock markets, the most obvious problem you have in this case is what ultimately befell the South Sea Company.
After almost a decade of providing reliable and unremarkable returns via direct Treasury payments, there was in 1720 an attempt to convert a huge amount of illiquid government debt into the liquid and more manageable form of South Sea Shares. At this point, the win-win-win equation that held between company, shareholder, and government was badly abused. Just about every kind of financial crime was practiced (insider trading, artificially pumping up prices, and outright bribery), and over course of the year the price of the shares increased ten-fold, from 100 GBP to 1000 GBP.
Among the reasons Levenson presents for the South Sea Stock crashing at the moment it did, was a collective realization that the stock could not offer a rate of return any better than the most ordinary of private loans. In truth the company couldn’t even offer that. In a desperate attempt to prop up the share price, a completely unsustainable dividend of 50 GBP was offered to shareholders. While that would be a magnificent return on the “par” price of 100 GBP, on the recent sale price of 1000 GBP this was a very ordinary 5% return.
William Hogarth – The South Sea Scheme
I cannot help but draw analogies with the current excitement around cryptocurrencies. In place of Hogarth’s satirical paintings, Defoe’s commentary, and Pope’s poetry, which accompany Levenson’s account, we have Twitter memes about buying the dip and right-clicking NTF art. We can also imagine that once cryptocurrencies begin to look a lot more “boring”, there might be a major correction. From this perspective the volatility of cryptocurrencies is less a liability and more of a feature.
If we are to embrace the analogy, there is a dis-quietening reality that the South Sea Bubble offers. Although the share price crashed, the political careers ended, and assets seized from many of the incriminated, the financial tools and derivatives that made it all possible would go on to form the backbone of modern finance (with some occasional regulation, if you can believe it). Similarly, even if bitcoin and etherium suffer some almighty crash, it doesn’t mean that it won’t find a place in the long term landscape of finance.
To be clear, I do not welcome a bitcoin future. Plenty of people, in particular those who understand what a blockchain actually is, are writing in strong terms about how little this offers. But at the heart of why I don’t like cryptocurrency is my suspicion of the world it would produce. As of the moment the main contributions of cryptocurrency to society are enabling cyber criminals looking to profit from ransomware, and diverting huge amounts of computational hardware, time, and energy towards “mining” these tokens. It is a libertarian future where governments can’t meddle with money on our behalf.
The South Sea Bubble, a Scene in ‘Change Alley in 1720 1847, exhibited 1847 Edward Matthew Ward 1816-1879 Presented by Robert Vernon 1847 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N00432
Where is Newton left in all of this? As best we can tell, he wisely sold his initial investment in the South Sea Company, at a profit, mid way through the bubble. He then unwisely reinvested later, as the price continued its precipitous rise, and lost out when the bubble crashed. So Newton, for all his unprecedented insight, was just as vulnerable to making a fool of himself as the rest.
Instead Levenson presents us with with Archibald Hutcheson MP, who despite his lack of scientific training best embodied the scientific analysis of the market when he sat down an began computations to derive how much the shares would have to return to justify their price.
This was recognizably a scientific revolutionary’s way of thinking. In the Principia Newton had constructed mathematical models that could explore the behavior over time of the moons of Jupiter or could predict the motion of a comet with a track that remained mostly unknown. He published his results both as an exercise in scientific reasoning and with persuasive intent: he sought to persuade his readers that what he had discovered “cannot fail to be true.” In his earlier writings, Hutcheson attempted much the same double act. His work focused on the dynamics of budgets instead of celestial bodies, but it spoke in the same unassailable language of numbers in flux — and thus asserted a claim to like power: just as Newton had declared his system of the world, Hutcheson’s arguments could not fail to be on the money.
Money For Nothing
Although this paragraph is immediately followed by a caveat.
There was, of course, a key difference between Hutcheson’s calculations and the utterly authoritative demonstrations in the Principia. When Newton bragged about his work’s unassailable accuracy, he could let nature be the judge, pointing to the agreement between his mathematical account of a comet’s flight and the track it actually traversed. Hutcheson could not command such certainty. Instead, he used the cultural power Newton and his friends had given to mathematical reasoning to strengthen his political argument. Whatever truth his algebra might contain was continent on the uncertain behavior of the human actors involved in any financial choice.
Money For Nothing
I have often been perplexed to read of kings, rulers, and governments being compelled to certain courses of action by economic necessity. It is hard to buy into a motivation you have little intuition for, and that belongs to a game for you don’t know the rules. Currency crises and borrowing crises and monetary crises and even national productivity crises are often referenced with little explanation. This is all to admit a glaring hold in my own education, but I certainly can’t imagine that I’m the only one.
It is a testament to the success of Levenson’s book that I found it as enlightening as I did. Having read no previous account of the South Sea Bubble, I was effectively going in cold. Levenson takes the reader through all the mechanics of the swaps and trades, providing the important back of the envelope calculations that make sense of what happened. There is no unnecessary hand-holding, and I did reread certain passages, but it was all there. On top of this, Levenson populates his account with an impressive dramatis personae, providing a vivid portrait of British society reacting to these events. The final chapters outlined the future success of British state borrowing, and I possessed a good sense of what that actually meant. I will be able to make far sense of at least some of the history I was reading than I did before.
There are some conspicuous omissions in Levenson’s narrative. While the South Sea Company’s involvement in the slave trade is covered (practiced, but not profitably) there is no consideration of how the rise of credit based finance might have driven the growth of the trade itself. There is far more discussion of how financing Britain’s wars made a secondary market for government issued debt necessary, and it is argued that the success of the treasury policy that Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister, developed in the aftermath of the bubble both incentivized avoiding war while also enabling Britain to “punch above it’s weight” when it did go to war. I found the passages that did address this particularly interesting, and would have read more. But there was no reflection on the implications of a system that enabled Empire, and while Levenson mentions the industrial revolution in Britain as a triumph for capital, I was left wondering about the huge social cost to the working classes of Britain.
To be fair, this would be the subject of a different book. (David Graeber’s Debt springs to mind). There is a very specific moral that Levenson wants to lead the reader to: That the crash of 2008 was fundamentally no different from the crash of 1720. Financial markets are ingenious human inventions, but they need careful supervision and regulation.
A fine message — and I agree. But given what was being invested in back in 18th Century England, you might imagine that some people would have been quite happy to have seen the system crash, investors ruined, and a political system collapse. There are very different kinds of consequences out there that investors or a nation should consider than a crash. Dangers we should also be vigilant for and legislate against.
Early in October I made my long awaited trip across the Atlantic. After a year and a half of an international travel ban, international uncertainty, and international levels of mooching about the house, things moved very quickly. The gears of the US immigration system had finally started turning again and I entered the US under a National Interest Exemption (which was far less glamorous than it sounds). A month later and the floodgates were open to all the suitably vaccinated from the UK/Europe.
Now I’m married and in the process of settling down and making this place my home. It came as something of a relief to discover that while the waiting times have grown on processing paperwork in every other state institution, I was able to get hold of both a library card and marriage license in under a week. It was in the library that I recently discovered the local newspaper, which did not disappoint.
I will miss walking along the bit of the river Thames that passed us by in Oxford. I certainly was not getting the full Magdalen college experience I thought I was signing up for when I took the position. The bicycling between the department and college for lunch, an occasional boozy high table dinner, and department seminars felt like a very brief and distant chapter in my life. I still get chapel updates in my email inbox (and you can watch recordings of Evensong on their Youtube channel).
A regatta on the Thames.
I’ve taken up the role of a rather callow would-be Tocqueville trying my best to make my observations about this America we’ve all heard so very much about. There is plenty to go at here in New England; there are so many little details that seem to separate the place from anything you might expect to encounter in Europe. There is the huge main road that cuts right through the middle of town that rivals the Champs-Élysées in breadth, but not in French-i-ness. There is the habit of sidewalks to be pulled away, out from beneath your feet, in certain neighborhoods; a feature of what I understand to be a sacred part of each American’s autonomy to decide things for themselves. I stared at one gas-station for a while trying to work out why it seemed so singularly a New England gas-station, and I finally settled on the Doric columns that framed the windows.
While the fall colours blossom in their red, yellows, and gold, the commercial store-fronts and advertisements struck me as strangely washed out. I only half believed my senses until we drove past an Aldi, and its colours leaped out at me as if they had imported high saturation colour along with their own German brand of discount supermarket experience.
I really did feel stuck in Oxford for the past year and a half. There was plenty of mathematics that I managed to get done that I was very pleased with (this paper with Sam, and this more recent article), but it really wasn’t where I wanted to be when the music stopped.
I won’t say that this was a coping mechanism for dealing with the circumstances, but there were times when I was very happy to fall down certain Youtube rabbit holes. Nothing political, extreme, or conspiratorial (although I understand these have been very popular), but certainly nerdy. My personal favorite was discovering the community of youtubers dedicated to the pursuit of constructing elaborately complicated model kits for giant Japanese Gundam battle suits. I’ve never watched the associated anime television series, nor tried constructing any of these kits myself, but giant robots need little explanation. I found something both soothing an compelling about watching these particular videos, on double playback speed (so I didn’t actually have to sit through the full twenty minutes).
There is an almost medical degree of precision committed to these builds, and plenty of nerdy tools and technique brought to bear. You’d think they were putting together a satellite in a clean room. Added to the constructions themselves is the video production itself, with all the camera’s, lenses, microphones, editing, and really every video is the product of two distinct headaches. Thinking about it harshes the mellow though, so I wouldn’t dwell on it.
With the level of unnecessary detail on these model robots, I was reminded of the lavishly illustrated Dorling Kindersley “look inside” books I would get as a Christmas present when I was growing up. These huge hard backed coffee-table-books-for-kids offered interior cross sections of Man-of-Wars, 747s, and the space shuttle. And in one notable series, the interiors of the vehicles from the Star Wars universe. That a fictional universe should be given the same attention as the real one didn’t bother the younger me in the least. For an eight year old the Star Wars universe was a far more immediately accessible and vivid world. To an adult the books look like and elaborate joke, but to a kid they were as serious as Star Wars itself.
I am telling myself that it must be a sign of deep maturity on my part that I look at the two above images and feel more of an urge to read some Patrick O’Brian rather than watch The Mandalorian.
[This is my third post on Newton. Previous posts: one and two.]
If you were to take a look around you during a math department seminar or colloquium, you would witness the audience’s attention begin to drift as the talk sunk further into detail and became increasingly difficult to follow. Losing interest in a talk is more or less expected, and the professional mathematicians in the audience come prepared. Maybe they bring a paper to read, or possibly exam scripts to grade. Sometimes they will turn to a fresh page of their notebook and begin doing some actual mathematics of their own.
As a graduate student at McGill, I remember watching a postdoc fill up a page with long exact sequences and all kinds of diagrams, the notation veering into doodles as he got stuck at what must have been a familiar dead-end. It was a rare, voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s solitary mathematical practice. I later asked this postdoc — whose notebook I presumed was full of such pages — if he ever went back and reread what he had written. No, he admitted, with a guilty smile.
Which was a relief. Not only because my own notebooks were full of repetitious dead-ends, but also because I too almost never went back to review anything I’d written.
Much has been made of Imposter Syndrome among academics — doubting whether we have truly earned whatever position we have reached given how paltry our contributions can sometimes feel. There is a related sense of insecurity to be found in wondering if you are doing mathematics correctly. To be clear, I don’t mean whether a proof we have written up is sound, but whether or not our process of formulating and devising them is the the “proper” way. As if there might be a correct way (or even a professional way) of doing mathematics.
These are not new concerns to have.
Isaac Newton was incredibly secretive in his work and did not have anything approaching students as we might describe them. But after his death, the calculus he developed would form the foundation of modern mathematical and scientific education at Cambridge.
Those who scribbled hastily on those exam papers were students, above all, of Newton’s mathematical physics. Though Newton had not cultivated a following during his own tenure at Cambridge, by the end of the eighteenth century the principals laid down in the Principia — and in particular the mathematical contents of that book — formed the basis for an intensely competitive system of testing at the university by which students were ranked in descending order based on their results on terminal examinations. known as the “Mathematical Tripos.” (The origin of the term Tripos is uncertain, but it may refer to the three legged stool on which students originally sat to take the oral examinations.)
The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 85
The material, and especially the notation, would be modernized as European influences arrived, but Newton did not lose his centrality. The manner in which he actually arrived at his great insights became a matter of interest. There is a great distinction between how discoveries are made, and how they finally appear on the page. Everyone knew how they personally went about doing mathematics, and even how their tutors told them to do mathematics, but was that the same as how Newton went about making his original discoveries? For all they knew, it might have all been provided to him by divine revelation.
On the Quadrature of Curves. See the Cambridge website to view more scans of Newton’s papers.
In 1872 a means of settling the question presented itself. Newton’s papers — or at least a large portion of them, covering far more than mathematical physics — had resided for nearly 150 years in the library of one of England’s aristocratic houses: Hurstbourne park. But now the Earl of Portsmouth was donating the scientific portion of papers back to the University of Cambridge.
Newton had been famously coy about his own methods, suggesting that he had kept his true means of discovering the Principia private and had only cast them publicly in the language of geometry. The question was therefore whether he adhered to the rigorous, manly, and above all morally upright techniques of thinking that Cambridge undergraduates were coached to acquire. To answer this Stokes and Adams were forced to consider whether Newton himself should — or could– be held accountable to the techniques that were mastered in his name. The Newton papers had the potential to probe more deeply the shadowy divide between patient work and divine inspiration, offering the promise of settling not simply what Newton had done but how he had done it. […] the question had a special urgency at Cambridge where the moral value of study was paramount. In that respect the Newton papers mattered for every undergraduate preparing for the Tripos and for what the Tripos itself stood for. Would the man who served as a model for what should be learned also reveal himself through his private papers, as a model for how to learn?
The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 88
Sarah Dry, author of The Newton Papers, a chronicle of the journey Newton’s writings took after his death, presents an interesting comparison of the two mathematicians, John Couch Adams and George Gabriel Stokes, who were tasked with making sense of his old notebook papers.
John Couch Adams (1819-1882),
On the one hand was John Couch Adams, whose ability to compute mathematically in his head was the stuff of Cambridge legend. This savant-like ability came with a tenacious reluctance to write anything down. This reluctance cost English astronomers the first opportunity to observe Neptune. Having deduced, from Uranus’ orbital irregularities, where a mystery planet should be found in the night sky, he failed to explain himself clearly to the astronomical bigwigs, who had little patience for the recent graduate. Roughly a year later, in 1846, the Frenchman Urbain Le Verrier managed to solve the problem and pointed his country’s own telescopes in the right direction. Adams was left with nothing but his incomplete written accounts and undated papers declaring his discovery, making establishing precedence impossible. Not that he seemed much bothered by losing out on the glory. He was personally very satisfied simply to have managed the computation.
Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet (1819-1903)
George Gabriel Stokes (of Navier-Stokes and Stokes’ Theorem) on the other hand, wrote compulsively, both mathematically and in personal correspondence (often to ease his own insecurities). Later in life he became editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, then the foremost journal in science, and this involved dealing with a huge amount of correspondence. Unfortunately he was a hoarder of papers of all and every kind, filling the rooms at his disposal with tables on which to pile up his papers. This was all compounded by his inclination towards procrastination
They might have made a formidable team, had their temperaments combined to negate the other’s weaknesses. Instead the project to deliver a verdict on the value of Newton’s papers and reveal his way of thinking was subject to great delay. Of the two however, it seems that Adams was the one who was most readily able to probe the documents deeply. Sarah Dry quotes Glaisher (Adam’s obituarist) as saying:
[…it was a] difficult and laborious task, extending over years, but once which intensely interested him, and upon which he spared no pains. In several instances he succeeded in tracing the methods that Newton must have used in order to obtain the numerical results which occurred in the papers. The solution of the enigmas presented by these numbers written on stray papers, without any clue to the source from which they were derived, was the kind of work in which all Adam’s skill, patience, and industry found full scope, and his enthusiasm for Newton was so great that he had no thought of time when so employed. His mind bore naturally a great resemblance to Newton’s in many marked respects, and he was so penetrated with Newton’s style of thought that he was peculiarly fitted to be his interpreter. Only a few intimate friends were aware of the immense amount of time he devoted to these manuscripts of the pleasure he derived from them.
John Glaisher — Memoir of the life of John Couch Adams
What Adams was doing, in his own manner, was nerding out. As with the discovery of Neptune, it seems that his motivations were overwhelmingly personal, and less in service to the scientific community. Imagine a referee today reading the paper under review very carefully, but forgetting to take notes and neglecting to get back to the editor. Nevertheless, conclusions were eventually drawn out of their little committee and a report of their findings was presented.
Here was confirmation that Newton had indeed worked by process of refinement that inevitably included false starts and error. In this sense, Newton revealed himself to be less an otherworldly genius and more a figure with whom the Cambridge wranglers could identify, a tireless worker in the mathematical trenches, where progress was made by increments rather than leaps. Adams knew the feeling well. In 1853 he had published an important paper pointing out errors made by Laplace in determining lunar motion and promising to provide the correct calculations soon; it had taken him six long years to get the final numbers. Here, in the papers, was evidence that Newton had worked just as hard to come up with his results.
The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 105
By the time I had finished my PhD I had produced a sizable pile of used dollar-store notebooks. Browsing through them I could recognize the contours of what I’d spent the past four years trying (and occasionally succeeding) to do. I might even have reconstructed from the pictures and computations I had written out what I might have actually been thinking at the time. And aside from myself, there are a few people in the world who could possibly make sense of their contents. It all went in the recycling. If somehow one of my notebooks did manage to survive, and made its way into the hands of future scholars, I would be alarmed to consider them giving the content more than cursory attention.
The hundreds (?) of pdfs that I have produced, now sitting out there in the cloud stand a far better chance at outliving me. And not just my published work and arxiv pre-prints (which number in the tens). But everything I ever committed to a latex document in my own personal space up there in the cyber heavens. Among all the discarded drafts that might find evidence of something interesting. Not only what I managed to do, but also what I failed to do. What I thought I had succeeded in doing, but had in fact betrayed my own good sense. When I have found mistakes, I am occasionally mindful enough to leave a short note in all-caps to make it clear where the point of failure lies. There is a great deal we can learn from knowing what other mathematicians have tried and failed to do.
Unlike physical notebooks, our cloud storage is password protected. Digital inheritance is already “a thing”, but it seems unclear to me how it will work out in practice. Kafka left his manuscripts in the possession of Max Brod with the instructions that they be destroyed in the event of his death. Brod told Kafka himself that he certainly wouldn’t, and indeed when Kafka died at the age of 40 as a consequence of tuberculosis, Brod set about getting Kafka’s work published. I haven’t taken a survey, but I would imagine that most young writers have made no attempt to ensure their passwords and unpublished estates are in suitable hands. In principal it is possible to submit a request to Google for access to the accounts of the deceased, but I can’t imagine there are any guarantees. I certainly have no idea what the terms and conditions that I have accepted have to say about such eventualities.
Newton died a man of wealth and importance. With neither wife nor children he had no direct descendants, but he did have a slew of half-nephews, half-nieces, and children of his half-sisters. The assets of obvious value were split between them. Those assets of less obvious value — the leftover pile of notebooks and “reams of loose and foul papers” fell into the possession of Catherine Conduitt. She was one of Newton’s half-nieces, and wife to John Conduitt, who had actively assisted Newton in his duties as master of the Royal Mint. This was the consequence of some rather wild tying-up of loose ends:
Newton had died while holding the post of master of the Mint, which in those days required that its holder assume personal responsibility for the probity of each new coinage of money. That meant that at Newton’s death he had nominal debts amounting to the entire sum of Great Britain’s national coinage. John Conduitt agreed to take on this debt until the coinage had been certified, accepting liability for any imperfections in the coins. In exchange for assuming this risk, he asked for, and was granted Newton’s manuscripts.
The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 15
The Conduitts took ownership of these papers with the view of producing a biography, and begin the work of securing Newton’s posthumous reputation. They became the first in a long line of people who had access to the papers, but lacked the tools really required to properly make sense of them. Their daughter, Kitty Conduitt married John Wallop who would become the Earl of Portsmouth, and papers would enter the library of Hurstbourne Park, seat of the Portsmouth family. (That is to say they fell into the possession of the aristocracy.) And it was there that they would remain, save occasional minor forays, and the recovery of the substantial portion of scientific papers by Stokes and Adams. What finally shifted the remaining papers out into the open was the fall of the English Aristocracy. In 1936, under the financial pressure of death duties and a recent divorce, Gerald Wallop, the ninth Earl of Portsmouth had the papers put up for auction at Sothebys.
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (1883-1946)
If there is a hero in Dry’s account of the Newton Papers, it must be John Maynard Keynes. His heroic virtue being exceptional taste and judgement. Having begun collecting books as a child (possibly his first foray into speculation) he developed a rather prescient sense for what should be considered valuable. Unlike the majority of collectors he shared the marketplace with, Keynes was actually interested in reading the books themselves. He was less interested in the superficial qualities: illuminations, illustrations, binding, or an illustrious list of prior owners left him unmoved.
Keynes’s new style of collection was self-consciously intellectual, as opposed to aesthetic or literary. It asserted that a particular history of ideas or chain of thought linked certain men through the ages. And it projected the implicit assumption that its creator was an inheritor of both the material and the intellectual masterpieces of a previous age. Keynes was a thoroughgoing Bloomsburyite in his respect. The paintings on the wall, the rugs on the floor, the furnishing in the room, and the books on the shelves were never just things: they were the physical embodiment of ideas and values whose display was a source of both aesthetic pleasure and moral reinforcement. A book in the hand, like the good life in Bloomsbury of the Sussex countryside, linked the life of the mind with that of the physical world.
The Newton Papers – Sarah Dry, pg 147
You might already get the sense that Dry sees Keynes as simply bringing a new set of beliefs to the table, complete with their own set of limitations. Indeed, Keynes considerable contribution to our modern impression and understanding of Newton as half magician and half scientist, was really a very hot take based on an initial reading. He was the one who announced that the papers reveal Newton devoted great time and energy to the disreputable pursuits of alchemy and heretical theology. Yet the fact that so many of Newton’s papers have remained together and in the possession of the University of Cambridge can be attributed to his prescience sense of the papers’ importance.
Abraham Shalom Yahuda (on the right) (1877–1951)
Kaynes was only one of two major buyers at Sotheby’s. Abraham Yahuda, a scholar of ancient languages, bought most of Newton’s theological writings. Yahuda had found himself alienated from his own field of scholarship, due to recent developments in Higher Criticism applied to biblical scholarship. The Documentary Hypothesis was a shocking new line of textual analysis that argued the origins of the Torah were of combination and synthesis with earlier texts. As a consequence, these texts cease to resemble one coherent whole revealed to man, and begin to look more like artifacts of history and culture.
For Yahuda this was a vision of criticism taken to extremes, the text reduced to nothing but error, the possibility of meaning dissolving amid a multiplicity of authors, leaving only commentary, a Talmud with no Torah left in it. He thought in particular that too many sources were being attributed to the Pentateuch and that too many “experts” were exerting themselves “in the art of text alterations and source-hunting.” Thus “the original text was distorted and disfigured and in its place was offered a quite new text of pure invention.” In Newton, who himself sought to return a blemished Christianity to its purer origins, Yahuda found a kindred soul. Interpreting ancient texts didn’t require robbing them of fixed meaning. Both Newton and Yahuda sought instead to find a singular truth amid the variations.
The Newton papers – Sarah Dry, pg170
As a consequence of Yahuda’s desire to find an ally in Newton, those theological papers now reside in The National Library of Israel.
The final portion of Dry’s book concerns the subsequent attempts at synthesis of the material. The fact of the matter is that the task was simply impossible. There is too much material, covering too many subjects for any grand unifying conclusions to be drawn. It was hard to even put together a definitive edition of the Principia that covered all the different editions as well as Newton’s own marginalia. When finally published it was controversial due to the inevitable editorial decisions to include or not include certain material.
It is worth making one final point clear. I have never read Newtons’ Principia. I don’t believe you could find a research mathematician alive who has — unless their research happens to be the history of mathematics. It is a book whose significance is measured in its influence. Many decisions in its composition — in particular the modelling Newton’s Laws on the axioms in Euclid’s Elements — were very important. But you should not read it. When we discuss “great” books, there is usually the tacit understanding that we are missing out if we have not actually read the book. I am quite certain that we have not missed out.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke’s alternate history fairy-tale, opens with one of its characters asking a question that carries through the rest of the novel’s thousand pages.
“Mr Segundus wished to know,” he said, “why modern magicians were unable to work the magic they wrote about. In short, he wished to know why there was no more magic done in England.”
This is an England that had once been a very magical place, yet is no longer so. Over the decade “history” the novel covers (1806-1817) we see two new magicians arrive to provide their spells in service to their county in the Napoleonic Wars. The magic of previous generations had been lost, or forgotten, or become dysfunctional in some way. This was apparently despite the many books about/of magic that had been written by the very real magicians of the past, making their secrets and practices clear. Indeed, as the novel opens, England has many leaned societies of magicians, but these members are exclusively of a “theoretical” type — quite unable to cast a single simple spell.
The title characters are our heroes, of a sort. Mr Norrell, an uncharitable and unsociable Yorkshire gentleman who had devoted his youth to carefully studying the remaining books of magic, while also hoarding them away from others. Jonathan Strange, the more sympathetic of the two, is of a more obsessive and intuitive character, sociable and likable, ready to befriend Norrell, and complement his own innate ability by becoming Norrell’s apprentice.
Reviewers have noted the imbalance between the two protagonists, with Strange being the more compelling of the two, yet only actually arriving in the narrative proper a third of the way in. I personally found a great deal interesting in Norrell, however, when I recognized parallels between him and the Isaac Newton I had recently been reading about. Indeed, as I previouslydescribed, many of Newton’s pursuits could be described as attempts to recover magical techniques or knowledge from the past that had become lost or forgotten. Norrell’s inclination towards either preserving his recovered knowledge and even monopolize magic are reflected in many of Newton’s own inclinations. The ultimate difference being that science is not magic, and Newton himself was indebted to many of his contemporaries, (most controversially to John Flamsteed for astronomical data). But if you were trying to imagine the mentality of a man like Isaac Newton, I think you could do much worse than consider the character of Norrell.
It can be considered a kind of rule in story telling that you make a promise at the start of a story and you must deliver on it by the end. The question of why there is no magic done in the England certainly makes a clear promise that some kind of light will be shed on the matter. While neither the reader, nor the characters, get direct or complete answers to that question, we do however learn a great deal that is interesting on the subject. Plenty can be deduced a careful reader — enough to leave the book satisfied.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was a publishing sensation. Bloomsbury invested heavily in marketing it, imagining that it would allow them to expand beyond their foundation of Harry Potter sales. I think it is fair to say that almost twenty years on, it is regarded as a classic. In as far as such a thing could be said at this point. I certainly found the length no obstacle, and by the final third I was enraptured by the characters’ unfolding trajectories and their ultimate ends.
It is easy to say that a novel is just words on the page, but the word “just” is doing a great deal of heavy lifting. I find myself increasingly paying attention to what goes on in an individual paragraph the way that film buffs concern themselves with actors, cinematography, and special effects. Take the following paragraph, which demonstrates quite well the Austen-esque prose styling along with Clarke’s ability to capture the regional richness of England which I either never really encountered or appreciated before in English fiction.
At no. 9 Harley-street Lady Pole’s country servants were continually ill at ease, afraid of going wrong and never sure of what was right. Even their speech was found fault with and mocked. Their Northamptonshire accent was not always intelligible to the London servants (who, it must be said, made no very great efforts to understand them) and they used words like goosegogs, sparrow-grass, betty-cat and battle-twigs, when they should have said gooseberries, asparagus, she-cat and ear wigs
pg 173
The list of alternates given in that paragraph pass by quickly in the way that good set dressing, special effects, and cinematography do, but this is harder to pull of than you might imagine. The following paragraph similarly stood out to me, again for it’s command of its setting, but also for the kind of fantastical whimsy that the likes of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Neil Gaiman manage to tap into. If it could be meaningfully produced industrially you’d find it sold in the Harry Potter stores scattered all across England.
Whereupon Mr Strange told them how, to his certain knowledge, there had been four copies of The Language of Birds in England not more than five years ago: one in a Gloucester bookseller’s; one in the private library of gentleman-magician in Kendal; one the private property of a blacksmith near Penzance who had taken it in part payment for mending an iron-gate; and one stopping a gap in a window of the boy’s school in the close of Durham Cathedral.
pg 281
For those of you reading this who are put off by a thousand page door stop, there is also the BBC miniseries adaptation that I hear was pretty good. And if you would prefer a shorter novel, her second, Piranesi was released last year, is much shorter, and also very good. The New Yorker wrote a good profile of Clarke discussing it.
[This post is something of a sequel to my previous post.]
William Chaloner was born sometime around 1650, making him maybe a decade older than Isaac Newton. He did not receive the schooling Newton did, and he certainly didn’t have a chance at Cambridge. He had the misfortune to be apprenticed into a trade with little future: making nails. A machine — the slitting mill — had arrived that readily produced rods of steel that could easily be cut up and hammed into nails, rendering a previously skilled trade an unskilled one. With protective guilds unwilling to admit him into a more lucrative trade, and arriving in London with no obvious means to support himself, he turned to criminal enterprises.
That is, Chaloner’s first attempt to rise above mere subsistence turned him into a purveyor of sex toys. London in the 1690s was as famous, or perhaps notorious, for its spirit of sexual innovation as Berlin would be in the 1920s. Prostitution was ubiquitous, as much a part of the life of the wealthy as it was that of the poor, who supplied most of the trade’s worker’s. The best brothels vied to outdo each other in their range of offerings — so much so that Dr. John Arbuthnot, a man about town in the early eighteenth century apparently spoke for many when he told a madam at one of the better houses, “A little of your plain fucking for me if you please!”
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson, pg 57
Chaloner soon moved on to various forms of con-artistry: quack medical advice, divination, and “thief-taking”. The latter involved informing on criminals or political subversives in order to collect financial reward. The Metropolitan police would not be formed until the 19th century, so such people were often the only avenue available for bringing criminals to justice. But the thief-takers often played both sides, exploiting whatever opportunities they could get, and often goaded people into committing crimes so that they could be “caught”. Chaloner made it his business to play both sides.
However much Chaloner made from such rackets — and it would not have been inconsiderable — he wanted more. And the biggest racket in all of England was going on in plain sight, with evidence everywhere to be seen. The racket in question was counterfeiting the King’s coin.
It was not an especially sophisticated game. The low production quality of hammered coins meant that an enterprising fellow could clip the edge of a coin and the coin would still be a coin, but you also had a fingernail of precious gold or silver. And in England it was silver that was of interest. The state of the commodity markets in Europe meant that you could take your pile of silver clippings to continental Europe, buy their cheaper gold, then return to England and convert it all back to silver at a profit and start clipping all over again. Classic arbitrage.
As a consequence, the silver coins of England were beginning to look somewhat diminished. Many of them weren’t even silver at all. Many were outright counterfeits made of baser metals. This caused all kinds of problems, not least of which was the ability of King William III to pay his own troops to fight his war in France. Foreign bankers were unwilling to accept English currency at a good price, and silver was vanishing from England for mainland Europe.
The solution was the Great Recoinage of 1696. The old coins were to be replaced with new machine-struck coins that bore milled edges to prevent clipping and render counterfeiting extremely difficult. This British state at this point in history was rife with corruption, sinecures, and cronyism, so initially at least this whole project was chaotic and in real danger of disaster. It was during this financial turmoil that Chaloner seized the opportunity and set up sophisticated counterfeiting operations that managed to produce high quality fakes of the new coins.
Reading Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson, it is unclear if counterfeiting really was so great a scam. Certainly there was no effective law enforcement in England at this time. And while Chaloner was committing a capital offense, juries were unwilling to sentence men to death on the contradictory hearsay that actually arrived in court. That said, the kind of operation Chaloner ran required the cooperation of a great many people. Not only the skilled craftsmen required to make the dies used to cast the fake coins, and the crew to actually run the production line, but also the actual buyers for the knock-off coins. All these people could potentially betray you. Even if you did not face the executioner, you might have to endure a brief stay in London’s hellish Newgate jail.
The jail used in 1696 was almost brand new, constructed on top of the ruins left by the Great Fire of 1666. The facade of the rebuilt prison was given a hint of the elegance with which its architect, Sir Christoper Wren, hoped to endow the whole city. But such graces did nothing to alter the essential character of a place that was, as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders put it, not “the emblem of hell itself” but a kind of entrance to it” too. Defoe wrote from personal experience: he had been imprisoned there briefly, for debt. Other celebrated inmates confirmed Defoe’s judgement. Casanova, imprisoned at Newgate under accusation of child rape, called it “this abode of misery and despair,” and infernal place “such as Dante might have conceived.”
pg 151
Chaloner would be pursued, with unusual diligence, for his crimes by the recently appointed Warden of the Mint who he had been provoking with the particular flagrancy of his crimes and deceits. In what was an act of considerable bravado Chaloner, who had already been caught for counterfeiting activities, conducted a political campaign to gain access to the Royal Mint, ostensibly to offer his “expertise”, but in reality to take whatever advantage he could. This political campaign involved impugning the newly arrived Warden. As perhaps the title of Levenson’s book has given away, this Warden was Isaac Newton, the celebrated natural philosopher.
Given the absence of anything remotely like a rigorous understanding of economics, soliciting Newton’s views on the currency crisis in England was a pretty reasonable thing to do. That said, everyone seemed to have a view on potential solutions. Newton’s own views would be borne out — not just his understanding that re-coinage was necessary, but also the inevitable failure of having a currency simultaneously based on both gold and silver, and his prescient views on the potential of fiat currency. But his duties as Warden of the Mint were simply to oversee the re-coining, and prosecute clippers and counterfeiters.
The first of these tasks Newton was eminently suited, given his facility with quantitative reasoning. He also had the virtue of considering his position as more than a mere sinecure. Having tired of life in Cambridge, he had been seeking some eminent position in London with which to apply his talents. He made the entire process the object of his attention, from the amount of coal consumed each day, to the rate at which the crews could, and reasonably should, hammer our the coins. Under his oversight the re-coining was completed ahead of schedule. (And to the standards of the day, far more safely than it would have otherwise been done).
The second of his tasks — prosecuting counterfeiters — he abhorred. Nevertheless Newton proved himself to be utterly ruthless. The full details of the lengths he went to have been lost — in that the paperwork was deliberately destroyed in part of what was likely a cover-up.
Conduitt chose not to explain why Newton wanted to destroy the papers, but one inference is that Newton enjoyed the role of inquisitor too much. In this view, Newton proved willing, perhaps eager, to terrorize his captives in pursuit of the necessary confessions and betrayals with a viciousness that even that strong-stomached time would tolerate. Formally, torture had not been used in England as an investigative tool for about half a century before Newton came to the Mint. Elizabeth I had face repeated rebellion, often animated by Catholic ambitions on her Protestant throne — and she was England’s most prolific torturing monarch …
But while official torture fell out of favor, interrogators still knew how to put the boot in as needed. Isaac Newton had plenty of ways to extract the information he wanted from reluctant prisoners and he made use of them. Most of them were within the customary bounds of police detection: trading in fear, not pain. He offered brief reprieves for information: he coerced husbands with threats and promised rewards to wives and lovers. But there is one — and only one– reference to his use of more brutal methods in the records he did not burn. In March 1698, Newton received a letter from Newgate written by Thomas Carter, one of Chaloner’s closes associates. The letter was one of a flurry of messages Carter had sent to confirm that he was eager to testify against his former co-conspirator, but this one had a postscript. “I shall have Irons put on me tomorrow,” he wrote, “if yo[ur] Worship not order to the contrary.” In other words: Don’t hurt me! Please. I’ll talk. I’m ready.
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson pg 165
Ultimately, Newton was victorious. He was patient and methodical and able to rally his superior resources to hound his man, subjecting Chaloner to an extended stay in Newgate while he gathered witnesses and finally wrong-foot him in the trial. The trial itself being a brief and prejudiced affair, as characterized English justice at that time.
But beyond the torture and lack of due process, there was a central hypocrisy to Newton’s activities. Newton and his famous chums were themselves guilty of crimes quite reminiscent to the ones he was prosecuting. The main difference, I think, was that Newton was practicing the upper class equivalents, which were not concerned with actually making a pile of money, but of a more recreational nature. Here is a passage on his relationship with John Locke:
In part, he relished the opportunity to tutor so well regarded a man. He gave Locke a private, annotated edition of the Principia and composed for him a simplified version of the proof that gravity makes the planets travel elliptical orbits. But Newton’s intimacy with Locke seems to have extended well beyond such benevolent displays of mastery. From the beginning, Newton allowed himself to write openly about secret matters. Both men had subterranean interests — in alchemy, for one, the ancient study of processes of change in nature; and in questions of biblical interpretation and belief, which brought them to the edge of what the established English church would damn as heresy.
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson pg 43
And more seriously, and quite parallel to the crime of counterfeiting Newton was a very active alchemist. Literally attempting to turn base metals into gold. A process if successfully performed at scale would have created unprecedented economic chaos. But like I say, that wasn’t his ultimate goal. Really he was looking to alchemy to settle the theological implications of his scientific endeavors. He saw performing alchemy as a means of proving the intervention of “God” (or rather Newton’s own notion of God) in the natural world:
He knew that all the theorizing, all the theological argument, all the indirect evidence from the perfect design of the solar system could not match the value of one actual, material demonstration of the divine spirit transforming one metal into another in the here and now. If Newton could discover the method God used to produce gold from base mixtures, then he would know — and not just believe — the the King of Kings would indeed reign triumphant, forever and ever.
Newton and the Countereiter by Thomas Levenson pg 85
It should be understood that once you set aside all the secrecy and strange codes that Newton cloaked his alchemist pursuits in, the experiments he performed were serious and rigorous. Even if he failed to make any progress or establish any new body of knowledge. In this enterprise at least he resembles quite closely many of his peers — making quite serious, but ultimately unsuccessful attempts at making a breakthrough.
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William Chaloner was hanged from the neck until he was dead, on 22 March 1699. It was not the worse fate he could have met under English law. Newton was not in attendance. He would live on until 1727 when he died in his eighties and buried in Westminster Abbey.
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Levenson has a recently released book that seems to pick up where this one left off, tracking the rise of modern finance and the influence the Scientific Revolution had on it. I’ve also stumbled on this podcast where Cambridge historian of science, Patricia Fara, discusses her own upcoming book which seems to have considerable overlap with Levenson’s. The first question she is asked is how Isaac Newton managed to die a wealthy man, which was actually a pretty good place to start. (Newton had invested in the East India Trading company, which means, among other things, slavery.)
