5/12/2018 Five Equa tions Tha t Cha nge d the World - slide pdf.

c om

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Equa'ioot
~ i " e 
,La' [LaogeJ ,Le
WorlJ

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Bridges to Infinity: The Human Side of Mathematics

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~ i " e  ~ q u a f i o n t 

fLaf (LangeJ fLe

WorlJ
The Power and Poetry o f Mathematics

~ 

M i ~ ~ a e l  Guillen, P ~ . D . 

I i ! H Y P E R IO NI
N ew York

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Copyright ti::l1995, Dr. Michael Guillen

All rights reserved. No part o f this book may be used or reproduced in

any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.

Printed in the Umted States o f America. For information address:
Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, Ne w York, New York 10011.

Library o f Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Guillen, Michael.
Five equations that changed the world: the power and poetry of
mathematics I by Michael Guillen.-lst ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7868-8187-9
1. Physics-Popular works. 2. Equations. I. Title.
QC24.5.G85 1995
5 3 0 . 1 ' 5 ~ c 2 0  95-15199
CI P

Designed by Chris Welch

FI1IST PAPERBACK EDITION

7 9 10 8 6

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To L.urel,
.Lo ~ ..~  D I ~  .orlJ lor .La I.eHer

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Acknowledgments

For their exceptional talent and tenacity, I wish to thank my re

searchers, Noe Hinojosa, Jr., Laurel Lucas, Miriam Marcus, and
Monya Baker.
For his extraordinary patience, friendship, and wisdom, I thank
my literary agent, Nat Sobel. Also, for their enthusiasm, construc
tive comments, and support, special credit goes to my publisher,
Bob Miller, and editor, Brian DeFiore.
For their invaluable assistance, advice. and encouragement, I am
indebted to: Barbara Aragon. Thomas Bahr, Randall Barone. Phil
Beuth. Graeme Bird. Paul Cornish (British Information Services).
Stefania Dragojlovic. Ulla Fringeli (Universitat Basel), Owen Gin
gerich. Ann Godoff, Heather Heiman. Gerald Holton, Carl Huss,
Victor Iosilevich. Nancy Kay, Allen Jon Kinnamon (Cabot Sci

ence Library, Harvard University). Gene Krantz, Richard Leibner,

- ii

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viii

Martha Lepore, Barry Lippman, Stacie Marinelli, Martin Matt

miiller (Universitatsbibliothek Basel), Robert Millis, Ron New

burgh, Neil Pelletier (American Horticultural Society), Robert
Reichblum, Jack Reilly, Diane Reverand, Hans Richner (Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology), William Rosen, Janice Shultz
(Naval Research Laboratory), John Stachel (Boston University),
Rabbi Leonard Troupp, David Vale (Grantham Museum), Spen
cer Weart (American Institute of Physics), Richard Westfall,
L. Pearce Williams, Ken Yanni (Hoover Dam), and Allen Zelon.
If, despite the aid and comfort of these gracious people, I have
made any errors, they are entirely my fault, and I thank the vigilant
readers who will surely set me straight.

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[onlenl•
..
MafLemaHeal Poefry 1
Introduction

Applet anJ Orangel 9

Isaac Newton and the Universal Law oj Gravity
F = G xM x m -7- d2

Defween a RoeL anJ a DarJ lile 65

Daniel Bernoulli and the Law oj Hydrodynamic Pressure
P + P x % v 2 =CONSTANT

119 [Iall Aef

Michael Faraday and the Law oj Electromagnetic Induction
V x E = -aBlat

An UnprohfaLle Ixperienee 165

Rudolf Clausius and the Second Law oj Thermodynamics
as universe> 0
[oriotify IblleJ fLe ligLft 215
Albert Einstein and the Theory oj SpedaZ Relativity
E = m x c2

InJex 267

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Introduction

M l l . L e m l l t i ~ l l l  P eh-y
•
oetry is simply the most beautifUl,
impressive, and widely effective mode of
saying things.
M ATTH EW A R NO L D

ath~matics is. a l a n ~ a g e  w ~ ~ s e  importance I c ~  best ex

M
plam by startmg WIth a familiar story from the Blble. There·
was a time, according to the Old Testament, when all the
people of he earth spoke in a single tongue. This unified them and
facilitated cooperation to such a degree that they undertook a col
lective project to do the seemingly impossible: They would build a
tower in the city of Babel that was so high, they could simply
climb their way into heaven.
It was an unpardonable act of hubris , and God was quick to visit
his wrath on the blithe sinners. He spared their lives, but not their
language: fu described in Genesis 11:7, in order to scuttle the blas
phemers' enterprise, all God needed to do was "confound their
language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
Thousands of years later, we are still babbling. According to lin-

1
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~ i . e ~ q u a t i o o t  .La' D.aofjeJ .Le WorlJ

2

guists, there are about 1,500 different languages spoken in the

world today. And while no one would suggest that this multiplicity
o f tongues is the only reason for there being so litde unity in the
world, it certainly interferes with there being more cooperation.
Nothing reminds us o f that inconvenient reality more so than
the United Nations. Back in the early 1940s, when it was first
being organized, officials proposed that all diplomats be required to
speak a single language, a restriction that would both facilitate
negotiations and symbolize global harmony. But member nations
objected-each loath to surrender its linguistic identity--so a
compromise was struck; United Nations ambassadors are now al
lowed to speak anyone o f ive languages: Mandarin Chinese, En
glish, Russian, Spanish, or French.
Over the years, there have been no fewer than 300 attempts to
invent and promulgate a global language, the most famous being
made in 1887 by the Polish oculist L. L. Zamenhof The artificial
language he created is called Esperanto, and today it is spoken by
more than 100,000 people in twenty-two countries.
However, as measured by the millions of those who speak it
fluendy and by the historic consequences of their unified efforts,
mathematics is arguably the most successful global language ever
spoken. Though it has not enabled us to build a Tower of Babel, it
has made possible achievements that once seemed no less impossi
ble: electricity, airplanes, the nuclear bomb, landing a man on the
moon, and understanding the nature o f ife and death. The discov
ery o f the equations that led ultimately to these earthshaking ac
complishments are the subject o f this book.
In the language of mathematics, equations are like poetry: They
state truths with a unique precision, convey volumes o f informa
tion in rather brief terms, and often are difficult for the uninitiated
to comprehend. And just as conventional poetry helps us to see
deep within ourselves, mathematical poetry helps us to see far
beyond ourselves-if not all the way up to heaven, then at least out
to the brink o f the visible universe.

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MatLemalieal Poefry
3

In attempting to distinguish between prose and poetry, Robert

Frost once suggested that a poem, by definition, is a pithy fonn o f
expression that can never be accurately translated. The same can be
said about mathematics: It is impossible to understand the true
meaning o f an equation, or to appreciate its beauty, unless it is read
in the delightfully quirky language in which it was penned. That is
precisely why I have written this book.
This is not so much an offspring o f my last book, Bridges to Infin
ity: The Human Side ifMathematics, as it is its evolutionary descend
ant. I wrote Bridges with the intention o f giving readers a sense o f
how mathematicians think and what they think about. I also at
tempted to describe the language-the numbers, symbols, and
l ogi c-t hat mathematicians use to express themselves. And I did it
all without subjecting the reader to a single equation.
It was like sweet-tasting medicine offered to all those who are
afflicted with math anxiety, individuals who nonnally would not
have the courage or the curiosity to buy a book on a subject that
has consistently frightened them away. In short, Bridges to Infinity
was a dose of mathematical literacy designed to go down easily.
Now, emboldened by having written a successful book that
contains no equations, I have dared to go that one step further. In
this book I describe the mathematical origins of certain landmark
achievements, equations whose aftereffects have pennanently al
tered our everyday lives.
One might say I am offering the public a stronger dose o f nu
meracy, an opportunity to become comfortably acquainted with
five remarkable fonnulas in their original, undisguised forms.
Readers will be able to comprehend for themselves the meaning o f
the equations, and not just settle for an inevitably imperfect non
mathematical translation o f them.
Readers of this book also will discover the way in which each
Why
equation was derived. is that so important? Because, to para
phrase Robert Louis Stevenson: When traveling to some exotic
destination, getting there is half the fun.

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I i ~ e  Iquafioo, tLat (LaotjeJ tLe WorlJ

4

I hope that the innumerate browser will not be scared offby the
zealousness o f my effort. Rest assured, though these five equations
look abstract, most certainly their consequences are n o t - a n d neither
are the people associated with them: a sickly, love-starved loner; an
emotionally abused prodigy from a dysfunctional family; a reli
gious, poverty-stricken illiterate; a soft-spoken widower living in
perilous times; and a smart-alecky, high school dropout.
Each story is told in five parts. The Prologue recounts some
dramatic incident in the main character's life that helps set the tone
for what is to follow. Then come three acts, which I refer to as
Veni, Vidi, Vici. These are Latin words for "I came, I saw, I con
quered," a statement Caesar reportedly made after vanquishing the
Asian king Pharnaces. Veni is where I explain how the main char
acter-the scientist-comes to his mysterious subject; Vidi ex
plains historically how that subject came to appear so enigmatic;
Vici explains how the scientist manages to conquer the mystery,
resulting in a historic equation. Finally, the Epilogue describes how
that equation goes on to reshape our lives forever.
In preparing to write this book, I selected five equations from
among dozens of serious contenders, solely for the degree to which
they ultimately changed our world. Now, however, I see that the
stories attached to them combine fortuitously to give the reader a
rather seamless chronicle of science and society from the seven
teenth century to the present.
As it turns out, that is a crucial period in history. Scientifically, it
the the
ranges. from beginning o f so-called Scientific Revolution,
through the Ages o f Reason, Enlightenment, Ideology, and Analy
sis, during which science demystified each one of the five ancient
elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether.
In that critical period of time, furthermore, we see: God
being forever banished from science, science replacing astrology

as our principal way o f predicting the future, science becom

ing a paying profession, and science grappling with the ultra-

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MafLemafieal Poetry
5

mysterious issues o f life and death and o f space and time.

In these five stories, from the time when an introspective young
Isaac Newton sits serenely beneath a fruit tree to when an inquisi
tive young Albert Einstein nearly kills himself scaling the Swiss
Alps, we see science wending its way from the famous apple to the
infamous A-bomb. Which is to say, we see science going from
being a source o f light and hope to its also becoming a source o f
darkness and dread.
Writers before me have chronicled the lives o f some o f hese five
scientists-all too often in frightfully long biographies. And writers
before me have reconstructed the pedigree o f some o f these intel
lectual innovations back to the beginning o f recorded history. But
they have never focused their roving attentions on the small num
ber o f mathematical equations that have influenced our existence
in such profound and intimate ways.
The exception is Albert Einstein's famous energy equation E =
m x Cl, which many people already know is somehow responsible
for the nuclear bomb. But for all its notoriety, even this nefarious
little equation remains in the minds o f most people scarcely more
than a mysterious icon, as familiar yet inexplicable as Procter &
Gamble's corporate logo.
What exactly do the letters E, m, and c stand for? Why is the c
squared? And what does it mean for the E to be equated with the
m x Cl? The reader will learn the surprising answers in "Curiosity
Killed the Lights."
The other chapters deal with scientists less well known than Ein
stein but who are no less important to the history o f our civiliza
tion. "Between a Rock and a Hard Life," for example, concerns
the Swiss physicist Daniel Bernoulli and his hydrodynamic equa
tion P + P X V2 t? = CONSTANT, which led ultimately to
the modem airplane. "Class Act" is about the British chemist M i-
E -aBlat,
chael Faraday and his electromagnetic equation V x
which ultimately led to electricity. =

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~ h ' e  tquafiont fLaf (LangeJ fLe WorlJ

6

"Apples and Oranges" tells the story o f the British natural phi
losopher Isaac Newton and his gravitational equation F =G X M
x m -7- d2- w h i c h led not to any specific invention but to an epic
event: landing a man on the moon.
Finally, "An Unprofitable Experience" is about the German
mathematical physicist Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius and his
thermodynamic equation (or more accurately, his thermodynamic

inequality) aSuniverse > O. It led neither to a historic invention or

event but to a startling realization: Contrary to popular belief,
being alive is unnatural; in fact, all life exists in defiance of, not in
conformity with, the most fundamental law o f the universe.
In my last book, Bridges to lyifinity, I suggested that the human
imagination was actually a sixth sense used to comprehend truths

that have always existed. Like stars in the firmament, these verities
are out there somewhere just waiting for our extrasensory imagina
tion to spot them. Furthermore, I proposed that the mathematical
imagination was especially prescient at discerning these incorporeal
truths, and I cited numerous examples as evidence.
In this book, too, readers will see dramatic corroboration for the
theory that mathematics is an exceptionally super-sensitive seeing
eye dog. Otherwise, how can we begin to account for the unerring
prowess and tenacity with which these five mathematicians are
able to pick up the scent, as it were, and zero in on their respective
equations?
While the equations represent the discernment o f eternal and
universal truths, however, the manner in which they are written is
stricciy, provincially human. That is what makes them so much like
poems, wonderfully artful attempts to make infmite realities com
prehensible to fmite beings.
The scientists in this book, therefore, are not merely intellectual
explorers; they are extraordinary artists who have mastered the ex-

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tensive vocabulary and complex grammar o f the mathematical lan

guage. They are the Whitmans, Shakespeares, and Shelleys o f the
quantitative world. And their legacy is five of the greatest poems
ever inspired by the human imagination.

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F == G x M x m -:- d2

Applet anJ Oranget

Isaac Newton and the Universal Law of Gravity

I sometimes wish that God

were back
In this dark world and wide;
For though some virtues he might
lack,
He had his pleasant side.
- G A M A l i E L BRADFORD

or the last several months, thirteen-year-old Isaac Newton

~ 
had been watching with curiosity while workmen built a
windmill just outside the town o f Grantham. The construc
tion project was very exciting, because although they had been
invented centuries ago, windmills were still a novelty in this rural
part of England.
Each day after school, young Newton would run to the river
and seat himself, documenting in extraordinary detail the shape,
location, and function o f every single piece o f that windmill. He
then would rush to his room at Mr. Clarke's house to construct
miniature replicas o f he parts he had just watched being assembled.
As Grantham's huge, multiarmed contraption had taken shape,
therefore, so had Newton's wonderfully precise imitation o f t. All
that remained now was for the curious young man to come up

9
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10

with something, or someone, to play the role o f miller.

Last night an idea had come to him that he considered brilliant:
His pet mouse would be perfect for the part. But how would he
train it to do the job, to engage and disengage the miniature mill
wheel on command? That was what he had to puzzle out this
morning on his way to school.
As he walked along slowly, his brain raced toward a solution.
Suddenly, however, he felt a sharp pain in his gut; his thoughts
came to a screeching halt. As his mind's eye refocused, young
Newton came out of his daydream and beheld his worst night
mare: Arthur Storer, the sneering, taunting school bully, had just
kicked him in the stomach.
Storer, one of Mr. Clarke's stepsons, loved to pick on Newton,
teasing him mercilessly for his unusual behavior and for fraterniz
ing with Storer's sister, Katherine. Newton was a quiet and self
absorbed youngster, generally preferring the company of his
thoughts to that o f people. But whenever he did socialize, it was
with girls; they were tickled by the doll furniture and ~ t h e r  toys he
made for them using his customized kit of miniature saws, hatch
ets, and hammers.
While it was common for Storer to call Newton a sissy, on this
particular morning, he was insulting him for being so stupid. Un
fortunately, it was true that Newton was the next-to-lowest rank
ing student in the whole of Grantham's Free Grammar School o f
King Edward VI, seeded well below Storer. But the idea of his big'
bully thinking of himself as intellectually superior made the reclu
sive young man's thoughts turn from windmills to revenge.
As he sat at the back of the class, Newton usually found it easy to
ignore what his teacher, Mr. Stokes, was saying. This time, how
ever, he listened with interest. The universe was divided into two
realms, each obeying a different set of scientific laws, Stokes in
structed. The imperfect, earthly region behaved one way, and the
perfect, heavenly region behaved another; both domains, he

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Applet anJ Oranfjet

- 1

added, had been successfully studied and their respective ordi

nances deduced long, long ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.
For young Newton, suffering at the hands of an earthly imper
fection such as Storer was proof enough o f what Mr. Stokes was
talking about. Newton hated Storer and his classmates for not lik
ing him. Above all, he hated himself for being so unlikable that
even his own mother had abandoned him.
God was the only friend he had, the pious young man thought,
and the only friend he needed. Newton was a much smaller person
than Storer, but with God's help, he certainly would be able to
vanquish the offensive tormentor.
No sooner had Mr. Stokes dismissed class that day than Newton
was out the door, waiting in the nearby churchyard for the bully.
Within minutes, a boisterous crowd o f students gathered-round.
Stokes's son selected himself referee, slapping Newton on the back
as i f o encourage him, while winking at Storer as i f o say this was
going to be as entertaining as watching Daniel being fed to the
lions.
At first, no one cheered for young Newton. Instead, each time
Storer landed a punch, the rowdy students whooped it up, egging
on the ruffian to hit even harder the next time. When it seemed as
if Newton had been beaten into submission, Storer straightened up
and relaxed, grinning boastfully at his young peers.
As he turned to walk away, however, Newton struggled to his
feet: He was not about to let Storer win the right to lord over him
for the rest of his life. Alerted by shouts o f warning, Storer wheeled
around and was greeted with a kick to his stomach and a punch to
the nose; Newton had drawn blood, and that reinvigorated him.
For the next several minutes, the two traded blows and wrestled
one another to the ground. Time and again, Storer staggered away,
thinking he had defeated Newton, only to be confronted anew.
When it crowd the
was all over, the was stunned into silence. As
young referee stepped in to congratulate the bloodied and ex-

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~ h ' e ~ q u a l i o D '  tLat (J.angeJ tLe WorlJ

12

hausted Newton, however, the dumbstruck students stirred and

began to cheer: Daniel had become David, they declared jubi
landy, as they danced around the fallen Goliath.
Newton was more than satisfied with what he had done, but his
schoolmates were not. As he attempted to walk away, young
Stokes grabbed his shoulder and encouraged him to humiliate
Storer. Newton hesitated, but wishing to gain the approval o f his
fellow students, he dragged the bewildered bully by the ears and
slammed his face into the church wall. The crowd of young specta
tors squealed with delight as they swarmed around the dazed vic
tor, patting him on the back and accompanying him all the way
home with unrestrained shouts o f celebration.
Having defeated Storer, Newton's attention quickly returned to
the problem of raining his pet mouse. Unfortunately for Newton,
though, this meant returning to the behavior that had incited his
tormentor in the first place.
In a matter o f weeks, the still-bruised and -battered Storer
worked up enough courage to begin reprising some o f his old
gibes. Worst of all, Storer's accusations still hit home: Despite his
pugilistic victory, Newton remained the dunce of his class.
All his life, with God's help, young Newton had been able to
withstand the hazing from insensitive oafs like Storer. But now that
he had known the pleasure o f being accepted by his compeers, o f
being loved, he found Storer's effrontery unbearable. This time, he
would truly finish the job he had only started in the churchyard.
In the months ahead, Newton paid attention in class as never
before and studied his lessons at home. He submitted his com
pleted homework on time and answered all o f Mr. Stokes's school
room quenes.
Gradually, miraculously, one desk at a time, young Newton
earned his way to the head o f the class. Literally now, he smirked
inwardly, he could tum his back on everyone who had ever hurt
his feelings or dared suggest they were better or smarter than he.

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13

In the decades ahead, the scope o f Newton's interests would

expand from windmills to the universe as a whole. But one thing
about him would never change: He would meet other antago
nists-or people whom he perceived as antagonists-and each
time, his obsessive desire for revenge and approval would impel
him to an unprecedented understanding o f the natural world.
Above all would be his unprecedented understanding of gravity,
the force that had always kept our feet on the ground. Newton's
stunning disclosure would sweep us off our feet, and in the end, our
cherished notions about God and Heaven would come toppling
down, just like the bully Storer.

V ~ N I 

Hanna Ayscough Newton was beside herself with anxiety. Her

husband, Isaac, had left suddenly to rally round King Charles I,
who had been driven out o f London by riotous mobs and an angry,
power-hungry Parliament. The king had sought refuge in Not
tingham, only thirty miles away from the Newtons' hometown o f
Woolsthorpe, and from there had just declared war.
England had been involved in many hostilities, but none like
this one. This was a declaration of civil war, pitting family mem
bers against one another. Ostensibly the conflict was over who
would govern England-the royal sovereign or Parliament-but
more fundamentally, it was a showdown between heaven and
earth.
For centuries, monarchs the world over had been anointed by
their country's highest-ranking religious figure; in England, it was
the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was no mere ceremony; it was

an acknowledgment that kings and queens were selected for office

by God himself

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14

In politics, as in science, therefore, much of the seventeenth

century world consisted of two dramatically separate realms. Mere
mortals inhabited the earthly realm, but kings and queens were
above it all; they dwelt in some lofty, heavenly domain, exempt
from obeying the strict rules and regulations they imposed on their
subjects-and their parliaments.
Over the years, these heavenly appointed rulers had tussled with
their earthly appointed parliaments about the details o f day-to-day
political power. In this regard, Charles had been no different; but
now in the fall o f 1642, for the first time ever, the two realms had
gone to war over the issue o f who was preeminent.
Parliament was demanding that Charles relinquish his control
over church and state, faulting him for having levied taxes illegally
and for having been so religiously intolerant that Pilgrims were
now fleeing en masse to uncivilized colonies in America. "The
question in dispute between the King's party and us," the rebel
lious Parliamentarians declared, "was whether the King should
govern as a god by his will . . . or whether the people should be
governed by laws made by themselves."
In response to this mutinous uprising, Charles had fled from his
castle; in Nottingham, he had organized an army o f loyalists and
was now advancing toward London. Though he and his army
were well equipped and fired up, however, their first major battle
against the parliamentary forces ended in a draw and left 5,000
soldiers dead.
Among them was thirty-six-year-old Isaac Newton, a yeoman
farmer whose father had prospered under the king's controversial
yet largely peaceful reign. It had been only last year that Newton
had inherited his father's sizable m a n o r - t h e largest in W ools
thorpe-and only this spring that he had married Hanna and con
ceived their first child.
Hanna was six months' pregnant when she received the devas
tating news. She understood and respected the importance o f the

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- 5

king's war with Parliament, but she was alternately angry and grief
stricken that her husband had gotten himself killed and orphaned
their child-to-be.
The only thing that consoled her was the common belief among
villagers that posthumous children invariably grew up having spe
cial curative powers and particularly good fortune. She was even
more heartened when she gave birth on December 25; a posthu
mous child born on Christmas Day, the villagers exclaimed, was
destined most certainly to be someone very, very special.
No sooner had she laid eyes on the newborn, whom she named
Isaac, however, than Hanna began to worry that the locals' joyous
predictions would prove to have been premature. Her baby had
been born several weeks too early; he was no bigger than a quart jar
and gave every indication that he would not survive.
As the pessimistic news spread, the good folks of W oolsthorpe
began to speak in hushed tones o f a good omen gone bad. Two
women sent on an errand on behalf of he newborn, in fact, did not
bother to walk very quickly and rested many times along the way,
so certain were they that the ill-fated child would die before they
returned.
They were wrong. As the days passed, baby Isaac clung to life
with increasing strength, revealing a stubbornness, a willpower so
extraordinary the villagers appeared to have been vindicated after
all: This son of a dead man, born on Christ's birthday, they whis
pered, was no ordinary human being.
During the fIrst few years o f his life, young Isaac Newton was so
feeble he had to wear a neck brace to hold his head in place. Nev
ertheless, the danger to his life had passed, and everyone in
W oolsthorpe assumed that mother and child would settle into a
reasonably happy and comfortable existence.
Once again they were wrong. When Newton was only two
years old, his mother received a proposal o f marriage from the
Reverend Barnabas Smith, a wealthy, sixty-three-year-old wid-

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ower from North Witham, a town located about a mile away.

After consulting her brother, the Reverend William Ayscough,
Hanna decided to accept, whereupon she moved to North With
am without her son, whom she left in the care of her mother.
Being abandoned at such a young age would have been trau
matic enough under normal circumstances. But this was 1645, and
England's civil war was now raging throughout the countryside.
W oolsthorpe, at first under the protection of the king, had been
captured by Parliament. Every week, there was gunfire from mor
tal skirmishes being fought in the area and intrusions from raiding
parties in search o f provisions and billeting. All this chaos fright
ened the frail young Newton, and worse, when he cried for his
mother, she wasn't there to comfort him.
Newton's grandmother tried her best to mollify him, but she
herselfwas quite frightened by what was happening. Nearly all the
able-bodied men o fW oolsthorpe had been killed or called away to
fight, leaving only clergymen to help defend the women and chil
dren against the bestialities o f the warring armies.
Adding to his fright, in 1649, the youngster began to attend
school. Being delicate by birth, he was afraid (and not welcome) to
participate in the aggressive games played by the other boys. Being
an orphan, moreover, he felt inferior to the other children, most o f
whom lived in homes enriched by the love o f a mother and father.
He was even more discomfited later that same year when the
village received news that the Puritan-dominated Parliament, led
by Oliver Cromwell, had defeated the royal armies; King Charles
himself had been beheaded. Over the years, young Newton had
formed a vicarious attachment to the swashbuckling monarch,
fully expecting that one day this surrogate father figure would
come galloping in to rescue him and his village from the nasty
Parliamentarians.
It was during these perilous years that young Newton came to
cherish the companionship o f his uncle, Hanna's brother, who

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17

lived two miles away. Like all Anglicans at the time, the Reverend
Ayscough saw the civil war in religious terms, pitting the k i n g 
England's "Defender of the Faith"-against a Parliament con
trolled by Puritans.
Both sides were devoted Christians, of course, but they were
split as to the way in which organized religion should be governed.
Anglicans were administered by a hierarchy of clergymen, headed
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the English equivalent o f the
Pope. The Puritans were organized in a less hierarchical, more
purely democratic, fashion. In truth, their differences were rather
esoteric, yet mutual intolerance was causing them to kill one an
other.
Newton was far too young to understand any of this, but as he
watched his uncle studying peacefully in the library, listened to his
uncle speaking gendy to his parishioners, young Newton became
conditioned to associate a religious and scholarly lifestyle with
safety and security.
In a short time, therefore, young Newton acquired the habit o f
turning away from the encircling chaos and toward his own
thoughts. He sought out secluded areas, where he would sit for
hours at a time, not so much to observe the natural world as to
immerse himself in it.
The young man discovered that ifhe meditated single-mindedly
on the minutiae o f his surroundings, he was able to escape from his
miserable existence and discover interesting things about Nature.
he in the
For example, noticed, rainbows always came same colors,
Venus always moved faster than Jupiter across the night sky, and
children playing ring-a-ring o'roses invariably leaned a bit back
ward, as if they were being nudged by some invisible force.
In these wholly encompassing immersions, the youngster was
able to enter a sanctuary every bit as comforting as his uncle's rec

tory, without having to travel the two miles to get there. Best o f
all, he discovered true happiness for the first time in his life.

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18

In 1649, Newton's newfound rapture was spoiled by the return

o f his mother and several young strangers. The Reverend Barnabas
had died, but only after having fathered three small children, one o f
them less than a year old. Even now, even with his mother's re
turn, young Newton fumed and fussed, he would not have her
undivided love and attention.
During the first several months of her homecoming, Mrs. New
ton-Smith tried to explain to her angry son that she had married
the old rector solely to secure their long-term financial security.
The rector o f North Witham, she revealed, had paid for a renova
tion and expansion of the Newton's manor and bequeathed to
young Newton a large parcel ofland.
Nothing his mother said, however, could sweeten his bitterness
at having been abandoned. Newton hated his mother and often
had dreamed o f setting fire to her and her second husband while
they lay sleeping together.
For the next few years, therefore, though one civil war between
king and Parliament had ceased, another raged between mother
and son. Ultimately, the only thing that stopped it was forcible
separation: This time, however, it was young Newton who left his
mother.
It had come time for the twelve-year-old to attend grammar
school in the city o f Grantham, seven miles away. Since that was
too far to walk, his mother had arranged for him to room and
board with the Clarke family, longtime friends of the Newtons.
Having lived with a mother he hardly knew and three half sib
lings he didn't care to know, young Newton was unfazed by the
idea o f moving in with complete strangers; at least, he thought,
they gave the appearance o f being an honest-to-goodness family.
There was Mr. Clarke, who ran his own apothecary; Mrs. Storer
Clarke and her four children from a previous marriage; they in

cluded a pugnacious son named Arthur and an attractive daughter,

Katherine, who took an instant liking to the new boarder.

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19

The Clarkes frequently entertained learned guests, so Newton's

mind was kept well fed with food for thought. Most wonderful o f
all was Mr. Clarke's vast collection of books in the attic. Here was
the perfect getaway, the ideal sanctuary, Newton enthused, as he
proceeded to immerse himself in subjects ranging over the entire
intellectual spectrum.
The books and dinner guests had the salutary effect o f introduc
ing this lonely youngster to a world of kindred spirits: the French
man Rene Descartes, who offered a theory for the recurring colors
of the rainbow; the GermanJohannes Kepler, who discovered that
a planet moved more slowly the farther away it was from the sun;
and the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens, who gave the name centrif
ugal force to the ring-a-ring o'roses phenomenon young Newton
had noticed a few years earlier.
Just that suddenly, Newton had the inklings of what it was like
to feel normal. All his life, he had felt like an intruder, as if there
were no place for him on this earth. Now, in the study o f ~ ; t t u r a l 

philosophy, he had found a home, a community of persons like

himself, where he might be accepted,_appreciated, possibly even
loved.
During this time, Newton fell behind in his studies at school, so
distracted was he by his newly adopted intellectual family. Also, it
didn't help his concentration that he had become infatuated with
Mr. Clarke's comely and kind stepdaughter Katherine-though he
was too shy to express his feelings except through the toy furniture
he made for her.
Indeed, it took a kick in the stomach from the girl's bully of a
brother to awaken young Newton from his reverie and to coax
him into scrapping his way to the head of the class. However, no
sooner had he done so than his mother intruded once again; this
time, she ordered him back to the manor.
The properties and responsibilities the Newtons had inherited
from the late Reverend Smith had become too burdensome for her

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20

to manage alone. Besides, she remonstrated, her son had already

received more than an adequate education; after all, neither his
father nor any other Newton in history had even been able to write
their own names.
Newton returned to Woolsthorpe, but he did so over the pro
tests o f his teacher and uncle. Not only was Newton now the
school's top student, Stokes and the Reverend Ayscough pleaded,
but by having earned that distinction so dramatically, the young
man was quite possibly the first bona fide genius this rural county
had ever produced.
The teenager now disliked his mother more than ever; he was
openly disobedient and frightfully surly. As'a symbol o f his protest,
the seventeen-year-old Newton purchased a small notebook: His
body might be back in Woolsthorpe, he thought defiantly, but his
mind would remain on natural philosophy, which required all its
students to keep a carefuljournal o f heir theories and observations.
Unfortunately for Hanna Newton-Smith, but fortunately for
science, her son proved to be inept at running a farm. One day, for
example, he became so engrossed in a small water wheel he had
built, he did not notice tb-at a group o f pigs had forded the stream
and were eating the neighbor's com.
His mother was fined "for suffering his swine to trespass in ye
com fields," the court clerk wrote in the record, and "for suffering
his fence belonging to his yards to be out o f repair." That was not
the first time Mrs. Newton-Smith had had to pay for her son's
distractedness, but it was most certainly to be the last; forthwith,
she sent him packing back to Grantham.
No sooner had young Newton returned to the Clarke house
hold than he realized fully just how much he had missed not only
his studies but the lovely Katherine. She herself gave many an indi
cation o f having similar feelings toward h i m - a gentle touch here,
t h e r ~ b u t  all no he
a kindly glance to avail. So fearful was about
being ·rejected, Newton stopped short o f ever confessing his ro
mantic feelings to her.

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21

The young man was much more aggressive when it came to his
grammar schooling, finishing it in only nine months. O n his last
day, in the summer o f 1661, Mr. Stokes bid him to stand before the
class. & ; the young man obeyed, he and his classmates had the
impression that a scolding was about to take place. There were
furtive glances, whispers, and a lot o f fidgeting. But why? What
now! Newton wondered glumly.

Facing the class, expecting the worst, Newton was soon relieved
o f his anxiety. Mr. Stokes began praising him for being such a
model student, entreating the others to be like this young man
who, though orphaned, bullied, and badgered, had become the
pride and joy o f Lincolnshire County. Weeping, the devoted
teacher delivered such a moving tribute to his prize pupil that even

the young students seated at their desks had tears in their eyes when
it was all over.
O n the strength o f enthusiastic recommendations from the
Reverend Ayscough and Mr. Stokes, not to mention the merits o f
his own achievements, young Newton was readily accepted into
Trinity College, the reverend's alma mater. It was, as he put it in a
letter to his mother, "the famousest College" on the entire campus
o f Cambridge University, having been founded in 1546 by none
other than King Henry VIII.
Objectively speaking, seventeenth-century Cambridge was little
more than a dingy village, but to this young man from the country,
it was the grandest place he had ever seen. By coincidence, it was
also at its gayest in more than a decade.
Eleven years earlier, when the civil war had been decided in
favor of Parliament, the puritanical victors had imposed on En
gland unprecedentedly strict rules of behavior. They had made
adultery a capital crime and outlawed nearly all manner of recrea
tion, including horse racing, theater, and dancing round the May
pole. The Puritan rulers even had outlawed the celebration o f
Christmas, prompting one aghast Anglican to grouse: "Who

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22

would have thought to have seen in England the churches shut and
the shops open on Christmas Day?"
By 1660, the English had had enough o f being forced to live so
austere an existence--of obeying the severe rules of some puritani
cal heavenly realm, as it were. They yearned for the more frolic
some rules of the delightfully imperfect earthly realm, whereupon
they restored the sacred English crown to Charles II, the beheaded
king's eldest son. Thus, in 1661, when Newton arrived in Cam
bridge, he found it in the midst of celebrating the country's return
to a more secular existence, complete with parades, music, and
rowdy fairs.
While England was loosening its hair, though, young Newton
was obliged to tighten his belt. Mrs. Newton-Smith was more than
wealthy enough to pay for her son's tuition, but she had decided to
withhold her support, forcing the freshman to be enrolled into the
college as a subsizar.
This was the name given to poor students who helped finance
their education by being part-time servants to others whose parents
fully supported them. For the next several years, therefore, New
ton once again found himself being tormented by equals who felt
superior to him; moreover, it would have been easier to withstand
the abuse if, deep down inside, Newton himself had not felt in
ferior and unloved.
Instinctively the young man reverted to his old habits. When
ever he was not occupied with classes, church services, or his ser
vile duties-which included emptying chamber pots, grooming
his master's hair, and hauling firewood-the insecure prodigy from
W oolsthorpe immersed himself in the details o f the natural world.
One evening, after finishing his suhsizar's chores in the kitchen
at Trinity, he divided the heart of an eel into three sections. For
hours, the young man stared and took careful notes, marveling at
how the disconnected pieces continued to beat in synchrony.
Newton even began to experiment on his own eyes with har-

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23

rowing carelessness. At one point, he wedged a flat stick "betwixt

my eye & ye bone as neare to ye backside o f my eye as I could,"
coming dangerously close to blinding himself, all in the hopes o f
understanding exactly how humans perceive light and color.
"Pressing my eye with the end of it . . . there appeared several
white, darke & colored circles," he noted casually, "which circles
were plainest when I continued to rub my eye with ye point of ye
bodkin."
During his years at Trinity, his small notebooks, which he car
ried with him everywhere, came to be filled with the observations
and queries o f his powerful concentration and wide-ranging curi
osity. " O f Light and Color," " O f Gravity," " O f G o d " - t h e s e
were more than mere headings in this queer young man's present
investigations, they were glimpses at the voracious appetite o f a
rare and gifted mind.
While Newton's brain sped onward, well nourished and full o f
energy, his body began to lag behind; in 1664, it gave out alto
gether. His ceaseless inquiries having deprived him of sleep for the
better part of his undergraduate career, Newton was bedridden
with exhaustion.
Though he felt weak for many months thereafter, the young
man recovered in time to take his final exams. He did not perform
well, but he earned his bachelor of arts degree. Moreover, influen
tial professors who espied in this introverted and mediocre student
the makings o f a first-rate scholar intervened, and Newton was
to
granted a scholarship pursue a master's degree.
He had hardly commenced his new course of studies when news
reached Cambridge that the dreaded plague had invaded London.
In the past twenty years, that city's population had doubled, seri
ously compromising its medieval sanitary facilities. Now reports
indicated that up to 13,000 people a week were dying.
Though more
Cambridge was than forty miles away from all o f
that, officials decided anyway to close down the university, wish-

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24

ing to avoid a repetition of history: Back in.the fourteenth century,

the Black Death, as it was called, had spread like a pestilent wind all
across Europe, turning Cambridge into a ghost town.
Before the formal order was given for students to evacuate the
city, however, young Newton had returned to Woolsthorpe: Even
his mother's company was preferable to the risk of being killed by
this horrific affliction. Anyway, he figured, it was time to reflect on
all that he had learned during the past four years at Trinity.
It was the summer of 1665, and while hysteria and death roiled
through the narrow streets o f London, the twenty-two-year-old
spent his days lounging in the garden, puzzling out the details o f a
new mathematics that would one day come to be called the calcu
lus. Above all, he savored the solitude, his mother having long
since given up on nagging him to become a gentleman farmer.
O n one particular day, the weather was so agreeable and New
ton was so immersed in thought, he did not notice it was getting
late. Gradually the garden around him began to glow warmly,
bathed with the soft golden light only a waning summer sun could
produce.
Suddenly the thud o f an apple falling from a nearby tree startled
the young man out o f his deep meditations. In the few moments it
took for him to switch trains o f thought, the top o f a gigantic
looking :full moon began to show itself above the eastern horizon.
Within minutes, young Newton's insatiable curiosity began to
nibble away at the apple and the moon. Why did apples fall straight
down to the earth's surface, rather than askance? What if the apple
had started from higher u p - a mile, a hundred miles, as high as the
m o o n - w o u l d it still have fallen to the earth?
For that matter, didn't the moon itself feel the tug of earth's
gravity? If so, would it not mean that the moon was under the sway
o f earthly influences, which contradicted the common belief that
the moon existed within the heavenly realm, completely aloof
from our planet?

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_J Oranget
-
Applet

Engaged by these heretical speculations, Newton persevered

into the wee hours o f the night. If the moon could feel the earth's
tug, then why didn't it fall to the ground like an apple? No doubt,
he conjectured, it was because Huygen's centrifugal force pulled
the moon away from the earth; if that and the earth's pull balanced
each other out, then perhaps that would explain how the moon
was able to stay in its ring-a-ring o'roses orbit indefinitely.
Seated beneath the steely light of the moon, Newton was en
grossed in his thoughts. More than that, while crickets chirped and
frogs croaked in a nearby pond, the young man began to jot down
certain ideas and calculations that would one day lead him to for
mulate his extraordinary equation of universal gravitation.
I t would take more than twenty years before the world would
learn of what had happened this night. It would take that long for
Newton to perfect and publish his results, but when that day came,
the heavens would fall to the ground with the thunderous boom o f
a million plummeting apples.

VIUI

Twenty-three centuries ago, Plato led a historic revolt against the

traditional gods who lived atop Mt. Olympus. They were n6 lon
ger praiseworthy, he complained, because they had become too

mischievous, too immoral, and too undignified.

More than that, the famous Academician sniffed, those old gods
were now too provincial for a Greek empire that had expanded
dramatically under the Macedoman leadership o f King Philip II
(and soon would grow even larger under his son, Alexander the
Great). Such a vast and victorious civilization needed-nay, mer

ited-world-class divinities.
"A man may give what account he pleases of Zeus and Hera and

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26

the rest of the traditional pantheon," Plato intoned, but it was time
for the Greek people to enlarge their religious horizons by looking
heavenward, recognizing the "superior dignity o f the visible gods,
the heavenly bodies. "
As if that were not enough to ask o f his fellow countrymen,
Plato went on to implore them to "cast off the superstitious fear o f
prying into the Divine . . . by setting ourselves to get a scientific
knowledge of their [i.e., heavenly bodies'] motions and periods.
Without this astronomical knowledge," he argued in sublime rhe
torical fashion, "a city will never be governed with true statesman
s ~ ] : ' ,  and human life will never be truly happy."
Convincing the Greek people to adopt entirely new gods plus
asserting that mere mortals were capable of comprehending godly
behavior was a religious revolution o f the most radical sort. I t also
was a sdentific revolution, though this was not to be recognized
fully until Isaac Newton's dramatic discovery in the seventeenth
century.
That recognition was slow in coming, it turned out, because
astronomers were slow to interpret correcdy what they were see
ing in the night sky. The sun, moon, and stars all behaved impecca
bly, they felt, always appearing to move in perfect circles around
the earth; among all known curves, circles were considered godly,
because they were flawlessly symmetric and, by virtue of heir hav
ing no beginning and no end, eternal.
What befuddled astronomers were five spots o f non-twinkling
light that seemed to wander hither and yon across the night sky as
if hey were drunk. Plato was aghast: This erratic behavior was not
godlike--indeed, it was redolent of Zeus's and Hera's outrageous
shenanigans-and it threatened to discredit his religious reforma
tion.
Greek astronomers soon began referring to these wayward dei
ties as planets-the Greek word for vagabonds-and set upon tr y-
ing to make sense out o f their seemingly imperfect movements. It

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took them two decades, but the effort was well spent: Plato's reli
gious revolution was rescued by a heroic exercise in circular rea
sonmg.
Whereas the other heavenly bodies appeared to whiz around in
imaginary circles, Plato and his colleagues explained, planets
whizzed about with a great deal more freedom upon the surfaces o f
imaginary globes. Since globes were just as symmetric and seam
lessly eternal as circles-in fact, mathematically speaking, globes
were nothing but two-dimensional circles-planetary motion was
no less divine than the motion o f the moon, sun, and stars.
In the years following Plato's death in 347 B.C., Aristotle ex
tended his mentor's incipient revolution even further. With ex
traordinary detail and fabulous logic, Aristotle now offered an
how why new
explanation for and Plato's celestial gods were supe
rior to humans and everything else on earth.
All the heavenly bodies in the universe--the moon, sun, planets,
and stars-revolved around the earth, which itself did not move in
any way. Furthermore, Aristotle theorized, the universe was segre
gated into two distinct regions: The central one encompassed the

earth and its atmosphere; beyond that-from the moon out

wards-was what Aristotle referred to as the celestial region.
The earthly realm, Aristotle opined, consisted of only four essen
tial qualities: wet and dry, hot and cold. They alone underlay ev
erything terrestrial, including the four elements his contemporaries
believed were the bases of physical reality. What they called Earth

was essentially dry and cold; Water was cold and wet; Air was wet
and hot; Fire was hot and dry.
The earthly realm was corruptible and changeable, Aristotle
maintained, because the quartet of basic elements and their under
lying four qualities were themselves corruptible and changeable.
For example, if one heated Water, which was cold and wet, it

became Air, which was hot and wet.

Furthermore, Aristotle explained, all four terrestrial elements

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tended to move in straight lines, which was entirely appropriate:

Straight lines were the most earthly of all curves, because they had
endpoints, symbolizing birth and death. For example, if not other
wise coerced, Earth and Water always opted to move straight
downward, giving them an air o f gravity. By contrast, Air and Fire
appeared to possess an inherent levity, always preferring to move
straight upward.
The celestial realm was another matter altogether. It consisted
entirely of a fifth basic element, a quintessential protoplasm named
Ether. This miraculous material came in different densities, Aris
totle imagined, forming everything from the sun, moon, stars, and
planets to a nested set of revolving globes upon whose invisible
surfaces the heavenly bodies were whirled around in their flawless
orbits.
The moon, sun, and stars were attached to globes that always
spun in one direction, which explained their perfectly circular or
bits. As for the celestial vagabonds, the planets, they were attached
to globes that spun this way and that in an orderly but complicated
fashion, which explained their more varied movements across the
night sky.
Unlike the four earthly elements, Aristotle believed, Ether was
incorruptible. Its flawlessness meant that the heavens would always
remain perfect and unchanging; they never would rust or break
down.
With this theory o f the universe, Aristotle had fulfilled Plato's
He peek
fondest wishes: had given the earthly rabble their first at
the privileged lifestyles of the celestial starlets, fresh-faced deities
whose impeccable behavior was at once unassailable and compre
hensible. People were quite thrilled at what they saw, furthennore,
because Aristotle's universe was through and through a cosmos, the
Greek word for orderliness, beauty, and decency-everything they

could have hoped for in their new gods.

His theory also satisfied the Principle o f Sufficient Reason, so

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- 9

dear to Western philosophy, which maintained that for every ef

fect in the universe, there had to be a rational cause. For example,
according to Aristotle, pieces o f Earth fell downward because o f a
natural desire to be reunited with their primary source, the earth.
Heavy objects fell faster than light ones, he supposed, because their
desire was that much greater.
Aristotle even had a plausible and reverent explanation for what
caused the huge heavenly globes to revolve. Each one, he ex
plained, was swept around by an ethereal wind whipped up by the
movement o f he globe immediately above it, the outermost globe
being impelled by the Primum Mobile, the prime mover, God Him
sel£
Plato had introduced religion and science to one another and
had lived long enough to see the two engaged. Now Aristotle had
married them in a most endearing and enduring way. Moreover,
every indication was that this odd couple would benefit mutually
from the unprecedented betrothal.
For its part, science painted a flattering picture of the heavens
and corroborated the existence o f a supreme god. Its down-to
earth explanations o f an otherwise mysterious realm informed and
enriched people's religious convictions, exactly as Plato had
hoped: "The study we require to bring us to true piety," he had
said, "is astronomy."
For its part, religion expanded the domain and elevated the rep
utation o f science. Before this, to the extent that it was even defin
able, science had been widely regarded as an eccentric enterprise o f
doubtful value, preoccupied by the esoterics o f the earthly realm
and the abstractions of the mathematical realm.
As the centuries passed, however, so did the Greek empire and
the fruits o f ts historic religious and scientific innovations. The rise
of Christianity in the Western world became the newest religious
revolution, during which many old earthly gods were exchanged
for the one heavenly God worshipped by orthodox Jews and ex-

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tolled by the recently martyred heretic, Jesus o f Nazareth.

Since most people in the civilized world came to speak Latin,
not Greek, they lived and died never even knowing about Aris
totle, much less his theory o f the universe. As the old Greek texts
gradually were translated, however, Christians discovered that, as
the Dominican St. Albert the Great enthused: "The sublimest wis
dom o f which the world could boast flourished in Greece. Even as
the Jews knew God by the scriptures, so the pagan philosophers
knew Him by the natural wisdom o f reason, and were debtors to
Him for it by their homage."
By the thirteenth century, students across Europe were begin
ning to learn all about Platonic rhetoric, Aristotelian logic, and
Euclidean geometry; indeed, it became quite the fashion to do so.
More significantly, Christian leaders were learning that the rabbi
Maimonides had already reconciled Aristotle's cosmology withJu
daism and that the philosopher Averroes had done the same with
the religion of Islam:
N ot to be left behind, therefore, the brilliant Dominican theo
logian St. Thomas Aquinas helped to accommodate Aristotle's
geocentric universe to Christianity. There were myriad subtleties
involved, but the upshot was that the heavenly bodies, no longer
worshipped as demigods, were imagined to ride upon globes kept
spinning by angels, not ethereal winds. Above all, Aristotle's Pri-
mum Mobile was identified with the one-and-only Judeo-Christian
God, not just some generic divinity. .
What Aristotle had first joined together and time and language
differences had put asunder, Jews, Muslims, and now Christians
had rejoined. Science and religion were in one another's arms yet
again, and this time their honeymoon would last throughout a his
toric renaissance in Western civilization.
Beginning in the fourteenth century, however, much o f the in
habited world was devastated by a succession o f horrifying out
breaks o f bubonic plague. Between the years 1347 and 1350 alone,

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Applet anJ Oranget

it wiped out at least one-third of the European population.

In the aftermath, there was a great deal of fmger-pointing: Sur
vivors blamed their spiritual leaders for not having forewarned
them o f this apocalyptic rebuke from God. And in response, the
clergy castigated the masses for inviting such punishment with
their sinful behavior.
Ironically, Christian churches and monasteries all over Europe
had been hit worse than the general laity; fully half of God's holiest
were now dead, which regrettably led to an even greater calamity.
As one observer noted: "Men whose wives had died of the pesti
lence flocked to Holy Orders of whom many were illiterate."
Lured by large sums of money offered by villages bereft of a
religious leader, more and more men joined the priesthood for all
the wrong reasons. Most o f hem were "arrogant, given to pomp,"
Pope Clement VI lashed out in disgust, wasting their ill-gotten
wealth "on pimps and swindlers and neglecting the ways of God."
In this derelict and weakened condition, the Catholic church
was pummeled by two o f its most disillusioned members. In 1517,
the German priest Martin Luther fathered a historic religious refor
mation by beseeching his colleagues to return to a Christianity
sustained by childlike faith and good deeds, not by the extrava
gances o f a temporal world. And in 1543, the Polish theologian
Nicholas Copernicus touched off a religious-scientific revolution
by urging a divorce from Aristotle; at the center of the universe
was the sun, he claimed, not the earth.
, Copernicus was an amateur astronomer, but he had no new ob
servational evidence with which to defend his opinion. He simply
believed that the geocentric theory was unnecessarily complicated,
made so by the misguided presumption that we were looking at
the heavens from some rock-steady vantage point smack in the
middle o f the action.
For example, Copernicus speculated, the movement o f the vag
abond planets appeared complicated only because we ourselves

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were moving through space in a complicated way, riding aboard an

earth that was whirling on its axis like a ballerina as it revolved
around the sun. Once we took those earthly motions into account,
he demonstrated, the motion of the planets"became sublimely cir
cular, just like that of all the other heavenly bodies.
To a child being swung around by the arms, everything in the
world appeared to wobble and spin. Were things really moving
that way? The child's answer would be "no, of course n,ot" only if
he admitted to being the one who was spinning around, not they.
Such was Copernicus's simple but stinging argument.
This Polish canon of Frauenburg, East Prussia, was not the first
to have championed the heliocentric theory; 2,000 years earlier, a
number of Greek philosophers had come up with several versions
of the same idea. It had proven to be controversial back then, and
for many of the same reasons, it turned out to be so again.
Scientifically speaking, the critics pointed out, it simply did not
feel as i f he earth were moving; if indeed it was whirling around
the sun and spinning around on its axis, we would expect there to
be some overt indication o f t. Some astronomers even conjectured
that everything would be flung off the earth's surface, like water
droplets flying off a spinning wet wheel.
Religiously speaking, there were compelling objections as well.
InJoshua 10:12-13, the Old Testament clearly stated that during
the battle o f Gibeon "the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until
the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies." Most
who believed in the Judeo-Christian God took this to imply that,
quite literally, under normal circumstances, the sun and moon
moved around the earth.
In view of these and other objections, and because there was no
physical evidence to favor the Copernican theory, most o f he civi
lized world-religious and scientific-continued to believe in Ar-
istotle's view o f the heavens. Even fellow revolutionary Martin
Luther ridiculed Copernicus for defending such an outlandish idea

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as heliocentricism. Still, it had been a revolutionary century, and

before it was over, there appeared signs in the heavens that tended
to absolve Copernicus.
The first omen came during one evening in 1572. A bright new
star suddenly appeared in the sky (astronomers later believed it to
be an exploding star, or supernova), causing people everywhere to
look up in wonder. "A miracle indeed," a Danish astronomer
named Tycho Brahe gushed, "the greatest of all that has occurred
in the whole range of nature since the beginning o f the world."
For Aristotle's theory, this miracle was a disaster, because it vio
lated the theory's all-important premise that the heavens were per
manent and incorruptible. Only in the earthly realm were things
supposed to pass in and out of existence like that.
Five years later, a second omen compounded the disaster. This
time it was a comet so bright it could be seen in daylight all over
Europe. Amazing as it was, however, the astronomer Brahe was
even more stunned when he measured the comet's parallax.
Parallax was an optical illusion that astronomers had found so
useful it had become one of he tricks o f heir trade. When looking
at an object, flrst with the right eye and then the left, an object
appeared to shift position with respect to the background. Fortui
tously, the amount o f that shift, or parallax, decreased as the object's
distance increased. (See it for yourself, by looking at your index
flnger from different distances.)
In the case of the comet, the right-eye view was provided by
Brahe watching from an island off the coast o f Denmark. The left
eye view, so to speak, was provided by his colleagues in Prague.
The difference between the two views, the parallax, enabled Brahe
to conclude that the comet was four times farther from us than the
moon.
Astronomers were incredulous. Aristotle had said, and they had
always believed, that comets were caused by flery disturbances in .
the earth's atmosphere, existing not much farther up than ordinary

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clouds. For a comet to be streaking through the heavens, beyond

the moon, was unthinkable.
O n the face o f it, therefore, the recent star and comet were
unsightly blemishes on Aristotle's stellar reputation. Indeed, the
only vindication Aristotle received during these fateful years was in
regard to his belief that comets were harbingers o f doom. O n that
score, unfortunately for his theory of the universe, he was abso
lutely right.
In the years ahead, as science became increasingly receptive to
the possibility that Aristotle might be wrong, religion became
more defensive toward dissenters o f any kind. Luther's religious
reformation had spawned a vast Protestant movement, and the or
thodoxy felt threatened and reacted like a wounded animal with its
back against the wall.
In 1600, the Italian monk Giordano Bruno was burned at the
stake for his belief n a bizarre philosophy that was part Christianity
and part alchemy, among other things. He also happened to be
lieve in the Copernican theory o f he universe, and because o f that
coincidence, his grisly execution had a chilling effect even on those
religiously pious individuals who questioned the earth's central po
sition but not the church's central authority.
Especially upset were Christian scientists who believed their re
ligion could be reconciled with Copernicus's heliocentricism, just
as once before it had been reconciled with Aristotle's geocentri
cism. Now, however, they were reluctant to express their opinion
openly, for fear o f attracting the attention o f inquisitors whom the
Catholic church recently had empowered to prosecute heretics.
A forty-seven-year-old German astronomer named Johannes
Kepler was being particularly discreet, because he was a Lutheran
and a Copernican-the worst o f all worlds, so far as the religious
establishment was concerned. He was director o f the observatory
originally run by the late Tycho Brahe, furthermore, and was
about to announce several discoveries that were sure to finish up

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Applet anJ Orange.

35

where Brahe's assaults had left off in discrediting Aristotle's theory

o f the universe.
Getting that far in life had not been easy for Kepler. He was only
sixteen when his father had deserted the family, relegating them to
a life of abject poverty. To make matters worse, his mother had
been rumored to be a witch, and that ultimately had cast malevo
lent suspicion on Kepler and his predilection for astrology.
Kepler was indeed a remarkable astrologer; during one year he
correctly predicted a cold winter, a peasant uprising, and a Turk
invasion. As a scientist, however, he tended to downplay his suc
cess: "If astrologers sometimes do tell the truth," he had explained
demurely, "it ought to be attributed to luck."
Kepler preferred astronomy, but there were no jobs for some
one who wished to study the stars solely for their scientific value.
Therefore, as a young man trying to earn a living for himself and
his poor , bedeviled mother, he had found it lucrative to cast horo
scopes. Besides, Kepler had always harbored the vague and generic
belief that heavenly bodies do somehow influence earthly affairs.
For example, at the age o f six, he and his mother had stood
outside, gazing fearfully and excitedly at the glowering comet o f
1577. He hadn't thought of it again until years later, when Brahe,
the great comet observer himself, had offered the impecunious
young astronomer ajob. From that moment on, Kepler had never
lost the intuitive conviction that his present position of promi
nence had been foreshadowed by that comet.
This now was his finest hour. He had spent the better part of he
past twenty years trying to make sense ofTycho Brahe's meticu
lous observations of the heavens. Using the very latest equipment
(save for a telescope, which had yet to be invented), Kepler himself
had spent hundreds o f hours observing the planets, trying to dis
cern their true "periods and motions," just as Plato had once en

joined his countrymen to do.

Now, two millennia later, the mission had been fulfilled, but the

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36

outcome was nothing like what Plato or Aristode had foreseen.

Kepler had discovered three remarkable things about the vagabond
planets, the first being that they do indeed have a wonderful under
lying regularity to their behavior, if one believed that the sun sat at
the center o f them all.
If T stood for the length o f a planet's year (the time it took for a
planet to go once around its orbit) and d stood for the planet's
distance from the sun, then the first thing Kepler had discovered
boiled down to this simple equation:

'P = onstant x d3

In plain English: The square of a planet's year always equaled

some multiple o f the cube o f the planet's distance from the sun.
That is, p l a ~ e t s  far from the sun had long years, whereas planets
close to it had short years. (Mercury, the planet closest to the sun,
has a year 88 days long; Pluto, farthest away, has a year 90,410 days
long!)
The second thing Kepler had discovered revealed an unseemly
irregularity in the heavens. Planets did not move at constant speeds
along their orbits, he announced; instead, they routinely sped up
and slowed down, like a jockey who kept changing his mind about
how fast to race around the track.
Finally, Kepler disclosed, the planets raced around orbits that
were shaped like ovals, not circles! O f the three revelations, this
one pierced closest to the very heart o f Aristode's age-old vision o f
heavenly perfection.
Though these discoveries were dangerously sacrilegious, at this
particular moment, the middle-aged astronomer did not care:
"Now . . . nothing holds me back. I yield freely to the sacred
frenzy. If you pardon me, I shall rejoice," a deliriously happy Kep
with " i f you
ler enthused reckless abandon, reproach me, I shall
endure."

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In the years ahead, Kepler was able to avoid the Catholic In
quisitors and to concentrate on honing his defense of heliocentri
cism. In his opinion, for instance, planets were kept in their orbits,
not by ethereal globes, but by some kind of magnetic force from
the sun.
His contemporaries had different theories: The French philoso
pher Rene Descartes, for example, believed that all heavenly bod
ies were located at the tapered ends of giant, invisible tornadoes.
The planets spun around the sun, he supposed, simply because they
were caught up in the sun's whirlwind.
By the same token, Descartes explained, the moon spun around
the earth because it was caught up in the earth's invisible tornado.
Furthermore, things fell to earth whenever they were unfortunate
enough actually to be sucked in by the tornado.
In Florence, Italy, yet another astronomer, a sixty-nine-year-old
named Galileo Galilei, was getting caught up in the swirling winds
o f change. Like Kepler and nearly everyone else in his generation,
Galileo had begun life as an avowed Aristotelian. But he had
changed his mind back in 1609, when he had looked through a
crude little telescope of his own design; with it, he had beheld tiny
moons circling around Jupiter, exactly as Copernicus had imagined
the moon circling around the earth.
The earth's moon, furthermore, was not nearly as perfect as Ar-
istotle had pictured; it was full oflarge blemishes. Some looked like
craters, Galileo commented, and others looked like maria, seas full
of water, a corruptible element supposedly found only within the
earthly realm.
(Many years after Galileo had been proven wrong about the
water, scientists would retain his imagery. In fact, the ftrst lunar
astronauts would land within an area called Mare Tranquilitatis, or
the Sea of Tranquillity.)
Galileo also had found powerful reasons right here on earth to
doubt Aristotle. For example, in measuring how fast metal balls

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38

rolled down slopes o f various steepnesses, he had discovered that

heavy objects did not fall faster than light ones; contrary to com
mon sense, and to Aristotle's vaunted theory, all objects fell to the
earth with identical speeds.
Unfortunately for Galileo, living in the national seat of Roman
Catholic power meant that he was in greater danger than Kepler o f
being accused of heresy for his often tactless denunciations o f Aris
totle and brash belief in Copernicus's heliocentricism. I t was not
surprising, therefore, when in 1633 he was summoned to the Vati
can to face the Inquisition.
Galileo stood accused o f gnoring an order from the Holy Office
issued to him fifteen years earlier. The papal injunction had warned
"that the said opinion o f Nicolaus Copernicus was erroneous" and
that, therefore "the aforementioned Galileo was ordered and en
joined to abandon completely this opinion. He is not to hold, to
teach or to defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writ-
. "
mg.
Though he insisted throughout the months-long trial that his
belief in heliocentricism had always been purely academic, Galileo
could not deny having defied the letter and spirit o f the church's
ominous warning. Consequently, on June 21, 1633, a tribunal of
cardinals found him guilty and demanded that he recant.
At first, Galileo was intransigent. "I have nothing to say," he
insisted. But after being threatened with the same fate as Giordano
Bruno, the weary old astronomer relented: "I, Galileo, being in
my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before
your Eminence, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I
touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the
heresy o f the movement o f the earth."
Badgered further, the defeated and prostrate Galileo reiterated
his confession: "I do not hold this opinion o f Copernicus," he said
with a moan. "For the rest I am in your hands. Do with me as you
please."
The tensions that had begun to strain the long-standing marriage

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- 9

between science and religion had finally erupted into a very ugly
public brawl. It was, however, not what it seemed: In Rome, reli
gion had brought science to its knees, but in reality, it was science
that now threatened to fell religion.
Indeed, one might argue, religion had not triumphed at all;
rather, it had surrendered long ago, when Aquinas and others had
relinquished to science the sacred right to define the Christian God

and His heavenly realm. What science had given, therefore, it was
now taking away.
In the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, science had given to Chris
tendom a resplendent heaven, undefiled by terrestrial imperfec
tions and run exquisitely by God. Now, though, in the theories o f
Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, science was replacing it
with a heaven despoiled by comets, ovals, and the beastly orbiting,
spinning earth itself
By corrupting the heavenly realm, science was now threatening
to rob religion o f that mysterious power and appeal it always had
derived from being associated with lofty, godlike sublimity. In
short, whereas religion was bringing science to its knees, science
was bringing religion down to earth and dragging it through the
dirt.
For its part, science now wished to be separated from religion.
However, religion-having grown comfortable with its marriage
and whose self-image was so greatly defmed by its scientific
spouse--wished desperately to remain wed.
After his trial, Galileo was placed under house arrest and left
untormented for the remaining eight years o f his life. Cataracts
eventually blinded him, but to the end, he was able to see clearly
that Plato's matchmaking had led to an unholy alliance.
In 1642, the beleagured old Italian astronomer died, and by co
incidence, Isaac Newton was born. In the years ahead, Newton
would learn about the growing estrangement between science and
religion and, in the end, bring about their permanent divorce.

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v(I
The villagers were delighted and intrigued to hear that Isaac was on
his way from Cambridge to be with his ailing mother. Over the
years, they had kept well informed of the strained goings-on at the
N ewton-Smith manor; now the gossips wondered whether finally
there would be a reconciliation.
To say that Wooisthorpe was proud o f its most famous native
son was a grotesque understatement; the tiny village venerated him
and congratulated itself on having foreseen his notoriety; the fa
therless child born on Christ's birthday was now a full-fledged
chaired professor in the department o f natural philosophy at the
University o f Cambridge.
The thirty-six-year-old had ascended quickly up the academic
hierarchy because of several discoveries he had made. Anyone of
them alone would have been sufficient to secure Newton a place in
history.
In a mathematical tour de force, for example, Newton had in
vented the calculus. Though in future it would become the bane
o f many a liberal arts student's college experience, seventeenth
century philosophers were thrilled to have been given a mathemat
icallanguage that enabled them, for the first time in history, to
describe the natural world with infinitesimal precision. (See "Be
tween a Rock and a Hard Life.")
Also, Newton had expanded and refined Galileo's seminal work
with metal balls by watching how objects moved in response to any
force, not just gravity. Ultimately, he had been able to summarize
their behavior with three simple truisms.

Truism #1. In a world where there are no forces to push things

around, an object that is not moving will remain motionless
forever, whereas an object that is moving will keep m oving for
ever, along a straight line and at a constant speed.

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_J Orange,
-
Apple.

Truism #2. In a world where there are forces to push things

around, an object bullied by a force will always either accelerate
or decelerate, depending on how the force is applied.
Truism #3. If two objects bump into each other, each will feel
the force of the collision equally, but in opposite directions.
(Years hence, many would paraphrase this by stating: "For every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction.")

All together, Newton's achievements had made him renowned

throughout the world, most especially at Woolsthorpe. He was an
intellectual giant, and yet as the thirty-six-year-old pulled up to the
stately manor, he trembled like a child at the thought o f facing his
bedridden mother.
When he entered the old house, he was greeted by his beloved
uncle. The Reverend Ayscough was delighted to see Newton after
all these years but also horrified to behold that the rumors he had
been hearing from his old university acquaintances were true.
Newton looked terribly gaunt and distracted: During these past
fifteen years, he had worked himself into a nervous breakdown
from which he was still recovering. So far as the d o c ~ o r s  had been
able to ascertain, the breakdown had been triggered by a physical
exhaustion caused by too much work and too litde sleep, com
pounded by an emotional fatigue brought on by his constant feud
ing with colleagues.
The worst o f it had started seven years earlier, in 1672, when
Newton had been noticed by King Charles II and subsequendy
elected to the Royal Society of London. Being a member of this
. ultra-exclusive scientific academy was a singular honor for any nat
ural philosopher, let alone one who had not yet turned thirty.
In keeping with tradition, the new inductee had submitted for
the Society's consideration a report o f his latest research. It was the
scientific equivalent o f a coming-out party, but it was to end in a
disastrous falling out.
Up until then, most natural philosophers had believed that white

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42

light was absolutely pure, and that all the known colors were pro
duced by its passing through some adulterating medium. For ex
ample, a little fouling produced red, a lot of it produced blue.
In their minds, that explained why white light passing through a
glass prism produced all the colors o f the rainbow. That portion
going through the narrowest part of the prism's wedgelike shape
produced red; that portion passing through the thickest part pro
duced blue.
Newton had com e to a completely different conclusion, how
ever, after noticing that colored light passing through any part o f a
prism remained the very same color; red stayed red, blue stayed
blue, and so on. Evidendy, he surmised, it was colored l i g h t - n o t
white light-that was pure and immutable. Indeed, white light
appeared to be a composite o f all the other colors, as evidenced by
the fact that it produced the rainbow.
Excited by these extraordinary revelations, young Newton had
thought them a grand way o f ntroducing himself to England's elite
Royal Society. Furthermore, buoyed by all this newfound collegial
attention-which reminded him of that day, years ago, when he
had been cheered for trouncing Arthur St orer-Newt on had gone
so far as to suggest immodesdy that his discovery concerning white
light was "the oddest if not the most considerable detection which
has hitherto been made in operations o f Nature."
The paper had been a hit, or so Newton had been led to believe.
"I can assure you, Sir," the Society's diplomatic secretary Henry
Oldenburg had effused, "that it mett with a singular attention and
an uncommon applause."
Actually, however, put off by the self-important air o f this
young unknown and the audacity o f his radical theory, a small
number o f Society members led by one Robert Hooke had
greeted the publication with particular scorn and condescension.
"As to his hypothesis," Hooke had snorted imperiously, "I cannot
see yet any undeniable argument to convince me of the certainty
thereof"

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-
Applet anJ Orantjet

O f course, scientific criticism was quite routine and, in most

cases, not meant to be taken personally. By questioning one an
other's theories with often brutal indifference to human feelings,
natural philosophers intended to create a kind o f ntellectual jungle
wherein only the fittest ideas would survive.
In this case, however, Hooke had been especially eager to dis
credit Newton, seven years his junior. Back in 1665, in a best
selling book titled Micrographia, Hooke had published an eloquent
defense o f the orthodox theory o f colors, embellishing it here and
there with ideas o f his own. Hooke had become famous because o f
it-indeed, Micrographia had been his single greatest achieve
m e n t - a n d he was not about to let it all be vitiated by the hair
brained hypothesis o f some arrogant upstart. "For the same
phaenomenon will be solved by my own hypothesis as well as his,"
Hooke had concluded defiantly, "without any manner o f difficulty
or straining."
Hooke's denunciations had rattled the reclusive and insecure
Newton, calling up old memories of abandonment and rejection.
He had tried to defend himself, to restate his results and reasoning
as carefully as possible, but with no success: The critics could not
be silenced.
Newton had become ill as a result, faulting Hooke most o f all for
poisoning his fledgling relationship with the Society. He had come
to loathe this bully, and yet, rather than accelerating his resolve, the
force of this newest kick to the stomach had caused Newton sud
the he had "I
denly to withdraw from only family ever embraced.
will resolutely bid adieu to it eternally," he had lashed out bitterly,
"for I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new, or
become a slave to defend it."
Though the bullies had cowed him, Newton had wished not to
give them the satisfaction o f knowing it. In his letter o f resignation,

therefore, he had pretended to be quitting the Society because

London was too far from Cambridge for him to attend the meet
ings: "For though I honour that body, yet since I see I shall neither

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44

profit them, nor (by reason o f this distance) can partake o f the
advantage of their Assemblies, I desire to withdraw."
Mter that, Newton had vowed never again to publish any o f his
work. During all these years, therefore, he had kept his ideas and
experimental observations secret, scrawled in the pages of his note
books; i f his famous achievements had come to be known
throughout the world, it was only because they had been leaked
vaguely and incompletely via letters and word o f mouth.
Never again had he sought to rejoin the Royal Society or soci
ety in general, for that matter. He even had given up any hope o f
ever joining up with Katherine Storer. In all this time, he had felt
too insecure, been too studious, to give himself to the only young
woman he had ever truly loved; in tum, she always had been too
much o f a lady to give herself to him. Now time had passed him
by; another man had married her.
Walking into his mother's bedroom, Newton felt like the
loneliest man alive: Already he had been rejected by his colleagues
and by the fabled Cupid, and now it appeared he was about to lose
this enigmatic woman who all her life had professed, i f not shown,
an undying love for him.
As he approached the large bed, Newton saw that his mother
looked ashen and was barely able to speak, though she did manage
a faint smile o f recognition. He was moved; he had hated her most
of his life, but now, faced with her extreme vulnerability, her mor
tality, something in his heart softened, and he wept like a baby.
She had not been much of a mother, but she was the one person
whom he had secretly wished most to impress. He had been defi
ant with her, even cruel, but that behavior was behind him. Now,
he pledged, his eyes awash in tears, his only desire was to show her
how much he had loved her all along and had wished for her love
in return.
Word o f
Newton's dramatic repentance spread throughout
Woolsthorpe, and the villagers watched in wonder. According to

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one witness, Newton: "sate up nights with her, gave her all her
Physick himself, dressed all her blisters with his own hands & made
use o f that manual dexterity for wc h he was so remarkable to lessen
the pain wc h always attends the dressing."
Sustained by a lifetime's accumulation o f unexpressed love,
Newton hardly ate or slept. He was unfailingly at his mother's beck
and call, one villager reported, "the torturing remedy usually ap
plied . . . with as much readiness as he ever had employed it in the
most delightful experiments."
Within a few weeks, his mother died and was buried in the
village cemetery. In the aftermath of it all, Newton cursed himself
for not having had a change o f heart sooner than this, but the
young natural philosopher also rejoiced at finally having discov
ered the feeling of a son's love for his mother.
In the days that followed, he remained in W oolsthorpe to help
settle his mother's affairs and to reminisce. He walked through the
pastures, rode to the windmill near Grantham-which was looking
quite rundown n o w - a n d spent many hours with his uncle.
One warm evening, while he strolled through the garden, the
moon began to rise, exacdy as it had fourteen summers ago. Back
then, Newton now remembered, he had done a calculation to
show why the moon did not fall to the earth like some apple from
a very, very high tree.
I t didn't fall, he had figured, because the earth's gravitational
force was being opposed by the moon's own centrifugal force;
Newton chuckled when he recalled that, as a youngster, he had
referred to it as the ring-a-ring o'roses force.
N ow that he was older, he was more inclined to picture the
situation in terms of a person being swung around on the end o f a
rope: The centrifugal force was what kept the rope taut, pulling
with a strength that depended on just three things.
it on grown-up being
First, depended mass: A large whirled
around strained the rope far more so than a small child.

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46

Second, it depended on the length of the rope: A very long rope

produced a larger effect than did a short rope; for the person at the
end o f the rope, certainly, being swept around in a larger circle
produced a far more dizzying experience.
Finally, it depended on speed: The faster a person was whirled
around, the harder she strained against the rope and the more she
had the feeling of being pulled away from the center.
Mathematically, i f m stood for the person's mass, d stood for the
rope's length, and T stood for how long it took to be whirled once
around, then the centrifugal force the person felt was described by
this simple equation:

CENTRIFUGAL FORCE = constant x m x d

T2

In plain English: A large centrifugal force corresponded to a

massive person or object being whirled around speedily on a long
rope in a very short amount o f time; that is, a large force resulted
from multiplying a large m and large d and dividing by the square o f
a small T.
Conversely, a small centrifugal force corresponded to a light
person or object being whirled around languorously on a short
rope in a large amount o f time; that is, a small force resulted from
multiplying a small m and small d and dividing by the square of a
large T.
As the garden swelled with the chirpings and croakings of its
nocturnal inhabitants, a relaxed Newton harked back to how his
mind had zeroed in on the 'P in that formula. At first, he had been
unable to remember where he had seen it before, but then it had
come to him.
A century earlier, Kepler had argued that the planets whirled
around the sun in orbits that obeyed a simple law:

T2 = constant x d3

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Apple. anJ Orange.

47

Admittedly, our moon was not a planet, Newton recalled hav

ing worried, but i f t orbited the earth, as some said it did, then it,
too, might obey Kepler's formula. If so, then he could replace his
own formula's 'P with Kepler's mathematical equivalent; namely,
constant x d3 • Consequently:

MOON'S CENTRIFUGAL FORCE

constant X m X d
constant x d 3

= n ew constant x m -:- d2

Back during that horrible plague-infested year of1665, in other

words, young Newton had come upon a most beautiful discovery.
The centrifugal force the moon felt as it whirled around the earth
depended on only two things (apart from the constant)-the
moon's mass m and the length d o f the imaginary rope connecting
it to the earth.
That imaginary rope symbolized the pull o f the earth's gravita

tional force. It yanked on the moon, and the moon's centrifugal

force yanked back in the o p p o ~ t e  direction. The result was a cos
mic standoff, young Newton had reasoned, which explained why
the moon, instead o f falling down or pulling away, circled round
and round in a kind o f eternal holding pattern.
Filled with nostalgia, Newton now recalled the climactic mo
ment of hat fateful night, when he was but twenty-three years old.
If he were correct about the standoff, he had concluded, if the
strengths o f the two opposing forces were equal, that meant they
obeyed the same mathematical equation:

EARTH'S GRAVITATIONAL FORCE

=MOON'S CENTRIFUGAL FORCE
= constant x m -:- d2

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48

That is, the earth's gravitational pull weakened the farther away it
was from the e a r t h - i t weakened with the square of the distance
(i.e., a smaller and smaller force resulted from dividing m by a larger
and larger d2 ) .
For instance, an apple two times as far away from the earth would
feel one-fourth the pull. (In other words, the force was diluted by
four, the square o f wo.) An apple three times as far away would feel
one-ninth the pull, and so forth. By the time one got as far away as
the moon, the earth's pull would be feeble indeed, but it would still
exist.
As far away as one could imagine, in fact, the earth's pull would
still exist. Its strength never vanished completely; it merely faded
away as one traveled farther and farther from the earth, toward
infinity.
That last assertion, Newton now realized better than he had
back then, was a frightfully heretical concept. Here was a perfectly
reasonable argument for thinking that the earthly realm might ex
tend to the farthest reaches of the universe, in direct contradiction
to Aristotle's belief that it stopped just short o f the moon.
As Newton picked himself up to return to the house, he looked
-up at the sky one last time and wondered what the heavens were
trying to tell him. He was not an avid astrologer by any means, but
like Kepler, he had always been inclined to believe in the intercon
nectivity of the universe's two realms.
God, he believed, intervened in our daily affairs out of necessity.
Indeed, Newton mused, as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom,
one could think of life as being another kind o f cosmic standoff:
Ever since Adam and Eve had bitten into the apple, God's redemp
tive presence had been the only thing keeping this imperfect world
from falling into ruin.
Coincidentally, as Newton fell asleep that night thinking afresh
about the tug o f war between the forces of heaven and earth, peo
ple in London were being kept awake by a similar struggle involv-

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Applet anJ Oranget

49

ing Roman Catholics and the English government.

Having so recently been ruled by overly strict Puritans, the En
glish regarded any and all non-Anglican zealots with unmerited
suspicion and malice; in a word, they were quite jumpy. Most
recently, for example, the Pope had been rumored to have re
cruited the Icing's brother James II in an effort to assassinate Charles
II; in the ensuing paranoid frenzy, many innocent Roman Catho
lics had been massacred.
When he returned to Cambridge, furthermore, Newton re
turned to a university that by law excluded from its faculty anyone
who did not sign a loyalty oath. According to this so-called Test
Act, in fact, no one could hold any public or military position who
refused to receive communion according to the tenets o f the secu
larized Church of England.
English natural philosophers were among the most enthusiastic
supporters o f the Test Act, which they saw as a timely sanction
against the Roman Catholic church's continued persecution o f sci
ence. After all, they noted, the Vatican still kept Galileo's writings
on its reprehensible list of prohibited books. (And would continue
to do so until October 31, 1992!)
In seventeenth-century England, religion was less wedded to
science and, therefore, more tolerant o f science's mercurial opin
ion o f God's creation. Conversely, science was more tolerant o f
religion. Indeed, many of Newton's contemporaries were devout
servants of both realms.
the one
As theologians, they read Bible and critiqued another's
interpretations o f t. As natural philosophers, they did experiments
and critiqued one another's theories o f how best to explain the
results. Among Anglicans, one might say, science and religion had
separated. They now lived in their own houses, and to the extent
they interacted, they tried to get along, even to reconcile their

widening differences.
Many of Newton's colleagues, for example, were trying to rec-

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50

oncile the laws o f science with the biblical account of he Flood. It

would take them years to finish, but after lengthy and controversial
calculations, they would eventually conclude that the Deluge had
begun precisely on November 28, 2349 B.C., when a low-flying
comet created huge fissures in the ground, allowing water to es
cape the oceans and flood the earth.
Newton himself wore two hats: If he wasn't picking apart the
meaning o f the obdurate predictions contained in the Book o f
Revelation, he was trying to change iron into gold. Though he
wasn't much o f an astrologer, he was becoming quite proficient in
alchemy, the forerunner o f modem chemistry.
The direction of Newton's thoughts was changed completely,
however, by a letter he received from his old nemesis, Robert
Hooke. Unbeknownst to Newton, Hooke had come to admire his
achievements from afar, albeit grudgingly and jealously, and now
wished to have Newton's opinion about a new idea.
Hooke had given Kepler's oval-shaped orbits a great deal of
thought over the years, the letter explained. As a result, he had
concluded the orbits probably were caused by a gravitational force
that weakened with the square of the distance from the earth!
Hooke had come to that idea, he explained, by imagining the
earth to be like a source of l i g h t - a candle, one might say. A cen
tury ago, Kepler had discovered that brightness diminished with
the square of he distance from the light source: A candle two times as
far away appeared one-fourth as bright; a candle three times as far
away appeared one-ninth as bright; and so forth.
Perhaps, Hooke conjectured in his letter, earth's gravity also
waned with distance, just like a light's brightness. If so, Hooke
concluded, "the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to
the Distance from the Center Recriprocall"-in other words, the
gravitational attraction always diminishes in proportion to the
square of the distance from the center of the earth.
As Newton read the letter, he smirked: The bully had lucked

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Apple...oJ O...otje.
51

upon the truth. But no matter. If only the odious little man knew
how far behind he was in his thinking. Fourteen years ago, New
ton had actually calculated the result at which Hooke was now
only guessing.
In the days ahead-though he had dismissed Hooke's letter as so
much child's pl ay-Newt on began to wonder about the loose ends
that had been left untied by his own efforts back in 1665, chief
among them being this question: What was the cause o f earth's
gravitational field? The philosopher's treasured Principle o f Suffi
cient Reason demanded an answer.
He dismissed Descartes's tornado theory, because ifit were true,
the apple in the garden would have spiraled down to the earth;
instead, Newton had noticed carefully that things fell straight
down. It was as if he center of a falling object were being yanked to
the center o f the earth, not off to one side or another.
At that point, Newton began to wonder: What would happen if
the earth was whittled down to the size o f a tiny particle at its
center and, likewise, the apple was whitded down to a tiny particle
at its core? Would the tiny apple-particle fall toward the tiny earth
particle? He could think of no reason why not, whereupon he
struck on the idea that would lead to his famous equation.
Everyone was accustomed to thinking o f the apple falling to
ward the earth, because the apple was so much smaller than it. By
reducing the situation down to two equally sized particles, how
ever, it became implausible to keep believing that the apple
particle would fall while the earth-particle would just sit there
unmoved.
It was more reasonable, more equitable, to suppose that the
two particles fell toward one another. In other words, what we
possessively referred to as earth's gravity did not belong to the
earth exclusively; gravity was a force o f attraction felt mutually

by all particles of matter.

These newer revelations did not disqualify the gravitation equa-

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52

tion Newton had first found as a young man, but they did require
it to be amended slightly. The original equation had been formu
lated with the idea that earth's gravity was a unilateral force, so the
equation contained a reference to only the mass o f he object being
attracted to the earth; in recognition of gravity being a mutual
force, the equation needed an explicit reference to the mass of the
earth being attracted to the object.
Alongside the m, which referred to the object's mass, therefore,
Newton inserted an M, which represented the earth's mass. That
way, both object and earth held an identical place in the revised
equation, in keeping with gravity's perfect reciprocity:

EARTH'S GRAVITATIONAL FORCE

= constant x M x m -;- d2

In plain English: Between the earth and massive objects close to

it, the force o f attraction was very strong and irresistible; between
the earth and tiny objects far away, the force was quite weak. In
short, the earth and any other object were attracted to one another
with a force whose strength depended on: the distance between
their centers, their two masses, and some constant number.
In years to come, scientific experiments would determine the
value o f hat number with enormous accuracy. In remembrance of
the man who first made reference to it, furthermore, it would
come to be called "Newton's gravitational constant" and desig
nated by the letter G. Ultimately, therefore, it would take a little
less space to write out the equation:

EARTH'S GRAVITATIONAL FORCE = G x M x m -;- d 2

In the most general terms imaginable, Newton's equation ex

the between two the
pressed gravitational force any objects; letters
m and M could stand for the mass o f the moon and Jupiter, or a

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- 3

comet and the sun, or any other pair o f bodies.

Gravity was a force of attraction that was felt mutually by all
particles everywhere in the universe; in short, Newton concluded,
gravity was the glue that held everything together.
After all these centuries, Aristotle's large-minded theory o f the
heavens had been pulverized by Newton's tiny-minded theory o f
gravity. According to this new v i ~ i o n ,  the universe was not segre
gated into two separate realms; there was only one universe, ruled
not by some divine monarch but by one very earthly gravitational
equation.
Much o f what the universe had been, was, and would be, New
ton had disclosed, was the outcome o f an inftnity o f material parti
cles all pulling on one another simultaneously. If the result of all
that gravitational tussling had appeared to the Greeks to be a' cos
mos, it was simply because the underlying equation describing their
behavior had itself turned out to be every bit a cosmos-orderly,
beautiful, and decent.
In 1682, as ifin celebration o f Newton's remarkable discovery,
the heavens produced a comet over the skies o f London. It was not
a very bright comet, however, perhaps because Newton was not in
a partying mood.
After all these years, this brilliant and successful philosopher had
not gotten over his hurtful experience with the Royal Society.
Excited though he was by his discovery, he feared being criticized
for it . Therefore, he decided, he would not publish the equation.
Some years later, Newton received yet another letter from
Hooke, who was now secretary o f the Royal Society. Hooke had
heard about Newton's gravitational equation and wanted to make
certain that Newton agreed it was he, Hooke, who had ftrst come
up with the "distance-squared" theory; as proof, he reminded
Newton of the letter he had sent years earlier describing the idea.
Newton was livid. "I am not beholden to him for any light into
this business," he protested vehemently in a letter to a colleague,

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54

"but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to

think on these things."
The petty tyrant was attempting to cow him again, Newton
steamed, but it wouldn't work. This time, he would respond the
way he had as a grammar-school student in Grantham: He would
beat this tormentor senseless, once and for all.
In the years that followed, Newton set aside his alchemical and
religious studies and devoted himself to exhuming every discovery
he had ever made. He searched through all his papers, even his
childhood notebooks, refining conclusions and redoing calcula
tions.
Newton did all this work himself, but he was encouraged every
step of the way by an astronomer named Edmund Halley. After
years o f vain efforts, Halley had been ovetjoyed to hear o f New
ton's equation of gravity; with it, he finally had been able to make
sense o f cometary behavior.
In fact, after hundreds o f hours o f searching back into the histor
ical records, Halley had concluded that the recent 1682 comet had
been the same one Kepler had seen in 1607 and that others had
observed many times before thenl Using Newton's equation, he
had figured out that the comet was in orbit around our planetary
system, passing by the earth roughly every seventy-six years; it
would reappear, he predicted, in 1758.
This was a far-fetched forecast, because heliocentric astronomers
since Kepler had come to believe that comets traveled along
straight lines: They passed by earth once, they believed, never to
reappear again. "Should the comet return according to our predic
tion," Halley stated imperially, "posterity will not refuse to ac
knowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman."
With financial help from Halley and the blessing of the Royal
Society itself, Newton finally came clean with the world from
which he had lived apart for nearly all his life. In 1687, he pub
lished his life's work in three volumes and titled it Philosophiae

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Naturalis Prindpia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural

Philosophy) .
The monumental publication stunned his English colleagues
and, with its powerful marriage o f mathematics and experimenta
tion, transformed natural philosophy into natural sdence; yet it was
missing something. The crafty orphan from W oolsthorpe had de
cided to withhold from this magnum opus any mention of his ideas
concerning light; he would not publish those until the bully
Hooke had di ed-whi ch would not happen until 1704-thus
guaranteeing himself the pleasure o f having had the last word.
In one way, by discrediting the idea of a segregated, two-realm
universe, Newton's scientific revolution crushed the rebellion
Plato had begun two thousand years earlier. In another way, how
ever, it represented the utter fulfillment of Plato's wish that hu
manity "cast off the superstitious fear o f prying into the Divine."
What Plato hadn't foreseen was that in the process o f helping us
Cast off our fears, science would help us cast off our gods. Earth's
gravity, Newton had demonstrated, extended to the moon and
beyond; indeed, there was no place in the universe that did not feel
however
its influence, remote it might be.
Consequently, there was no place left uncorrupted in the uni
verse for God to dwell. He had been crowded out of our picture o f
the universe by gravity's infinite reach. For the first time in West
ern history, the heavens had been completely despoiled; God's
perfect existence had been purged ignominiously from our scien

tific theories.
The historic betrothal Plato had arranged had now ended in
complete ruin: As a result of our investigating the heavens, science
had become irreligious and religion had become unscientific. It
was a momentous parting of the ways, and though Newton was
the main person responsible for the troubled marriage's final

breakup, he had a surprise accomplice o f sorts.

In 1688, only months after Newton's revolutionary publication,

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the English had decided they had had enough o f their new king.
James II had succeeded Charles II only three years ago, but already
his flagrant Catholicism had brought his country to the brink o f
another civil war.
To keep that from happening, English politicians of all faiths had
cooked up a scheme, which began with their sneaking into the
country a Dutch prince named William o f Orange and his consort,
the king's Protestant daughter, Mary II. The next step now was for
Parliament to declare that James II was no longer the king o f En
gland.
Predictably, the king responded by reminding England that he
ruled by divine right, just as his predecessors had done. He had
been appointed by God Himself to lead the English people, and it
was sacrilege for any secular institution to presume to countermand
His authority.
At the sight of William leading a large army into London, how
ever, James quickly gave way and fled the country. It was called the
Glorious Revolution, because from then on, for the first time in
history, Parliament would have the undisputed authority to ap
point England's kings and queens.
With that, the Western world had begun to expurgate God from
its government as well as its cosmology. Politically and scientifi
cally, the influence of he earthly realm had vanquished the age-old
authority o f the heavenly realm; God and his representatives were
no longer wanted or needed to govern the English people or N ew
ton's cosmos.
State separated from church; science divorced itself from reli
gion. These were historic and enduring disconnections. Even three
centuries hence, modern Western civilization would show the ef
fects o f being the offspring o f divorced parents: Its people would
live in a scientific and political world without God and a religious
world without science--the remarkable legacy, one might say, o f
an apple from W oolsthorpe and a prince from Orange.

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- 7

IPILOGUI

The 1960s were a time when it seemed nothing could go right for
the United States. It was the era of the Vietnam War, ofleaders
being assassinated, o f violence raging in the streets; it was a time of
great pessimism.
It was not surprising, therefore, that in 1969, many people
thought the idea o f going to the moon was impossible. Some were
skeptical for technical reasons: How could we transport ourselves
to something that was one-quarter o f a million miles away, let
alone land on it and then return safely?
Others were doubtful for religious reasons. The earth's gravity
might extend into the heavenly realm, they conceded, but earth
lings themselves would never do s o - w o u l d never plant their dirty
feet on the moon or any other heavenly body.
The doubters notwithstanding, the United States had pressed
ahead, under the leadership of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. The forerunner o f NASA had been fonned back

in 1957, immediately after the Soviets had launched the world's

first satellite, and now it was well on its way to planning the world's
first round trip to the lunar surface.
Politically speaking, NASA was acting in response to President
Kennedy's 1961 State o f the Union challenge: "I believe that this
nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this dec

ade is out oflanding a man on the moon." If successful, the United

States would score a stinging Cold War victory against commu
msm.
Genetically and scientifically, however, NASAwas responding
to that irresistible human urge to explore the unknown. The space
agency was racing to beat the Soviets, yes, but it was also trying to

fulfill a visceral desire first articulated by the astronomer Johannes

Kepler in Somnium (Dream), history's first work o f science fiction.

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Published posthumously in 1634, Somnium had described a boy

journeying to the moon with the supernatural aid of a friendly
demon, conjured up by the boy's witch o f a mother. The story was
quite unbelievable, but it had survived to infect other writers with
the dream o f going to the moon, most notably a Frenchman
named Jules Verne.
In his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, Verne had de
scribed a trip to the moon in prophetic detail. According to the
popular author, three men had made the long journey inside a
huge aluminum bullet, fired from a 900-foot-Iong cast-iron can
non located in Tampa, Florida.
Now, a century later, NASA was planning to send three men to
the moon traveling inside what amounted to a giant titanium bul
let, fired from a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, one hun
dred miles directly east of Tampa. The astronauts would not be
shot from a cannon, but they would ride atop a 363-foot-Iong
liquid-fueled rocket, the Saturn V.
In preparation for that trip, NASA had sent a group o f as
tronauts, including Neil Armstrong, to the Lowell Observatory in
Flagstaff, Arizona, to have their first close-up look at the moon.
They could have gone to any number o f observatories in the
United States, but it was especially significant that NASA had cho
sen this one.
The observatory had been founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell,
a well-to-do eccentric who had wanted a telescope to search for
life on Mars. Though he never did end up finding any "little green
men," his observatory had become one o f he country's most pres
tigious facilities for studying the solar system.
When the Lowell Observatory had first opened, people believed
the solar system consisted o f seven planets (in addition to the
earth). There were the five planets known to Copernicus, plus two

more--Uranus and Neptune--that astronomers had discovered in

the years since.
Astronomers had noticed, furthermore, that Uranus's orbit was

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-
Applet anJ Oranget

not perfectly oval, in violation o f one o f Kepler's laws. That had

led many o f them, including Lowell, to blame the aberrations on
the gravitational pull o f a nearby planet not yet discovered.
Armed with nothing but Newton's gravitation equation and his
own brand-new telescope, Lowell had predicted the probable lo
cation o f this hypothetical planet. H e had not lived to see it hap
pen, but in 1930, his assistant Clyde Tombaugh had found the
planet only six degrees away from where Lowell had said it would
be; subsequently, astronomers had named it Pluto.
Now, in 1969, Newton's equation was poised to playa similarly
crucial role in sending astronauts to the moon. Indeed, i f NASA
succeeded in its mission, it would be only because Newton had
given us the mathematical wherewithal to find our way there.
Using Newton's equation, astronomers over the years had cal
culated the moon's orbit so precisely that NASA engineers were
now able to know exactly where their lunar target would be at any
moment in time. By calculating the rate at which earth's gravity
diminished at any point along the way to the moon, furthermore,
NASA had been able to determine what size rocket was needed for
the the of it turned
j o b - o n e twice as tall as Statue Liberty, as out!
It was in order to give their rockets an extra 5 percent boost,
furthermore, that NASA had originally chosen to launch them
from Cape Canaveral. There, close to the equator, the effect o f the
earth's spinning was felt more so than anywhere else in the coun
try; that is, objects were whipped around with the greatest centrif
the the equator from the
ugal force at equator, because was farthest
earth's axis. When a rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, there
fore, it was like being slung off the edge o f a fast-spinning carousel.
To take full advantage o f this earthly boost, NASA usually pre
ferred to launch rockets eastward, with the earth's spin, not against
it. Fortunately, they were able to do this safely, because immedi

ately to the east o f Cape Canaveral was the Atlantic Ocean and
only a few sparsely populated islands.
Upon first hearing o f President Kennedy's challenge, engineers

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60

had realized that it was not going to be as simple as launching a

rocket and pointing it toward the moon. To calculate the best
route to the moon, therefore, NASA had created the Mission Plan
ning and Analysis Division (MPAD), based at its Mission Control
Center in Houston, Texas; in 1969, at its height, MPAD consisted
o f nearly a thousand scientists and engineers.
Theirs was a dreadfully complicated task, because it required
applying Newton's equation to three objects simultaneously
earth, moon, and spaceship-not just two. I t was what scientists
referred to as a three-body problem: As the spaceship sped along on its
journey, its distances from the earth and moon would be changing
constandy; consequendy, the gravitational pulls between it and the
two bodies would be changing constandy.
Keeping track of all that, predicting the net effect o f three ob
jects pulling on one another, was impossible to compute exacdy.
In applying Newton's equation to three-body problems, the best
one could hope to do was approximate an answer, and even that
much could not be done without the aid o f computers.
Equal to the challenge, NASA had provided MPAD engineers
with state-of-the-art IBM computers. They occupied the entire
first floor o f the Mission Control Center, and for the past several
years, they had operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a
week, and fifty-two weeks a year; on the eve o f NASA's first at
tempt to land on the moon, the engineers and computers had cal
culated the safest and cheapest way to get there.
The moon
astronauts were to travel to the and back along a
route shaped like a figure-eight; any other shape, it turned out, was .
either more dangerous or more wasteful of rocket fuel. Further
more, by following such a smooth and simple trajectory, the as
tronauts could whip around the moon and return safely to earth in
case they had to abort the mission at the very last moment; in such

an emergency, Newton's equation had predicted, no fuel would be

required, because the moon's gravitational pull would automati-

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61

cally sling the spaceship around and onto the return leg of the
figure-eight.
O n the morning o f July, 16, NASA engineers had done every-
thing they felt was necessary to prove the skeptics wrong. They
had confidence in all their calculations; nevertheless, when the
critical moment arrived, they held their breath as the three as- "
tronauts lifted off amid a fiery explosion and billowing cloud o f

steam.
The giant rocket inched slowly upward, struggling against the
unrelenting force that had held us captive on this earth for all of our
species' existence. As the rocket thundered its way into the clouds,
it began to spin like a bullet; long ago, scientists had figured out
that putting a spin on a fast-moving projectile kept it from"wob

bling off course--the same reason a child's spinning top stays up
right.
At first, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael
Collins sped toward the moon at 25,000 miles per hour, the run
ning start needed to pull free of the earth completely. For days,
fighting earth's gravity was like traveling uphill. Two-thirds o f the
way there, however, 190,000 miles away from the earth, the space
ship started to speed up, as if it were going downhill: The as
tronauts had reached the point at which the moon's gravity was
stronger than the earth's.
O n July 20, at 3:18 P.M., Houston time, as more than 600 mil
lion people watched the lunar lander come to rest on the moon's
rock-strewn Sea o f Tranquillity, NASA engineers breathed a loud
sigh o f relief; the Somnium had come true. A short while later, as
the world watched Neil Armstrong take his first step onto the
moon, those same NASA engineers cheered: "That's one small
step for man," Armstrong intoned, "one giant leap for Mankind."
Had he been alive, no doubt, Newton would h a v ~  cheered right
alongside the men and women who had -taken such spectacular

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62

advantage of his equation. It was a historic moment, made possible

by a historic equation.
For the posthumous child from W oolsthorpe, moreover, it was
a posthumous honor befitting a man who in his last years of ife had
finally discovered the familial love for which he had longed so
desperately. Following his discovery o f the universal gravity equa
tion, Newton had been elected president of the Royal Society,
appointed a member of Parliament, and knighted by Queen Anne,
daughter o f England's last heavenly monarch, James II.
During that time, Sir Isaac had hobnobbed with aristocracy and
entertained guests from high society in his posh London apart
ment. He had never married, but a niece named Catherine Barton
acted as his hostess. Her beauty and intelligence beguiled even the
great French philosopher and playwright Frans;ois Marie Voltaire.
The world had become Newton's family, with a few notable
exceptions. Having laid Robert Hooke to rest, literally, Newton
had become involved in an all-out feud with a German philoso
pher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had claimed credit
for discovering the calculus. (See "Between a Rock and a Hard
Life.")
During that time, furthermore, he had reflected on his most
famous equation and its stupendous consequences, conceding that
"we have explained the phenomena o f the heavens . . . by the
power of gravity, but have not assigned the cause o f this power."
Ultimately, he had insisted, God was the cause of it all. "This
most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets," Newton
believed earnestly, faithfully, "could only proceed from the coun
sel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
Aristotle had been wrong to think o f God as being confined to a
heavenly realm separated from the earth, Newton had concluded,
and now it was just as wrong for his younger contemporaries to
surmise that because of the thoroughgoing gravitational "corrup
tion" of that perfect domain, God had been ostracized from the
umverse.

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- 3

Instead, the Creator always had been, was, and would be every
where throughout His Creation, even in the tiny-most particle o f
apple and earth. "H e is eternal and infinite; omnipotent and omni
scient," the aging natural scientist had held passionately; "his dura
tion reaches from eternity to eternity;-his presence from infinity to
infinity. "
Newton died in the wee hours o f the morning on March 20,
1727, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the church where
nearly all English monarchs since William the Conqueror had been
crowned and only the most famous of the famous were interred.
His casket had been borne by nobility: three dukes, two earls, and
the Lord High Chancellor.
He had been the ftrst scientist to be honored so lavishly, and yet,
even ifhe had been alive to boast about it, he most certainly would
not have done so. Newton had died a man satisfted that all the
bullies of the world had been put in their place by the great esteem
and affection with which the world held him. That had pennitted
him to become humble: "If! have seen further," he had said at one
point, "it is by standing on the shoulders o f Giants."
Luckily for us, Newton had taken us along for the ride. With his
marvelous equation, he had hauled us up on his shoulders, and in
1969, as Neil Armstrong walked about in the celestial realm, we
were astonished by what we saw and felt.
The experience was grand and godlike, yet in the end, disquiet
ing. W e had conquered the heavens, but in that year when we
witnessed ftrsthand the empty vastness of the purely scientiftc cos
mos, we felt meeker and lonelier than at any other time in human
history.

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p + p x ~  V2 = CONSTANT

Delweeo an o ~ L  aoJ
aUarJ Lile
Daniel Bernoulli and the Law of
Hydrodynamic Pressure

Destiny has more resources than the

most imaginative composer of fiction.
- F R A N K FRANKFORT M O O R E

the homing pigeon flew over the houses, thirty-four-year

old Daniel Bernoulli stopped to watch. How wonderful it

A must be to fly, he thought, and how swiftly a bird was able to

go from here to there; his own recent trip home from Russia had
taken an entire two months, traveling by horse-drawn coach.
As he turned away and began to gather the mail, Bernoulli's
heartbeat quickened when he spotted the letter from Paris; no
doubt, he guessed, it contained the contest results. Oddly, though,
it was addressed to him and his father Johann; they both had en
tered the competition, but they had submitted separate essays.
Every year, the French Academy of Sciences challenged the
public to solve a technical problem o f some importance. This was
not the only contest o f its kind-scientific institutions in several

European countries did the same thing-but this was one o f the

65
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66

oldest and most prestigious in the world. For the past sixty-eight
years, since its establishment by King Louis XIV in 1666, scores of
engineers, mathematicians, and laypeople had vied for the money
and prestige that came with winning.
So far, young Bernoulli had entered the contest a total o f four
times and already had won once. He was mathematically gifted in
all subjects, but he especially loved tackling problems involving
fluids. Scientifically speaking, fluids included not only all kinds o f
liquids but also gases and any other pliable material that was not
completely solid.
Fluids fascinated the mathematician in Bernoulli, because they
were complicated enough to be challenging yet simple enough to
be scrutable. Furthermore, fluids were so much a part of day-to
day living that studying their actions was a useful and relevant thing
to d o - a n d the time seemed right.
In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton had successfully de
scribed the behavior o f solid objects. And in the nineteenth cen
tury, scientists would discover the laws of genetics, evolution, and
psychology that governed the activity of human beings. In between
those two centuries lay Bernoulli's century, a time destined to be
long to fluids, whose complexity lay somewhere between a solid
rock and human existence.
Bernoulli had always dreamed o f becoming the Newton of his
time, o f being the first to discover the laws that steered the move
ment of fluids. That was why, over the years, he had made it a
point to enter the French Academy's contest whenever it involved
a fluids problem: It was an invaluable opportunity to exercise, and
to showcase, his precocious talents.
Now, as he ripped open the envelope, he drew a deep breath:
He had just returned to Basel after having spent the past eight years
at the Russian Academy o f Sciences. What a nice homecoming
it would be i f been the winner
present his essay had declared this
year.
After pulling the letter out o f the envelope, Bernoulli unfolded

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67

it and began to read. It was, as he had suspected, the announcement

o f this year's contest results, but what he saw made him gasp.
For the rest o f the afternoon, the young man waited eagerly for
his father to arrive. He had decided not to track him down at the
university, knowing that the famous Professor Johann Bernoulli
generally became angry at anyone who dared to disturb him while
he worked.
When his father arrived that evening, the young Bernoulli
greeted him with the letter, without saying a word about what it
contained. Quizzically, the stem-faced professor took the missive
and read for himself that the Academy had decided to award this
year's first prize to both father and son.
Young Bernoulli, who could not contain his excitement much
longer, anticipated that he and his father soon would embrace with
elation; but it was not to be. In a matter o f seconds, young Ber
noulli sensed that something was amiss.
His father was reacting not with a shout o f ubilation but with a
joyless silence. Worst o f all, when he was done reading it, he
crushed the letter in his fist and glowered at Bernoulli, erupting
with an effusion o f terrible accusations.
At first, Bernoulli was paralyzed with confusion. But slowly he
began to comprehend the reason for this ghasdy tum of events.
The elder Bernoulli, who years ago had introduced his son to
mathematics and taught him many of the basic ideas and tech
niques that underlay their pair o f prize-winning essays, was furious
that the young man should now be considered his equal. He de
nounced the Academy for not distinguishing the master from the
pupil and derided his son for not giving him proper credit.
As his father's rage intensified, Bernoulli himself became angry.
Being away from home these past eight years, he not only had
practiced and perfected the ideas and techniques his father origi
nally had taught him, he had enhanced them in his own way, with
out anyone's help.
I t was as i f he had learned from his father how to run the farm

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machinery but then, by himself, had gone on to plow and plant his
own field; now, properly enough, he was harvesting the rewards of
his own labor and skill. What's more, the young man shouted im -
pudently, his essay was better than his father's!
As evening fell and the city grew quieter, the hateful sounds
coming from the Bernoulli household grew louder. The two men
roared at each other, availing themselves o f he opportunity to vent
old, pent-up grievances. By the time their bitter clash reached its
climax, the original quarrel about the Academy prize had been
superseded long since by passionate complaints about filial disre
spect and paternal jealousy.
In the end, the elder Bernoulli demanded that his ungrateful
offspring leave the house, screaming that he could not tolerate liv
ing with such a miscreant. Bernoulli, in the midst o f the escalating
tension, had feared it would come to this. Now, as he heard him
self being evicted, he regretted immediately many o f the things he
had said to his father.
Young Bernoulli had always been proud of having descended
from a family of distinguished mathematicians. He was the son o f a
man who was arguably the most renowned mathematician alive
and the nephew of a similarly famous mathematician. In fact, Ber
noulli men had dominated mathematics for the last fifty years, a
pedigree the likes o f which had never been seen before and might
never agam.
Bernoulli was sad this great old family tree o f his suddenly was
not faring too well; he feared being severed from his roots, perhaps
forever. Still, he was .too angry to apologize or to sleep under the
same roof with a man whom he had long admired but now mis
trusted.
It took him less than an hour to pack his belongings, and as he
walked out the door, he paused to look back. He had been born
here, and he would miss living here . . . and i f truth be told, he
would miss the spirited conversations he recently had been having

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with his father about the latest theories concerning fluids.

Now, more than ever, dealing with fluids seemed so much more
appealing to Bernoulli than dealing with people. With fluids, at
least, there was some hope that their behavior would tum out to be
predictable. By contrast, people's behavior seemed hopelessly un
fathomable; for example, Bernoulli thought with a shrug, who
could have predicted what had happened today?
As the young man stepped out into the cool autumn darkness,
he wondered where he would spend the night. For Bernoulli, re
grettably, this was only the beginning o f what was to be a steady
and tragic decline in his personal fortunes; but it would not end in
total ruination.
In the course o f his life, the young mathematician was to come
upon a magical equation that would reveal the secret o f flight. As a
result o f that, his scientific reputation would soar . . . and so would
the mind, body, and spirit of the human species.

VINI
Unlike the medievalists immediately before them, Renaissance
philosophers were disinclined to invoke supernatural explanations
for the puzzling phenomena they saw and heard around them. In
stead, they gradually readopted the ancient Greek attitude that, for
every mystery that existed in the natural world, there was a down
to-earth explanation.
Indeed, Renaissance scholars went so far as to say that, by know
ing the rational laws o f Nature, they could actually foretell the fu
ture. For example, sixteenth-century astronomers argued, if only
they knew the scientific laws o f heavenly bodies, they easily could

predict a planet's orbit.

Already, astrologers were claiming to have the ability o f prophe-

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symg a person} s fate; but their mystical methodology-though

based on sound astronomical observations-was regarded with sus
picion by science. Someday, pundits asserted, by discovering the
bona fide scientific laws of human nature, they truly would be able
to predict human behavior.
As the seventeenth century unfolded, however, science encoun
tered reasons both to hope and to despair that it would ever realize
its bold objective. O n the one hand, in 1687, when Isaac Newton
published his astonishing discoveries governing the behavior o f in
animate objects, it seemed certain that similar discoveries soon
would be made regarding the behavior of animate objects.
O n the other hand, the colorful saga of one particularly promi
nent European family, the Bernoullis, seemed to bode ill for sci
ence's great ambition. Indeed, the Bernoullis seemed to prove that
while people can be predictable in certain ways, it was sheer folly
to hope their overall fates ever could be divined scientifically.
The Bernoullis' eccentric and quarrelsome tale began in 1622,
when Jacob the Elder fled to Basel, Switzerland. He had been born
in Belgium and was a diehard Huguenot persecuted mercilessly by
the Catholic majority.
Basel's reputation for religious tolerance was renowned the
world over; indeed, the Huguenots' spiritual leader John Calvin
himselfhad emigrated there from his native France, following the
tumultuous sixteenth-century Refonnation. Like Martin Luther
before him, Calvin had believed that in God's Master Plan, each o f
us played a predetermined role.
In Jacob Bernoulli's eyes, therefore, it had been his destiny to:
prosper in Basel, marry three times, and father only one child. To
ward the end o f his life, the old patriarch regretted not having had
more offspring, but he need not have worried; his lone son Niko
laus was destined to sire an extraordinary dynasty, as tempestuous
as it was talented.
After marrying, Nikolaus and his wife gave birth to a total o f a
dozen children, o f whom only four would survive into adulthood.

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Two o f the SurVIVOrs would become world-class mathemati

cians-:Jakob, born in 1654, and Johann, born in 1667-t hough at
first their father did not see it quite that way.
When the sons were young, father Nikolaus was certain Jakob's
brooding intellect meant he was to become a theologian and that
Johann's naturally thrifty ways indicated he was to become a mer
chant. Acting on those beliefs, consequendy, the devout Hugue
not demanded that each son prepare himself for his predetermined
role in life.
Feigning obedience, Jakob went on to earn a master's degree in
philosophy at the University of Basel and a license in theology. But
covertly, he pursued his real love, physics and mathematics.
"Against my father's will," he confessed in his diary, "I study the
stars."
Thirteen years younger than Jakob, Johann behaved dutifully.
He acquiesced to become an apprentice in the family's prosperous
spice and drug business, but ended up performing so miserably that
the disgusted father was forced to recant his original premonition.
God's plan was now more clear to him, Nikolaus announced
one day: Johann was meant to be a doctor. It was a profession still
related to the family business, and it would provide a handsome
living.
Obediendy, sixteen-year-old Johann entered the University o f
Basel and earned his medical license. During that time, however,
he conspired with his older brother Jakob to learn the language o f
numbers. "I've now turned to mathematics," the teenage Johann
admitted in his diary, "for which I feel a special joy."
Coincidentally, Johann's clandestine conversion took place
around the time German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leib
niz came out with a landmark paper announcing his discovery o f
the calculus. It was a revolutionary new kind o f mathematics that
had been developed independendy-though not yet publ i shed
by the Englishman Isaac Newton.
Printed in 1684, Leibniz's article did not elicit any immediate

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response, simply because very few people in the world could com
prehend it. The author, with characteristic arrogance, had not tried
very hard to explain his discovery, presumably because he wanted
to remind people o f how much smarter he was than they.
The Bernoulli brothers, too, were unable to make much sense
ofLeibniz's paper, despite their dogged efforts to do so. They even
wrote to the great mathematician, begging for help, but did not
receive so much as a reply.
Undiscouraged, they persevered, until one day, as if by some
miracle, Jakob suddenly understood everything. Thereafter, he
shared his epiphany with Johann, so that together they could ex
plore the subtle minutiae ofLeibniz's monumental achievement.
It all hinged on something called the "infinitesimal," Jakob ex
plained, an imaginary whit so infinitely tiny as to be devoid o f any
complexity; it was tinier even than the tiniest imaginable speck o f
paint on one o f Vermeer's variegated masterpieces.
Here then was the crystal ball philosophers had been wanting all
these years; by reducing complex processes down to their infinitely
tiny, infInitely simple parts, Leibniz's calculus gave science a way o f
predicting the unpredictable-including, perhaps, human behav
ior!
According to Leibniz, with the calculus, the seemingly unpre
dictable process o f selecting a lottery winner-whether it involved
the tossing o f dice or drawing of lots-could be broken down
mathematically into a sequence o f infinitely simple events, each o f
which was easily predictable. In the end, merely by adding up the
outcomes of all those infinitesimal events, one could divine the
result o f the entire process.
Leibniz's novel mathematics appealed instantly to the Bernoulli
brothers' Calvinist training, insofar as it seemed to validate their
belief in predestination. If God knew in advance what people's
to
futures were be, then the calculus was the technique they could
use to read God's mind.

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For three years, Jakob and Johann struggled excitedly and se
cretly to increase their fluency in this wondrous new mathematics;
then, much to their surprise, they received a belated reply from
Leibniz. Writing back to him immediately, the young erstwhile
theologian and merchant exclaimed their progress. From that mo
ment, they enjoyed the very rare privilege o f corresponding regu
larly with the lofty codiscoverer o f the calculus.
Exceedingly less enjoyable for them was the day their father dis
covered their deceitful behavior; immediately, Nikolaus Bernoulli
demanded they find well-paying jobs. He no longer cared what
kind of jobs they found, he shouted, but he absolutely had no
intention o f subsidizing their pursuit o f so unprofitable a preoccu
pation as mathematics.
Shortly thereafter, despite his father's invectives, Jakob was hired
as a professor o f mathematics at the University o f Basel; there, in
the years to come, he became famous for his success in using the
calculus to solve complicated problems in every known field o f
science, from chemistry and cosmology to engineering and eco
nomics. In the process, though, he r ~ v e a l e d  himself to be a slow,
methodical thinker-the proverbial tortoise in Aesop's famous
fable.
By comparison, younger brother Johann became the fabled
hare, a mathematical prodigy both clever and q u i c k - w i t t ~ d .  In
1691, he traveled all the way to Paris to tutor French mathemati
cians in the calcUlus, including no less a person than the Marquis
Guillaume de l'Hospital, France's most gifted man o f numbers.
In exchange for 300 pounds "give me at intervals some hours o f
your time to work on what I request," the marquis had proposed,
and also "communicate to me your discoveries . . . [but] not to any
others." That last request had worried Johann, but he had con
sented to it nonetheless; he wanted the money and, besides, the
marquis appeared to be an honorable man.
While in France, Johann became quite the disciple o f the new

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mathematics, emerging as its most articulate and arrogant defender

against growing accusations that England's Isaac Newton had been
the first to invent the calculus, not Germany's Leibniz; after all, the
zealous young man inveighed, Newton had published his version
o f the calculus in 1687, three years after Leibniz. (See "Apples and
Oranges. ")
"When in England war was declared against Monsieur Leibniz
for the honor of the first invention o f the new calculus o f the
infinitely small," an immodest Johann later would recall, "I alone
like the famous Horatio Cocles kept at bay at the bridge the entire
English army." The dispute would drag on for years, but it had the
in'unediate effect of boosting Johann's career, and ego, inasmuch as
people everywhere began to speak his name in the same breath as
Leibniz's.
Publicly, Jakob reveled in Johann's increasing fame abroad, re
minding everyone back in Basel that he had been his younger
brother's mentor. Privately, though, Jakob became increasingly
jealous of Johann's friendship with Leibniz and began to worry
that his swaggering younger brother was proving to be a better
mathematician than he.
In 1695, in order to stay closer to home, the free-roamingJo
hann applied for a professorship at the University o f Basel. Under
normal circumstances, the worldly wunderkind would have been a
shoo-in; but behind the scenes, Jakob traded on his friendship with
members o f he university's academic senate, getting them to reject
the application.
When Johann learned of his brother's betrayal, he was heart
broken and furious. But his revenge came swiftly and sweedy,
when Christiaan Huygens, the Netherlands' greatest living scien
tist, invited him to become chairman of the mathematics depart
ment at Groningen University.

From then on, the relationship between the Bernoulli brothers

deteriorated rapidly; they took to belitding each other's mathemat-

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ical prowess, first privately, then publicly, in the pages o f the pres
tigious journal Acta Eruditorium. (Ironically enough, it meant "The
works of the erudite.") The brothers taunted each other in print
for four consecutive years, until fmally, in 1699, the journal's dis
gusted editor put an end to it.
The bitter warfare continued, however, with insults being pro
mulgated via letters to colleagues and handbills circulated through
out Europe. Thus, while the rest o f the world came together to
celebrate the end of the seventeenth century, Jakob and Johann
found themselves as far apart filially as their universities were geo
graphically.
I t would have been hard for anyone to believe that the warring
Bernoulli brothers were devoted family men, but they were.
Forty-fIve-year-old Jakob was married and had two children. A
doting father and husband, thirty-two-year-old Johann also had
two children, and his wife was about to give birth to another.
It happened less than a month into the new year, on the twenty
ninth ofJanuary: Johann and his wife became the parents o f a brand
new son, whom they named DanieL Though it was too soon for

even a Huguenot to predict, history was about to repeat itself;

whether by destiny or by chance, this newborn was to follow in
the footsteps o f his father and uncle in more ways than one.
Five years after Daniel's birth, Johann decided reluctantly to re
turn to Basel, to be near his father-in-law. The old man was ailing
and claimed that being reunited with his daughter 'after these ten

long years was the only thing that would cure him. "For we cannot
answer in eternity for our stubbornness against God," a resigned
Johann had responded, "if we sin against our parents by hastening
their death."
En route to Basel, news reached Johann that Jakob had died o f
tuberculosis. Although it was a horrible way for the brothers' ran

corous relationship to end, the,hardenedJohann saw it as a way o f

scoring one fmal victory. "This unexpected news bowled me

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over," he later would recall shamelessly, "and then it entered my

thoughts immediately ... that I could succeed to my brother's
position. "
Promptly upon his arrival in Basel, Johann began lobbying for
Jakob's vacant professorship, and in less than two months he got his
way. When he moved into his brother's old office, he felt a bit
remorseful, but mostly he felt justified at having finally obtained
the university post his older brother had been instrumental in de
nying him a decade earlier.
His family's unexpected move to Basel left young Daniel with
only a few precious memories o f the Netherlands, chief among
them being windmills. Much o f the country lay below sea level, so
the Dutch used windmills everywhere to pump water away from
their cities and farms.
Daniel also treasured the memorable images o f diamond-shaped
kites. They were a relatively recent invention, but many Dutch
children had quickly discovered how easily and gaily the kites flew
upon the strong winds blowing in from the North Sea.
Life in Basel was very different, young Bernoulli discovered, but
in one respect things remained the same. His father did not like
being contradicted, so he always was careful not to appear
disobedient or disrespectful.
He did not disagree or complain, for instance, the day his father
announced that he, Daniel, was destined to marry the daughter o f
a certain wealthy businessman. Neither did he object when his

father decreed that he was to become a merchant; ironically, the

father-like his father before him-wished his young son to pros
per by becoming something more than an impecunious mathema
tician.
Secretly, however, Daniel Bernoulli was not so tractable as he
appeared. For one thing, he was not at all sure he would wed that
he would when
particular girl; decide that for himself the time
came. And furthermore--as i f t were in the Bernoullis' b l o o d - h e

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was fascinated by mathematics and coaxed his older brother Niko

laus II into tutoring him.
Daniel Bernoulli's eyes widened as he learned about the calculus.
He was equally fascinated to discover the various ways it already had
been used by his father and uncle to explain subtle questions about
the everyday world, such as: "What shape did a ski slope need to
have in order to produce the fastest nde down?" or "Why was the
shell o f a c h a m b e r ~ d  nautilus shaped like a perfect spiral?" or "Why
were soap bubbles always round?"
The young man also was surprised to learn that Isaac Newton,
whom his father maligned so tirelessly, recently had discovered the
simple rules by which solids moved--something all scientists
before him had failed to do, despite 2,000 years o f trying. New
ton's was a heroic achievement that stirred something deep within
Bernoulli's mind and spirit.
Because he had assimilated during his formative years in the
Netherlands some of that country's famous preoccupation with
water, Daniel Bernoulli now wondered whether Newton's laws
could be applied to fluids. Intuitively he doubted it-fluids obvi
ously were so different from solids-but intellectually he was not
nearly sophisticated enough to decide the question-at least, not
yet.
While Daniel's study o f Newton continued in secret, his father's
unrelenting public denigration of the vaunted Englishman es
calated. Soon, in fact, it reached a point where the elder Bernoulli
needed help in manning the various fronts of battle.
At first, he recruited the help o f Daniel's cousin Nikolaus I and
older brother Nikolaus II, but then he enjoined help from Daniel
himself The youngster demurred, pretending to be disinterested in
his father's war of words, though in truth, he had come to admire
Newton and hoped one day to be just like him.
fIrSt
It was the time the thirteen-year-old had defied his father
openly. Instead o f being angry, however, the despotic Professor

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Bernoulli was only mildly irritated and to some extent reassured

that this son o f his .was definitely not destined to become a mathe
matician.
Later that year, however, it became equally clear that his son was
not fated to become a merchant. After twice trying to make a go o f
being an apprentice in the pharmaceutical business, young Ber
noulli ended up failing as completely as his father had failed a gen
eration earlier.
Mter that, Daniel Bernoulli decided to stop altogether his pre
tending to go along with his father's astrologylike notions o f what
God expected o f h i m - t h a t included the"business of becoming a
merchant, marrying some preselected girlfriend, and the nonmath
ematical charade he had been carrying on for several years now.
Consequendy, the young man broke the bad news to his father and
begged for permission to pursue his love o f numbers.
This time round, his stem father's reaction was truer to form.
The young man could continue his mathematical studies, the senior
Bernoulli snarled angrily, but being a prrjessional mathematician
was absolutely out o f the question; instead, he decreed, his son
would become a doctor.
The only part o f that scolding which the young man heard
clearly was his father giving him permission to pursue his mathe
matical interests. As for the rest of it, he would obey his father,
albeit halfheartedly, because he saw no harm, and possible advan
tages, in acquiring medical training.
For the next several years, Daniel Bernoulli attended the univer
sity and was tutored at home by his kindly and patient older
brother Nikolaus II. This only strengthened their relationship,
which already was as warm and caring as that which once had
existed between two other brothers, their father and uncle.
In time, as it became obvious that young Bernoulli's interest in
mathematics was no mere fleeting fancy, his unhappy father re
lented and offered to tutor him. It was a rare honor to be taught the

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calculus by the very man whom Leibniz considered his closest

friend; unfortunately, it was also a rare punishment.
One day, for example, the merciless professor gave his son an
exceptionally difficult problem to solve. Mter struggling for hours,
the young man finally solved it, whereupon he walked to his fa
ther's study and handed in his work.
Proud o f his achievement, the youngster eagerly awaited his fa

ther's praise. The work had been done correctly, the senior Ber
noulli groused, but "couldn't you have solved it right away?"
Insensitive though he was, Professor Bernoulli shared generously
with his son everything he knew about mathematics and natural
philosophy. During one lesson, for example, he began describing an
exciting new i d e ~  that was to prove crucial in the youngster's career;
it concerned energy, though it had not yet been given that name.
Instead, like his illustrious friend Leibniz, the elder Bernoulli
called it vis viva--Latin for "living force"-because it appeared to
be something possessed by objects that were to some degree ani
mated. By doing various experiments, Leibniz had noticed that an
object's vis viva depended on only two things: its mass and speed.
Mathematically speaking, if m stood for an object's mass and v its
speed, then the formula for vis viva boiled down to this:

VIS VIVA =m X v2

A rogue elephant, being massive and fast, had a lot of vis viva. A
leafblown along by a gentle breeze, being lightweight and slow,
had very little vis viva. A seated young Daniel Bernoulli, listening
raptly to his father's lectures, had no vis viva whatsoever.
Vis viva was like some kind o f invisible fuel, the young man was
told; it could be spent in order to raise an object off the ground. Vis
viva, for example, was what propelled a rubber ball tossed into the
air; as its altitude increased, its vis viva decreased.

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At the top o f its climb, exhausted o f all its vis viva, the ball
stopped and began to fall back down again. Along the way, experi
ments indicated, the ball recovered fully all of its spent vis v i v ~ 
which was like some perfecdy recyclable fuel--so that when the
ball returned to its starting point, things were back exacdy where
they had started.
Throughout the ups and downs of a thrown ball's existence, in
other words, there was a precise give-and-take between altitude
and vis viva. When one increased, the other decreased, so that the
total o f the two never changed:

ALTITUDE + VIS VIVA = CONSTANT

It was as if an object's vis viva could never be destroyed, merely

exchanged for something else--in this case altitude. At least, that
was what Johann Bernoulli, Leibniz, and many others finnly be
lieved; they called it the "Law of Vis Viva Conservation." (Late in
the next century, scientists would call it the "Law of Energy Con
servation" a sacred tenet o f modem physics.) (See "A n Unprofit
able Experience.")
Though many o f these lessons were intellectually daunting,
young Bernoulli learned them well. He was a genuine prodigy,
graduating from college when he was but fifteen years old. A year
later, in 1716, he earned his master's degree and immediately began
his medical schooling.
Given his training, it was natural for the teenage medical student
to think of the human body as merely a complex machine, like a
fancy watch, subject to the elucidation o f scientific laws. Accord
ing to that mechanistic way o f seeing things, the body was not
animated by some supernatural soul, as Aristode and many after
him had believed, it was powered by vis viva; its overall move
ments, furthermore, conformed to Newton's laws,just as with any
other solid object.

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As he pursued his medical studies, young Bernoulli was de

lighted to discover that others shared his nuts-and-bolts philoso
phy. In his book On the Motion ojAnimals, for example, Giovanni
A,lfonso Borelli shot down one o f humanity's most wistful and
wonderful dreams. Mter computing the vasdy disparate abilities o f
human and bird muscles to store up vis viva, he concluded: "It is
impossible that men should ever fly craftily by their own strength."
Young Bernoulli found a kindred spirit also in British physician
William Harvey. Up until now, nearly everyone had followed Ar-
istode, Hippocrates, and Galen in believing that the heart was the
human body's primary source o f heat. But in his book On the Move
ment oj Heart and Blood in Animals, Harvey had written the heart
was like a pump and our blood vessels like a network of canals:
"The one action o f he heart is the transmission of he blood and its
distribution, by means o f the arteries, to the· very extremities of the
body."
Young Bernoulli was attracted to Harvey's research, because it
suggested a way he could indulge two o f his loves, mathematics
and fluids, while earning the medical degree his father expected o f
it worthy of
him. Furthermore, was a challenge his best efforts,
considering that no o n e - n o t Newton, Leibniz, or even the impe
rious Johann Bernoulli-had yet discovered the basic rules by
which fluids moved.
Indeed, young Bernoulli's father was currendy embroiled in an
argument over Newton's analysis o f water streaming from a hole

punched near the bottom of a drinking cup. Natural philosophers

at the time were still very inept at measuring the speed, pressure, or
even the size o f fluid streams, and such uncertainties inevitably led
to endless quibbling.
As always, Daniel Bernoulli remained uninvolved in his father's
batde with Newton, but though he maintained his distance, he was

very deftnitely interested in the outcome. That was because his

doctoral dissertation concerned the mechanics of human respira-

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82

tion, which, like the water-cup problem, involved the movement

o f a fluid, namely air.
In 1721, following the completion of his medical studies, young
Bernoulli came away sobered by the unresolved complexities o f
fluid behavior. Now, more than ever, he wanted to tackle the sub
ject that had defeated so many before him; all he needed was an
academic position that would give him the freedom and equip
ment to fulfill his dream.
Like his father had before him, the twenty-one-year-old applied
for a professorship at the University o f Basel. And like his father
had been before him, amazingly, he was denied the opportunity,
though for different reasons.
It was the practice in Bernoulli's day for a university to rely on
chance in selecting from among equally qualified candidates. Final
ists competing for a faculty position, therefore, were required to
draw lots; the winner was awarded the professorship.
Because o f his precocity, Daniel Bernoulli had been selected as a
finalist for two professorships, one in anatomy and botany and the
other in logic. Consequently, in his own mind, the brilliant young
medical graduate had been rather relaxed about his chances ofwin-
ning a coveted place in his hometown university; he never would
have guessed that he would lose out on both lotteries.
Like his father, Bernoulli had grown up believing in the ability
o f the calculus to predict the outcome o f all rational processes.
Now, however, the twenty-one-year-old had discovered that, the
ken o f
calculus notwithstanding, it was still beyond the science to
predict the outcome o f a game of chance, let alone a person's life.

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VIUI

Even though we humans have always lived on solid land, 'we owe
our existence to fluids. Without water to drink, we would die in a
matter of days; worse still, without air to breathe, we would perish
in a matter of minutes.
Fortunately, the earth is awash with water and air; indeed, there
has always been plenty o f both to sustain our 4-million-or-so-year
old species. Unfortunately, though, we have not always been as
adept as we are today at exploiting those precious resources.
Our nomadic, cave-dwelling ancestors, for example, were at the
mercy o f their region's geology. Air was plentiful everywhere they
roamed-save the of mountains-but
for tops very tall individuals
would live or die depending on their ability to locate natural
sources o f potable water along their migration routes.
As our predecessors organized into cities, they settled near rivers
and began to contrive ways o f channeling the constantly flowing
waters into their homes and onto their crops. "Egypt," Herodotus

once wrote, "was a gift from the Nile."

Five thousand years ago, engineers began to build dams, canals,
and aqueducts to domesticate the wild waters of the earth's great
rivers, but in so doing, they relied solely on intuition or hit-and
miss experiences. As recently as 2,000 years ago, not even Aristotle
had figured out the scientific rules that described how water

moved.
By comparison, solid objects were simpler to study than water,
because at least they held themselves together. If a rock was hit by
a paddle, for example, all its parts moved in unison, making it rela
tively easy to describe its trajectory.
However, when struck by that same paddle, water splattered

every which way, becoming a shower o f countless droplets. The

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incohesiveness of that life-sustaining fluid, in the minds of many,

made it appear incoherent.
About the only sensible thing Aristotle was able to deduce about
fluids concerned their density-or,actually, the opposite o f density,
which he referred to as subtlety. "If air is twice as subtile as water,"
he wrote, "[a] body will require half the time to traverse the same
distance in air as in water." That is, it's twice as easy to move
through air than through water.
Aristotle's assertion was a reasonable guess, but eventually it was
proven wrong: The resistance of an airplane fuselage moving
through air, let us say, was not half the resistance of a similarly
shaped submarine hull moving through water. The connection be
tween a fluid's density and its resistance to moving objects turned
out to be far more complicated than that.
The first person to discern a correct (and surprising) truth about
the quirky behavior of water was the Sicilian scholar Archimedes.
It all began when his friend Hiero II, monarch of Syracuse, won
dered whether there was any way of checking the purity of the
metal that had been used to make his newly wrought imperial
wreath. It was supposed to have been made o f pure gold, but the
king suspected the royal goldsmith of having diluted it with silver.
It was a bedeviling problem, because the wreath could not be
scraped for a sample nor defaced in any other way. Archimedes
racked his brain day and night, but without success. Then, one
afternoon, he decided to take a dip at the public baths.
He had done this often, as a way of giving his mind a rest. A
thousand times, in fact, he had lowered his sizable body into a pool
of water and not paid any attention to how, invariably, the water
level went up a fraction of an inch; this time was different.
Archimedes was so excited by his revelation that he ran home
before getting dressed, shouting like some naked lunatic "I have
found it, I have found it!" What he had found, he later revealed in
a book called On Floating Bodies, was the Law o f Buoyancy, ac-

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cording to which a floatingobject always pushed aside an amount

of water equal to the object's own weight.
Archimedes also had discovered that a nonfioating obj ect -one
that sank-pushed aside an amount of water equal to the object's
W ~ ~  " \ ) \ ~ m ~ .  \\. ~ ~ 1 '  'l. ( ~ ~ ~  ~ ' l . ~  ~ ' l .  k l n n . c . \ k I \ ~  "iN'n.en. 'ffi.e--y -p\u.n.ge ~ 
spoonful o f shortening into a graduated cup o f w a te r in o r d e r to
measure its volume.) Quite by accident, Archimedes had found a
way to help his roral friend.
By placing into a tub o f water Hiero's heavy metal w r e a t h 
which was nonbuoyant-Archimedes invoked his newfound rev
elation to determine its volume. Next, he weighed the wreath,
whereupon he was able to ascertain its density simply by dividing
its weight by its volume.
It came out to be somewhere between 10.5 and 19.3 grams per
cubic centimeter, the densities o f silver and gold, respectively. Ar
chimedes had confIrmed the king's suspicions that the wreath had
not been made out o f pure gold; as a result, the royal goldsmith was
executed.
Though Archimedes's discoveries were important, they per
tained solely to fluids in a container of some kind, such as a tub o f
water. Consequently, the Archimedean laws represented the begin
nings of hydrostatics, the study of captive fluids; they had nothing to
say about freely flowing water, which remained an ineluctable mys
tery.
Throughout the many centuries o f the Roman Empire, never
theless, engineers managed to build impressive public aqueducts
that delivered as much freely flowing water per capita as many
modem cities receive today. In A.D. 97, Rome's great water com
missioner Sextus Julius Frontinus boasted: "Will anybody compare
the idle pyramids or those other useless though much renowned
works of the Greeks with these aqueducts?"
The remarkable water works were made possible not with brain
but brawn. Whatever scientifIc principles Frontinus and his fellow

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engineers invoked were rather trite, such as: "Water always flows
downhill, never uphill" or "The largest amount of water a pipe can
deliver depends on the size o f its opening." (They did not even
take into account that it also depended on the water's speed: A
pipe's output was greater, naturally, if water poured out o f it
faster.)
It took fourteen more centuries for another Italian, Leonardo da
Vinci, to make the first significant discovery about moving water.
Indeed, another two centuries hence, his prescient observations
were to playa pivotal role in Daniel Bernoulli's own historic dis
covery concerning moving fluids.
For long stretches of time, the great Renaissance painter
philosopher-engineer would sit near waterfalls and toss grass seeds
at them. As he watched the seeds get caught up in the water's
roiling plunge downward, he sketched their paths, thus becom
ing the first person to illustrate in extraordinary detail the many
hitherto-invisible subtleties o f water in motion.
The more waterfalls he sketched this way, the more he began to
realize something very important about water: Seemingly chaotic
though its motion appeared to the casual observer, there were pre
dictable patterns to its behavior, clearly revealed in the gently curv
ing lines o f the sixteenth-century master's meticulously penned
drawings.
Leonardo also studied rivers, tossing seeds or sawdust into their
waters and watching what happened. It was in this endeavor that
he made his most historic observation, though he did not see it all
at once; it dawned on him in stages.
At first, Leonardo noticed simply that: "A river o f uniform
depth will have a more rapid flow at the narrower section than at
the wider." In other words: A river of water always flowed fastest
when squeezing through a bottleneck (a potentially dangerous fact
that any white-water rafter understands instinctively).
Leonardo went one step further, observing that the water's

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speed increased in direct proportion to the narrowing of the bottle

neck. For example, through a botdeneck one-half as wide as the
normal river, the water passed twice as fast as normal. Through a
botdeneck one-third as wide, the water moved three times as fast,
and so forth.
Leonardo's all-important discovery o f so simple a fact o f Nature
came to be called the "Law o f Continuity." Though it referred to
a fluid, the law's implications could be understood by imagining,
let us say, a steady stream of animals flowing into Noah's Ark.
Suppose that in this imaginary ark, pairs of animals walked
through its front entrance shoulder to shoulder. Suppose also that
after being processed by Noah in a giant antechamber, they fIled
singly through a narrow interior doorway, the ark's botdeneck,
into the rear holding pens; the interior door, say, was one-half as
wide as the front door.
According to Leonardo's Law o f Continuity, in order to keep
things moving along, each animal needed to double its speed when
squeezing through the ark's botdeneck. Suppose, for example, that
animals sauntered into the Ark at one pair per second-that is, two
individuals every second. When each pair split up in order to file
into the rear pens one at a time, each individual needed to speed
up, needed to zip through th e botdeneck in one-half s e c o n d 
twice as fast; otherwise the orderly procession o f animals would
back up.
In ~ e ,  Leonardo surmised that his Law o f Continuity applied
to fluids o f all kinds, including air. In fact, he was the fIrst person in
history to appreciate fully that air and water were birds o f a feather.
"In all cases," he wrote, "water has great conformity with air."
Leonardo had noticed this kinship as a result of studying the
flight of birds in air and o f fIsh in water. He was inspired by the
former to sketch fanciful designs of man-powered ornithopters and
by of
the latter to sketch designs underwater ships, foreshadowings
o f the airplane and submarine, respectively.

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In the decades immediately following these unprecedented in-

sights, several natural philosophers made various other important
discoveries about moving fluids, though none turned out to be as
crucial as Leonardo's. For some reason, furthermore, all the re
searchers-every single one o f t h e m - w a s Italian!
Perhaps it was because o f the tradition that had been inspired by
the famous Roman water works. O r perhaps it was because o f the
incomparable Italian tradition during the Renaissance o f world
class creativity and scholarship. Whatever it was, during the entire
seventeenth century, Italians-including Galileo Galilei, Evan
gelista Torricelli, and Domenico Guglielmini-studied fluids with
more success than any other people on earth.
Things changed dramatically in 1642, however, when Galileo
died, after having been arrested by the Catholic Inquisition and
forced to recant certain o f his scientific beliefs. (See "Apples and
Oranges. ~ ' )  After that, the river of ideas and inventions that had
made Italy such a creative Mecca never again flowed as freely.
During those tumultuous years, science sought fertile ground
elsewhere. It found it in Germany, England, France, and virtually
any other country where the Catholic orthodoxy did not hold
sway. This was the beginning o f a new era, the climactic stages o f a
scientific revolution that was being aided by the religious revolu
tion that Martin Luther and John Calvin had begun more than a
century before.
Already, with their emphasis on hard work, the Calvinists were
being credited with leading the seventeenth-century rise in capital
ism. Now, with their emphasis on mental discipline, they were
being credited with supporting the rise o f scientism, the belief that
ultimately everything in the natural world could be explained
mathematically and proven experimentally.
In Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz became one o f the
world's leading expositors of this philosophy-cum-religion, along
with England's Isaac Newton and Switzerland's most illustrious

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family o f Huguenots, the Bernoullis. They would not succeed en

. tirely, but in the decades ahead, these natural philosophers were to
take on three of the most perplexing mysteries o f Nature: first sol
ids, then fluids, and, finally, human beings themselves.

VI[I

In 1723, Daniel Bernoulli ran away from Basel in order to forget

his having failed to win a university professorship. The crestfallen
young doctor headed for Italy, hoping to practice medicine there,
but when he arrived in Padua, he himself became deathly ill with a
fever.
During his year-long recuperation, Bernoulli corresponded
with a friend named Christian Goldbach, in the course o f which he
restated many o f the lessons he had learned from his father. More
over, he applied those techniques to many o f he most provocative
problems of his day, inchiding the one about how water gushed
forth from a hole in a drinking cup.
Once recovered and raring to flex his intellectual muscles, Ber
noulli decided to enter the annual competition sponsored by the
French Academy o f Sciences. This year's challenge was to design a
ship's hourglass that would produce a reliable trickle o f sand or
water even when tossed from side to side by rough seas.
Far from being academic, the problem was of crucial importance
to sailors, who relied on clocks to compute their longitude--that
is, their easterly/westerly distance from home port. (Latitude was
reckoned easily enough by observing the sun's position.) For that
reason, countries were competing fiercely to come up with accu
rate onboard chronometers, knowing that with superior naviga

tion came superior profits fr<;>m improved maritime trade.

Young Bernoulli submitted his entry but really did not expect to

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win. Recently having lost out on two lotteries, he was not feeling
very lucky; and besides, he had come to discover that the world
abroad was full o f highly talented mathematicians, many o f whom
were competing against him for this award.
When the results were announced, therefore, twenty-four-year
old Bernoulli was flabbergasted to learn that he had won first prize!
His award-winning design had involved mounting an hourglass
atop an iron slab floating in a pool o f mercury; even when buffeted
by violent storms, the young man had calculated, the sheer heavi
ness o f the mercury would keep the timepiece from sloshing
around very much, providing it with a relatively stable foundation.
Bernoulli had barely recovered from the surprise of winning the
French Academy's inestimable award when he received still more
shocking news. Goldbach had been so impressed with the letters he
had received from the convalescing Bernoulli, he had decided to
have them published.
Though Bernoulli objected, complaining the letters had been
written informally, without proper attention to detail, he ended up
relenting, giving the book his blessing and its unprepossessing title:
Some Mathematical Exerdses. Furthermore, out o f respect for his fa
ther, whose ideas had inspired much o f what was contained in the
missives, the unassuming young man asked the publisher to iden
tify him simply as "Daniel Bernoulli, Son ofJohann."
In 1725, having gone from being a double loser to a double
winner, a rejuvenated Bernoulli decided he had seen enough of
home: When he in
Italy and headed arrived Basel, however, his
homecoming was nothing like he had expected it would be.
In recent months, letters had poured in from all over the world,
hailing Bernoulli's new book as the work of a mathematical
prodigy. Most amazingly, awaiting him was a letter from Catherine
I, the Empress o f Russia.

In the note, she praised the young man's uncommon talents and
invited him to become professor o f mathematics at the Imperial
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Both city and Academy

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having only recently been built, by order o f her just-deceased hus

band Peter the Great, the empress was now attempting to populate
them with the frnest minds in all o f Europe.
Bernoulli was flattered by the offer but intimidated by the pros
pect of being alone so far from home. He was tired o f living
abroad; he craved sleeping in his own bed and being close to his
own family.
He decided to tum down this opportunity of a lifetime and
began to compose a letter of regret to the empress. But before
young Bernoulli could put pen to paper, his older brother Niko
laus II interceded, selflessly offering to go with him.
With that, an emboldened Daniel Bernoulli decided to accept
the empress's offer, on condition that she grant professorships to
both him and Nikolaus II. " If you could second this plan," he
explained to an Academy official, "you would have the merit o f
keeping together two brothers bound by the closest friendship in
the world."
With the empress's whole-hearted approval, both brothers left
Basel in the fall o f 1725, journeying across Europe on the longest

trip of their lives. About two months later, they arrived in St. Pe
tersburg and almost immediately regretted having gone there.
The Russian people themselves were warmhearted and friendly,
but their weather was cold and nasty. At the beginning of the new
year, Nikolaus II came down with a respiratory infection that
wouldn't go away. It persisted into the spring and summer, until

finally, on July 26, 17;26, he succumbed to the ravages of tubercu

losis.
Jolted by this cruel twist offate, Daniel's impulse was to go right
back home and put the traumatizing incident behind him. But his
belief in destiny made him decide to stick it out in St. Petersburg.
There had to be a reason other than to see his brother die, the

young Huguenot consoled himself, to explain why God had

brought him to this faraway place.
In an attempt to assuage his loneliness, Daniel Bernoulli decided

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to send for Leonhard Euler, a young man whose intelligence had

earned rave reviews from the severe Professor Johann Bernoulli.
Indeed, Daniel could not remember a single instance when his
father had ever complimented anyone's sagacity so uninhibitedly,
save his own or Leibniz's.
Leonhard Euler's ancestors, like Bernoulli's, had originally fled
to Basel in order to escape religious persecution, and they had
prospered. The only difference was that young Euler had de
scended from a long line of comb makers and clergymen, not spice
merchants and pharmacists.
Euler himself was the son of a Calvinist minister in a small town
just down the river Rhine from Basel. Before he was born, his
father had often trekked to the University of Basel to hear Profes
sorJakob Bernoulli lecture on the mathematics of everything from
astronomy to zoology.
After Leonhard was born, the minister had passed on to him
everything he had learned from those lectures. Subsequendy, the
Reverend Euler had recognized in his young son a genuine talent
for numbers and arranged to have him attend the best schools in
Basel.
In 1720, at the tender age o f thirteen; young Euler had ma
triculated to the University o f Basel. Soon afterward, the boy ge
nius had asked to be coached by the famous Professor Johann Ber
noulli; but "he was very busy," Euler had lamented, "and so
refused flady to give me private lessons."

The elder Bernoulli had, however, deigned to allow the gifted

youngster to drop by every Saturday afternoon to have his work
evaluated. During those encounters, Euler had solved every single
problem put to him by the surly professor, and in record time.
Eventually, therefore, the brilliant teenager had been granted the
extreme privilege of becoming Bernoulli's premier protege.

Back in 1725, just weeks before Daniel and his brother had left
for St. Petersburg, their father had surprised them by expressing

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increasing admiration for the wonder child. Indeed, Professor Ber

noulli had come to sound like a man unabashedly in awe of a scien
tific and mathematical mastermind the likes of which the world
rarely beheld.
With a recommendation such as that, both Daniel and his
brother had entreated Catherine I to consider inviting the adoles
cent wizard to her young Academy. Now, with his brother dead
and Euler's studies completed, Daniel Bernoulli pressed even
harder, and successfully, to have Euler invited there.
While awaiting Euler's reply to the empress's invitation, the
twenty-six-year-old Bernoulli tried to pick up where he had left
off in his study of the human body. Having grappled with the
problem o f respiration, he now turned his attention to the even
more o f blood
complicated problem circulation.
Most of what was known in his time about the insides of the
human body was the result o f vivisections that had been conducted
on and offfor more than 2,000 years. It was a macabre practice that
had been described and defended in ancient times by the Roman
scholar Celcus in On Medicine, the first volume of his epic encyclo

pedia:

Thus, they laid open men whilst alive--criminals received out

of prison from the kings-and whilst these were still breathing,
observed parts which beforehand nature had concealed . . . Nor
is it, as most people say, cruel that in the execution of criminals,
and but a few of them, we should seek remedies for innocent
people of all future ages.

During the Renaissance and throughout Daniel Bernoulli's day,

human vivisections were still done, though the complexity of the
body's insides often left scientists more bewildered than ever.
"When I first gave my mind to vivesections," William Harvey had
complained, "I found the task so truly arduous . . . that I was

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tempted to think . . . that the motion of the heart was only to be

comprehended by God."
Nevertheless, through sheer perseverance, science came to dis
cover that the body's insides were infiltrated by veins and arteries
o f various diameters, some wide, some narrow. Moreover, by
watching the arteries o f people who were still alive, Harvey and
others had confirmed that when the heart contracted, the arteries
were suddenly and momentarily filled with blood, causing them to
bulge, like so many over-stuffed sausages.
Harvey and his contemporaries also had found that when the
heart relaxed, the arterial walls snapped back, squeezing down on
the blood within them and squirting it on its way. Over and over
again, the arteries bulged and squeezed, bulged and squeezed, pro
ducing what philosophers long ago had called the "pulse" of life.
What Daniel and others o f his time wished to know was the
speed and pressure with which blood actually flowed through our
complex circulatory system. It was the kind of problem the brilliant
Roman water-works engineer Frontinus might have pursued, but
had not.
No one throughout the centuries following Frontinus had done
so either, simply because the problem was so complex. "Those
who have spoken about the pressure o f water flowing through
aqueducts," Bernoulli complained, "did not hand down any laws
other than those for extended fluids with no m o t i o n " - t h a t is, the
hydrostatics founded by Archimedes.
In the case o f static fluids, philosophers had no difficulty comput
ing pressure; they simply divided a fluid's weight by the area o f its
supported surface. It was a straightforward adaptation of he defini
tion that always had been used to calculate the pressure o f solids.
For example, the solid point o f a high-heel shoe worn by an
average-size woman produced huge pressures-about 2,000
pounds per square inch!-because her entire weight was being
supported by a very small area. (In fact, in the early days o f air

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travel, passengers wearing spiked heels were prohibited from

boarding an airplane, owing to the danger of their puncturing its
thin metal floors.)
Similarly, the static waters trapped within an artificial reservoir
produced uncanny pressures on a dam. Why? Because the water's
voluminous weight was being supported-kept from spilling
o u t - b y the relatively small surface area o f the dam's wall. (In the
case o f Hoover Dam, in Nevada, waters press against the concrete
wall with pressures up to 45,000 pounds per square foot!)
By contrast, for freely moving fluids, the situation was far more
complicated. That was because it was not so easy to measure, or
even define, the pressure of something whose weight was con
stantly shifting or whose shape-and, therefore, the area of whose
supported surface-was constantly changing.
For Daniel Bernoulli's generation, this was more than a theoret
ical problem. Many an eighteenth-century physician was in the
habit o f treating patients by deliberately cutting open one o f their
veins, the belief being that people became swollen with illness,
because their bodies had accumulated a surfeit o f blood. Known as
phlebotomy, or bloodletting, the procedure dated back to the fifth
century B.C., when Hippocrates used it on patients with inflamma
tory ailments. In Bernoulli's time, however, many physicians used
the technique to treat nearly any kind o f illness.
The practice had become so popular, so gratuitous, in fact, there
arose a demand for ways o f finessing its brutalizing effect on pa
tients. If someone could invent a way o f measuring a patient's
blood pressure, then physicians could use that information to
gauge exactly how extensively they should bleed him.
The question was "How could such a thing be done?" No de
vice existed to measure blood pressure; incredibly, no reliable
gauge o f any kind existed to measure the speed and pressure o f any
kind o f fluid moving within any kind of pipe-shaped conduit.
In 1727, while young Bernoulli pondered this matter, news

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came ofIsaac Newton's death. The great natural philosopher had

been a font of creativity and always would be remembered for
discovering, among other things, the three truisms concerning the
behavior o f solid objects:

Truism #1: A solid object will move in a straight line at a constant

speed (or not move at all), unless it is pushed off-course by some
force.
Truism #2: A solid object will invariably accelerate (or decelerate)
if it is pushed by some force.
Truism #3: Two solid objects pushing off of each other will feel
equal and opposite forces.

In Basel, Daniel Bernoulli's father reacted ambivalendy to the

demise of his old nemesis, the darling o f "the scurvy English." O n
the one hand, it pleased him to know that now he alone would be
the most esteemed mathematician in the whole of the civilized
world; but on the other hand, Newton's death brought to mind his
own mortality.
In reflecting back on his stormy career, the sixty-year-old pro
fessor felt downright cheated by life. For example, the Marquis de
l'Hospital-the French mathematician whom many years ago Ber
noulli had tutored in the calculus and in whom he had confided
many o f his discoveries-had turned out to be something of a
scoundrel. Not only had the marquis taken credit for some o f hose
discoveries and failed to pay Bernoulli for past services, he recendy
had written a best-selling calculus textbook without including a
proper acknowledgment to his former mentor.
And then there was the matter o f his wife and in-laws: In order
to please them by staying close to home, he had constandy de
clined very desirable offers from prestigious universities around the
world. Consequendy, he had been stuck in the same post at the
same provincial university all o f his ~ d u l t  life.

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Then there was the most grievous insult o f all, the one that an
gered him most: After all these many years o f trying, the great and
glorious Professor Johann Bernoulli had failed to win first p r i z e 
or even an honorable ment i on!-i n the French Academy's world
famous competition. Even his own young son was ahead o f him on
that score.
Thousands of miles away, in St. Petersburg, Newton's death had
a far different effect on Daniel Bernoulli. The young man had
never met Newton but felt an emotional attachment to him that
came partly from-wishing one day to be as famous as he. "Newton,
a man immortal for his merits," Bernoulli eulogized, was "superior
and incomparable in his abilities."
Two people close to his heart having died in as many years,
young Bernoulli was delighted when finally the day came that
Euler arrived at the Russian Academy. Also, he was thrilled to
learn that his father's nineteen-year-old prize pupil had just won a
prestigious Certificate o f Merit in the French Academy's annual
competition.
Cheered by Euler's stimulating intelligence and youthful en
ergy, Bernoulli soon began to regard the St. Petersburg Academy
with new appreciation, which it fully deserved. During its few
years of existence, the young and prestigious institution had at
tracted natural philosophy's creme de la creme and provided them
with the very best facilities.
"I and all others who had the good fortune to be for some time
with the Russian Imperial Academy," Euler would recount one
day, "cannot but acknowledge that we owe everything . . . to the
favorable conditions we had there."
In the years to come, Bernoulli and Euler would labor on many
o f the same problems, separately and collaboratively. They both
would make historic discoveries concerning solids and fluids, but
whereas Euler proved to be more o f a pure mathematician, prefer
ring to work in his office with paper and quill, Daniel had proved

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early on that he was not above getting his hands wet in a labora
tory.
Shortly after Euler's arrival, in fact, Bernoulli resumed his efforts
to find a way of measuring the pressure o f water moving through a
pipe. He tinkered with polished iron pipes o f various diameters but
failed continually in his purpose.
Nearly fifty years earlier, a clever Frenchman named Edme
Mariotte had managed to measure the pressure o f water not flow
ing through a pipe but gushing out o f one. He had done so by letting
the escaping water push against one end of a small wooden teeter
totter. At the other end o f the teeter-totter, Mariotte had placed
lead shot. By the amount o f weight it took to balance the push o f
the water, Mariotte had been able to estimate its force and, from
that, its pressure.
Certainly, it would not be wise to use Mariotte's technique to
measure blood pressure; that would require cutting open a person's
artery and letting the blood gush out in huge quantities. For Ber
noulli, therefore, the trick was to come up with a way o f measuring
a fluid's pressure without hemorrhaging the fluid or noticeably dis
rupting its flow through the pipe.
In 1729, as Bernoulli contemplated the matter, he remembered
something he had read in Harvey's book. "When an artery is di
vided or punctured," the vivisectionist had noted, "the blood will
be seen spurting with violence." During the course o f a complete
heartbeat, Harvey continued, the jet o f blood "projected now to a
now less jet "when
greater, to a distance," the tallest occurring the
heart contracts."
Clearly, Bernoulli reasoned, the height o f the spurting blood was
a direct measure o f its pressure within the artery; the greater the
arterial pressure, the higher the spurt. As our heart contracted and
relaxed, our blood pressure increased and decreased, the highs and

lows corresponding to what doctors called the systolic and diastolic

pressures, respectively.

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Following Harvey's lead, Bernoulli punctured the wall of a pipe

and attached to this small hole one end o f a glass straw. Allowing
water to flow through the pipe as usual, he watched, waited, and
then noted with elation that as the water flowed past the opening,
a small column o f water rose up in the glass tube and stopped at a
certain height. He had done it! That height was a measure o f the
flowing water's pressure.
If the water rose high up the glass tube, it meant that, at that
point, the water pressure within the iron pipe was large. Con
versely, if the water barely rose up the glass tube, it meant that, at
that point, the water pressure within the iron pipe was small.
And in all cases, happily, no water was spilled in making the
measurements.
Eager to share the news o f his breakthrough with others, Ber
noulli wrote to his old friend Christian Goldbach, who was now in
Moscow. "During these last days, I made a new discovery that will
be very useful in the design of the water supply," an elated Ber
noulli predicted, "but mainly, it will open a new era in physiol-
ogy. "
True to Bernoulli's prophesy, physicians all over Europe soon
began to adapt his innovation to their work. Before deciding to cut
open a patient's vein to bleed him, doctors now stuck pointed-end
glass tubes directly into one o f his arteries.
The blood continued to flow largely unspilled and uninter
rupted through the punctured artery, but a tiny bit would rise up
the glass tube. Where it stopped, high or low, was invariably a
measure o f the patient's blood pressure. (Incredibly, it wouldn't be
until 1896 that Italian doctor Scipione Riva-Rocci would invent
the sphygmomanometer, the painless, inflatable cuffiike device fa
miliar to us today.)
Bernoulli was thunderstruck by the implications of his new
technique, not only to medicine but to the physics of fluids. "I
cannot but feel well concerning those physical principles with

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which I became strongly involved," Bernoulli observed modestly

at the time, "since indeed they led me by the hand to exposing
many new properties concerning . . . the motion of fluids."
I t was quite possible, he sensed with a quiet, mounting excite
ment, that he finally had come to the threshold o f realizing .his
lifelong dream o f becoming the Isaac Newton o f this exceedingly
slippery subject. But this was no time to stop and daydream about
some childhood fantasy.
As he pressed onward, the young man confirmed what Leo
nardo da Vinci had first discovered two centuries before, the Law
o f Continuity: Water flowing from a wide pipe to a narrower one
sped up; water flowing from a narrow pipe to a wider one slowed
down.
What Bernoulli observed next, however, was completely un
precedented. Slow-moving water (in the wide pipe) always had a
higher pressure, he discovered, than fast-moving water (in the nar
row pipe). In other words, there appeared to be a trade-off be
tween pressure and speed: The smaller the speed, the greater the
pressure, or the greater the speed, the smaller the pressure.
Immediately Bernoulli's mind flashed on Leibniz's famous prin
ciple, the Law o f Vis Viva Conservation. Bernoulli's father had
taught him that it applied only to solids. But now, the young man
wondered: Was it possible that he had stumbled on evidence that
fluids, too, obeyed an analogous kind of conservation principle?
Bernoulli's heart quickened at the thought, and so did his mind.
According to the conservation principle, when any object was
tossed into the air, there always was a trade-off between its vis
viva-that is, its energy of motion-and its altitude. If Bernoulli's
hunch was right, his new principle would involve a trade-off be
tween a fluid's vis viva and its pressure.
Before going any further, however, Bernoulli had to stop and
he vis viva
think about what was saying. Leibniz's formula for ap
plied solely to solid objects:

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VIS VIVA =m X r
Was it possible to extend its meaning to include fluids, young
Bernoulli wondered, and if so, how?
Ironically, finding the answers required him to call upon the
mathematical ideas o f both Leibniz and Newton. In life, the two
arch rivals had never seen eye to eye about anything; now their
brain children were about to collaborate in a most felicitous way.
Guided by Leibniz's calculus, Bernoulli began by breaking this
complex problem down to its infinitesimal parts. In particular, he
imagined slicing the water flowing through a cylindrical pipe into
an infinite number o f nfinitely thin wafers-so thin they could not
be discerned with the aid o f any conceivable laboratory device.
Bernoulli imagined these impossibly thin watery wafers to be
have like a bumper-to-bumper parade o f solid rubber pucks, push
ing against each other through the pipe. In effect, Bernoulli was
imagining that even though fluids and solids behaved differendy on
a macroscopic scale, essentially they amounted to the same thing
when looked at through the infinitely powerful microscope of the
mathematical imagination.
Next, Bernoulli used Newton's famous three truisms o f solid
behavior to calculate the pushings and shovings between his hypo
thetical solidlike watery wafers. And finally, to obtain the net re
sult, the young man used Lei\:>niz's calculus to add up the infinitude
o f wafer-to-wafer interactions.
The normally ceremonious Bernoulli danced with glee: His cal
culations had led to a fluid version ofLeibniz's old vis viva formula.
In fact, both formulas were identical, except for one very under
standable substitution: In place o f the mass o f a solid object there
appeared a reference to the density o f a fluid, symbolized by p, the
Greek letter rho. That is:

VIS VIVA =P x v2

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A fast-moving deluge of very dense molasses, for example, had a

huge vis viva, a huge energy o f motion. By contrast, a slow-moving
trickle o f very thin alcohol had very little vis viva. And static fluids,
like the tears of oy that now pooled up in Bernoulli's eyes, had no
vis viva at all.
What's m o r e - a n d this was the most exciting part-Bernoulli's
calculations had confirmed what his pipe experiments had fIrst sug

gested to him: Fluids do obey their own version o f the old Law o f
Vis Viva Conservation. "I thus added a new portion to the theory
o f water," Bernoulli enthused, "with the most pleasing success."
As in the case o f the vis viva formula itself, Bernoulli's new fluid
version o f the conservation principle was nearly identical to the
original solid version. The only difference was that a moving fluid
traded off its vis viva for pressure, not altitude:

PRESSURE + VIS VIVA = CONSTANT

In terms o f mathematical symbols, using P to stand for pressure,
Bernoulli's revelation boiled down to this:

P + P x v2 = CONSTANT
Bernoulli's discovery could be considered in terms o f a lobbyist
trying to persuade senators to vote her way on some political issue.
The more swiftly she made her rounds-the more she divided her
t i m e - t h e less she was able to pressure each politician; similarly, in
the case o f a fluid making the rounds, the faster its speed (the
greater its vis viva), the smaller was the pressure it exerted on its
surroundings.
The same was true the other way around. The more slowly the
lobbyist made her rounds, the more she was able to pressure each
politician; similarly, the more slowly a fluid moved (the lesser its vis

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viva), the greater was the pressure it exerted on its surroundings.

Bernoulli's chain of reasoning applied perfectly well to blood
racing through an artery. Each time the heart pumped, the artery
ballooned out (widening its diameter), causing the blood flowing
through it to slow down, in accordance with Leonardo's old Law
o f Continuity. That meant, according to Bernoulli's new princi
ple, the blood's vis viva decreased and its pressure increased.
Conversely, each time the heart relaxed, the artery squeezed
back down again. The blood sped up through the narrowed ves
sel-that is, its vis viva increased momentarily-and its pressure
decreased accordingly. And so it was with all liquids, Bernoulli had
discovered, moving through all kinds of channels.
A century later, a German physicist named Gustave Gaspard
Coriolis would add a factor o f one-half to the original formula for
vis viva. He did this while working on a wholly different prob
l e m - o n e having to do with the earth's spin-solely for the conve
nience o f his own calculations, but his version o f he formula stuck.
From then on, therefore, Daniel Bernoulli's principle came to be
written:

P + Px :Jh VZ = CONSTANT
In a way, this remarkable equation was not just a summary o f
fluid behavior but a validation o f Bernoulli's mathematical career.
It could be argued that the thirty-year-old had stumbled upon it by
accident or been guided to it by destiny, but either way, the equa
tion's elegant simplicity, its poetic conciseness, left no doubt that a
great truth had been articulated. "It is clearly very amazing," the
young author marveled in the afterglow o f discovery, "that this
very simple rule, which nature affects, could remain unknown up
to this time."
Unable to contain himself, Bernoulli confided his discovery to a
few friends at the Academy, most especially Euler, with whom he

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had developed a brotherly attachment. Euler himselfhad not been

doing too badly, publishing more papers than anyone else at the
Academy, on subjects ranging from astronomy to military weap
onry to the movement o f solid objects with complicated shapes.
As Euler's reputation had increased, so had the reverence with
which he had been greeted in letters sent by his aging mentor back
in Basel. Several years earlier, Euler had rated but a moderately
flattering salutation-something along the lines o f "esteemed col
l e a g u e " - b u t in the latest communication, Johann Bernoulli had
addressed him unrestrainedly as the "most learned and gifted man
o f science, Leonhard Euler."
It was well-deserved approbation from a man who himself was
feeling particularly learned and gifted this year. It was 1730, and to
Professor Johann Bernoulli's enormous joy and relief, he had fi
nally won, in his words, "the great prize of 2500 Livres of the
[French] Royal Academy of Sciences."
When Daniel received word o f his father's tremendous accom
plishment, something ached within him to return home. He had
come to cherish the intellectual freedom at the Russian Academy
and the pampering he had received from its royal benefactors; but
his work there was done and, i f ruth be told, he still hated the cold
climate.
For the next two years, he tried to get a position at the Univer
sity of Basel, but unluckily, he kept losing the academic lotteries. In
1732, just when he was about to give up, however, the young man
finally hit the jackpot, winning a coveted professorship in the de
partments o f anatomy and botany.
Before leaving Russia, Bernoulli hastened to finish up one very
important piece o f business. During the seven years he had worked
at the Imperial Academy, he had assembled into a single large man
uscript the results o f all his experiments, including his treasured
fluid-flow equation.
Before having it published, however, he wanted to add a con-

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cluding section. Just before departing, therefore, he decided to en

trust that portion which was already complete to his dearest friend
and colleague, Leonhard Eu1er.
In one last gesture o f affection, furthermore, Bernoulli recom
mended that Eu1er be appointed his successor as professor o f math
ematics. Empress Catherine I honored his request, but insisted on
appointing Bernoulli, whom she was loath to see leave, a lifetime
absentee member o f the Academy.
O n his return, Bernoulli raced through one country after an
other, eager as a child for the trip to be over. He was a long way
from home and a long way from being a child, however, as he was
so pleasingly reminded during the final leg of his journey, on a road
just outside o f Paris.
He was aboard a horse-drawn coach, conversing with his fellow
passengers, when one o f them, a botanist, asked for his name. "I
am Daniel Bernoulli," the young man replied. Thinking he was
being mocked, the stranger said with a sarcastic snort, "Yes, and I
am Isaac Newton."
Though Bernoulli repeated his claim, the botanist insisted that
his interlocutor was far too young to be the famous Daniel Ber
noulli. But when Bernoulli showed proof o f who he was, the flus
tered passenger fell silent, remaining star-struck for the rest o f the
trip.
Bernoulli chuckled to himsel£ If he was famous now, he
thought, wait until the scholarly world had a chance to read his
It one more be
manuscript. needed only chapter to complete, and
then he wou1d have it published.
When finally he arrived in Basel, Bernoulli was greeted like a
hero by members of the university's academic senate, by old
friends, and by the townspeople. Even from his elderly father, he
received a polite greeting and an invitation to stay at his house.

It did not take long for young Bernoulli to readjust to life in his
hometown. The climate was ki nd and so was fate. As professor o f

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anatomy and botany, he had to give lectures, which he loved to do,

and most importantly, he had plenty o f ime to work on his manu
script.
In 1734, just when it seemed that things were going swim
mingly, however, Bernoulli's paradisiacal homecoming turned
nightmarish. That was the year he and his father were selected
co-winners of the French Academy competition.
Although each had won first prize once before, it pained the
father to admit that at such a young age, the son was equaling, and
probably even surpassing, him as a mathematician. In return, the
son was tactless enough not to conceal his youthful arrogance.
The Academy's glad tidings, therefore, ended up degenerating
into a colossal collision o f conceits, after which young Bernoulli
relocated to an apartment of his own and buried himself in work.
During the day, he lectured and held meetings with students and
faculty; during the night, he worked on his beloved fluids, com
pleting the manuscript by year's end.
In anticipation o f this moment, Bernoulli had arranged for the
manuscript to be printed in Strasbourg, France, the city where 300
years earlier Johann Gutenberg had invented movable type and
that was now famous for its publishing houses. They used the most
sophisticated presses in existence; but even so, printing and binding
in those days were very slow processes.
For that reason, it took more than three years to complete the job.
It wasn't until 1738 that Bernoulli finally was able to hold in his
hands the printed and bound labors of his adult life. As he opened
the cover, his eyes began to water, for there it was, emblazoned on
the frontispiece: Hydrodynamics, by Daniel Bernoulli, Son o f Jo
hann.
He had chosen once again to identify himself in that humble
fashion to avoid igniting another confrontation with his father, to

prove that Daniel Bernoulli was not the ungrateful son his father
had accused him o f being. It was meant to be a loving tribute to his

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father's legacy and fame, but it was to end up being a tribute to the
Bernoullis' legacy o f bickering and backstabbing.
The tragic tum of events began the very next day, when an
excited young Bernoulli dispatched several copies of his new book
to his trusted friend Euler. He instructed him to keep one copy for
himself and distribute the rest to various important colleagues there
in St. Petersburg, including the new empress, Anna Leopoldovna.
"Please ask Her to accept this work of mine as a sign o f my grati
tude," he wrote obsequiously, "and with assurances that I am most
certainly not looking to derive any tangible benefits from this gift."
In fact, he was most certainly expecting to derive benefits from
the Academy, even i f hey were not tangible. In recent years, the
fledgling Academy in St. Petersburg had become as prestigious as
the venerated old academies in Paris, ~ e r l i n ,  and London. There
fore, his fame could be expected to increase substantially once his
book came to the attention o f its distinguished members.
After nearly ten months of not hearing anything, though, Ber
noulli wrote anxiously to Euler, whereupon his dear friend
responded with the worst news imaginable: There had been no
reaction to his new book, because the copies o f t had not yet arrived!
Astonished, Daniel was so beside himself with anxiety, he pes
tered Euler unceasingly for the next full year, but to no avail. Fi
nally, in 1740, word came that, at long last, the books had arrived;
Bernoulli was dismayed, however, by the faint praise contained in
Euler's critique and by the dubious-sounding explanation Euler

proffered for the long delay.

More than a year after Bernoulli's book had been printed, Euler
explained, Bernoulli's father himself had sent Euler part o f a manu
script, allegedly containing original research on moving fluids. The
old man had proposed to call it ,Hydraulics.
The existence o f this partial manuscript had come as a complete

surprise, Euler explained in his letter to young Bernoulli, because

his former mentor had never once before mentioned working on

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such a project. Taking the estimable professor at his word, how

ever, Euler had waited eagerly for the second half o f the manu
script.
It finally had arrived in late 1740, whereupon Euler had read it,
along with Daniel's book, which by then had arrived from Basel.
He had written reviews of both works, Euler concluded, trying not
to be swayed by his feelings ofloyalty to either man; he hoped he
had not hurt young Bernoulli's feelings.
Daniel Bernoulli was floored by Euler's letter. Then three years
later, in 1743, he was absolutely devastated when his father's book
-appeared in print. The elder Bernoulli had instructed the publisher
to print the year "1732" on the title page, making it appear that his
Hydraulics had been written before Daniel's Hydrodynamics.
Moreover, in the preface was an adoring excerpt from the pane
gyric review that had been written by Johann Bernoulli's pet pupil,
Leonhard Euler: "I was thoroughly astounded by the very fluent
application of Your principles to the solution o f the most intricate
Problems, because o f which . . . Your very distinguished Name
will forever be revered among future generations."
That was hurtful enough, but when Bernoulli read a little fur
ther into Euler's gushing review, his anguish became indescribable:
"But You also so distinctly and plainly explained the most obscure
and most abstruse question about the pressure which the sides of
vessels experience as a result o f water flowing through them that
there remains nothing more to be desired concerning this rather
troublesome matter."
Daniel Bernoulli could never prove it, but he would always sus
pect his father o f plagiarism and his alleged friend Euler o f duplic
ity. " O f my entire Hydrodynamics, of which indeed I in truth need
not credit one iota to my father," Bernoulli lamented, "I am
robbed all o f a sudden, and therefore in one hour I lose the fruits o f
a work o f ten years."
Euler had purposely delayed a reply to his repeated entreaties,

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Bernoulli was convinced, in order to give the elder Bernoulli the

benefit of some extra time to complete his spiteful deed. No doubt,
the subterfuge had been Euler's loyal-minded way of repaying the
old man for having tutored and touted him all those many years
ago, and Johann Bernoulli's way o f repaying his successful son for
having upstaged and humbled him one too many times before.
"What my father does not claim completely for himself he con
demns," a bitter Bernoulli complained to Euler, "and finally, at the
height o f my misfortune, he inserts the letter o f your Excellence in
which you, too, diminish my inventions in a field o f which I am
fully the first, even the only, author."
Daniel Bernoulli would never forgive his father for having
robbed him o f the glory that came with being the first to discover
the fluid-flow equation. Above all, he would never forgive his fa
ther for having demolished his boyhood dream o f becoming the
Isaac Newton of his day.
Following these tragic events, young Bernoulli became angrywith
God, whose plan for him had turned out to be so mean-spirited.
He was disappointed, too, with science, whose incompetence at
forecasting the future, his future, was now all-too-painfully obvi
ous.
In the end, therefore, despondent over his startling fate and his
seemingly pointless career, Daniel Bernoulli decided to take con
trol o f his own destiny; he decided to quit mathematics: "I would
rather have learned the shoemaker's trade than mathematics. Also,
I have no longer been able to persuade myself since then to work
out anything mathematical. My entire remaining pleasure is to
work some projects on the blackboard now and then for future
oblivion. "

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I P I L O ~ U I 

In mythology, humans have always found it easy to fly like birds. In

a fifth-century Norse legend, for example, a weapons maker
named Wayland fashioned himself a suit of feathers and was able to
fly merely by obeying these two simple rules o f the air: ((Against
the wind shalt thou rise easily. Then, when thou wouldst descend,
fly with the wind."
In reality, however, our earliest efforts to fly like birds always
ended in disaster. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was a popular
sport for people with homemade wings attached to their arms to
jump offhigh towers. If they were lucky, they escaped with a body
full o f broken bones.
With the publication in 1680 o f Giovanni Borelli's unprece
dented mathematical study o f human muscle power, the world got
its first lesson in how very poorly designed the human body was for
flying. "It is clear that the motive power o f the pectoral muscles in
men," Borelli proclaimed, "is much less than is necessary for
flight. "
According to Borelli's calculations, humans would need pector
als twenty times stronger than normal to be able to lift themselves
off the ground, using wings of reasonable size. People's only hope,
Borelli concluded, was to lighten their bodies in a manner that
enabled them to float into the air "the same way as a strip oflead
can float on water if a certain amount o f cork be attached to it."
Borelli's vision o f bodies bobbing around in the air came true in
1783, when the Montgolfier brothers, Etienne and Joseph, became
the first to get a hot-air balloon to fly. They did not get very high
in their ornately designed paper-and-linen balloon, but they did
attract worldwide attention-not to mention scare away the birds!
The theory supporting these balloons was simple enough,
namely Archimedes's Law of Buoyancy. The problem was in

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knowing how to control them. In 1785, two Frenchmen, Pilatre

de Rozier and Pierre-Ange Romain, crashed while trying to cross
the English Channel aboard a huge, unwieldy balloon with a mind
o f its own.
Scientifically speaking, balloons and blimps were called aerostatic
(the airy analog of hydrostatic) , because their weight was supported
entirely by the buoyancy of still air. By contrast, vehicles supported
by the movement o f air were called aerodynamic (the airy analog o f
hydrodynamic) .
Throughout the eighteenth century, these technical distinctions
proved secondary to the human disasters. While some daredevils
vainly wrestled the controls o f their aero static monstrosities, others
had even less luck getting off the ground in their aerodynamic
contraptions.
In 1742, for example, the Marquis de Bacqueville attached four
wings made of starched linen to his hands and feet. f u he leapt off
the Left Bank of the river Seine, he dropped like a rock and broke
his leg when he landed atop a washerwoman's barge.
As the decades flew by and the death count of these ~ o u l d - b e 

aviators soared, human optimism took a nosedive. By the nine

teenth century, many wondered whether history was trying to tell
us something; namely, that we were destined to live out our exis
tence bound to the earth and never know what it feels like to
swoop through the air like an eagle.
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible," declared
William Thomson, one o f Britain's most famous physicists. Even
Thomas Edison, the very embodiment o f vision and persistence,
was doubtful we would ever fly. "The possibilities o f the aero
plane," he concluded pessimistically, "have been exhausted."
If history had taught nineteenth-century citizens to be skeptical
about scientific efforts to leave the ground, it also had taught them
to be skeptical about scientific efforts to predict the future. Two
hundred years earlier, Leibniz's hopeful scheme of using the calcu-

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Ius to divine the exigencies o f life had failed so utterly, the French
playwright Voltaire had derided it in Candide, a wickedly satirical
comedy in which Leibniz had been identified with the simpleton
Dr. Pangloss.
That was not to say that, by the nineteenth century, everyone had
given up entirely on Leibniz's facile-minded dream. Indeed, hopes
were raised anew when Austrian monk Gregor Johann Mendel
discovered the laws of heredity and Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund
Freud articulated the tenets of psychoanalysis.
Perhaps, philosophers speculated once again, people's behavior
was not too irrational to be prophesied by the rational laws o f
mathematics and science. By knowing "all the forces that give mo
tion to nature and the respective conditions of all natural beings,"
enthused a brilliant French mathematician named Pierre Simon de
Laplace: "Nothing could be uncertain to such an intelligence, and
future and past alike would be open to its vision."
In aviation, too, hopes were raised anew when George Cayley,
a young British baronet who as a boy had marveled at the exploits
of he Montgolfier brothers, designed a flying machine that did not
rely on flapping its wings for lift.
Cayley's aeroplane, as he called it, had a fuselage whose aerody
namic shape was patterned after the hydrodynamic shape of a trout.
Attached to its top, like one large immovable wing, was a kite. It
wasn't very pretty, but it was the forerunner o f today's modem
airplane.
At first, Cayley built and tested only unmanned gliders. They
worked so well, however, that in 1849, he dared putting a young
boy inside one o f hem. Much to Cayley's delight, "it lifted off the
ground for several yards."
In 1853, emboldened by his success, the baronet coaxed his
coachman into the cockpit of his newest glider and pushed him off
a hillside. The flight across the small valley ended successfully, but
the pilot had been so traumatized by the experience, he quit on the

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spot: "I was hired to drive," he shouted hysterically, "not to fly."

Following Cayley's breathtaking success, inventors soon started
to add gasoline-powered engines to the ftxed-wing flying ma
chines. In essence, the strange-looking vehicles began resembling
kites propelled by windmill blades.
In the decades ahead, these motorized airplanes flew-or, more
accurately, bunny-hopped-their way past many exciting mile
stones. The grand ftnale, however, was to be the Wright brothers'
historic flight near the seacoast village of Kitty Hawk, North Caro
lina.
Wilbur and Orville Wright were owners of a bicycle shop in
Dayton, Ohio. They ftxed and built bicycles for a living, but for
years, they put all their mechanical know-how into building a gas
oline-powered airplane.
After completing their new flying machine, they chose to try it
out at Kitty Hawk, because o f the location's strong and steady sea
breezes. Like the mythical Wayland, they believed ftrmly in the
idea that ( ~ g a i n s t  the wind shalt thou rise easily."
On December 17, 1903, at 10:35 A.M., his shirt rippling in the

wind, an anxious Orville approached the machine, slipped into the

driver's sling, and gave his brother the signal to start the engine. In
a moment, he was carried across the sand and lifted into the air.
As he flew along the coastline, he grappled with the controls,
managing to keep the rickety airplane aloft for twelve seconds. Just
that quickly, Orville had piloted himself and his brother right into

the history books.

It was the ftrst time a self-powered airplane, controlled by a
human, had flown for any signiftcant amount o f ime. The trip had
lasted only a dozen seconds, but as brother Wilbur reflected, hav
ing witnessed it from the ground, "the age o f flight had come at
last. "

After all these centuries, history had proven the naysayers

wrong. It had also proven a larger truth: Fate very often surprised

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114

us, but we in turn were capable of surprising Fate.

Because we still did not understand how an airplane was able to
fiy, however, we were still far from conquering the skies. The
Wright brothers notwithstanding, we were a lot like those early
hominids who had used fires ignited by lightning without know
ing themselves how to create them.
Beginning back in 1871, however, scientists had begun to build
wind tunnels for studying the aerodynamics of wings. Being little
more than wide-diameter pipes of fast-flowing air, wind tunnels
were reminiscent o f Bernoulli's pipes of fast-flowing water.
Typically, engineers would put miniature airplanes inside the
breezy tunnels and then toss in some metallic dust, so as to make
visible the air currents; in that respect, they were mimicking Leo
nardo da Vinci, who had used grass seeds to study river currents.
One such engineer was a Russian named Nikolai Zhukovsky.
As a six-year-old boy, he had fallen in love with kites, after hearing
the story o f how, in A.D. 906, the Russians had used kites shaped
like giant horsemen to frighten the Greeks into surrendering Con
stantinople.
As a youngster, he had planned to become a military engineer,
just like his father. As fate would have it, however, Nikolai Zhu
kovsky would end up following in the footsteps of someone com
pletely unrelated and unknown to him: Daniel Bernoulli.
Like Bernoulli, young Zhukovsky loved mathematics and the
study o f solid objects moving through fluids-kites struggling
against the air being one of his favorite case studies. Coincidentally,
too, in 1868, Zhukovsky had enrolled in a school near the famous
St. Petersburg Academy, only to leave a short while later, because
"the lectures are none too good" and the harsh climate was worse.
In the course o f his subsequent studies at the University ofMos
cow, Zhukovsky had learned about the multitudinous achieve
ments and multifarious exploits of the famous Bernoulli family.
Their tempestuous story, he had discovered, was as captivating as
the subject o f kites.

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Despite Daniel Bernoulli's disheartening experience with his fa

ther, Zhukovsky had read with fascination, he had gone on to win
eight more prizes from the French Academy, bringing his total
winnings to ten! That had remained an all-time record, bested only
by Euler, who had won twelve prizes, one less than the thirteen
children his wife had borne him.
As for Johann Bernoulli, though he had· not won any more
prizes, he had continued to disparage his son and posture for pos
terity. In 1748, nearly blind, asthmatic, and gout-plagued, he had
died, believing that somehow fate had cheated him out of his just
rewards.
Daniel Bernoulli had died peacefully in his sleep at the age o f
eighty-two. Euler, who had gone blind by then, had remained so
industrious, it had ended up taking one hundred pages just to list
the tides o f his published works.
While reading all this, Zhukovsky had developed a superficial
kinship with Daniel Bernoulli, the result of heir both having stud
ied in St. Petersburg and dedicated their lives to the study o f fluids.
It also had brought home to Zhukovsky just how much had

changed in a hundred years.

Inhis day, Bernoulli had faced the question o f how to measure
blood pressure. Now Zhukovsky faced a much different question,
one that had been raised by the astonishing success o f Cayley's
gliders: How was it possible for an airplane to fly? What exacdy
lifted it into the air and, in apparent defiance o f gravity, kept it

there?
After finishing his schooling, Zhukovsky had been appointed a
professor at the University of Moscow, whereupon he had applied
himself to answering those all-important questions. Back in 1891,
after years of pleading, Zhukovsky even had managed to persuade
the university to build him a small wind tunnel.
Now,
two years after the Wright brothers' stunning achieve
ment, forty-four-year-old Zhukovsky himself was about to fly
straight into the history books. Airplanes were able to fly, he an-

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n o u ~ c e d  in 1905, because o f Bernoulli's fluid-flow equation.

In order to understand what Zhukovsky had discovered, one
needed only to picture a disembodied, miniature airplane wing
inside a wind tunnel whose floor and ceiling were flat. The wing's
shape was typical, with a flat bottom surface and a rounded top
surface.
The cross section o f a typical wing, in fact, looked like the upper
half o f a reclining teardrop that had been divided lengthwise. Inside
the wind tunnel, as in actual flight, the blunt end o f the semitear
drop knifed through the wind, while the tapered end trailed be
hind.
Inside the wind tunnel, the wing inevitably split the onrushing
air into an upper stream and a lower stream. The upper stream
flowed between the wing's upper surface and tunnel's flat ceiling.
The lower stream was bounded by the wing's lower surface and
tunnel's flat floor. (In effect, the tunnel's "ceiling" played the role
o f the top of the atmosphere and the "floor," the actual ground.)
Zhukovsky had noted that the upper air stream was slighdy nar
rower than the lower one. That was simply because the wing's
upper surface was rounded, ever so slighdy pinching off the space
between it and the tunnel's ceiling.
According to Leonardo da Vinci's Law o f Continuity, Zhu
kovsky had reasoned, the upper (narrower) air stream whizzed by
more quickly than the lower (wider) air stream. It was exacdy the
same reason a river's waters suddenly sped up when squeezing

through a botdeneck.
According to Bernoulli's fluid-flow equation, Zhukovsky had
concluded, the lower (slower) air stream exerted more pressure than
the upper (faster) air stream. That is, the air pressure pushing up on
the wing was greater than the air pressure pushing down.
The net result? Airplanes flew because the pressure beneath their

wings overcame the pressure above them. Put another way, air
planes lifted off the ground because their wings were pushed up by

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the relatively high pressure o f the air rushing past their lower sur
faces. (Or, equivalendy, airplanes flew because their wings were
sucked up by the relatively low pressure o f the air rushing past their
upper surfaces.)
In the years ahead, twentieth-century historians would look
back at Zhukovsky's extraordinary explanation as the dramatic
conclusion o f one era and the beginning o f another. By under
standing, at long last, how airplanes were able to defy gravity,
modern aeronautical engineers were able to design flying machines
not just with their hands but with their minds.
It had taken our species millions o f years to build an airplane that
flew like a bird, millions o f years for us to go from lumbering
around caves to hovering above them. Amazingly, however, once
we had learned exacdy how airplanes flew, it took us only fifty
years to go from soaring above Kitty Hawk to soaring into space.
Ultimately, the credit belonged to Daniel Bernoulli, whose
seminal work in hydrodynamics enabled Zhukovsky and others to
get the human species off the ground. Ironically, though, most
scientific textbooks quickly fell into the habit o f referring to the
famous fluid-flow equation simply, but ambiguously, as Bernoulli's
Principle.
It was not as if anyone seriously doubted it had been Daniel
Bernoulli specifically who had first discovered the equation.
Rather, it was as i f ather and son were destined to keep slugging it
out, with the outcome forever doomed to remain up in the air.

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vx E = -oBlot '

Michael Faraday and the Law of Electromagnetic

Induction

I know of no more encouraging fact

than the unquestionable ability of Man
to elevate his life by a conscious
endeavor.
- H E N R Y DAVID THOREAU

is evening, as nineteen-year-old Michael Faraday and his

friends walked out o f Professor Tatum's house, he paused to

T marvel at the recently installed gas lamps that now lined Dor
sett Street. How quickly his world was changing, he thought, and
for the better: Gas lamps had made walking the streets o f London at
night far safer-indeed, the crime rate had plummeted ever since
the city had begun installing the bright new lighting three years
ago.
A technological revolution was taking Europe by storm, and
Faraday wanted so impatiently to participate in it; that was why he
was attending Tatum's lectures. He and the others in the group
could not afford to go to a university; they came from poor families
but were ablaze with a desire to exceed the subjugating expecta

tions o f their highly class-conscious society.

119
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120

Faraday himself was an apprentice booksmith. Were he to sur

render to his presupposed fate, he surely would grow up to do
nothing more than make books for members o f England's upper
crust to read. Thanks to his having a master who empathized with
his ambition to overcome his lowly lot in life, however, young
Faraday was permitted these occasional evenings to educate himself
in the mysteries o f the natural world.
Tatum's lecture this evening had focused on Luigi Galvani's bi
zarre discovery o f "animal electricity." Nineteen years ago, in
1791, the Italian anatomist had been experimenting with electrical
sparks when he noticed they invariably caused dead frogs nearby to
twitch. Most surely, an excited Galvani had concluded, this meant
that electricity was the source of all animate existence.
Hearing about this remarkable discovery had been especially in
teresting for Faraday, because his father had passed away only last
week. Now, as the young man prepared to walk home, he won
dered whether Galvani had indeed found a way to create life.
Putting on his coat, Faraday exchanged good-byes with his
friends and watched as they disappeared into the dimly lit city. It
was fall, so the fog was particularly heavy, causing Faraday to hesi
tate for a moment: His family had just moved to this part of Lon
don, and he still needed to reassure himself that he was heading in
the right direction.
One certainly did not want to get lost in this neighborhood, he
thought with a wan smile. Not to say he was complaining: This
was all his father had been able to afford, and now things could get
even worse, with only his apprentice's modest stipend to support
his mother and younger siblings.
Partway through his journey home, the teenager was ap
proached by a bobby who questioned him suspiciously before al
lowing him to continue along. Someday, young Faraday muttered
to himself, it would be different; he would be a respected natural
philosopher and treated like a gentleman by everyone.

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After some time, as he rounded the comer onto Weymouth

Street, Faraday felt relieved to see candlelight filling the windows
o f unit 1 S - i t reminded him o f the warmth with which he had
been brought up. He also felt terribly lonely and sad, however,
because it reminded him o f how very much he missed his father.
Late that night, as he lay in bed, the young man sobbed, burying
his face into the pillow, so the others would not hear. He had loved
his father even more than he had come to love chemistry, and that
was saying a lot.
Young Faraday remembered the time, before the family had
moved to the city, when he had been playing in the loft o f heir old
bam. He had fallen through a hole in the floorboards but had been
saved from possible death by the cradling arms o f his burly father
who, as usual, had been toiling over his anvil down below.
Overcome with grief now, young Faraday resolved to emanci
pate himself from the servile existence into which he had been
born. True, in order to support the family, he would have to con
tinue working at the bookbindery, but in the long run, he was
determined to develop his mind and become a chemist.
As he mourned his father's absence and contemplated his uncer
tain future, Faraday began to feel drowsy. His eyes grew heavy, and
his final thoughts turned to Tatum's lecture.
Galvani had believed that electricity was the spark o f life. Could
he be right? young Faraday wondered. Surely scientists knew so
very little about the phenomenon o f static electricity that one
not out o f
could dismiss the idea hand.
In his growing sleepiness, Faraday's scientific imagination over
took him. What iflast week he had been more scrutinizing when
his father had drawn his final breath? There in the darkness, would
he have been able to see jagged and luminous fingers of static elec
tricity exiting from his father's dying body? These were morbid
he but
questions, realized, they excited his budding scientific curi
osity.

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That night, though the young man eventually fell asleep, some
thing within him had been awakened, had been animated by Gal
vani's spark. It went beyond questions about his father's passing,
beyond the Italian anatomist's ghoulish theory; it was the inklings
o f a new science.
Before it was fully articulated and accepted, however, the blue
collared booksmith would need to do battle with the ignorance
and arrogance o f the blue-blooded scientific establishment o f his
day. It was to be a difficult and dramatic struggle, but in the end,
this young son of a blacksmith would electrify the world with his
first-class mind and a most shocking equation.

VINI

It was 1791, and the civilized world was in the throes o f class strug
gles the scope of which had never been seen before: Suddenly, in
both the Old and New worlds, common people were venturing to
improve their status by revolting against the status quo.
In the N ew World, American colonists recently had drafted an
unprecedented "Declaration ofIndependence" and won their lib
erty from Britain. Now, in the Old World, the lower-class citizens
o f France having stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, Louis XVI
was acquiescing grudgingly to their complaints by signing a "Dec
laration of the Rights o f Man and Citizen."
Coincidentally, furthermore, working-class people in America
and Europe themselves were having to acquiesce to the harsh de
mands o f yet another unprecedented uprising, the Industrial Rev
olution. In England, for example, textile workers by the thousands
already had surrendered to a revolutionary army of steam-powered

soldiers.
The Industrial Revolution had started fifty-eight years ago, in

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123

1733, when John Kay had invented the flying s h u t d e - a device

that had so sped up the weaving process that the spinners hadn't
been able to keep up with the new demand for thread. Then in
1765, James Hargreaves had invented a machine that could spin
eight strands o f cotton at once; after that, it was the weavers who
had been unable to keep up.
N ext, in 1787, the Reverend Edmund Cartwright had invented
the power loom-enabling the weavers to keep pace with the
spinners, but creating pressure on the cotton growers to produce
more raw material. In a few more years, that problem, too, would
be solved: Eli Whitney would invent the cotton engine--or cot
ton 'gin for short -whi ch would remove seeds from raw cotton
two hundred times faster than any human being!
By 1791, the Industrial Revolution's high-speed robots had in
creased productivity and profits to an all-time high. They had done
so, however, at the expense o f the working classes, who now
found themselves being exploited or dismissed by employers who
were using the newfangled machinery as a way to get rich quickly.
Even for James and Margaret Faraday, who lived in the country
coup de
side, far from England's growing industrial centers, this main
was hitting close to home. Ever since childhood, James had labored
long and hard to become a consummate blacksmith; now, though,
his superbly wrought handiworks were being steadily devalued by
the increasing availability of machine-made products.
In an attempt to find more business, James moved his family to
the he
village o f Newington, nearer to London; needed desper
ately to earn more money. In the past, his wife had been able to
supplement his income by working part time as a maid, but that
was not possible right now, because Margaret was pregnant with
their third child.
O n September 22, as the leaves on the trees began to fall, she

gave birth to a son whom they nam ed MichaeL The infant's eyes
had not yet seen much, but already his tiny red face screamed and

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scowled at the social upheavals around him. Thoughjoyous at the

new arrival, the Faradays were exceedingly anxious: What would
become of this child-to· them a l l - i f ames was not able to find
steady work soon?
Their only source o f comfort in those desperate days was a pas
sionate belief that Jesus Christ would see them through this crisis,
as He had many times before. The Faradays were devoted mem
bers of what their son would later describe as "a very small and
despised sect of Christians known, if known at all, as Sandemani-
ans. "
The founder o f their church, the late Robert Sandeman, had
been a man who had eschewed fancy religious arguments based on
scholarly exegeses o f the Bible. "That God exists," he had insisted,
"is evident from the intricate contrivances of Nature. Let him who
doubts cast up his eyes at the heavens and all doubt must vanish."
To him, it had been as plain and simple as that.
Most original Sandemanians were people who had split from the
Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Church o f England. The
sermons from those churches having become too intellectualized
for them, the defectors had created a sect that emphasized the
childlike faith that Jesus had demanded o f his disciples.
This meant, among other things, that the Faradays were not
strong believers in formal education. In 1796, therefore, when
they moved to northern London, still in search o f a steady income,
the children were not pressured even slightly to do well in school;
worse still, the school itself, being located in a rundown neighbor
hood, was not very demanding.
In the years ahead, the only time Michael Faraday's parents took
an active interest in his schooling was the day he was going to be
punished for constantly referring to his older brother Robert as
"Wabert." The teacher sent Robert to buy a whipping stick, but
boy home mother
the hurried to tell his instead.
Sandemanians believed in corporal punishment, in keeping with

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the admonition in Proverbs 13:24 that "H e who spares the rod
hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him."
But punishment was unacceptable at the hands of someone from
outside their sect, whom Sandemanians regarded as impure. Con
sequently, upon hearing Robert's story, Margaret Faraday imme
diately had her children transferred to another school.
Though he had been spared a beating, the quality and quantity
o f young Faraday's education went from bad to worse. Not only
was the new school inferior to the first, the child himself continued
to lack any encouragement from his parents, who were too preoc
cupied with providing for his physical and spiritual well-being.
"My education," Faraday would lament later, "was of the most
ordinary description, consisting o f little more than the rudiments
o f reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day school." That
explained why, for years after his brush with punishment, he con
tinued to mispronounce his older brother's name: "Wabert," he
would say, not to be a rascal, but because he didn't know any
better.
"My hours out of school," Faraday would recall, "were spent in
the streets." O n a typical day, he and his rowdy band of friends
would roam all over the neighborhood and then settle in for a
game of marbles in the alleyway next to his family's ramshackle
tenement.
During these years, the Faradays lived on nothing more than
several loaves o f bread a w e e k - a dole from the English govern
ment. Oddly, though, even as their situation worsened, the Fara
days remained a happy family.
Indeed, all Sandemanians were never happier than when they
were penniless. Poverty reminded them o f when Jesus, who, im
pecunious himself, had warned the Israelites that a rich man had
less of a chance to enter the Kingdom o f God than a camel had o f
passing through the eye of a needle.
For that reason, Sandemanians were rugged and unpretentious

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people, able to survive on very little, save for their bountiful faith
in the mercy of God's only Son. Indeed, since they believed that
God had specifically chosen Sandemanians to enter heaven when
they died, very little frightened t hem-apart from the threat o f
excommunication.
That danger was taken very seriously, which was why young
Faraday and the other Sandemanian children were allowed to run
wild during the week, but on Sunday afternoons, they were re
quired to be in church. Failing to do so even once, without a
proper excuse, was grounds for being expelled from the church.
Despite his being brought up to be a good Sandemanian, in the
eyes of contemporary English society, Michael Faraday was little
more than a poor, ignorant street urchin. Furthermore, when he
was thirteen years old, though he could barely read or write, time
had come for him to quit school altogether.
According to the traditions o f the working class, the young man
now needed to fInd a job. The routine was all very clearly spelled
out: He would begin with some kind o f apprenticeship, during
which he would acquire a skill that would earn a living for him and
whomever he would choose to marry.
Under normal circumstances, James Faraday would have wished
for his son to become a blacksmith. But these were anything but
normal times, made even more precarious by the fact that England
was now at war with France.
During the years young Faraday had been growing up, France's
proletariat had guillotined Louis XVI and his queen, Marie An-
toinette. Now, in 1804, the bourgeoisie had crowned as their new
emperor one Napoleon Bonaparte, an imperialistic general who
designed to conquer the world with the aid of new and deadly
military machines spawned by the Industrial Revolution.
With promises o f providing a nurturing environment for ex
perimenting and inventing, Bonaparte had attracted to France
talented young scientists and engineers from all over the world,

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especially America, whose recent independence could not have

been won without French assistance. Indeed, at this very moment,
an American inventor named Robert Fulton was tinkering with
steam-powered boats on the river Seine.
Clearly, it seemed, the future belonged to steam and to those
who exploited its power, for good or ill. Therefore, though it
broke his heart to admit it, the elder Faraday knew his son could
not---should n o t-fo llo w in his footsteps.
Fortunately, the news was not all bad. As automation had in
creased, so had the opportunities for unskilled laborers-poor, un
educated young people just like Michael Faraday. He had many
job opportunities, therefore, and he thought about them all very
carefully.
Unable to choose, though, young Faraday made an interim de
cision that would prove to be as consequential as it was ironic: This
semiliterate boy from the wrong side o f the river Thames decided
to become the new errand boy at a nearby bookstore run by a Mr.
George Riebau.
The job did not require him to read. In fact, all he really needed
to do was scurry around the neighborhood, something at which
the former waif was quite experienced. It did not pay much, he had
judged, but it was preferable to being cooped up inside one o f
those depressing and hazardous sweatshops that were now sprout
ing up all over the city.
As it turned out, the job was desirable for still another reason.
Unbeknownst to Faraday, the literacy rate was skyrocketing
throughout industrialized Europe, in part because mechanized
printing presses and boats were making it easier and cheaper to
produce and distribute books. Consequently, people were buying
them in record numbers; keeping the new delivery boy very busy.
Intrigued by the widespread interest in books, young Faraday's
own attitude toward the printed word slowly began to change.
This miraculous transformation was abetted, furthermore, by his

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becoming interested in what went on at the back ofRiebau's shop;

there pages o f text were bound together into books.
This aspect o f the business so attracted young Faraday that in
1805, he made the decision to become an apprentice. For the first
time in his fourteen years, he had quit the streets. He had never
once gone to a library, but for the next seven years, a library o f
books from all over the world would come to him.
As a novice, Faraday had a lot to learn, and the work was not
easy. Bookbinding hadbeen one of the few crafts to survive the
Industrial Revolution, precisely because it required a mental con
centration and manual dexterity that no clumsy machine--and
very few people--could bring to the task.
Faraday was taught to take pages from aprinter, stitch them,
trim them, and secure them to a handmade leather cover. The
process demanded scientific precision; the product was a work o f
art.
Though the young apprentice was astonished at the effort that
went into making a book, he was equally surprised to discover how
difficult it was to read one. Increasingly, he became frustrated and
angry by his inability to enjoy the fruits o f his labor-like the con
struction worker who discovered he was unqualified to attend a
college he had helped to build.
Consequendy, the young teenager began to teach himself how
to read. It was a laborious and painful process, but in a matter o f
months, he made up for what he had neglected to learn during all
those years o f public schooling.
One day, while stitching together the newest edition of the En
cyclopaedia Britannica, Faraday's life changed forever. In reading its
127-page entry on electricity, Faraday learned that, though natural
philosophers had known about this invisible phenomenon for cen
turies, they still had not figured it out.
Something within him stirred, reminding him o f a biblical verse
he had heard a thousand tiines before; it was from Romans 1 :20:

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"Since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities-his

eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being
understood from what has been made."
So long as electricity remained invisible and enigmatic-which
was to say not "clearly seen" and not "understood"-it would be
impossible for anyone to have a proper understanding o f "God's
eternal power and divine nature." This was intolerable, the young
Sandemanian decided, so then and there, he resolved to help rem
edy the situation.
Because he had been brought up to believe in the fundamental
simplicity o f man's relationship to God, Faraday doubted that elec
tricity could be as complicated as all that. Fortunately, the London
o f his day offered this unsophisticated youngster unparalleled op
portunities to find out for himsel£
In recent years, the Industrial Revolution had caused such a
widespread interest in science and technology that natural philoso
phers had begun to write popular magazine articles and books and
to conduct lectures especially for the public. The books were
snatched up as quickly as they were published, and the lectures
were usually delivered to standing-room-only crowds.
For Faraday, the unprecedented demand for science books was a
double blessing: As a bookbinder, it meant job security; as a
would-be natural philosopher, it meant fInding plenty o f nforma
tion about electricity written in plain English. "It was in those
books, in the hours after work," Faraday would recall later, "that I
found the beginning of my philosophy."
While he rejoiced in the books that were freely available to him,
however, Faraday was chagrined about being too poor to buy tick
ets to any of the public lectures, particularly those o f Humphry
Davy, the famous chemist and director of the prestigious Royal
Institution o f London. In recent years, Davy's extravagant and
lively presentations had received such rave reviews they had
become legendary.

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The youngster had become possessed by a desire to see Davy in

action, a reasonable wish, considering that the Royal Institution
was located only a short distance from Riebau's shop. As English
society saw it, however, this presumptuous apprentice might- as
well have been wishing to visit an enchanted casde in some faraway
land.
In nineteenth-century England, science was not yet a paying
profession, so the only people who could afford to do it were the
very wealthy. The Royal Institution was like an ultra-exclusive
country club, and its aristocratic members never would have
deigned to consort with the likes o f Michael Faraday or anyone
else of his lowly class.
It didn't stop there: Even more elitist than the Royal Institution
was the Royal Society, located nearby; its members were the
equivalent of scientific royalty. Therefore, Faraday's wanting to
become a scientist was akin to a pauper dreaming about becoming
a pnnce.
Mercifully, the young proletarian was not old enough to under
stand any o f this, and his master Riebau was too kind-hearted to
disabuse him o f his fantasies. Indeed, Riebau so empathized with
the boy's desire for a better life that he gave in to Faraday's pleading
request to convert part o f the shop into a makeshift laboratory.
Mter hours, Riebau's fireplace became Faraday's furnace and
the mantelpiece his workbench. The young man's lab equipment
was crude, of course, but doing the experiments and keeping care
ful notes in his journal made him feel like a real philosopher.
In the months ahead, the teenager built himself an electrostatic
generator, a hand-cranked device that created sparks o f static elec
tricity. He also managed to save up a few shillings to buy a pair o f
Leyden jars; static electricity was by its nature elusive, but it could
be trapped and stored inside these jars, like fireflies in a botde.
Faraday also began reading self-help books, because he realized
that ifhe was to become a man of science, he would have to learn

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not just its theories but its techniques, as well. In Improvement cif the
Mind, a book by Dr. Isaac Watts, for example, Faraday learned the
four best ways of becoming smarter: attend lectures, take careful
notes, correspond with people o f similar interests, and join a dis
cussion group.
In 1810, unable to afford showy public lectures, Faraday joined
a discussion group consisting mainly o f working-class young men
who aspired to improve their stations in life. Every Wednesday
night at eight, with Riebau's permission, Faraday would leave
work and travel to the house o f a science teacher named John
Tatum.
During these meetings, either Tatum or one of the attendees
would deliver a lecture on a subject o f his choice. Faraday always
would listen intendy and take careful notes; at the end o f it all, he
planned, he would bind all his notes together into one big, beauti
ful book.
When Faraday's tum came to give a presentation, he spoke
about electricity and drew a warm and enthusiastic response from
his confreres. Tatum wasn't Davy and his house wasn't the Royal
Institution, but at only one shilling per week, the meetings were
eminendy affordable and enlightening.
In the course oflearning to become a natural philosopher, Fara
day revealed himself to be as distrustful in matters scientific as he
was trustful in matters religious. Whereas he accepted literally and
unquestioningly anything written in the Holy Bible, he put to the
test any assertion made in books written by mere mortals.
"In early life I was a very imaginative person, who could believe
in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopaedia," Faraday re
called later, "but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could
trust a fact, and always cross-examined an assertion."
To Faraday, facts were as sacred as scriptural verses, in that both

were the only reliable ways o f comprehending God's creation.

Each evening, therefore, after everyone else had left, the young

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man would sequester himselfin Riebau's shop-cum-Iab and dupli

cate every experiment mentioned in the books he had read. "I was
never able to make a fact my own," he would confess, "without
seeing it."
Faraday had never felt so invigorated as he did now, but the
same could not be said about his long-suffering father back home.
Recendy the elder Faraday had written to Michael's brother
Thomas to complain that: "I am sorry to say I have not had the
pleasure of enjoying one day's health for a long time."
The doctors were puzzled as to what was debilitating the father,
but their prognosis was that he would become an invalid. One last
time, therefore, the Faradays moved to another tenement, located
more conveniendy near the center of town. Within months, how
ever, James Faraday died.
In the two years that followed, Michael Faraday helped support
his mother and siblings, all the while nursing the hope o f becoming
a natural philosopher. But in 1812, the year his apprenticeship was
scheduled to end, ruefully, he began surrendering to the likelihood
o f having to live down to the expectations of his society: Unless
something miraculous happened to change the course o f his life; it
appeared he was doomed to become a bookbinder, just like his
master Riebau, and to keep science merely as a hobby.
As winter was coming to an end, however, a man named Dance
Junr walked through the front door o f the bookshop-and into
Faraday's life. During his last visit, Junr had spotted the ornately
crafted book young Faraday had made o f his notes from Tatum's
lectures. Curious as to its contents, Junr had asked and received
permission from Riebau to borrow it for a while.
Now, several weeks later, he was returning it direcdy to Fara
day, with four small pieces o f paper sandwiched between the pages.
Junr was a member o f the Royal Institution, Faraday was aston
to out o f young
ished discover, and admiration for the man's work,
he was returning the book, along with complimentary tickets to
the next series o f public lectures by the famous Humphry Davy!

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Da.. Ae'
133

VIUI

Long before Christians had come to believe in the Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, natural philosophers had stumbled on their own trin
ity: electricity, magnetism, and the gravitational force. These three
forces alone had governed the creation o f the universe, they be
lieved, and would shape its future forevermore.
Their belief had been founded on a rock, literally, 600 years
before Christianity. Back then, the Ionian philosopher Thales o f
Miletus had noticed that lodestones attracted shards o f iron and
that amber-fossilized tree sap-attracted chaff and bits o f straw,
after being rubbed with wool. Added to those mysterious forces
was the self-evident fact that the earth attracted objects o f all
kinds.
Given the forces' disparate behaviors, it was no wonder that
philosophers very early on were left scratching their heads: Were
these three forces completely different? O r were they, like the
Christian Trinity, three aspects o f a single phenomenon?
They were tempted to believe in the unity o f the three forces,
simply because it was most consistent with their notion that, de
spite its ostensible complexity, Nature fundamentally was simple.
Unfortunately for that tidy premise, howeve r, every shred of evi
dence indicated the three forces were indeed as varied as their out
ward behavior implied.
Ancient philosophers venerated gravity above the other two
forces, because it alone appeared to be universal; it was every
where, at all times. Ultimately, too, gravity's influence was irresist
ible: It had the power o f felling mighty trees and mighty kings.
In comparison, the lodestone and amber forces did not have
anywhere near as conspicuous a presence in people's everyday
lives; indeed, lodestones were quarried in only a few places on
earth, and amber was as rare as gold. Furthermore, these forces
seemed to influence only specific things, and only under very spe-

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134

cific conditions. In short, compared to gravity, they were a nov

elty, a mere curiosity.
Not surprisingly, therefore, in his celebrated magnum opus,
Physics, even the widely inquisitive Aristotle made no mention of
Thales' two eccentric forces. He did, however, call attention to the
mystery of "the natural downward motion of the earth" and, in
referring more than once to the "gravity" of solid objects (in con
trast to the "levity" o f gaseous objects), gave the ubiquitous force
its name.
During the centuries that followed, the slight persisted: Sober
minded philosophers studying gravity did not allow themselves to
be distracted by minor mysteries, such as lodestones and amber. In
the society o f ideas, as it were, gravity had become a pampered
aristocrat who lorded over a pair o f nameless nobodies.
It wasn't until 1581, when an English physician became inter
ested in their possible curative powers, that Thales' two ill-treated
forces began being taken seriously. His name was William Gilbert,
and for years, he went around rubbing everything in sight with
wool, silk, and fur; it made his colleagues wonder about his sanity,
but in the end, the good doctor discovered something truly amaz
mg.
Gilbert had been able to elicit Thales' amber force by rubbing
diamonds, sulfur, sealing wax, and many other ordinary substances,
not just amber. Moreover, the force attracted not only chaff and
straw but "all metals, woods, leaves, stones, earths, even water and
oil, and everything which is subject to our senses, or is solid."
Indeed, since it now appeared that the amber force was nearly as
universal as gravity, Gilbert decided it deserved a name of its own.
He christened it the electrick force, after elektron,. the Greek word for
amber.
Gilbert was just as enthusiastic about lodestones. "The loadstone
far excels all other bodies known to us in virtues and properties
pertaining to the common mother [earth]," he raved, "but those

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properties have been far too litde understood or realized by philos

ophers."
In this case, Gilbert was not the first to name the phenomenon;
Thales' lodestone force already had come to be called ~ a g n e t i s m , 

after the Asian district o f Magnesia, where many lodestones were

mined originally. Gilbert was the first, however, to discover that
the two ends of a magnet always behaved differendy; he called
them the north pole and the south pole.
According to Gilbert's experiments, whenever a pair o f magnets
was brought together, similar poles repelled one another and dis
similar poles attracted. That is, two neighboring magnets always
spun around so that the south pole o f one magnet lined up with the
north pole o f the other.
Gilbert wondered whether this surprising discovery might help
explain why a magnetic compass needle always pointed northward.
Up until that time, natural philosophers had speculated that com
pass needles behaved that way simply because they were attracted
to the North Star or to some fabled lodestone-laden mountain
range located within the Arctic Circle.
After giving it some thought, Gilbert presented "to the view o f
the learned our New & unheard o f doctrine." The entire earth was
a magnet, he proposed, complete with its own two poles! That
explained a compass's behavior: Its magnetic needle's south pole
naturally was drawn to the magnetic earth's north pole (and vice
versa, the needle's north pole was drawn to the earth's south pole).
Gilbert published these revolutionary observations and theories
concerning Thales' two forces in a book tided De magnete, mag
netisque corporibus, et de magna magnete tellure (On the magnet,
magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth; a new
Physiology, demonstrated by many arguments & experiments). It
was a seminal book, because Gilbert was the first to make use o f
what came to be called the saentific method, that unique and power
ful blend o f speculation and experimentation.

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This remarkable publication disappointed Gilbert's colleagues,

however, because it seemed to dash any remaining possibility that
electricity, magnetism, and gravity were somehow.related. Already
philosophers had known that gravity was different from the other
two forces; now, according to Gilbert's revolutionary observa
tions, those two forces themselves were complete opposites.
Whereas electricity was sympathetic (stricdy attractive), magnet
ism was polar (attractive and repulsive); and whereas electricity was
catholic (attracting many different kinds o f things), magnetism was
highly selective (affecting only iron and other magnets). In the early
seventeenth century, therefore, things looked gloomy for disciples
of the scientific belief that simplicity underlay the natural world.
In 1663, they were heartened to hear o f an experiment done by
a German named Otto von Guericke. Mter rubbing a piece o f
sulfur with his bare hands, he had discovered it attracted many
things, just as Gilbert had found, but it also repelled certain things!
Evidendy, electricity was not so completely different from mag
netism after all. If von Guericke was to be believed, both forces
were capable ofbeing attractive and repulsive, which made philos
ophers wonder anew about gravity: Was it possible that their pet
force, too, was capable of repelling objects? ,
If gravity were able to push things away, then a person would
expect to see objects floating up into the sky, entirely on their
own. The possibility seemed to defy gravity and common experi
ence, and yet, philosophers enthused, no one had ever proven that
it could not happen.
It was not until 1687 that the famous English natural philoso
pher Isaac Newton brought science back down to earth by pub
lishing his monumental three-volume work Philosophiae Naturalis
Prindpia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles o f Natural Philoso
phy). In it, he offered compelling evidence that gravity worked in
one w a y - i t
only always pulled objects to itself, never pushed
them away. (See "Apples and Oranges.")

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With that matter apparently settled, science returned its atten

tions to von Guericke's sulfur experiment and the striking
similarity in the behavior of electricity and magnetism it had re
vealed. Were the two forces similar in other respects? The answer,
natural philosophers soon began discovering, was a resounding yes.
In 1785, for example, a Frenchman named Charles-Augustin
Coulomb hung small bar magnets from the ends of strings and
watched how they influenced each other when separated by vari
ous distances. He discovered that the force between them dimin
ished with the square o f their separation: If the distance between
magnets increased twofold, the force decreased fourfold (22 = 4);
i f the distance increased threefold, the force decreased ninefold
(3 2 = 9); and so forth.
This revelation was especially remarkable, because by also sus
pending electrically charged objects on strings, Coulomb discovered
the electric force obeyed an identical rule! By the end o f the eigh
teenth century, therefore, science was beginning to feel sanguine
about the possibility of finding some modicum of unity between at
least two o f Nature's three forces.
At the same time, however, science still was not sure how to
make use of electricity and magnetism, unified or not. Whereas
Newton's theory of gravity was now leading to all kinds of useful
predictions-such as the moon's gravitational influence on the
tides, the existence of new planets, and the flow of water over
miles-long aqueducts-electricity and magnetism were more en
tertaining than enlightening.
Back in 1745, for example, Dutch physicist Pieter van Mus
schenbroek had invented a special j a r - n a m e d after the University
of Leyden-that was able to store large amounts o f electricity. The
invention of the Leydenjar, which foreshadowed the modern bat
tery, meant that natural philosophers no longer had to settle for
tiny amounts of static electricity eked out by stroking "elecktrick"
materials such as amber.

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During an early demonstration of his novel creation, van Mus

schenbroek had felt its frightening sting. It had happened as he was
reaching for a Leyden jar filled to the brim with static electricity:
"The arm and body was affected in a terrible manner which I can
not express," he later reported, "in a word, I thought it was all up
with me." Van Musschenbroek had discovered the electric spark.
At first, the showy new phenomenon commanded some "ah
has" from serious-minded philosophers, but soon it began eliciting
many more "oohs and aahs" from public audiences all over the
world. Natural philosophers attempting to satisfy the public's
growing interest in science and technology had found that Leyden
jars in particular-and electricity and magnetism in general-were
real crowd pleasers.
N o o n e knew that better than Luigi Galvani, who back in the
1770s had begun a series o f electrifying experiments intended to be
scientifically serious. He and some assistants had gathered around a
freshly dissected frog and what they saw had made them jump out
of their skins: "Now when one o f the persons who were present
accidentally and lighdy touched the inner neural nerves of the frog
with the point o f a scalpel, all the muscles of the leg seemed to
contract repeatedly as i f hey were affected by powerful cramps."
Mter having given some thought to what he had just seen, Gal
vani had leapt to the conclusion that he had found the spark of ife ,
an occult assertion that ultimately had ostracized him from the
scientific community. Now, many years later, the disreputable
Galvani had turned into something o f a carnival barker, and elec
tricity into a seedy sideshow.
During his sensational public lectures, Galvani showed people
how dozens of frogs' legs twitched uncontrollably when hung on
copper hooks from an iron wire, like so much wet laundry strung
out on a clothesline. Orthodox science cringed at his theories, but
the spectacle of that chorus line of flexing frog legs guaranteed
Galvani sell-out crowds in auditoriums the world over.

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The provocative Italian managed to make a believer even out of

John Wesley, the learned Englishman whose founding of Method
ism during the early eighteenth century had inspired fellow evan
gelist John Sandeman to create his own sect. Wesley had learned
about Galvanism-the name given to Galvani's theory of animal
electricity-during his student days at Oxford; now, in 1784, he
decided to include in the dissident religion's new constitution the
explicit conviction that" electricity is the soul o f the universe."
In 1800, the electricity sideshow suddenly acquired an even
greater power to attract large and distinguished audiences. It was
the result of yet another flamboyant Italian physicist, this one hav
ing invented a device that could produce a steady flow of electric
ity, a vast improvement over Van Musschenbroek's fleeting sparks
and Galvani's momentary twitches.
His name was Alessandro Volta, and his invention consisted of
stacking, like poker chips, disks o f copper and zinc, separated by
disks of cardboard moistened with salt water. They were called
Volta's "piles," because thirty to sixty disks had to be piled up in
order to produce a measurable effect; the higher the pile, the
stronger the electric current.
Volta's piles were, in fact, history's first modemlike storage bat
teries. To determine i f one was working, a person needed only to
touch its two terminals to the tip o f the tongue; the electric cur
r en t - t o o weak to harm anyone-invariably created a tingling,
sour sensation. (The very same effect can be produced by touching
the tongue with a silver spoon and a piece o f tin foil connected to
it.)
O n March 20, 1800, an enthusiastic Volta wrote to Joseph
Banks, president o f the Royal Society o f London, informing him
o f a horizontally arrayed version o f his pile: "W e set up a row o f
several cups . . . of pure water, or, better, of brine or oflye. W e join
them in of by of
all together a sort chain means metallic arcs [which
bridge adjacent cups o f liquid]. "

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Volta called this his "crown of cups," and Banks was so im
pressed by it that he showed the letter to his colleague William
Nicholson, a civil engineer working in London. Nicholson and his
aristocratic colleague Sir Anthony Carlisle replicated Volta's new
device immediately and within a month made a jolting discovery
o f their own.
When Nicholson and Carlisle had taken the two wire terminals
from their crown of cups and dipped them into a container full o f
water, the water had begun to bubble. At first they had been puz
zled, but then they had concluded the electric current was some
how decomposing the water into its two basic elements, hydrogen
and oxygen; both were gases, which explained the bubbling.
N o o n e understood exactly how an electric current was able to
produce this effect, but it resembled the behavior o f a lightning
bolt, cleaving whatever objects it hit. In any case, the mysterious
phenomenon was undeniably real and eventually given the name
electrolysis, from the Greek "to loosen with electricity."
Just that suddenly, science had discovered a reason for taking
electricity seriously: The entertaining force had a useful purpose,
especially for chemists. Recently they had embraced the novel idea
that matter consisted o f only a few dozen essential elements; here,
now, was the perfect means o f putting their idea to the test, for
prying those alleged atoms out into the open.
Immediately hundreds o f chemists everywhere set upon build
ing themselves Voltaic piles or crowns o f cups in hopes of being
the first to discover some new atomic element. Among them, one
chemist emerged as the most proficient at applying this new tech
nology to his subject: Humphry Davy.
By 1807, five years after having arrived at the Royal Institution
in London, Davy had built one o f the world's largest and most
powerful Voltaic piles and used it to isolate two hitherto unknown
elements: sodium and potassium. A year later, he used his pile to
discover four more elements: barium, boron, calcium, and magne-

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sium. It was an achievement so remarkable that Napoleon, though

he was at war with England, awarded to Davy the Institut de
France's prestigious Bonaparte prize.
From then on out, electricity and magnetism were destined to
bring new meaning to the emerging science o f chemistry. Recip
rocally, chemistry was to bring new credibility to the study of elec
tricity and magnetism, and something m o r e - t h e extraordinary
talents and ambitions o f a young man named Michael Faraday,
who at this very moment was coming o f age in London.
Like Thales' two ancient forces, young Faraday always had oc
cupied a gallingly humble place in the scientific community. But
now, after all these years, the would-be scientist was about to
become the very ticket this would-be science of electricity and
magnetism needed in order to become a first-rate discipline.

VI[I

O n February 29, 1812, Faraday leapt up the stone steps and

rushed through the heavy doors of London's Royal Institution.
Symbolically, it was like the storming of Bastille, except it was
Faraday who would lose his head, not any of the noblemen who
dwelt within.
This was the evening for which he had been waiting so long.
For years, he had fantasized about this palace of science. And now,
as he gawked and walked his way through the opulent antecham
ber and into the auditorium, Faraday nearly swooned at the reality
of it all.
Once seated, the young man opened his notebook and began
drawing and describing the elegant room and the gadget-filled
stage in front of him: "literary and scientific, practical and theoreti
cal, blue-stockings and women of fashion, old and young, all

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crowded-eagerly crowded-t he lecture-room."

The event was scheduled to start at eight o'clock, and at that
moment precisely, all eyes turned to watch the tall, handsome lec
turer stride onto the dais. Humphry Davy was not a king, but he
bore himself like one. To m a n y - n o t just to the young book
binder applauding adoringly from his seat in the center s e c t i o n 
he was one of the greatest natural philosophers o f his day.
When the applause quieted down, Davy proceeded to dazzle the
gallery with his legendary talents and fantastical demonstrations.
Chemicals glowed, electricity flowed, and throughout it all, Fara
day himself glowed, and the ink from his pen flowed; by the time
it was over, the eager young man had filled up ninety-six pages o f
notes and illustrations.
For the attendees, it was the end o f a memorable evening, made
all the more so by rumors that this was to be Davy's final series o f
lectures. For the twenty-year-old Faraday, however, it was to be
the beginning of a revolutionary scientific career, one that ulti
mately would lead to the dethronement o f the Royal Institution's
vaunted liege.
As the ecstatic young Faraday walked home, his lighthearted
mood gradually was overcome by the surrounding darkness. His
apprenticeship would expire in only eight months, he thought
glumly, at which point he was committed to work as ajourneyman
for the French bookbinder Henri de la Roche. The wages would
be enough to support him and his widowed mother, but the job
itself would not make him happy.
That evening, Faraday had come within arm's length o f his
dream, the closest he ever had gotten to it; now, more than any
thing, he wanted to grab hold o f it. But how could someone as
insignificant as he seize Davy's attention?
During the next several months, while the increasingly anxious
young man attended Davy's three remaining lectures, an idea came
to him. He would recopy his lecture notes and make them into a

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book so exquisite, Davy would be sure to notice i t - a n d him. His

book o f notes from Tatum's lectures had gotten him into the
Royal Institution, -Faraday reasoned; perhaps this one would get
him employed there.
N o sooner had he congratulated himself for having come up
with such a brilliant game plan, however, than a public announce
ment was made: Within these past few days, Humphry Davy had
been knighted by the queen and betrothed to a wealthy widow.
The couple was now honeymooning in Scotland until the end o f
the year.
Faraday was beside himself with anger and frustration: He could
not wait that long, because by the end o f the year, his fate as a
bookbinder would be sealed! In desperation, Faraday wrote to Sir
Joseph Banks, president o f the Royal Society; the young man im -
plored him to help but received not so much as a reply.
O n October 7, Faraday's apprenticeship came to an end, along
with any hopes for a better future. The following day, he reported
to his new job and immediately took a disliking to his boss. Mon
sieur de la Roche was quick-tempered and, worse, made it clear he
was not going to indulge Faraday's scientific pipe dreams, as Riebau
had done for so many years.
As fall turned to winter, Faraday's precious memory o f Davy's
spring lecture series began to shrivel and die like the leaves all
around him. "I am working at myoi d trade, the which I wish to
leave at the first convenient opportunity," he wrote despondently
to a friend, "Indeed, [unless] I stop in my present situation I must
resign philosophy entirely to those who are more fortunate in the
possession of time and means."
In December, having found out that Sir Humphry and his bride
had returned to London, a critically unhappy Faraday decided to
follow through with his original plan: "M y desire to escape from
trade . . . and to enter into the service of Science . . . induced me at
last to take the bold and simple step o f writing to Sir H. Davy," he

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later would recall, "at the same time, I sent the notes I had taken o f
his lectures."
In the days that followed, the young man awaited a reply, but
none came. Then, on December 24, an elegantly dressed footman
appeared at 18 Weymouth Street. He knocked on the door o f the
Faradays' dilapidated apartment and handed to Michael this note
from the Royal Institution's monarch himself:

I am far from displeased with the proof you have given me of

your confidence, which displays great zeal, power of memory,
and attention. I am obliged to go out of town, and shall not be
settled in town till the end of January. I will then see you at
anytime you wish. I t would gratify me to be of any service to
you; I wish it may be in my power.

Faraday felt as giddy as all those children throughout London

who were eagerly awaiting the imminent arrival o f Old Father
Christmas. He had waited a lifetime for this opportunity, and now
he needed to wait only a month longer; that month, however,
seemed to last an eternity.
When the big day finally did come, Faraday's meeting with
Davy passed so quickly he wondered i f t had been only a dream.
He remembered having felt faint while shaking Davy's hand, then
hopeful as the scientific nobleman had listened to his pleas for em
ployment, and ultimately devastated, when Davy had explained he
had no jobs to offer and that Faraday would be wise to keep his
present position as ajoumeyman bookbinder.
As he tottered down th,e steps o f the Royal Institution, the
young man was certain he would never pass through its doors
again. All that effort, all those big plans, all o f hat anticipation: It all
had com e to naught.
For months, there had been bad blood between Davy's assistant
and another employee at the institution. The two had managed to

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maintain their civility, but several weeks after Faraday's visit, their
simmering feud suddenly exploded into a flurry of blows.
O n the morning o f March 1, as Faraday prepared for work,
there was a knock at the door. It was the footman again, with the
message that Davy's assistant had been fired for fighting.
If he was still interested, Davy offered, Faraday could have the
job and a small, two-room apartment above the lab. Still interested?
Without waiting to reread the message, Faraday began packing,
and shortly afterward he rushed out the door to inform his boss.
To Faraday's surprise, Henri de la Roche had come to like him.
"I have no child," the hot-tempered Frenchman now confessed,
"and if you stay with me you shall have all I have when I am
gone." Faraday, however, was as fanatical about becoming a natu
ral philosopher as he was about being a good Sandemanian-noth
ing, and no one, could change his mind.
Within minutes, Faraday bounded into the Royal Institution,
hardly believing that this was now to be his home as well as his
place of employment. He felt like a frog-turned-prince and was
unfazed as Davy explained to him that being a lowly lab assistant
involved merely washing test tubes and sweeping the floor.
"He still advised me not to give up the prospects I had before
me, telling me that Science was a harsh mistress . . . poorly reward
ing those who devoted themselves to her service," Faraday would
recall later. "H e smiled at my notion of the superior moral feelings
o f philosophic men, and said he would leave me to the experience
me on the
o f a few years to set right matter."
O n the contrary, during the next few years, the young lab assist
ant reveled in the service of science. Among other things, he
learned to extract sugar from beetroot, to improve the chemical
properties of steel, and to use electrolysis to disassemble a variety o f
compounds.
he
It was as if had become an apprentice all over again, except
this time the object o f his handiwork was the great book of Nature:

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how it was stitched together, and how it might be understood by

science and improved by technology.
In the process, Faraday learned how to survive the physical dan
gers that came with working in a chemistry lab. "I have escaped
(not quite unhurt) from four different and strong explosions," he
reported to a friend.

O f these the most terrible was when I was holding between my

thumb and finger a small tube containing 7Yz grains of [nitrogen
. trichloride]. The explosion was so rapid as to blow my hand
open, tear off a part of one nail, and has made my fingers so sore
that I cannot yet use them easily.

During his first trip abroad-which began in October 1814-

Faraday also learned how to survive the insults that came with
being a working-class bookbinder who sought acceptance into the
high-class world of science. In some ways, the barbs were even
more difficult to endure than the chemical explosions.
The foreign scientists were not the problem: They all fell in love
with this unassuming young man who was so easily intoxicated by
anything and everything scientific. The culprit was Davy's wife
. . . and to some extent, Davy himse1£
Originally, Davy had invited Faraday to join him on the research
and lecture tour as his lab assistant. However, because the ongoing
Napoleonic wars had made travel in Europe very dangerous,
Davy's fretful valet had backed out of the trip at the very last min
ute.
Reluctandy, Faraday had agreed to double as Davy's manser
v a n t - b u t only as far as Paris, their first stop, whereupon the aristo
cratic chemist had promised he would find someone else for the
job. In fact, Davy never did fmd a valet who could satisfy his
snooty standards, so for the entire trip, he required Faraday to be
his flunky-in-waiting as well as his lab assistant.
That was the injury; Lady Davy was the insult. "She likes to

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show her authority," Faraday complained in a letter to a friend,

and is "extremely earnest in mortifying me." She saw how compe
tently Faraday assisted her husband in research, yet she insisted on
introducing the young man to everyone as their servant and on
treating him in a manner befitting that position.
The humiliating trip, however, was not a complete disaster for
Faraday. Owing to his mentor's world-class stature, he was able to
meet and work with some o f Europe's finest scientists-including
Alessandro Volta, who had become quite a celebrity since his in
vention o f the battery, and Andre-Marie Ampere, a middle-aged
Parisian prodigy who was wowing the world with his phenomenal
mathematical abilities.
These were scientists about whom Faraday had read during all
those years as an apprentice in Riebau's shop. These were the sci
entists whose work he had tried to duplicate in his makeshift lab,
using crude and inexpensive apparatus. Now, to his wonderment,
he was able to speak to them and to inspect firsthand the elegant
and expensive equipment they had been using to investigate elec
tricity, magnetism, and other natural phenomena.
"I have learned just enough to perceive my ignorance, and,
ashamed o f my defects in everything, I wish to seize the opportu
nity o f remedying them," Faraday wrote in a letter midway
through his trip, "the glorious opportunity o f improving in the
knowledge o f chemistry and the sciences continually determines
me to finish this voyage with Sir Humphry Davy."
By the time he returned to London, in the spring of1815, Fara
day had accumulated what resembled an upper-class education:
Mter completing public school and a few years at Oxford or Cam
bridge, young British aristocrats o f the day usually toured the Con
tinent, accompanied by their tutors. Therefore, although socially
Faraday still belonged to the lower classes, professionally he now
was positioned to earn himself a respectable place in the scientific
community.
Within days of their return, a grateful and somewhat sheepish

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Davy rewarded Faraday with a dual promotion to the positions o f

Superintendent o f the Apparatus as well as Assistant in the Labora
tory and Mineral Collection. The elder chemist also encouraged
Faraday to start experimenting on his own, which he did, begin
ning with a rock sample he had collected while in Italy.
In 1816, Faraday published his results-"Analysis of Native
Caustic Lime o f Tuscany"-in the Quarterly Journal of Science. It
was his first scientific publication and something o f a declaration of
independence: Officially now, he was free of being Davy's puny
protege.
In the years ahead, Faraday's emergence as a gifted scientist
shook the Royal Institution like a vial o f exploding nitrogen tri
chloride. Now that he had access to proper equipment, he revealed
himself to be a technical wizard-some even began to say Davy's
heir apparent.
Faraday assembled experiments the way he once had put to
gether books, with extraordinary patience and precision. He had
such a keen eye for detail, furthermore, that scientists tended to
accept his word for the existence o f this-or-that subtle effect, even
if they themselves had not yet seen it with their own apparatus.
Faraday was unlikely to return the compliment, however, be
cause he had not lost any o f that uncompromising skepticism he
had evidenced as a youngster. Time and again, he would refuse to
agree on the existence o f some phenomenon until he had seen it
for himself, explaining: "The philosopher should be a man willing
to listen to every suggestion, but determined to judge for himself
. . . He should not be a respector o f persons, but o f things. Truth
should be his primary object."
At the same time, his religion and social standing in life had
made Faraday a humble man. When expressing his vaunted skepti
cism to a colleague, therefore, he was careful not to become too
smug about his own abilities or ideas: "By adherence to a favourite
theory, many errors have at times been introduced into general

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science which have required much labour for their removal . . . To

guard against these requires a large proportion of mental humility,
submission, and independence."
By practicing what he preached, the intellectually irreverent and
religiously humble young philosopher earned such a respected po
sition at the Royal Institution, he no longer worried about ever
having to go back to bookbinding. Now, he thought cheerfully,
rolling up his sleeves, he could concentrate on that other child
hood dream of h i s- t h e one about becoming the first to demystify
the puzzling phenomenon o f electricity; unfortunately for Faraday,
however, others around the world had grown up having the same
dream and now were coming very close to realizing it.
The closest person appeared to be a Danish physicist named
Hans (ftrsted. In 1820, he discovered that an electric current caused
the needle o f a magnetic compass to move slightly, as i f he electric
current itself were behaving like a magnet.
A few months later, in France, the startling news was confirmed
in a slightly different way by Ampere and a colleague, Dominique
Franvois Jean Arago. They discovered that an electric current in
the shape o f a corkscrew also behaved like a magnet, attracting iron
fillings; for that reason, they called their discovery an electromagnet.
Over the past two centuries, natural philosophers had discov
ered various similarities between electricity and magnetism . The
Frenchman Charles-Augustin Coulomb had found that both
forces looked alike; they weakened with distance in exactly the same
way. And the German Otto von Guericke had found that both
forces were twofaced; they were capable o f repelling some objects
and attracting others.
Now, Faraday reflected incredulously, (ftrgted, Ampere, and
Arago had revealed something more, something deeper about the
two forces. Their stunning discovery now raised the possibility that
electricity and magnetism were somehow interchangeable.
If electricity could behave like a magnet, however, it remained

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to be seen i f the reverse was also true: Could magnetism behave

like electricity? Put another way: Was a magnet able to produce
electricity? Suddenly, finding an answer to that question became
the Holy Grail o f nineteenth-century science.
Just as Faraday was about to join the search for the sacred truth
about electricity and magnetism, however, he was sidetracked by a
young woman named Sarah Barnard. Faraday had met the twenty
three-year-old daughter of a Sandemanian elder in church, and
though they liked each other very much, he had hurt her feelings
by writing a poem that faulted love for distracting men from their
work.
In order to win back her affections, ironically enough, Faraday
now was obliged to drop everything he was doing. It proved to be
difficult, but as a result of applying to the crisis the very same per
sistence he had demonstrated in his scientific research, eventually
he succeeded: OnJune 12, 1821, the son o f a blacksmith was wed
to the daughter of a silversmith.
In lieu o f a honeymoon-love haVing distracted him far too
much already-Faraday declared his wishes to spend the time writ
ing an article about the history o f electricity and magnetism. His
forbearing wife Sarah, fully aware o f what she had gotten. herself
into in the first place, gave her consent.
For the next several months, the newly wedded natural philoso
pher persevered with inimitable intensity. He read everything he
could obtain from both the Royal Institution's own library and his
mends abroad. In vintage style, furthermore, Faraday redid every
single experiment described in the literature, so that he might ver
ify the various results for himsel£
By the end o f August, after having pored over thousands o f facts
and replicated hundreds of experiments, Faraday could not put out
of his mind one tiny quirk in Q)rsted's experiment. Others had
noticed it, but this was something so subtle and seemingly inconse
quential that only Faraday's uncanny mind for minutiae could have
become so engrossed by it.

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In the years ahead, in fact, Faraday would often refer back to this
moment as a lesson in the importance of being alert to details:
" [Science] teaches us to be neglectful o f nothing, not to despise the
small beginnings . . . for the small often contains the great in princi
ple, as the great does the small."
The magnetism produced by an electric current, Faraday had
noticed, always deflected a compass needle the same way: Imagining
the compass as lying on a table and the electric current as flowing
from floor to ceiling, the needle always moved slightly counterclock
w i s ~ n e v e r  clockwise. Faraday wasn't sure what this signified, but
after submitting his article on the history of electricity and magnet
ism to the Annals ojPhilosophy, he set about to figure it out.
As he concentrated, a mental picture began to take shape that
explained Q>rsted's original experiment. Just as a warm updraft o f
air sometimes evolved into a tornado, Faraday speculated, a rising
current o f electricity might very well produce swirling winds o f
magnetism, causing any nearby compass needle to rotate a bit.
This was more than a guess and less than a theory, Faraday real
ized, but there was a way of putting it to the test: If an electric
current did indeed produce a magnetic tornado, then its churning
winds should be able to whirl any magnetic object round and
round continuously, not just slightly, as with Q>rsted's compass nee
dle. The question was how to make that happen.
After fiddling with equipment day and night for weeks, the an
swer came to Faraday in early September. First, he took a bar mag
net and weighed down one of its ends. That way, when placed in
a pool of mercury, the bar magnet floated upright, like a tiny buoy.
N ext, he planted a vertical wire at the center o f he pool and sent
an electric current flowing through it, from bottom to top. As a
result, the most remarkable thing happened: The buoy-magnet
began wheeling around the wire, as if it were being swept around
by an invisible current-an invisible counterclockwise current.
With this single experiment, Faraday had landed a formidable
one-two punch. He had confirmed his magnetic tornado theory

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and, in the process, had created the world's frrst electric motor.
In the years ahead, engineers would refIne Faraday's crude con
traption, creating electric motors that eventually would outmuscle
the steam-powered engines that currently were driving the Indus
trial Revolution. But even a century hence, when electric motors
would come in all shapes and sizes, every single one of them would
be impelled to spin by the tomadolike magnetic force-fIeld fIrst
recognized by England's working-class wunderkind.
In October 1821, the Quarterly Journal oj Science published Fara
day's discovery in an article with the understated title " O n Some
New Electromagnetic Motions." The report was translated into
dozens o f different languages, and soon, scientists worldwide fever
ishly were fabricating their very own facsimiles o f Faraday's fabu
lous find.
Faraday's fame soared, and so did the height o f Voltaic piles: In
order to obtain the electricity necessary to run electric motors with
any signifIcant power, scientists were forced to build the unwieldy
batteries so big and tall they filled entire rooms. Until somebody
could invent a more efficient source of electricity, it became appar
ent, steam-powered engines would continue to run circles around
Faraday's new machines.
Although the thirty-year-old Faraday was still earning only a lab
assistant's salary, he now had the unmitigated respect and admira
tion of his Royal Institution colleagues-that is, except for one:
Humphry Davy. In recent years, the middle-aged chemist had
watched young Faraday's skyrocketing scientifIc career with a cu
rious mixture of pride and jealousy; now he could contain himself
no longer.
The showdown between the once and future kings o f chemistry
began days after the publication o f Faraday's Journal article. The
young man began hearirig rumors accusing him of having plagia
rized the idea for the electric motor from William Hyde Wolla
ston, a manager at the Royal Institution.

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Wishing to extirpate the accusation, a flustered Faraday wrote to

Wollaston straightway:

I am bold enough, Sir, to beg the favour of a few minutes' con

versation with you on this subject, simply for these reasons
that I can clear myself-that l o w e obligations, to you-that I
respect you-that I am anxious to escape from unfounded im
pressions against me--and i f I have done any wrong that I may
apologise for it.

Two days later, the two men met face to face. Yes, Wollaston
confirmed, he had been experimenting with equipment similar to
Faraday's and, like the young philosopher, had come up with the
idea about the swirling nature of an electric current's magnetic
force-field. Nevertheless, Wollaston assured Faraday, he had not
started the slanderous rumors, nor did he countenance them.
Within the next few weeks, Wollaston's avowed support o f Far
aday silenced the whispers. But it was the silence o f Sir Humphry
that most troubled the young man. N ow that the crisis was over,
Faraday was left wondering why his former benefactor had never
come to his defense.
Two years later, Faraday got his answer. Havingjust discovered
how to liquefy chlorine, Faraday allowed Davy to read his article
before submitting it for publication. This was in keeping with
proper protocol, since Davy was both Faraday's boss at the Royal
Institution and now president o f the ultra-prestigious Royal Soci
ety.
Having himself worked for the better part o f two decades to
liquefy chlorine, theforty-five-year-old Davy was especially eager
for the world to acknowledge his role as Faraday's mentor in this
climactic achievement. But he went too far. By the time he was

done rewording the paper, Davy made it appear as ifit was he who
had given his young protege the idea that had led to the discovery.

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It put Faraday in an awkward position, for whether he com

plained or not, he was in jeopardy o f suffering another Wollaston
like scandal. This time, therefore, the young man chose to relent
with humility. "Though perhaps I regretted losing my subject,"
Faraday later would explain, "I was too much indebted to him for
much previous kindness to think of saying that was mine which he
said was his."
Two months later, Faraday was nominated for membership in
the Royal Society, the Mt. Olympus of English science. I t was a
measure of the esteem Faraday's colleagues now had for him; it was
also to be the fmal and dramatic step in Faraday's rapid ascension to
a throne that had been held by Davy for more than two decades.
Not only did Davy not support Faraday's nomination, he cam
paigned actively against it. O n his lunch hour, the knight with less
than shining armor would circulate among his colleagues at the
Royal Society, reminding them o f the Wollaston affair and en
couraging them not to vote for the young usurper.
At one point, Davy even demanded o f Faraday that he voluntar
ily remove his name from nomination. "I replied that I had not put
it up," Faraday recalled later, therefore "I could not take it down."
In that case, Davy warned, he himself, as president o f the Royal
Society, would annul the proposal. According to Faraday: "I re
plied that I was sure Sir H. Davy would do what he thought was
for the good of the Royal Society."
O n July 1, in an attempt to save the nomination-and his honor
and reputation-Faraday published a detailed retelling of the
events surrounding his discovery o f the electric motor. Once again
Wollaston himself corroborated Faraday's remonstration, and once
again Sir Humphry remained silent.
This time, however, Faraday was delighted at Davy's muteness,
for it meant that he would not stay the election process, as he had

threatened to do. Consequently, on July 8, 1824, members o f the

Royal Society voted in secret, and the outcome was nearly unani-

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mous: There were many white balls cast in favor o f Faraday's in
duction that day . . . and only one black ball cast against him.
Without a conscious desire to do so, the reluctant young warrior
had vanquished the English king o f science. Faraday still did vener
ate Davy's talents as a chemist-and would, for the rest of his l i f e 
but he disapproved privately of Davy's treacheries as a colleague.
"The greatest o f all my great advantages," Faraday later would
confide satirically, "is that I had a model to teach me what to
avoid."
The following year, in 1825, the newest young Fellow o f the
Royal Society was promoted to director o f the Royal Institution.
I t was, for Faraday, the crowning achievement o f his career.
Twelve years earlier, he had come to this stately castle of science as
a humble servant; now he had become its newest potentate.
In the lab, the unaffected Faraday now worked harder than ever
to fmd the answer to a question that had intrigued him ever since
his discovery of the electric motor. If electricity was able to pro
duce magnetism, then why shouldn't the reverse be t r u e - w h y
shouldn't magnetism be able to produce electricity?
Many been the but
scientists had wondering very same thing
had failed to find an answer. N ot even Q>rsted had been successful,
even though he had been working day and night to find the logical
complement to his original discovery.
O n August 29, 1831, Faraday struck paydirt. He began by wrap
ping a long piece o f wire around one segment of an iron doughnut,

then did the same around another segment, directly across from the
first. If the wires were bandages, it would have appeared as if the
doughnut's circular arm had been wounded in two opposing
places.
Characteristically, Faraday's game plan was straightforward: He
would send an electric current coursing through the first wire ban

dage, producing a magnetic wind that would swirl through the

entire iron doughnut. If that magnetic storm were to produce an

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electric current through the other wire bandage, then Faraday will
have discovered what everyone had been seeking; magnetism will
have created electricity.
If it happened, Faraday anticipated, then probably the electric
current thus produced would be very small; otherwise, almost cer
tainly, others would have seen it long ago. Consequendy, Faraday
attached to the second wire bandage a meter that would detect
even the tiniest dribble o f electric current; with that, he now was
ready for anything-or nothing-to happen.
As Faraday electrified the first wire bandage by hooking it up to
a Voltaic pile, he glanced hopefully at the electric-current meter.
Its needle stirred! "It oscillated," Faraday scribbled hysterically into
his lab book, "and setded at last in original position."
For a while, Faraday stared at the needle in stupefaction. Would
it move again? After a few minutes o f waiting in vain, he gave up.
As he disconnected the battery, however, Faraday was astonished
to see that there was "again a disturbance of the needle."
For the rest of that night, Faraday kept connecting, then discon
necting the iron doughnut; each time he did that, the needle o f his
electric-current meter danced spasmotically. Finally, an idea
dawned on him, and at that moment he was like the young man
who had jumped for joy once before, on a Christmas Eve almost
twenty years ago.
The electric current through the first wire bandage was produc
ing a magnetic tornado; that whirlwind, in tum, was causing a

second electric current to flow through the other wire bandage-

but it was doing so only when the tornado's intensity either in
creased or decreased. That explained the jumpy needle: Whenever
Faraday connected/disconnected the battery, the magnetic tor
nado suddenly came on/went off, producing the effect. In be
tween those moments, so long as the magnetic winds swirled

steadily through the iron doughnut, nothing happened.

It was like a person who had lived all his life near a lighthouse;

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157

he would sit up and take notice if, one day, the foghorn were to
stop making its usual sound. Or, i f after having been off for a long
period of time, it were to start up again. However, so long as the
foghorn kept operating without any change, that person did not
react.
For the next several months, Faraday revised and refmed his
apparatus and, in each case, affirmed his original discovery. In
1831, fmally, the Royal Institution's forty-year-old prodigy was
able to summarize his historic discovery in a single statement:

Whenever a magnetic force increases or decreases, it pro-

duces electricity;
the faster it increases or decreases, the more electricity' it
produces.

Though his colleagues could find nothing wrong with his mo
mentous finding, they were rather amused at Faraday's decision to
express it in English. Ever since the seventeenth century, when
Newton had invented the calculus, mathematics had become the
chosen language o f science. (See "Apples and Oranges" and "Be
tween a Rock and a Hard Life.")
Even when written flawlessly, any ordinary language--English,
Latin, Greek-could be misunderstood as much as 20 percent o f
the time. By contrast, mathematics appeared to be the only form o f
communication with which natural philosophers could hope to
describe the world with perfect clarity.
In 1831, therefore, Faraday was an anachronism, one of the few
notable exceptions to this popular way o f thinking. Not only had
he not trained himself mathematically-indeed, he was quite illit
erate in that respect-he believed his colleagues were being misled
by their foolish trust in the figments of the mathematical imagina
tion; only the facts from well-run experiments, clearly stated in
plain English, were what mattered.

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For the rest of his life, Faraday was adamant in his wishes to express
his discovery in a way that ordinary people could understand, re
maining faithful to the biblical verse that sixteen years earlier had
inspired him to clarify the mystery o f electricity and magnetism in
the first place: "Since the creation of the world, God's invisible
qualities-his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly
seen, being understood from what has been made."
Three long decades would pass before the Sandemanian's
quaintness would be superseded by modem conventions. In 1865,
a young Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, would publish
his landmark A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, in
which he would translate Faraday's simply stated discovery into a
mathematical equation.
Maxwell would use B to stand for magnetism and E to stand for
electricity. Also, he would use -a/at to stand for the phrase "the
rate of increase or decrease o f . . ." and V X to stand for "the
amount o f . . . In that case, Faraday's discovery boiled down to
this equation:

x E -aB/at
v =
That is, the amount o f electricity produced by magnetism was
equal to the rate of increase or decrease o f the seminal force. A lot
o f electricity was produced by a rapidly changing magnetic force,
whereas barely a trickle was produced by a slowly changing mag
netic force. None at all was produced by a magnetic force that
remained constant over time.
Tholl;gh he had expressed himself in what science considered an
inelegant language, Faraday had seen the world through the eyes o f
a p o e t - t h a t is, where there had been complexity, he had seen
simplicity. Together with Qrsted, he had shown that electricity

could beget magnetism, and magnetism could beget electricity, a

genetic relationship so incestuous and circular there was none
other like it in Nature.

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Although electricity and magnetism each could assert itself indi

vidually, they were, in fact, inextricably conjoined; when one was
present, so was the other. For this reason, science eventually chris
tened these queerly-related forces with a single, hybridized moni
ker: electromagnetism.
With this new way of seeing electricity and magnetism, Faraday
and his successors fmally had realized part of science's ancient

dream of unifying the forces o f Nature. It was a minor victory,

however, in comparison to their overall failure to consolidate all
three forces; science's trinity was not as sublime as Christendom's
after all.
Neither, as it turned out, was it as sacred. During the twentieth
century, scientists were to discover entirely new forces, beyond the
original three, complicating even further their vision of how the
natural world was created and how its future was being shaped. In
retrospect, in fact, the cosmos would never look as simple again as
it had in the days when Faraday first had helped reveal to the world
the intimate connection that existed between electricity and mag
netism.
Because of Faraday's equation, furthermore, people's lives would
never be as simple again. The son of a common laborer had dis
cerned and written down a great secret of the natural world, one
that would spell the end o f the Industrial Revolution and the be
ginning of the Electrical Age.

t P I L O ~ n t 

Nearly a hundred years after having won their independence from

England, the Americans had gone to war with each other over the
issue o f slavery. It became one o f the most bitter and violent class
struggles in history, but now it was over: O n April 9, 1865, at

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160

Appomattox, Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S.

Grant, and slavery in the United States was about to end.
Back during the War of1812, news of its conclusion had trav
eled so slowly that American and British soldiers had kept fighting
each other for a full two weeks after a peace treaty had been signed.
Now things were very different: Because o f the telegraph, news of
Lee's surrender spread throughout the world in an instant.
The telegraph had been operational only since 1844, but already
it was bringing peoples o f the world closer together by enabling
them to communicate at the speed of light. First patented by an
American painter named Samuel Finley Morse, the telegraph was a
direct result o f Q)rsted's, Ampere's, and Arago's discovery of the
electromagnet.
Whenever a sender pressed a telegraph key, it switched on an
electric current that traveled through a wire to the receiver's end,
where it powered a small electromagnet. Each time that happened,
the electromagnet sucked a thin iron tongue to itself, producing a
clicking sound; whenever the sender let go o f the key, the electric
current stopped, the electromagnet went dead, and the iron tongue
sprung back to its normal, straight position.
Morse had developed a code, such that the intermittent clicks
produced by his novel device could spell out any letter o f the al
phabet. Consequendy, with practice, a very good telegraph opera
tor was now able to send or receive about 150 letters per minute.
The telegraphs themselves had been developed and touted by a
number o f people, not only Morse, but they had not attracted
much attention until the outbreak o f the American Civil War.
During that conflict, the telegraph had changed military strategy
forever, by facilitating communications between field officers and
their commanders back at headquarters.
Now that the war was over, and the telegraph had won so much
respect, twenty countries decided to sign a pact agreeing to stan
dardize telegraphic equipment and communications. It was the

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161

forerunner of he ITU (International Telegraph Union) and ofpri

vate companies such as AT&T (American Telephone and Tele
graph) and IT&T (International Telephone and Telegraph).
~ t e d ,  Ampere, and Arago had died before seeing what their

discovery had wrought, but their colleague Michael Faraday was

still alive, though ailing. He had heard about the American Con
federacy's surrender and the historic telegraph pact from his nieces,
who were attempting to nurse him and his wife, Sarah, back to
health.
Faraday himself had just surrendered his thirty-six-year-Iong di
rectorship at the Royal Institution. His reign had been unprece
dented: Never before had someone from the lowest echelon of
English society risen to head the Royal Institution and to earn a
living at what others before him had done largely for the intellec
tual pleasure of it all; henceforth, science would cease being a
~ o b b y  o f the independendy wealthy and become a profession of
the independendy minded.
At seventy-three, the humble servant o f science now was living
in a small house loaned to him by Queen Victoria. Her Majesty felt
warmly and behaved generously toward the aging Faraday, but he
had not exploited or reveled in the relationship, as might someone
more extravagant than he. Besides, earlier in life, he had discovered
that such fme indulgences could lead to trouble.
Back in 1844, for example, Faraday had been suspended as an
elder of the Sandemanian church for missing a Sunday worship
service-the only time that had ever happened to him during his
entire life. He had tried explaining to them that he had been dining
with the queen, but the austere-minded church fathers had not
considered that an adequate excuse.
Though his .strict religious beliefs had not allowed him to
become socially elitist, they had allowed him to accept the legion
of scientific honors conferred on him by admirers everywhere. All
together, over the years, Faraday had received no fewer than a

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hundred titles and commendations from nearly every major coun

try on the planet.
It wasn't that he valued the approbation: Fulfilling his lifelong
wish to become a scientist had been reward enough. Faraday had
accepted all those awards out of politeness: "I look upon them as
honorary memberships," he once explained, "and not to be re
fused without something like an insult to the other parties con
cerned."
Though Faraday had been honored for all kinds of noteworthy
accomplishments, his greatest achievement had been the discovery
back in 1831 that a changing magnetic force produced electricity.
That simple insight had changed the world, because it had given
life to dynamos, Prometheus-like devices that were able to pro
duce electricity far more efficiently and prodigiously than Volta's
piles.
Dynamos created a constantly changing magnetic force simply
by spinning a magnet. So long as the dynamos kept rotating, Fara
day's equation warranted, they would produce a steady stream o f
electricity. '
Figuring out how best to spin a magnet had been the key· in
designing the dynamo. At first, back in the 1830s, engineers had
used an electric motor to spin the dynamo's magnet; the motor itself
was kept spinning by siphoning off some of the electricity pro
duced by the dynamo. In other words, the dynamo fed itself, like a
person who always reserved some of his body's energy to grow his
own food.
Later on, however, engineers had attached paddles to the dy
namo's magnet. At first, the magnetic paddle-wheels had been
spun by the force of falling water, creating what came to be called
hydroelectric power plants.
Others afterward had decided to boil the water, with the thought
of using the resulting steam to tum the magnetic paddle-wheels; it
was such a good idea, in fact, even dynamos well into the twentieth

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century would be powered with steam, though the source o f heat

would come from a variety o f fuels, including nuclear radiation,
wood, coal, oil-even catdemanure!
If the steam was produced at a very high pressure, furthermore,
engineers had discovered it made the dynamo spin very rapidly. In
keeping with Faraday's equation, faster-spinning magnets pro
duced a faster-changing magnetic force and a larger electric cur
rent.
By 1865, dynamos had become powerful enough to run the
giant arc lamps atop most lighthouses. In the decades ahead, dyna
mos would increase in size and power, in order to generate enough
electricity to operate Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Thomas
Alva Edison's light bulbs, Guglielmo Marchese Marconi's r a d i o 
and a growing army o f factory machinery.
Dynamos electrified the Industrial Revolution, by replacing
clunky and inefficient steam-powered engines with relatively quiet
and smooth-running electric motors. With the increasing availa
bility of electricity, moreover, people o f all classes eventually were
to benefit from labor-saving electric appliances such as the vacuum

cleaner, iron, and washing machine.

Wherever they were being built, dynamos were energizing the
economies o f towns across the world. They were helping to create
jobs, products, and consumers to such a large degree, in fact, their
combined output soon became a measure o f a town's prosperity. In
the future, the gross national product of a country would rise and

fall in step with its total production o f electricity, an astonishing

correlation that could not be seen with any other form of energy.
In 1867, just as electricity was in the process o f boosting the
standard of iving for millions o f people everywhere, Michael Fara
day himself, the human dynamo who had made it all possible, fi
nally was beginning to wind down. "I remain in the house useless

as to further exertion," he had written a few years earlier, "excused

from all duty, very content and happy in my mind, clothed with

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kindness by all, and honoured by my Queen."

He had labored for forty-plus years, filling up seven large volumes
of detailed laboratory notes; he had turned down the presidency o f
the Royal Society not once but twice; and he had declined the
queen's offer o f knighthood. "I must remain plain Michael Faraday
to the end," he had explained politely.
To friends who stopped by to reminisce and to inquire about his
activities, a frail Faraday remarked that he was now ''just waiting."
He had done everything he had ever dreamed of doing, and then
some; now it was time to rest. O n August 25, 1867, Michael Fara
day, ever vigilant, died sitting up in his favorite chair.
Queen Victoria had offered Faraday his final h o n o r - t o be bur
ied with Isaac Newton and other British luminaries in Westminis
ter Abbey. But predictably, the famous scientist had demurred,
opting instead to be given "a plain, simple funeral, attended by
none but my own relatives, followed by a gravestone o f the most
ordinary kind, in the simplest earthly place."
Michael Faraday had died as he had lived, wishing to offend
neither his God nor his colleagues. "Now that forty years have
elapsed," an aging Faraday had written, looking back at everything
he had accomplished, "I still hope . . . that I have not either now or
forty years ago been too bold."
In three-quarters of a century, Faraday had gone from being a
poor, hard-working errand boy to being a poor, hard-working
scientist. No one before had changed science and society in such
profound and permanent ways, or has since. For that reason, Mi
chael Faraday-the son o f paupers and the confidant of princes
always would be r e m e m b e r e ~  for being in a class by himsel£

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Ll S universe >0
An UnprolilaLle ~ x p e r i e n ~ e 
Rudolf Clausius and the Second Law of
Thermodynamics

It's no good crying over spilt milk,

because all the forces of the universe
were bent on spilling it.
- - S O ~ E T A ! 4 U G H A M 

fe had been fairly good to him, the fifty-three-year-old R u 

dolf Clausius reflected; nevertheless, its normal wear and tear
had wearied him physically and emotionally. Even worse, he

L
now faced a crisis exceedingly more calamitous than the nagging
pain in his knee and all the other minor injuries he had sustained in
life: His wife, Adelheid, was in danger of not surviving the birth o f
their sixth child.
Smiling bravely at the five children seated anxiously on the
couch, he-fantasized about turning the clock backward; then again,
he interrupted, how lucky he was to be who he was-Prussia's
most celebrated physicist. Before him, scientists had begun to un
derstand the complicated behavior o f earth, air, and water; but it
was Clausius, in 1850, who had first discovered the true nature o f
fire, arguably the most mysterious o f Aristode's four terrestrial ele

ments.

165
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He had always been a humble man who ascribed little value to

the approbation his achievements had earned him worldwide. But
at this particular moment, he very much cherished his privileged
position, because it was making it possible for his "Adie" to have
the best medical care that money and prestige could procure.
As he stared up toward her room, waiting for the doctor to
fInish the delivery, his wife's screams shattered his soul the wayan
enemy bullet had once shattered his knee. Unable to remain stand
ing, he fell into the nearest chair and reached for the wailing three
year-old, youngest of the Clausius children.
When this child had been conceived, back in 1872, life had been
so much more pleasant and exciting. In that year, Clausius had
brought the family back to his beloved Prussia after having been
abroad for a long while. The terrible war with the French having
just ended, what better way to commemorate their homecoming
and the creation o f a German empire, Adie and he had giggled,
than with a small creation o f their own.
That was a year to be cherished for sure, he mused, hugging the
toddler closer to him. But if only he had the power to do so, he
would reverse the clock even further, to a time bifore the war, bifore
the injury he had suffered while volunteering in the military ambu
lance corps.
War! How similar to the politics o f war were the vicissitudes o f
life, the great Prussian scientist mused, trying desperately to occupy
his mind while waiting for news about his wife. The essence o f
both were the epic and eternal struggles between right and wrong,
life and death, victory and defeat.
Also, Clausius thought wearily, in the fInal analysis, both life and
war seemed a bit pointless. But were they really? he wondered. I f
some cosmic bookkeeper were able to tally up the outcomes of all
the struggles-big and small-that had ever taken place through
out the universe for all time, what answer. would he come to?
Presuming the struggles could be quantifIed somehow-like

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Olympic competitions-would the bookkeeper find that, in the

end, Right had prevailed over Wrong? Life over Death? Victory
over Defeat? O r would he discover that it all had added up to a
gigantic, meaningless draw?
Earlier this century, Clausius thought, a great victory had been
granted to Napoleon I, to the French people. Back then, theirs was
the empire, they were the rulers of Europe. But look what recently
had happened! First Napoleon I and now more recently Napoleon
III and his people had been defeated-no, humiliated-by the for
midable Prussian army. So far as contemporary French and Prus
sians were concerned, therefore, the net result o f all those battles,
all that killing, had been an absolute wash.
Lost in reflection, Clausius suddenly realized that his wife had
not screamed for some minutes now. She was a fighter, like the
French Communards who had defended Paris to the bitter end
against the Prussians, even after the rest of France had surrendered.
He hated the French, but he admired such courage.
He hoped and prayed, however, that his wife would be more
successful in staving off death than had been the Communard mar
tyrs. He wished this for her sake, of course, but also his own and
the children's; even the oldest child, the fourteen-year-old, was
still too young to be without his mother.
As the minutes passed, the seemingly interminable waiting
began to tell on the children's behavior. They had become increas
ingly restless and tearful, wanting to know how their mother was
doing. In an effort to assuage their fears, Clausius headed upstairs,
wondering to himself why things had grown so quiet.
He had barely reached the stairs, however, when suddenly the
silence was broken by the welcome cry o f a newborn infant. It
took Clausius a moment to react, but as soon as he recognized that
beautiful sound, he bounded up the stairs with a victorious sense o f
happiness and relief
His wife had done it one more time, he marveled, but he already

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168

had promised God it would be the last time, if only He would spare
Adie's life. They both had wanted to have this child-she espe
cially-but he would no longer jeopardize her life for the sake of
having a large family.
As the jubilant man reached the landing, the door to his wife's
room opened. The doctor stepped out, but oddly, he was not smil
ing. He beckoned Clausius and confided in a whispered and ex
hausted voice that his wife had not survived the ordeal. The baby
had been born feet first, the doctor explained, creating a struggle
during which Adelheid's overtaxed body had simply given out.
Clausius grC;lbbed for the balustrade to steady himsel£ At first, he
was unable to grasp the full meaning o f what he just had been told.
Shortly, when he did comprehend, he began to break down, but
then just as quickly straightened up again, realizing that the chil
dren below were looking his way.
Composing himself, Clausius followed the doctor into his wife's
room. It was dark inside, the shades having been pulled down, and
it smelled of sweat and blood. The room was quiet, except for the
crying o f the newest member o f the Clausius family, a beautiful
baby girl.
Timidly, reverently, Rudolf Clausius walked to the bed upon
which his Adie lay, her sheets stained crimson. Her eyes were still
open, as if she might still be alive, and her skin was still warm. But
the stillness o f her body quashed his last glimmer o f hope. The
doctor had not been mistaken; his beautiful and brave wife o f six
teen years had lost her war with death.
How ironic, how cruel and painful, was the timeless struggle
between life and death, Clausius lamented bitterly, holding his
wife's cooling hand. He had devoted his career to the scientific
understanding o f heat. But as he felt the heat o f life pass from his
wife's hand, all he could feel was an overwhelming sense of anger

over the apparent craziness of human existence.

From the moment we were conceived, Clausius thought, shak-

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169

ing his head ruefully, we did little else but struggle with each other
and with death. W e pitied a soldier who was killed in war for
having died violently. But, in truth, we all spent our lives in a
violent, ultimately futile, struggle for survival.
Anyone who had ever lived had recognized that terrible truth,
but Clausius now understood it better than anyone who had ever
lived, and not just because o f his wife's death. Twenty-five years
earlier, Clausius's revolutionary theory of heat had enabled him to
describe Life and Death not emotionally but quantitatively, in un
precedented terms.
Consequently, he had been able to compute the answer to that
extraordinary bookkeeping question about Life and Death. At any
given moment, his calculations had revealed, more things were
being killed in the universe than were being born; Death always
outscored Life, which explained why each and every life always
came to an end. Always.
The universe as a whole was dying, Clausius had found, its life
succumbing inexorably--struggle by struggle--to the forces o f
death. Indeed, even now, at this moment of his most profound
grief, the grim imbalance had been maintained: He had lost a wife
and gained a daughter, but in his heart and mind, Clausius under
stood how and why the great equation of ife had taken more than
. it had given.

V ~ N I 

In the whole o f he universe, there are only two kinds of processes.

Revocable processes are those whose consequences can be undone,
like purchases that can be returned for a full refund or a motion

picture that can be stopped and run in reverse. Irrevocable processes

are those whose consequences are impossible to reverse, like terri-

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170

ble insults whose harm cannot be repaired or the inescapable rav

ages of time on our bodies.
By being perfectly reversible, revocable processes are able to go
on forever, first forward, then backward, then forward again, then
backward again, and so forth, ad infinitum. Indeed, in theory, per
petual-motion machines are powered by revocable mechanisms,
analogous.to the repetitive up-and-down, up-and-down pedaling
of a tireless bicyclist.
By contrast, irrevocable processes are mortal. As they proceed,
~ h e y  deteriorate in some indelible way-l i ke an egg that has been
scrambled or a tomato that has rotted. Loosely speaking, such
things "age" and always end up dying or being destroyed.
"Life would be infinitely happier," Mark Twain once lamented,
"if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually ap
proach eighteen." Though that might be true, living was inescap
ably an irreversible process: From the moment a life was conceived,
its time on earth always flowed from the past, through the present,
and into the future; life never flowed the other way around.
At the same time, the seventeenth-century philosopher Isaac
Newton noted with some surprise, the overall character of the uni
verse appeared to be reversible: Objects rolled uphill and downhill;
pendula swung to and fro; things exploded and imploded; in short,
for every natural process that behaved one way, there appeared to
be a natural process that behaved in exactly the opposite way.
Could it be, therefore, that the universe was a cosmic-size per
petuum mobile, destined to exist forever?
For most of the eighteenth century, natural philosophers tended
to answer in the affirmative, a scientific conclusion wholly in line
with common sense and Judeo-Christian convictions. It was diffi
cult for them to imagine the universe's ever coming to an end;
worse, it was blasphemous, considering that the Creator Himself
was part of it all, eternal and unchanging.
During the late 1700s, however, philosophers were aghast to

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An UnprolifaLle Ixperienee
171

discover that the cosmos was not wholly reversible after all: There
were several natural processes for which there appeared to be no
opposing counterparts, and at least two o f them had something to
do with heat.
First, heat seemed always to flow from hot to cold, never from
cold to hot. A pot o f cold water placed atop a hot campfire, for
example, always heated up. It never happened that the water got
colder and the fIre hotter; that is, a pot o f water put on a fIre never
froze up.
Second, friction always changed motion into heat, never the
other way around. Simply by stepping on the brakes o f a moving
vehicle, for example, one could cause the vehicle to stop and the
brakes to heat up. But there was no natural mechanism-no such
thing as "unfriction"-by which heat spontaneously changed back
into forward motion. If there was, the world would be a strange
place indeed; for instance, rocks heated by the sun suddenly would
start moving on their own, as i f possessed by some invisible, pur
poseful spirit.
The existence o f these naturally irreversible processes implied
that, like life itself, the universe was aging, changing from one day
to the next in a manner that could never be undone. But in what
ways exactly did the two irreversible heat processes "age" the uni
verse? And was this aging process ultimately fatal, or would the
universe be able to survive it somehow?
These were scientifIc questions, o f course, but to the extent they
with
involved issues o f mortality, they soon became intertwined
our deepest philosophical quandaries about human existence.
Eventually, in fact, the subject of heat and its effect on the universe
extended to the very heart o f our religious beliefs.
One who didn't fmd this growing confluence between the in
tellectual and spiritual worlds very heart-warming was a Protestant

cleric named Ernst Carl Gottlieb Clausius. A devoutly religious

man, he believed that God alone could understand the mysteries o f

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our creation and mortality and that Man's own stubborn efforts to
do so were arrogant and foredoomed.
Clausius was known as a strict minister by the people ofK6slin,
a small town in northern Prussia (now Koszalin, situated in the
northwest corner of Poland). He was an unyielding traditionalist
who kept God's commandments, especially the one that exhorted
believers to "be fruitful and multiply."
As the year 1821 drew to a close, Clausius already had thirteen
children, and this wife was pregnant with another. The family's
excitement over the imminent birth waxed throughout the Christ
mas holidays and into the new year; finally, the wondrous event
happened. O n January 2, 1822, Clausius and his wife became the
parents of a new boy, whom they named Rudolf ulius Emmanuel.
In that very same year, in Paris, a young French engineer was
giving birth to a new era. After years of dogged effort, Sadi Camot
was putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus, Reflections
on the Motive Force of Heat, which one day would inspire the new
born Clausius to make discoveries about heat that would change
the world forever.
The son o f Lazare Carnot, Napoleon I's brilliant minister o f war,
young Sadi had grown up during the early 1800s, at the height of
the French Empire. Having witnessed firsthand its demise at the
hands of England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, however, he now
wished to see France recover its strength and dignity by tapping
into the power o f steam.
Already, Carnot warned, England had used steam engines to
mine huge amounts o f coal for use in smelting unprecedented
quantities o f iron, a material essential to the future of any industri
alized country. In fact, Carnot observed, so essential had steam
engines been in making France's archrival a world leader that to
take them away now "would be be to dry up all her sources o f
wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to
annihilate that colossal power."

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An Unproln..Lle I x p e r i e n ~ e 
-
73

It galled young Carnot that English steam engines were more

efficient than French ones: For identical amounts of fuel, English
engines invariably produced more work. It was mainly to remedy
this humiliating and dangerous disparity that Camot had dedicated
his life to the study o f these marvelous machines.
Most steam engines burned wood or coal, Carnot had leamed,
converting water into steam. The high-pressure steam filled the
engine's pistons, pressing them downward. When the steam was
released through an exhaust port, the pistons returned to their
original positions. The exhausted steam was piped to a cool radia
tor, where it changed back into water, which flowed to the boiler,
and was reconverted into high-pressure steam.
A steam engine repeated these steps many times every second. It
was a complex piece o f machinery, but its essential effect was sim
ple: We provided it with h ~ a t ,  and it provided us with w o r k 
though it usually took a great deal o f heat to produce very little
work.
During this time, it was widely believed that the work an engine
produced was determined solely by the temperature o f its boiler;
that is, the hotter an engine's boiler, the more steam it produced,
the faster and harder its pistons moved, and the more work they
generated. It seemed like common sense, but as Camot would re
veal in his historic treatise, it was really nothing but common non
sense.
Back in Koslin, several years after his son Rudolfs birth, the
Reverend Clausius was in the final stages o f preparing his family to
move to the nearby village o fD ckenniinde, where recently he had
been invited to start a private school. With so many mouths to
feed, the elder Clausius had accepted eagerly this new pedagogical
position. It would bolster his meager ministerial income and pro
vide him with a convenient opportunity to influence his children

intellectually as well as spiritually.

Dckenniinde was located about one hundred miles southwest o f

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Koslin, so it took a few days for the Clausius family to complete the
journey. When they arrived, they were not disappointed: Their
new hometown was located on the coast o f he Pomeranian Bay o f
the Baltic Sea, which made for a lovely setting and a relatively
stable climate, the seasonal variations being moderated by the
water.
As soon as Rudolf was old enough, he began attending the Rev
erend Clausius's one-room schoolhouse, right along with his
brothers and sisters. He had a cheery disposition, a far-ranging cu
riosity, and a disinclination to follow in his father's ecclesiastical
footsteps.
Young Clausius was curious about the natural world. In the
summer, he loved to hike along the coast, collecting seashells and
basking in the warm sunshine. For a change of scenery, he would
climb high up into the Pomeranian forest, collecting rocks and
digging tiny fossilized seashells from out o f the mountainous strata.
In the classroom, young Clausius was eager to know how shells
had come to be embedded in mountains so far away from the
ocean, and his father was just as eager to explain. According to the
Bible and geologists calling themselves Neptunists, the Reverend
Clausius taught, God's great flood had killed every creature on
earth, except for those aboard Noah's Ark. After the waters had
subsided, the creatures' carcasses had been left high and dry, en
tombed in the mud stirred up by the deluge. That was why, the
elder Clausius concluded, ministers like himself all over Europe
had hung fossils in the rafters o f heir churches with the inscription:
"Bones o f Giants Mentioned in the Scriptures."
The Scriptures were also very specific about the date of the
flood, the youngster was told. It happened 4,180 years a g o - a
number obtained by adding up the ages o f persons described in the
Old Testament. By using the same technique, the minister ex
plained, N eptunists also had estimated the ages of the earth and
sun; both were about 6,000 years old.

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It wasn't until Rudolf Clausius had to attend high school in the

nearby port city ofStettin that he discovered how entirely possible
it was to explain the natural world without any reference whatso
ever to the supernatural. It was the teenager's first exposure to a
nonclerical education, and it was about to ignite in him a lifelong
devotion to the study o f heat.
In contrast to the religiously inclined N eptunists, young
Clausius learned, there were secular geologists called Uniformitarian
ists. Recently, one o f their chief proponents, a Briton named
Charles Lyell, had written a provocative book titled The Principles
of Geology: being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the
Earth's Surface by riference to Causes now in Operation.
Throughout its history, Lyell asserted, the earth had been
changed continuously and gradually by normal, everyday geologic
forces, not suddenly and catastrophically by intermittent outbursts
o f Divine fury. What's more, he wrote, these geologic forces were
powered by an inexhaustible supply o f heat coming from the
earth's own molten interior, much as the human body was sus
tained by the heat from its core.
Considering that scientists generally were abandoning their old
Newtonian-inspired idea of a perpetual universe, Lyell's vision o f
an inexhaustible earth was decidedly unfashionable, but it was
hugely popular nonetheless among his fellow Uniformitarianists.
"Until we habituate ourselves to contemplate the possibility of an
indefinite lapse o f ages," a strident Lyell scolded, "we shall be in
danger of forming most erroneous views in geology."
Young Clausius could hardly believe it. The suggestion that the
earth was not 6,000 years old was exciting enough, but it was even
more so to imagine that beneath his feet, thousands o f miles down,
at the very center o f he earth, there could be a heat engine power
ful enough to have sculpted the natural w o r l d - t h e mountains, the
with which he
ocean basins, everything was so enthralled.
As a result of hat epiphany, the young man became increasingly

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fascinated by heat-driven engines. They had been around since

antiquity, he learned, but had not become useful until the early
1700s, with major improvements being made in 1764 by Scottish
engineer James Watt. Young Clausius even had the opportunity to
see a steam pump in operation.
By 1840, in fact, Rudolf Clausius had seen, learned, and done
more as a student in Stettin than he had during his entire life grow
ing up in Ockermiinde. Two years earlier, ships powered by steam
had crossed the mighty Adantic Ocean for the first time in history.
Now, thanks to his eye-opening high school education, he himself
felt liberated from the fetters o f the past, just like those ships.
Following his graduation, the eager eighteen-year-old entered
the University o f Berlin, just as five of his brothers had done before
him. He began by taking courses in science and mathematics and
was immediately captivated by something he learned from his
physics professor, Gustav Magnus.
While lecturing one day, Magnus revealed that he had recendy
made a surprising discovery about body heat. It appeared to be
generated by complex chemical reactions that took place in our
bloodstream, Magnus explained, not in our lungs, as scientists had
always believed.
. At that moment, the feeling washed over young Clausius that it
might be fascinating and worthwhile to consider seriously the pos
sibility o f devoting himself to the study of heat. Fascinating, because
o f heat's central role in the origins of the natural world and in the
life o f our own bodies. And worthwhile, because though they were
still wheezing, noisy contraptions, steam engines had matured dra
matically in Clausius's brief lifetime, revolutionizing industry and
creating lucrative careers for engineers knowledgeable in the mys
teries o f heat.
By the time he reached his senior year, in 1843, young Clausius
was elated with the way things had been going in his life. He had
earned good grades and the respect of his professors and classmates.

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Equally important, his free-wheeling interests m the natural

sciences had finally organized themselves into a short list of favorite
topics, with heat vying for top honors.
Suddenly, however, his esprit de vivre was snuffed out by word
that his mother had died while giving birth to her eighteenth child.
Over the years, each pregnancy had robbed her body of some o f
the strength it needed to survive; now, horribly, all of her stamina
had been used up.
N ot wishing to burden his father fmancially, a grieving young
Clausius decided to take on a part-time tutoringjob. Furthermore,
because most o f his older siblings were married and already encum
bered with obligations to their immediate families, he volunteered
to help raise the younger children; that way, Clausius thought,
they would not suffer too greatly from the absence o f a warm and
caring mother.
Although the additional responsibilities took time away from his
coursework at the university, Clausius managed to complete his
undergraduate studies in 1844. Immediately thereafter, he began
his graduate studies at the University of Halle, about one hundred
the
miles to southwest o f Berlin.
Determined not to renege on his promise to help raise his
- younger siblings, Clausius decided to stay in Berlin and commute
into Halle on horseback. As it was a hard day's ride, Clausius made
special arrangements with his professors, whereby he would do as
much of he required studies at home and travel to campus only for

the most essential lectures.

It was an inefficient way to earn a doctorate, but it did have the
advantage of granting Clausius freedom to read and learn at his
own pace. He began by pursuing his tentative interest in heat and
in no time at all discovered himself warming up to the subject.
The young man was particularly intrigued by scientists and engi

neers who had discovered ways of making heat behave in unnatural

ways. The Chinese, for example, had invented a device that forced

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heat to flow from cold to hot, entirely contrary to its normal tend
ency; called a refrigerator, it used ice and worked on the principle o f
evaporation.
The details o f its operation aside, Clausius learned, its ultimate
effect was to force heat to flow from inside a cool box to the rela
tive warmth o f the room outside. Consequently the cool box be
came cooler and the warm room became warmer, something that
never would happen naturally.
Young Clausius became especially enthralled with the life and
work ofSadi Camot, who observed that steam engines, too, were
essentially devi;ces for making heat behave in an unnatural way.
They were the antithesis o f friction, Camot explained, able to do
what Nature could not: Steam engines routinely converted heat
into movement.
What an uncommon insight into the common engine! Clausius
was eager to read more of this man's writings, particularly his little
booklet titled Reflections on the Motive Force of Heat, which Clausius
had learned was Camot's main work.
For months, the young man searched excitedly through book
stores and libraries everywhere, but he came away empty-handed
and in the process discovered why. In 1832, when he was only
thirty-six years old, Camot had contracted cholera. By order o f he
health officer, therefore, all his personal belongings, including
nearly all o f his papers, had been burned.
Undaunted, young Clausius gleaned whatever he could of Car
work by
not's by reading secondary sources and was amazed what
he leamed. According to the French engineer, the work produced
by a steam engine did not depend solely on the temperature of its
boiler; it depended on the difference between the temperatures' o f ts
boiler and its radiator. This simply stated formula was considered
such a major revelation, Clausius read, it rated being called Camot's

Principle.
In order to operate, a steam engine needed not just heat but a

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An DnprolnaLle I x p e r i e n ~ e 
-79

flow o f heat; that occurred only when there was a temperature differ
ence between an engine's hot boiler and cool radiator. "The pro
duction o f heat is not sufficient to give birth to _the impelling
power," Camot had concluded, "it is necessary that there should
be cold; without it, the heat would be useless."
In plain language, Carnot was suggesting that a steam engine was
like a simple mill wheel. Such a wheel worked by tapping water
that flowed naturally from a high place to a low place; similarly, a
steam engine worked by tapping heat that flowed naturally from a
hot boiler to a relatively cool radiator. The bigger and higher the
waterfall (picture Niagara Falls), the more horsepower a mill wheel
produced; analogously, the bigger and higher the "heatfall," the
more work an engine produced.
Clausius was delighted to discover that Camot had made still
one more, equally surprising discovery. According to Camot's
Principle, an engine whose boiler and radiator temperatures were,
say, 160 and 40 degrees Celsius, respectively, should produce 20
billion foot-pounds of work for every ton o f coal it burned;
theoretically, such an engine could lift a 20 billion-pound weight
one off the one-pound
foot ground-or, equivalently, a weight 20
billion feet off the ground.
When Camot had measured the actual output o f many different
engines, however, he had found that the best English engines pro
duced only one-twentieth of that; French engines were even
worse. All engines, in other words, appeared to fall far short o f

Camot's theoretical ideal. W hy should this be? the young French

man had wondered.
The short answer was that Camot's ideal engine represented a
perpetual motion machine. In other words, any hypothetical en
gine whose efficiency corresponded exactly to the difference be
tween the temperatures o f its boiler and its radiator could operate

forever: Somehow, in theory, the work it produced could be recy

cled back into heat, which could then be used to fuel the engine, to

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180

produce work, to be recycled back into heat, and so forth, ad in

finitum.
Like perpetual motion machines, however, Carnot's ideal en
gines were impossible to build (although that intimidating obser
vation had never stopped skeptics from trying). The world's
engineers-whether British or French-could build only real-life
engines, which never operated at their full theoretical potential,
defined by Carnot's Principle.
Impeccably designed and perfectly maintained though they
might be, all real-life steam engines were riddled with inefficien
cies of one sort or another. One of the worst, Carnot had discov
ered, was caused by an engine's parts rubbing against each other.
That was not surprising, considering that friction (which turned
horsepower into heat) was completely antagonistic to the opera
tion o f a steam engine (which turned heat into horsepower).
By 1848, as Clausius pondered everything he had read, he began
entertaining fanciful thoughts about the fate o f the universe: It was
aging, scientists believed, because the heat flowing within it was
experiencing various kinds of irreversible changes.
Fine, Clausius thought, but what i f we could deploy machines
throughout the cosmos to force heat into reversing its natural be
havior-refrigerators, for example, to force heat to flow from cold
to hot? In that way, would we not be able to reverse the cosmic
aging process? At the very least, he wondered, might we not be
able to stop it, so that the universe would stay the same age forever?
He of we
could knew, course,enough
never produce that such a possibility
machines was far-fetched;
to do that. But what i f
there were machines already out there, made by others, or natural
machines made by Nature itself? In that case, Isaac Newton and his
contemporaries would have been correct after all: The universe
would be a gigantic perpetual motion machine, kept alive eternally

by engines that forcibly reversed the aging caused by heat's natu

rally irreversible behavior.

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An DnprolnaLle I x p e r i e n ~ e 
- 81

All these questions exhausted young Clausius, but they also

made him feel very much alive, the way one felt after a healthful
bout o f strenuous physical exercise. Above all, they stimulated him
to make an irreversible decision: He wanted to be the first person
to find the answers.

VIUI

Scientists have always studied the subject o f heat as if their lives

depended on it, and it was no exaggeration: Their lives-all l i v e s
did depend on heat. As Aristode once observed: Heat is "the
source of life and all o f its p o wer s- o f nutrition, of sensation, of
movement, and o f thought."
Aristode, like Hippocrates before him and Galen afterward, be
lieved that body heat came from an inscrutable fire that burned
within us, somewhere within the left ventricle o f the heart. Ac
cording to vivisectionists, that was where the blood looked red

dest, which they took to mean hottest.

Two thousand years later, in 1833, a British astronomer named
John Herschel speculated that heat powered all forms of ife on this
planet, not just humans. Subsequent experiments proved him
right, though they also showed that the vivifying heat came not
from within the living entities themselves but from the s u n - 1 7
w ~ r t h 
million billion kilowatt-hours' every day!
That tremendous outpouring o f heat was what powered all the
plants on earth, their leaves-tiny solar panels-converting sun
shine into biomass and physical movement. Plants, in tum, sus
tained the animals, whose myriad activities brought the hubbub of
life to the farthest reaches o f the earth.

Solar heat, Herschel ventured, breathed life into even inanimate

phenomena. When heated, for example, air and water expanded

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182

and rose, producing currents in their wake. These restless currents,

Herschel concluded, were what ultimately gave rise to the lively
and often violent weather so characteristic o f the earth.
W e had always feared the weather, because it could be the agent
o f human death and destruction. But Herschel's argument made us
come to understand that the so-called natural disasters-the hurri
canes, tornadoes, and floods-were the earth's vital signs, welcome
evidence that our home planet was alive and well.
In the end, all o f his suggested a rather startling metaphor for the
natural world: The sun was like the furnace o f a gigantic steam
engine, producing heat that powered the earth and everything on
it. So long as that furnace stayed hot, all the engines it p o w e r e d 
from human beings to windmills-would never run out of steam.
By extension, scientists reasoned, other suns might be expected
to power other worlds in a similar way. Therefore, they con
cluded, each and every portion of the universe-macroscopic or
microscopic, animate or inanimate-could be thought o f as being
powered by some kind o f heat engine.
Not surprisingly, this perception o f heat's importance led many
scientists to believe that if only they could understand its irrevers
ible behavior, they might understand at long last the irreversible
character of life itsel£ In the time between Aristotle and Herschel,
however, scientists created and discarded four different theories o f
heat before getting it right, and even then, certain questions
about heat and life-have remained unanswered to this day.
Initially, the biggest challenge was just figuring out how to mea
sure heat. That led the ancient Greeks to make the first guess, Heat
Theory #1: "Heat is what produces the sensation o f hotness."
That was all; it was a rather trivial theory.
It was also wrong, incapable of explaining even this very simple,
paradoxical experiment: If a person put her right hand in cold
water, it would feel cold; if she put her left hand in hot water, it
would feel hot. So far, no surprises. But now, if she put both hands

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183

in warm water, then invariably the right (formerly cold) hand

would feel hot and the left (formerly hot) hand would feel cold.
The inconsistency illustrated an intolerable flaw in Heat Theory
#1. Consequently, scientists were forced to admit that heat was not
what produced the sensation o f hotness; it was the flow o f heat that
did so. This realization led to Heat Theory #2: "Whenever heat
flows into our bodies, it produces the sensation o f hotness: when
ever heat flows out o f our bodies, it produces the sensation o f cold-
ness."
This new theory, together with the age-old observation that
heat flowed naturally from hot to cold, was enough to explain the
paradoxical experiment. In that case, heat from the warm water
flowed into the cold hand, making the hand feel hot; conversely,
heat flowed out o f the hot hand into the warm water, making the
hand feel cold.
This also explained the phenomenon known as paradoxical un
dressing. When a person fell into cold water, his body immediately
responded by redirecting the warmth from the outer skin to the
vital organs, in an all-out effort to keep them functioning. Gradu
ally, therefore, the outer skin grew colder and colder, until soon it
became even colder than the surrounding water.
At that point, since heat naturally flowed from hot to cold, a tiny
amount o f warmth from the cold water began to flow into the even
colder outer skin; that produced a sensation o f hotness, which
caused the victim to strip off his clothes, hastening his own death!
Heat Theory # 2 served scientists so well it reigned supreme
until 1592. In that year, the famous Italian scientist Galileo Galilei
invented the thermometer-or, as he called it, the thermoscope.
The contraption was unwieldy, "a glass vessel about the size o f a
hen's egg," his assistant described it, "fitted to a tube the width o f
a straw and about two spans long." It was, in effect, a long-necked
bottle, which Galileo then turned upside down, placing the mouth
into a bowl o f water. "This instrument," the assistant recounted,

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184

"he used to investigate degrees o f h e a ~  and cold."

O n cold days, the air inside the bottle would contract, causing a
slight sucking action that would draw water up into the bottle's
neck. The height o f the column was a rough measure o f how cold
it was outside-the colder the temperature, the higher the column.
The thermoscope was, in retrospect, a backward thermometer.
But for scientists of that day, Galileo's gawky gizmo represented a
forward-looking way o f measuring the effect of heat and the basis
o f a new theory. To wit, Heat Theory #3: "Heat is what causes the
column in a thermometer to change height."
Heat theories #1 and #2 had been founded on the undepend
able, unpredictable human sensation o f heat. By contrast, this now
was a purely objective theory; air and nearly all other fluids expanded
as they got hotter by amounts precise enough for scientists to mea
sure with a ruler.
Water was one o f the few exceptions; oddly, it expanded"when
cooled. Indeed, this peculiar behavior was the main reason for
doubting that a person put into a £i:eezer immediately after dying
could ever be brought back to life. When frozen, the water in the
body's cells expanded, bursting the cell walls beyond repair.
This exception aside, though, seventeenth-century scientists
were excited by Galileo's crude thermoscope and undertook to
perfect it. Instead o f relying on the contraction and expansion o f
air, which proved to be a bit fickle, they built thermometers made
with a l c ~ h o l .  The main problem was that everybody applied dif
ferent scales o f measurement to their instruments; there was no
consistency.
A group of Florentine scientists, under the direction of Grand
Duke Ferdinand II, for example, used a temperature scale whose
high and low marks corresponded to the hottest and coldest days o f
the Tuscan year, respectively. Not to be outdone, the culinary
minded French used scales whose high mark corresponded to the
temperature of melting butter and low mark to the temperature o f
a Parisian wine cellar.

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An UnprolitaLle Experienee
- 85

The first standardized thermometer was not invented until

1714. In that year, a little-known German physicist named Daniel
Gabriel Fahrenheit unveiled an instrument that used mercury
sealed inside a tiny glass bulb with a long, thin neck. When heated,
the mercury expanded beyond the confines of the bulb, rising up
the strawlike neck a distance proportional to the heat applied to it.
Fahrenheit had chosen mercury because it expanded uniformly
when exposed to temperatures from about minus 40 to plus 626
degrees-an extraordinary range. Unfortunately, though, the
zero-degree mark o f his thermometer corresponded to the temper
ature of freezing salt water, which meant that freezing pure water
corresponded to 32 on his scale and boiling pure water to 212.
People complained that these numbers were too awkward, so in
1742, a Swedish astronomer named Anders Celsius designed a sim
pler temperature scale whose 0 corresponded to boiling water and
whose 100 corresponded to freezing water. The masses objected to
this, as well, however, but were mollified when Celsius reversed
the two numbers.
In the years that followed, people in all walks o f life found a
new
multiplicity of uses for the fabulous gadgets. Farmers were
able to monitor the temperature of animals and incubating eggs,
for instance, and meteorologists were able to monitor air tempera
ture. As a result, regional and national weather services were
founded worldwide, each of which began to compile the invalu
able temperature records scientists would use later to develop

apocalyptic theories o f global warming.

Eighteenth-century physicians, too, began using thermometers,
though the instruments were still quite clumsy. Typically, patients
were asked to breathe on the thermometer or hold it in their
hands, and it often took the better part o f an hour to produce a
reliable reading. (It wouldn't be until 1866 that British physician

Thomas Clifford Allbutt would invent the small clinical thermom

eter with which we are so familiar.) -
Despite the shortcomings o f these early thermometers, how-

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186

ever, they provided scientists with an unprecedented opportunity

to measure the intensity of he fabled human fIre, the source of ife.
Much to their amazement and excitement, they discovered the fIre
was imperturbable: Whatever the season, whatever the weather
outside, the interior of the human body appeared to remain stub
bornly at about 96° Fahrenheit or about 36° Celsius (an estimate
later revised upward).
Scientists were in store for other surprises, too, not all of them
pleasant. In fact, one of those unexpected disclosures was about to
throw cold water all over their lovely new theory.
The villain, as it were, was a Scottish chemist named Joseph
Black who worked at the University o f Glasgow. In the late 1750s,
Black did something seemingly innocuous: He baked equal quan
tities o f mercury and water in an oven and then checked their
temperatures. Much to his amazement, the mercury was much
hotter than the water. But how couId they possibly have different
temperatures, he wondered, when both had been heated by the
same oven, for the same amount o f time?
Anyone who has ever scalded her mouth biting into a piece o f
freshly baked apple pie might ask the same question. Invariably, the
filling is very much hotter than the crust, even though the two
have been baked in one and the same oven.
The same phenomenon is commonly experienced at the beach
on days when, though the sand is too hot for bare feet and the
water is too cold for swimming, the air is just right for lying out on
a towel. The sand, water, and air have completely different tem
peratures, even though they are all baking under the very same sun.
Mter some thought, Black came to the conclusion that heat
traveled. in the form of a weightless, invisible, and indestructible
fluid. And, judging from his oven experiment, it appeared to him
that different objects had different capacities to absorb and retain

this thermal fluid, the way different people had different capacities
to consume and hold their liquor.

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An Unproln.J.le I
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x p e r i e n ~ e 

The behavior of someone with a large alcohol capacity-some

one who could "hold" his liquor, so to speak-changed very litde
even after he had imbibed many drinks. Analogously, Black con
j ectured, the temperature of any material having a large' heat capac
ity" changed very lillie even after it had absorbed great quantities
o f thermal fluid.
Conversely, the behavior o f someone with a small alcohol ca
pacity changed dramatically-embarrassingly, in most cases-even
after just one drink. By the same token, the temperature o f any
material having a small heat capacity rose quite a lot even i f ex
posed to just a lillie bit o f heat.
The same analysis applied to the pie and beach. Apple filling and
sand were materials having very small heat capacities: It didn't take
much heat to make their temperatures rise. At the other extreme,
pie crust and air had huge heat capacities: They kept their cool
even in the hottest surroundings. Water, always the exception, lay
somewhere in between.
Fascinating as it was, Black's innocent litde experiment had di
sastrous implications for thermometers. Ifidentical amounts o f heat
could produce in different materials completely different tempera
ture readings, then thermometers could no longer be regarded as
infallible measures o f heat. It was that simple, and that painful; it
was the end of Heat Theory #3.
It was enough to make even the most clean-living scientist think
about going out and getting drunk. Instead, however, Black and

others o f his day quickly regrouped, creating yet another theory,

this time based on his idea o f a thermal fluid, which was thereafter
christened caloric, from calor, the Latin word for heat. Heat Theory
#4: "Heat consists o f a caloric fluid that is invisible, weighdess, and
indestructible."
In no time at all, scientists grew to like this new theory very

much, because it seemed to explain so many things, even simple

ones. For example, a material expanded when heated, they imag-

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ined, because it swelled up in the process o f absorbing caloric fluid,

the way a dry sponge expanded when it absorbed water.
Here, too, was an explanation for why objects heated up when
rubbed together, a major source of inefficiency in the operation o f
steam engines. The rubbing, scientists now imagined, liberated ca
loric fluid that had been stored in the objects all along, the way dust
was liberated from an old coat when it was brushed vigorously.
Decades later, Sadi Carnot would become a disciple o f this the
ory. In fact, the imagery o f a caloric fluid would be at the very
heart of his famous comparison of heat engines with mill wheels,
inspiring him to assert that "we may jusdy compare the motive
power o f heat with that of a fall o f water."
With the new theory, however, there did come one big prob
lem: How were scientists supposed to detect a fluid that was invisi
ble and weighdess? Here again, Joseph Black assured himself a
place in history, by inventing something called (what else?) a ca
loric meter, or calorimeter for short.
In its essence, Black's device consisted o f a well-insulated jar
through whose lid was stuck a thermometer. When cremated in
side the jar, materials released all their heat, all their caloric fluid,
into the air trapped inside, and the resulting increase in tempera
ture was measured directly by the thermometer.
How could a person be sure the therm ometer reading was a true
measure o f the heat released, since thermometers had just recendy
been discredited? It was because the thermometer in this case al
ways measured the heat liberated into the trapped air, which always
reacted the same way to the same amount o f heat: One unit o f heat
elicited a certain temperature reading, twice the heat elicited twice
the reading, and so forth.
Black's calorimeter was a beautifully clever litde device, and it
did not take long for scientists to adopt it with the same eagerness
they once had adopted Galileo's ill-fated thermoscope. This time,
however, they felt confident they were on the right track; this time

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their theory was going to stand up to the heat.

Surprisingly, for an entire century, experiment after experiment
validated their optimism. The most spectacular of them all came in
1775, when the famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier used a
calorimeter to discover just how the mysterious heat source of life
was able to maintain a constant temperatUre within the human
body.
By now, scientists had long since replaced Aristotle's belief in a
self-sustaining fire with explanations that were considerably homier
and amusingly irreverent. One Scottish doctor, John Stevenson,
had speculated that body heat was the result o f our body's compost
ing the food we ate. "Man's body, o f which he is so vain," Steven
son concluded, "is little better than a smoking dunghill."
Even Benjamin Franklin had ventured a theory. "I imagine that
animal heat arises by or from a kind of fermentation in the juices o f
the body," the great statesman-scientist had written, "in the same
manner as heat arises in the liquors preparing for distillation."
Being the sober-minded investigator that he was, Franklin had
been careful to put his hypothesis to the test. "The liquor in a
distiller's vat," he discovered, "has nearly the same degree o f heat
with the human body; that is, about 94 or 96."
In a series oflandmark calorimeter experiments, Lavoisier com
pared the heat produced by the burning o f powdered charcoal with
the body heat naturally produced by birds and guinea pigs. (Merci
fully, he did not incinerate the poor creatures; he only incarcerated
them in a calorimeter.) He also monitored the amount of air con
sumed by each and observed the gases they exhaled.
Pound for pound, Lavoisier discovered, both the animals and
the burning charcoal consumed identical amounts o f air and gave
off identical quantities o f heat. Was this mere coincidence? he
wondered. No, he decided, it must mean that animate beings pro
duced their heat the same way inanimate objects did when in
cinerated; that is, by simple chemical combustion.

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In the crudest kind o f way, Lavoisier had validated Aristotle's

2,000-year-old assertion: The source of life was indeed some kind
of fire. But if it was truly the result o f ordinary combustion,
Lavoisier reasoned, then the fire o f ife could not be self-sustaining;
like any inferno, it would need constant feeding, the fuel being the
food we ate. Also, it would need air, a steady supply o f which came
from our breathing. To the French aristocrat-scientist, therefore,
the body's combustion chamber was probably situated in the lungs,
not the heart.
During the course of its growth, an average-size carrot absorbed
about 20,000 calories o f heat from the sun. (Nutritionists today
prefer to use Calories, spelled with a capital "C"; one Calorie
equals 1,000 calories.) When someone ate that carrot, Lavoisier
imagined, all that heat, all that caloric fluid, was liberated by the
person's combustion process. That was how the body maintained
its constant temperature, how we humans stayed alive.
With triumphant-sounding explanations like that, the caloric
theory and calorimeter continued to prosper into the nineteenth
century. But then., in 1814, one Julius Robert Mayer was born in
Bavaria, a Germanic kingdom second in size only to Prussia.
Though he was to have a pitifully tragic life, his ideas were destined
one day to help Rudolf Clausius extinguish Heat Theory #4.
As a young man, Mayer was exposed to two completely antago
nistic ways of looking at the world. As a high school student at" an
evangelical theological seminary, he was given the impression that
science did not have all the answers. Later, though, in medical
school, he was given the impression that religion did not have all the
answers.
Mter his schooling, Mayer was not fully satisfied by either tradi
tion, which meant that neither tradition was fully satisfied with
him. This was especially well demonstrated when Mayer an
nounced his theory of how the world came into being; like him,
the theory was a curious-some called it scandalous-mishmash o f
science and religion.

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An UnprolilaLle I x p e r i e n ~ e 
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191

In the beginning, Mayer imagined, the umverse had been

brought into existence by a single, inexpressibly huge force, which
he called the Ursache} German for "the Cause." Subsequendy, the
Ursache had split up into smaller, diverse kriifte ("forces"), each o f
which now powered some particular aspect o f the universe, be it
electric, chemical, thermal, and so forth.
Mayer alienated theologians with his lack of reference to God
and scientists with his reference to the supernatural-like Ursache.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Mayer was rejected when he tried
publishing the theory in Annalen der Physik und Chemie ("Annals o f
Physics and Chemistry"), one o f Europe's most prestigious scien
tific journals.
Thereafter, even when Mayer's explanations were more con
ventional, his reputation for being an oddball prejudiced the re
views his work received from peers. At no time was this more
evident than in the winter of1840, when young Dr. Mayer agreed
to serve as physician aboard a Dutch merchant ship bound from
Rotterdam to Surabaya, Java.
Like most nineteenth-century doctors, Mayer treated his pa
tients by bleeding them, the theory being that a surfeit of blood was
what caused the body to become swollen with illness. At first,
Mayer did not notice anything abnormal in the blood he let from
the sailors. But as the journey took them closer and closer to the
tropics, he noticed their blood becoming redder and redder.
This puzzling phenomenon, he decided, was an unexpected val
idation o f the popular caloric theory of heat and Lavoisier's ideas
about biological combustion. Back in the Netherlands, he rea
soned, the cold weather had forced the sailors' bodies to generate a
lot o f heat in order to stay warm. In this progressively warmer
climate, however, their bodies' combustion mechanism was able
to throtde down. Therefore, less o f the air inhaled by the sailors
was burned up; more o f the air was simply absorbed into their
blood, causing it to become redder.
Had it been announced by anyone else, this astonishing discovery

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192

would have been hailed by the caloric-theory-loving establishment.

But coming from this iconoclastic young Bavarian, the elegant ex
planation was published with very litde reaction or appreciation
from his peers.
Disheartened but undefeated, Mayer proceeded to do himself
even greater h . ~ m  by incorporating his very credible explanation
o f the sailors' reddening blood into the framework o f his very in
credible Ursache theory. The cross-breeding produced a chimeric
view o f the world that horrified the contemporary mind.
According to Mayer, the one huge seminal force that had split
up into many smaller and smaller forces was, to this day, still splin
tering. The sun's force, for example, was now bifurcating into a
luminous force (sunlight) and thermal force (solar heat), both o f
which were being transformed by plants into a chemical force
(food), which itself was being split up in multitudinous ways by the
living creatures that consumed it.
Some o f the chemical force was being converted by the crea
tures' internal combustion chambers into a thermal force (body
heat) and some by their muscles into a mechanical force (body
movement). Some o f he chemical force, also, was being converted
by the creatures' voice boxes into an acoustic force (sounds) and by
their brains into an electric force (neural impulses).
Mayer's grand conclusion? The strengths of all the subordinate
forces o f today-luminous, thermal, chemical, and others yet un
named-added up exacdy to the strength o f the original Ursache,
from which they all had sprouted. In other words, though things
everywhere appeared to be changing ceaselessly, the total amount oj
force in the universe was one o f the great constants oflife; it never
had changed, and it never would change.
It was like saying that a barterer's total wealth remained un
changed, even though the number o f her possessions increased
steadily. It could happen, if the wealth were being split up into an
increasing number oflesser and lesser expensive items.

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An Unproli,.J.le Ixperienee
193

Years hence, in the hands of Clausius and others, Mayer's fantas

tic assertions would become one of the most sacred theories in all
of science. But this was 1842, and though young Dr. Mayer
managed to get it published in a respectable journal, Annalen der
Chemie ("Annals of Chemistry"), his theory o f the natural world
was widely snubbed.
Most o f his colleagues rejected it, based solely on their wariness
of he author's reputation for odd ideas. Those few who did bother
to contemplate the theory rejected it for speaking of a thermal
force being transformed into other forces (e.g., the sun's thermal
force being transformed by plants into a chemical force). Accord
ing to the caloric theory, heat-whether called a force or a fluid or
whatever-could not be transformed; that is, it could not be de
stroyed and then reincarnated as something else. Heat, the caloric
disciples chanted, was indestructible.
In the years ahead, Mayer's despair worsened. Since most scien
tists had never even read his paper, they were not able to give him
credit, even when they began to publish theories reminiscent o f his
own. In 1847, for example, the great Hermann Ludwig von Helm
holtz, a fellow German, published Ober die Erhaltung der Kraft
("Concerning the Conservation o f Force''). I t was hailed as a bril
liant piece o f work, suggesting the exciting possibility that the
combined strengths o f all natural forces in the universe never
changed; yet not once was Mayer's name even mentioned!
By this time, Mayer had come to the very threshold o f a nervous
breakdown, and his doctors were threatening to commit him to a
mental hospital. Mayer's woes increased further when he was ar
rested by insurgents during the Revolution of1848, a violent par
oxysm o f German nationalism. He was released shortly afterward,
but two years later, all the frustration and alienation o f his tor
mented life finally caught up with him: One night, unable to sleep,
the thirty-six-year-old pariah climbed out o f bed and leapt from
the window o f his second-story apartment.

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Much to his chagrin, however, Mayer did not succeed in killing

himself; he was still alive, but why? While his colleagues were still
trying to understand the source o f life, now more than ever, he
craved only to understand the meaning of ife. He cursed fate for his
continued suffering, not realizing that in this most tragic year of his
discontent, his ideas-his life--were about to be validated by a
young Prussian physicist who finally would get to the heart o f heat.

VUI

In 1848, in Berlin, RudolfJulius Emmanuel Clausius was leading

as many lives as he had names. He was a high school teacher who
was well liked for his friendliness and lucidity. He was a graduate
student, contemplative and intense, who was only months away
from earning his doctorate. And he was a loving, caring surrogate
mother to his four younger siblings.
The only thing he lacked was a wife. Friends and neighbors
commented constandy on his eligibility as a bachelor, but twenty
six-year-old Clausius always demurred, explaining that, though he
had the desire, he had neither the money nor the time to start a
family o f his own.
For now, Clausius was wed to his studies. Indeed, the only hot
prospect he had in mind was completing his thesis and fmding a
decent-paying job having something-anything!-to do with
heat. Recendy the caloric theory had been called into question,
and young Clausius was eager to become part o f he exciting fracas.
Much of the controversy centered on the work o f an amateur
scientist named James Joule. The son of a wealthy brewer, Joule
had grown up in Manchester, England, enchanted by the English

scientist Michael Faraday's remarkable discoveries concerning

electricity and magnetism. (See "Class Act.")
Recendy Joule himself had made a remarkable discovery: Ordi-

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195

nary electricity always heated up the wire through which it flowed

and, in the process, lost some of its impetus. A century from now,
people would become used to their electrical appliances warming
up, especially toasters, TV sets, and light bulbs. But in Clausius's
day, no one was quite sure what to make ofJoule's discovery.
An influential Irish scientist named William Thomson, for one,
argued publicly that Joule probably had observed little more than
an extraordinary example of ordinary friction-electricity rubbing
its way along the wire, producing heat as it lost some o f its own
steam; it was a well-known phenomenon, Tho mson reminded ~ v 

eryone, that long ago had been explained by the caloric theory.
His bold public assertions notwithstanding, Thomson secretly
had begun to have serious doubts about the vaunted caloric theory.
But he dreaded the consequences o f admitting it, warning that if
scientists stopped believing in the indestructibility o f heat, "we
meet with innumerable other difficulties . . . and an entire recon
struction of the theory o f heat from its foundation."
There was now simply too much riding on the caloric theory to
abandon it, including Camot's Principle, which was based firmly
on the concept o f a caloric fluid. Scientists and steam-engine de
signers had come to cherish Camot's Principle; consequently,
Thomson was loath to see it discredited by Joule's discovery. For
that reason, in a paper published in 1849, the Irishman avowed
stubbornly: "I shall refer to Camot's fundamental principle, in all
that follows, as if its truth were thoroughly established."
To make matters even more rousing for young Clausius, the
debate over Heat Theory # 4 had become political, ever since "the
incident" of 1848. In that year, an aggrieved Mayer had written a
blunt letter to Joule, accusing him of hogging all the credit for
possibly having found fault with the caloric theory. Now, only a
short while later, that rancorous personal "exchange had grown into
between
a full-fledged nationalistic feud British and German scien
tists.
Clausius himself had not yet made up his mind about the caloric

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theory, but he was quick to side with his fellow Gennan's com
plaint against the British brewer's son .& Clausius would argue in
coming years, Mayer had published his caloric-busting ideas before
Joule, and in science, publication dates were what established or
ders o f priority.
In some ways, Clausius was reacting like the meticulous scientist
he had become, a stickler for precision and protocol. But in other
ways, the young man was reacting like a consummate Prussian,
fiercely loyal to the cause o f German reunification.
Twelve centuries earlier, the Franks had consolidated Germanic
lands into something o f an empire. But their wondrous creation
had been subjugated by the Holy Roman Empire, which itself had
been weakened by the Reformation and finally, at tl].e tum of this
century, vanquished by the French.
Now the German people resided in a loose confederation o f
nation-states, a shattered reflection of the mighty empire it once
had been. And worse, Clausius lamented bitterly, Prussia itself,
though the mightiest o f all the German kingdoms, was little more
than a French vassal.
The Revolution o f 1848 had managed to call attention to the
German people's yearning for unity, but already there was some
indication that it would not lead to much. It had produced a parlia
ment in Frankfurt, but just recently Prussia's King Frederick Wil
liam IV had refused to acknowledge its right to offer him an imperial
crown.
In reflecting on the German people's sad situation, Clausius was
consoled by the thought that he was about to join the worldwide
community o f scientists. They were not a perfectly unified people,
as evidenced by the rift between Joule and Mayer, but at least they
fought their wars with words and numbers, not knives and bullets.
In the spring of1848, young Clausius was awarded his doctorate
he
in science. O ut of fmancial necessity, retained his high school
teaching job but hoped that soon he would be able to afford to

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197

marry some young woman and have children.

For now, he began to mull over everything he had ever read on
the subject o f heat. At long last, his time for being on the sidelines,
for merely acquainting himself with other people's theories, was
over.
The newly christened scientist wanted to create a theory o f his
own, but where to begin? As a boy being taught geology, Clausius
had learned that science and religion did not always mix well. Un
fortunately, he opined, the caloric theory had now become more
like a religion than a science, with wavering disciples such as Wil
liam Thomson trying hard not to lose their faith. Scientists, he
insisted, had to rely on facts, not faith.
He saw in Joule's exacting experiments the factual basis and in
Mayer's offbeat speculations the philosophical basis of a whole new
way o f thinking about heat. The two simply needed to be woven
together, warp and woof, in the 100m o f mathematics. The task
wouldn't take long, the young scientist imagined, but he was
wrong: In the end, it took him eighteen years to create what was to
be the first, and best, intellectual tapestry o f his life.
He began this monumental effort in 1850, by publishing a very
long paper with a very long tide: " O n the Motive Power o f Heat,
and on the Laws which can be Deduced from it for the Theory o f
Heat." Heat and work, Clausius theorized, were but two varieties
o f a single phenomenon that came to be called energy (a name sug
gested by the doubting Thomson). Put another way, heat and
work were fundamentally the same thing, in that a unit o f heat
could be exchanged for a unit of work, without affecting the total
energy o f the universe.
It was as if Clausius were suggesting that rocks and people were
two varieties of a single phenomenon called matter. According to
this way o f thinking, rocks and people were fundamentally the
same thing, in that a pound of rocks could be swapped for a pound
of flesh, without affecting the total weight o f the universe.

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Clausius didn't stop there. Just as there were many other varie
ties of matter, such as leather; wood, metal, and so forth, there
were many varieties o f this overarching phenomenon called en
ergy. Besides heat (thermal energy) and work (mechanical energy),
there were solar energy, electrical energy, and acoustic energy, to
name just a few.
According to Clausius, in Joule's enigmatic experiment, electri
cal energy was being changed into thermal energy; that is, as the
wire heated up, the electricity flowing through it slowed down,
with exact reciprocity. More generally, a unit o f anyone kind o f
energy could be changed into a unit of any other ki nd-wi t hout
affecting the total energy o f the universe.
This novel concept came to be called the Law ofEnergy Conserva
tion, according to which energy could not be created or destroyed,
merely transformed from· one variety to another. The total energy
of the universe was a true constant oflife, Clausius concluded; the
only thing that ever really changed was the mix o f different kinds o f
energIes.
Using the coded language o f mathematics, Clausius's brainstorm
could be summarized in far less space than it took to spell out in
plain English. Choosing E u n i v e rse to stand for the total energy o f the
universe and the capital Greek letter delta, d, to stand for "the net
change in . . . ," the Law of Energy Conservation boiled down to
this mathematical equation:

universe
4E =0
That is, the net change in the total energy o f the universe is
always zero, because the total energy o f the universe is an eternal
constant.
Clausius's reasoning spelled the end o f the caloric theory, be
cause it recognized energy, not· heat, as being the indestructible
phenomenon. That unprecedented idea led to Heat Theory #5:

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- 99

"Heat is but one of many different kinds of energy, all o f which can
be exchanged for one another at any time, without any net effect
on the total energy o f the universe."
Upset though they were to see anyone suggest a replacement for
their beloved caloric theory, William Thomson and other scientists
nevertheless were pleased about one thing. Even i f his new theory
was adopted, it would not lead to the demise ofCamot's precious
rule, only a reinterpretation o f it.
According to young Clausius, Camot's Principle had been cor
rect in saying that an engine's ideal output was determined solely
by the difference between the temperatures of ts boiler and its radia
tor. But Camot had not been correct to compare heat engines with
mill wheels.
Camot had imagined that, like water driving a mill wheel, ca
loric fluid driving a steam engine survived the process, flowing from
the boiler, then in and out o f the pistons, and finally ending up in
the radiator; there the caloric fluid was reabsorbed into the water
and recycled back to the boiler. According to tllat quaint meta
phor, in other words, the caloric fluid was never actually consumed
in the process o f ts being tapped for power, merely pushed around,
sucked up, spit out, pushed around, sucked up, spit out, and so
forth, over and over again.
In the imagery and vocabulary o f Clausius's new theory o f
h e a t - t h e heart o f which was the Law o f Energy Conservation
thermal energy from the boiler was outright destroyed and changed
into mechanical energy. As Clausius put it: "In all cases in which
work is produced by the agency o f heat, a quantity o f heat is con
sumed which is proportional to the work done."
Any o f the boiler's heat that got as far as the radiator, therefore,
was heat that had escaped being changed into work by the inter
vening pistons-heat that had trickled through the engine's walls
One might
and radiated away uselessly into the surrounding air. say
it was wasted heat, Clausius explained, heat that had not produced

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any work, like water spilling ineffectually past a mill wheel.

A similar profligacy appeared to exist in all real-life engines,
Clausius observed, from windmills to human bodies. For example,
o f the total amount o f aeolian energy that turned a windmill, only
some was transformed productively into mechanical energy, used
to pump water or grind com. The remaining part was transformed
into thermal energy by the windmill's vanes rubbing against the air
or by the axle rubbing against its bearing, heat that ended up being
dissipated uselessly into the air.
Similarly, o f the total amount o f chemical energy (food) that
powered a human body, only some was converted beneficially into
mechanical energy, used by a person to walk up stairs or lift heavy
objects; inevitably, part o f it was converted wastefully into useless
by-products, excreted by the body's imperfect digestive and meta
bolic systems.
No engine appeared capable o f operating flawlessly, o f convert
ing 100 percent o f its fuel into useful work. Unless one could
switch off friction or create perfect thermal insulation, it appeared
Camot had been correct: Real-life engines always would operate
well below their ideal, theoretical potential.
Nevertheless, even in their inherent wastefulness, Clausius reit
erated, engines always obeyed the Law o f Energy Conservation. In
the case o f an ordinary, wheezing steam engine, for example, the
total thermal energy going into the hot boiler was exacdy equal to
the work (mechanical energy) produced by the pistons plus the
wasted heat (thermal energy).
Similarly for windmills and human bodies: The total input al
ways equaled the useful plus the wasteful outputs. In short, all the
myriad energy changes occurring in all the engines of the universe
always tallied up so that there was never any net change in the total
energy o f the universe. Always!
pro
Clausius's youthful imagination had, without question,
duced as radical a theory as had ever derailed the study o f heat.

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Nevertheless, its physical arguments were so precise, its mathemat

ics so persuasive, that scientists could not resist falling under its
spell.
Within a short time, therefore, Rudolf Julius Emmanuel
Clausius was being praised all over Europe--and so were Joule and
the outcast Mayer, whose work had inspired the young scientist. It
was a turning point for all three, but especially for Mayer, who in
the years ahead was made a member o f the world-famous French
Academy of Sciences and awarded their prestigious Prix Po'ncelet for
a lifetime of outstanding achievement; by the time Mayer died at
the age o f sixty-four, he was at peace, having received the credit he
had so desperately sought as a tormented young man.
Meanwhile, twenty-seven-year-old Clausius himself was hon
ored with an invitation to teach physics at the prestigious Royal
Artillery and Engineering School there in Berlin. He began his new
appointment in the autumn of1850 and acquitted himselfso impres
sively that by December, he was made a privatdozent (lecturer for
hire) at the University o f Berlin. This new position allowed him to
charge students attending his lectures a small admission fee, thus
enriching his hope that soon he might have enough money for
marriage and a family.
In 1851, moreover, a stubborn William Thomson finally de
cided to recant his outspoken belief in the caloric theory and to
support Heat Theory #5. H e offered credit to "Mr. Joule, o f Man
chester, [who] expresses very distinctly the consequences ...

which the not He

follow from fact that heat is a substance." even
deigned to tip his hat to the foreigner Mayer, whose 1842 paper,
Thomson conceded, "contains some correct views regarding the
mutual convertibility of heat and mechanical effect."
Thomson also paid well-deserved homage to young Clausius,
"who by mathematical reasoning . . . [has] arrived at some remark

able conclusions." But the Briton stopped short o f actually giving

the Prussian credit for helping him to face facts: "I may be allowed

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to add that . . . it [the reinterpretation ofCarnot's Principle] occur

red to me before I knew that Clausius had either enunciated or
demonstrated the proposition."
Clausius sensed in Thomson's equivocation something o f the
nationalistic rivalry that continued to overshadow the scientific
study of heat. But Clausius c ~ o s e  to remain above petty disputes.
In the years ahead, he continued to mind his manners and to work
diligently; his good judgment soon was rewarded.
When Clausius was barely thirty-two, he was offered a profes
sorship at the Ecole Polytechnicum, a prestigious new university in
Zurich. Even though the celebrated young scientist was crestfallen
at having to leave his homeland, the new position paid very well,
and he was excited about having the chance to do research along
side some of the finest minds in the world. What's more, his sib
lings were now old enough to care for themselves.
In the years following the young bachelor's arrival in Zurich, it
wasn't long before he was able to accumulate a small fortune and
find the love of his life, a young woman named Adelheid Rimpau.
Though she lived in Zurich, Rimpau was very much a G e r m a n 
to Clausius's delight-born and raised in Braunschweig.
O n November 13, 1859, the two were wed. For about a year
they lived in Riesenbach, a suburb o f Zurich. Clausius was happier
now than he had ever been in his life. His beautiful wife was not
only stalwart and talented musically, she shared his desire to have
many children-she, too, having come from a very large family.
In 1861, they were ovelj oyed when Adelheid gave birth to a
lovely, healthy girl. Soon thereafter, the young family moved sev
eral miles farther away from the center of Zurich, where they
could afford a large house and a location "where one has fresh air,"
Clausius enthused, "and a nice view to the lake and to the moun
tains. "
Clausius was now on top of the world, and from there, he was
able to discern the fullest implications o f his earlier ideas. Unlike

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the cool, clean air surrounding the alpine mountains o f Zurich,

however, his conclusions would prove to be anything but refresh
ing; disquieting was more like it.
He began his dramatic reasoning by recalling the two familiar
examples of heat's irreversible behavior. First, heat seemed natu
rally to flow from hot to cold, never from cold to hot. Second,
friction changed mechanical movement into heat; Nature ap
peared to have no comparable process for changing heat into me
chanical movement.
In its essence, Clausius observed, this lopsided behavior of heat
represented two different kinds o f change. One represented a tem
perature change (thermal energy flowing from hot to cold). The
other represented an energy change (mechanical energy changing
into thermal energy, via friction).
Was an energy change fundamentally different from a tempera
ture change? Clausius wondered. It reminded him o f a similar
question- he had asked years ago when analyzing steam engines,
namely: "Is an increment of heat fundamentally different than an
increment of work?" Boldly, he recalled, he had proposed that
they were not, that they were but two varieties of one t h i n ~ 
increments of energy; that assertion had led him to the Law o f En
ergy Conservation.
By analogy, Clausius now decided to propose something just as
far-reaching: Energy changes and temperature changes-like those
that occurred in the irreversible behavior o f h e a t - w e r e also but
t h i n ~ c h a n g e s  in "I
two varieties of one entropy. have intention
ally formed the word entropy so as to be as similar as possible to the
word energy, " Clausius explained, "for the two magnitudes . . . are
so nearly allied in their physical meanings, that a certain similarity
in designation appears to be desirable."
Years before, Clausius had shown that solar energy, fundamen
or
tally speaking, was made of the same stuff as electrical energy
acoustic energy or any other kind o f energy. Despite their different

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204

sources, despite their different appearances and b ~ h a v i o r s ,  all varie

ties o f energy were covertly one and the same thing.
Ultimately, therefore, all could be reckoned against a common
ruler. Thus, whether it was solar, electrical, or acoustic, every type
o f energy could be measured in terms of, say, calories. It was like
saying that every type o f massive object-stick, stone, or p e r s o n 
could be ranked in terms o f pounds or some other common unit o f
weight.
Now, Clausius was saying, there was an even larger, more com
prehensive phenomenon than energy. Entropy, he imagined, en
compassed not only all the varieties o f energy but also temperature
-temperature being defined, as always, by the readings o f an ordi
nary thermometer.
It was if Clausius had been the first to discover that, large as it
was, the United States of America was merely part o f a much larger
continent. Entropy represented a new and mysterious frontier in
scientific thought-one that encompassed the vast territories o f
energy and temperature and who knew what else--and the young
Prussian pioneer was only too eager to explore it.
Despite their different appearances and behaviors, Clausius ven
tured, energy changes and temperature changes could be reckoned
against a common ruler. That is, just as with different brands o f
energy, these different brands o f entropy could be added and sub
tracted.
A flood o f 9.uestions now came to the intrepid explorer's mind,
among them: What exactly was the sum total of all the entropy
changes happening in the universe? Did that grand total fluctuate, .
or was it a constant? In other words, was there a Law o f Entropy
Conservation, to match his Law o f Energy Conservation? If that
were true, he thought, glowing, what a fme pair o f trophies those
two laws would make.
But how would he to out
even begin carry such a cosmic-size
computation? How could he possibly figure out the total entropy

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An Unpro'if .Lle t x p e .;
- 05
e n ~ e 

o f the universe? That would require him to tally up all the energy
changes and temperature changes taking place at any given mo
ment!
Undaunted, young Clausius decided to give it a try, by first
creating a simple bookkeeping system: All natural changes-energy
and temperature changes that occurred spontaneously throughout
Nature, without coercion-would be treated as positive changes in
entropy. For example, wherever heat was escaping from warm
houses into the relatively cool outdoors or a cup o f hot coffee was
slowly getting colder-behavior that came naturally to h e a t 
Clausius would say the entropy at those locations was increasing.
Conversely, all unnatural changes-energy and temperature
changes that occurred only when Nature was coerced by some
kind of engine--would be treated as negative changes in entropy.
For example, wherever there were steam engines changing heat
into work or refrigerators forcing heat to go from a cold place to a
relatively warm place, Clausius would say the entropy at those lo
cations was decreasing.
Armed with a way of keeping the books, the young man now
needed to add things up. But how? Years ago, he recalled, he had
put the notion o f energy conservation to the Xest by adding up the
energy changes that occurred within steam engines. O ut of curios
ity, therefore, he now undertook to proceed the same way with
entropy.
In the machinations of ideal engines, to begin with, Clausius
found reason to rejoice. According to his arithmetic, there were
exactly as many positive entropy changes as there were negative
ones; that is, there was no net change in the entropy of the uni-
verse!
Clausius was ecstatic: This was the first bit of evidence that in
deed there was a second law identical to the first, a Law of Entropy
Conservation! When he continued his computations, however,
the blessed rapture gave way to a cursed reality.

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For all real-life steam engines (which invariably fell far short of
realizing the ideal efficiency defined by Camot's Principle),
Clausius's calculations revealed something completely different.
The natural changes in such engines (heat escaping wastefully from
hot boiler to cool radiator and work being changed wastefully into
heat by friction) always exceeded the one and only unnatural change
(heat being changed into work by pistons).
In terms o f Clausius's simple bookkeeping scheme, this meant
that in any ordinary steam engine, the positive changes in entropy
always exceeded the negative changes. That is, the operation of
such an engine always resulted in a net increase in the entropy o f he
umverse.
The terrible turn of events did not stop there: A stunned
Clausius reminded himself that these results applied to every con
ceivable kind o f real-life engine, including windmills and human
beings. This meant his discovery about entropy was universal. All
the positive and negative entropy changes that occurred in all the
real-life engines of the universe always combined so as to increase
entropy. Always!
In the shorthand of mathematics, Clausius chose Suniverse to stand
for the total entropy of the universe; the capital Greek letter delta,
d, to stand for "the net change in . . . ;" and the symbol> to stand
for "is always greater than . . . " Therefore, his startling result boiled
down to this equation:

4Suniverse >0

In plain English: "The net change in the total entropy of the

universe is always greater than zero." That is, at any given mo
ment, the Sturm and Drang of existence always left the universe
with more entropy than it had the moment before, the positive
entropy changes always exceeded the negative ones.
Clausius mused wistfully: For a brief while there, he had been

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An Unpl'oli• .Lle Ixpel'ienee

- 07

fooled into thinking he had discovered a Law o f Entropy Conser

vation. But that was a law that applied only to a perfect universe, a
universe full o f ideal engines-which was to say perpetual motion
machines-where things never aged but went on forever. In that
hypothetically ideal universe, entropy was a constant of life, just
like energy.
Alas, Clausius sighed, ours was not such a universe. Ours was a
universe full o f imperfect engines-whether they were animate and
minuscule, like the cells in our body, or inanimate and gigantic,
like the swirling galaxies in the heayens. Ours was a universe where
energy was conserved but not exploited with sublime effi
ciency-a universe, furthennore, governed with inequity by a
most mysterious Law o f Entropy Nonconservation.
Clausius wasn't completely disappointed, however: Though his
two laws did not match, he was overjoyed to discover that this law
that revealed the lopsided behavior o f entropy also provided the
long-sought-after explanation for the lopsided behavior o f heat
and of ife itself; in fact, his new law was the first scientific explana
tion for why everything in the universe aged and eventually died!
The universe, this remarkable entropy law revealed, was like a
casino. Entropy was like money. Engines were like players.
Clausius's Law o f Entropy Nonconseryation was like saying that
a casino's positive money changes always exceeded its negative
money changes. In other words, a casino's winnings always ex
ceeded its losses; it always made a profit, which was how it stayed
in the which
business. A casino existed at expense o f its players,
meant it could keep winning only so long as its players could keep
losing. When they had lost everything, when positive money
changes ceased to exist, the casino would shut down forever.
Similarly, Clausius's Law o f Entropy Nonconservation meant
that, like a casino, the universe existed at the expense of ts engines,
the human long the
engine included. So as universe continued to
make a profit, as it were, so long as the positive entropy changes

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208

exceeded the negative ones, it would stay in business. The day all
its engines lost everything-the day positive entropy changes
ceased to exist-the universe would shut down forever.
There was also another way o f seeing it. According to Clausius's
bookkeeping scheme, positive entropy changes corresponded to
natural changes, such as heat flowing from hot to cold or friction
changing work into heat. Therefore, his law was equivalent to say
ing that the universe would shut down forever when all its natural
changes had c ~ a s e d  to exist-that is, when all its naturally irrevers
ible phenomena had spent themselves completely.
When would that happen? The number of engines and the size
of the universe were far too great for Clausius or anyone else to
estimate how long our universe would stay in business. However,
he was able to imagine what it would look like in its final days.
As thermal energy flowed from hot to cold, it would leave hot
areas a litde cooler and cold areas a litde warmer. Ultimately,
therefore, there would be no regions o f hot and cold: The entire
universe would be uniformly lukewarm.
Without hot and cold regions, heat would cease to flow. That
meant, according to Carnot's Principle, that engines would cease
operating; they could no longer change heat into useful work.
Friction, in the meantime, would turn any remaining work into
heat. That heat would continue to flow from hot to cold until it,
too, evened itself out to match the uniform lukewarmness o f the
dying universe.
Clausius's Law of Entropy Nonconservation portrayed a uni
verse rushing headlong toward a moment when the buzz and fury
o f its trillions of engines would be silenced forever. It portrayed a
universe where mortal violence inevitably gave way to eternal
qUIescence.
In a manner o f speaking, Clausius concluded, his new law
painted the picture o f an extremely tense universe in the process o f
letting its hair down, seeking a calmer, albeit moribund, existence.

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An UnprokfaLle Ixperienee
209

And therein lay the solution to one of science's greatest mysteries:

The irreversible behavior o f h eat - t h e irreversible nature o f ife, in
general-was merely an indication that the universe had not yet
reached its final resting place.
So long as heat poured forth from all the hot spots in the uni
verse--the stars, the cores o f planets, the cores of iving bodies-so
long as the engines o f he universe converted that flow o f heat into

horsepower, the universe would remain alive, uptight, and violent.

But when that moment came when all the hot spots had cooled
off, when all the purposeful mechanical energy had been changed
to heat, and that heat, too, had cooled off-only at that moment
would peace and quiet prevail in all parts o f the universe forever.
For Clausius, the end of his eighteen-year effort had been
reached, though not in a way he ever would have imagined. In
1850, he had set out merely to fashion a new theory o f heat. He
had done that, but he also had come upon an inequality in the laws
of Nature that revealed a chilling truism about human existence:
W e inhabited not a nurturing universe that sustained life but a
profiteering universe that existed at the expense o f life.
As a student of science, Clausius was reassured to think that it
probably would be billions of years before the universe won away
from us everything we held dear-the earth, the heavens, our chil
dren. There was, in other words, no immediate cause for alarm.
As a former student o f the Reverend Clausius, however, the
forty-three-year-old was disquieted by this unprecedented scien
tific proof that an end would come. He could grasp the mortality o f
the human body: "All flesh shall perish together," Job 34:15 stated,
"and man shall tum again to dust." Clausius could even imagine
the impermanence o f the earth or the life-giving sun or any other
,individual aspect o f the natural world; but this newly discovered
One he the
law affected everything. day, concluded glumly, whole
of God's creation would be dead and gone forever.

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210

EPILOtUE

It was a volcanic eruption that people everywhere would remem

ber for the rest o f their lives: O n August 26, 1883, the picturesque
Indonesian island o f Krakatoa exploded, killing 36,000 people and
causing the air around the globe to quiver uncontrollably.
The monumental eruption blew so much gas and dust into the
upper atmosphere, it blocked out the sun, making it look greenish
blue. Consequently, for the next three years, the temperature as far
away as Europe dropped by 10 percent, imparting to the summers
there an autumnlike coolness.
In Bonn, Germany, sixty-one-year-old Rudolf Clausius mar
veled at the aftereffects o f Krakatoa. They were, in his mind, a
dramatic illustration o f the force, the determination, with which
the universe was tumbling toward its ultimate fate of rest and relax
ation, like a boulder bounding down a steep mountainside or, as
the poet John Keats had written earlier in the century, like "a frag
ile dewdrop on its perilous way from a tree's summit."
Like all natural disasters, a volcano was nothing but a big engine.
It was powered by the heat that flowed from its very own subterra
nean pool of molten rock. This so-called magma chamber was to a
volcano what a boiler was to a steam engine or the metabolic pro
cess was to a warm-blooded animal.
The power produced by a volcano was enormous. Whereas a
human body produced no more than one-half horsepower and a
modest-size steam engine produced hundreds of horsepower,
Krakatoa's thunderous eruption had produced more than 30 billion
horsepower-lifting 20 billion cubic meters of ash and debris more
than twenty miles into the air, raising fifty-foot-high waves on the
ocean's surface, and dousing the lives o f 36,000 people!
There by of
were other effects produced Krakatoa: Some its
underground source of thermal energy had been spent producing a

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An UnprokfaLle IxperienC!e
211

loud sound, acoustic energy. Some of it had been changed into

bright light, luminous energy. Some o f it, too, had been wasted:
The heat simply had flowed from the 2,000-degree-Fahrenheit
magma chamber to the relatively cool tropical air o f the small is
land paradise that earlier had been Krakatoa.
According to Clausius's old bookkeeping scheme, some o f
Krakatoa's catastrophic effects had corresponded to positive en
tropy changes; others had corresponded to negative ones. All to
gether, however, they had combined so as to increase the overall
entropy of the universe, just as he would have expected.
The aristocratic-looking old professor shook his white-maned
head in amazement: In a flash, 36,000 persons and one volcano had
lost everything to the cosmic casino. It would take quite an effort
to compute the exact wagering that had gone on, so to speak, but
the inevitable conclusion was spelled out by the Law o f Entropy
Nonconservation: The universe had profited from the Krakatoa di
saster.
Because of Krakatoa, the universe was now one step closer to
realizing its eternal retirement oflukewarm tranquility: Thlrty-six
been
thousand-and-one engines had stilled. Temperature differ
ences had been evened out: The volcano and the bodies of the
victims were now a little cooler; the air around them was now a
little warmer.
This much of the grim vision of entropy's aging effects on the
universe had been the result o f Clausius's original discovery fifteen

years ago. Only six years ago, however, in 1877, an Austrian physi
cist named Ludwig Boltzmann had discerned a different way o f
describing the same thing.
Entropy, Boltzmann had proved mathematically, was a measure
o f disorganization. Therefore, he had c'oncluded, Clausius's Law of
Entropy Nonconservation meant that the universe was becoming

more chaotic as well as more relaxed.

This implied, o f course, that the universe must have started out

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212

being very tense and very well organized; it was as if, billions o f
years ago, Something or Someone had built a superbly designed
spring-driven clock and had wound it up good and tight. Like that
clock, the universe was now in the process o f slowly winding
down, slowly relaxing, slowly falling apart.
Right now, the universe was still quite well organized, all its
parts operating with scientific precision. There were well-defined
regions o f hot and cold; there were well-defined and well
designed engines producing well-organized mechanical energy
that could be' put to well-defined purposes.
With time, however, the universe was losing all o f those distin
guishing features: Temperature regions were blending into one
another, and engines were running out o f stearn, decaying and
blending into the surrounding ground. Even the solid ground it
self-all solids, in fact, and liquids, t o o - w e r e gradually disassociat
ing, everything ultimately becoming a hodgepodge o f nondescript
lukewarm gases.
Boltzmann's chaotic interpretation o f entropy only added to its
frightful nature, its incomprehensible ruthlessness. Now, more
than ever, it was clear that Clausius's Law of Entropy Nonconser
vation meant that the universe preyed on life and lifelike behavior;
it was inclined toward death and destruction.
The creation of life was an unnatural act, a temporary undoing
o f the natural disorder o f things. In short, life defied the laws o f
Nature! So how was this apparent defiance o f the entropy law pos
How it to in
sible? was possible for life come into being a universe
governed by a law inimical to life?
Clausius now knew the answer: Like all unnatural behavior, life
was the result o f some engine whose coercive effects were able to
reverse the laws o f normal behavior-the way a refrigerator was
able to make heat flow from cold to hot. The engine o f life-

Whatever or Whoever it might be--was something o f a mystery,

of course, but one thing about it was certain: Inevitably, its machi-

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An Unprolif..Lle Ixperienee
213

nations involved entropy changes, some positive and some nega

tive.
The newly created offspring itself corresponded to the biggest o f
the engine's negative entropy changes; that is, the chaos ofbiologi
cal chemicals that resulted from combining a woman's egg with a
man's sperm ultimately was transformed into a well-ordered orga
nism, thus diminishing the disorganization o f the universe. As such,
life represented an enormous loss, an unprofitable experience, to
the cosmic casino.
According to Clausius's u n f o r g i ~ g  entropy law, however, the
useful negative entropy changes produced by the engine o f life al
ways must be exceeded by the wasteful positive entropy changes.
Scientifically speaking, in other words, the creation o f a certain
measure o f life was unavoidably accompanied by an even greater
measure of death.
Clausius k n ew- an d felt-all too well what this meant. He and
his beloved wife, Adie, had been engines o f ife. Together they had
given birth to two boys and four girls, but in exchange, they had
paid a mortal price.
Back in 1875, Clausius had lost a wife and gained a daughter; in
the years that followed, furthermore, the newborn had flowered
beautifully. Recalled a family friend: "Never have I met a little girl
as cheerful, as joyous, with such a bounce in her step as that last
child who was never able to rest on her mother's breast."
But the exchange had not been equitable, the exhausted old
He in
man as
just thought. hadhetaken
once before had great pleasure
enjoyed raising
raising his the children,
own motherless
brothers and sisters. But despite his having received great quantities
oflove and companionship from them all, some part o f him could
never be cheered, some part o f him had died with his precious
Adie, irretrievably lost to the cosmic casino.
In o f our
the battleground daily existence, Clausius had discov
ered, the forces o f Death were stronger ultimately than the forces

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214

o f Life. He was still living, but he had suffered a net and grievous
loss. He was a casuality of the inequitable entropy law; only the
universe had gained from the exchange.
Two years before, in 1886, Clausius had remarried. Perhaps, the
aged professor thought, brushing at his tear-filled eyes with the
back of his hand-perhaps it was his feeble way o f trying to make
up for the loss of his first love and the loss o f his own youth and
vigor, his way of trying to defy the entropy law.
Deep in his heart and mind, o f course, the elderly Clausius real
ized that such defiance was futile. The Law of Entropy Noncon
servation required that life be lived forward, from birth to death.
As the young Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud would put it
one day: "The goal o f all life is death."
To wish for the reverse was to wish for the entropy of the uni
verse to diminish with time, which was impossible. One might as
well wish for autumn leaves to assemble themselves in neat stacks
just as soon as they had fallen from trees or for water to freeze
whenever it was heated.
For Clausius, the season o f life was coming to an end. Doctors
explained that his body had lost its ability to absorb vitamin B 12 ,
which resulted in his having pernicious anemia. His body's fire was
flickering, as it were, being smothered by a lack of oxygen.
By the summer o f 1888, Clausius's illness had produced irrevers
ible changes to his brain and spinal cord: He couldn't remember
things and he had trouble walking. Mercifully, on August 24, he
died, surrounded by his adoring family and a few close friends.
His colleagues around the world mourned the loss of a great
scientist; his students, the loss of a great professor; his children, the
loss of a great father. The world had profited from Clausius's long
and productive life. And now that this kind and clever engine had
been stilled, the greedy universe as a whole had profited from his
death.

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E = = m x c2

(uriotify RdleJ .Le liqL't

Albert Einstein and the Theory of
Special Relativity

i f a little knowledge is dangerous, where

is the man who has so much as to be
out of danger?
- T . H. HUXLEY

t was the spring of 1895, and for sixteen-year-old Albert Ein

stein, this field trip through the Alps in northeast Switzerland

I was the nearest thing to paradise he could imagine. For the next
three days, he would not have to sit in a classroom and listen to
some boring lecture; here he and his curiosity wer.e free to roam up
and down some o f the most spectacular landscape in the world.
He would have preferred being alone, o f course, instead o f with

his classmates from the Swiss cantonal school in Aarau and his geol
ogy teacher, Friedrich Miihlberg. He hated being led around like
some pack animal, but he consoled himself by tuning out Miihl
berg's running commentary and turning his attention and thoughts
to wherever he pleased along the way.
O n this particular day, Miihlberg had decided to lead the group
up to the summit ofMt. Santis. It was raining lightly when they set

215
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216

out at dawn, but no one complained, because the misty view was
so spectacular, silhouetted against the brightening reddish tint o f
the eastern horizon.
For hours, the small tribe o f students struggled their way up the
mountain. The rain intensified, but everyone was wearing hiking
boots, so they managed to keep their footing. Everyone, that is,
except for Einstein. He hadn't paid much attention to the way he
had dressed for the trek; consequently, he now found himself slip
ping and sliding up the steep-faced slope in his street shoes.
Late that morning, the students were well up the 8,OOO-foot
peak when it happened. Curious about some edelweiss growing
out of a dark crack in a huge outcropping o f ro<rk, young Einstein
leaned too far over and lost his balance. As he began tumbling
downward, he tried to grab a bush, a boulder-anything!-but to
no avail; he was plummeting to his death.
Just below him, classmate Adolf Fisch looked up and instantly
apprehended Einstein's peril. Without hesitation, Fisch fumbled
with his climbing stick and held it out, just as his ill-shod classmate
came hurdling down. Instinctively young Einstein reached for the
alpenstock and held on; his fall had been broken.
Oftentimes, a brush with death causes a person to reevaluate the
meaning o f his life, to become more introspective, even more reli
gious. But not Einstein; at sixteen, he was already so disengaged
from the common reilities o f life, it was hard to imagine his
becoming any more introverted.
As for becoming more religious, young Einstein was Jewish by
birth but never had believed in a personal God who dwelled in
heaven. Instead, he believed in a pantheistic God who dwelled
here on earth, in the flowers, the rain-even the slippery rocks of
the Swiss Alps. "I believe in a God who reveals Himself in the
harmony o f all that exists," a middle-aged Einstein would write,
"not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and actions o f
men. "

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217

Despite his close encounter with death, therefore, the youngster

remained curious not about the imponderable beauty o f some
supernatural Kingdom but about the ponderable beauty of the
natural world-for him, a heaven on earth. "I have no particular
talent," he would say later in life. "I am merely extremely inquisi
tive."
In particular, the teenager was "extremely inquisitive" about
light. Recently a Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell
had offered mathematical evidence for a most extraordinary i d e a 
that light consisted o f waves, waves made out o f electricity and mag
netism.
These hypothetical undulations were difficult to picture, but the
principle could be illustrated by thinking o f a woman trying to
adjust the position o f a large rug by grabbing one edge o f it and
flicking it with her wrist; invariably she produced a ripple in the
rug that traveled across the room.
According to Maxwell, a similar thing happened every time
electricity was switched on (the equivalent of flicking the rug): It
always produced an invisible ripple o f electromagnetism that trav
That
eled across space. ripple, Maxwell had proved mathemati
cally, was precisely what we called a light wave.
For the past few years now, young Einstein had wondered what
a ripple o f electricity and magnetism actually looked like. One way
to find out, he supposed, would be to pull up alongside the ripple
and stare at it. But it was merely an intellectual daydream, he had

realized, to suppose one could ever travel at 300 million meters per
second, the speed of a light wave.
If only it were sound waves that interested him. They traveled at
a mere 300 meters per second, making it far easier to imagine what
would happen ifhe pulled up alongside them. What would happen?
The surprising answer, the young man had concluded, was that he

would cease hearing the ripples o f sound.

For example, i f he were to travel away from an orchestra at

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218

exactly the speed of sound, then his ears would be moving with the
music (like a surfer riding a wave); consequently, the notes them
selves would be moving alongside his ears, not into them. As he
looked back, he would see the musicians, but he would not hear
their music.
Could this same thing be true of light? If by some miracle he
could travel away from the orchestra at the speed of light, young
Einstein had speculated, the inevitable conclusion seemed to be
that the light waves would travel alongside his eyes, not into them.
Therefore, when he looked back at the musicians, he would not
see them; it would be as if they all had disappeared!
To young Einstein, this had seemed to suggest a universe too
supernatural for his tastes, a place where anything-people, plan
ets, galaxies-could appear to be here one moment and gone the
next. Later in his life, as he continued to grapple with this night
marish brain teaser, he would shake his head in frustration and
disbelief, saying: "Who would imagine that this simple law [con
cerning the speed o f light] has plunged the conscientiously
thoughtful physicist into the greatest intellectual difficulties?"
For now, however, the sixteen-year-old brushed himself off and
breathed a sigh of relief As he started back down the mountain,
with his classmates and teacher trudging protectively nearby, Ein
stein congratulated himself for having escaped unharmed. The
danger was over, he thought, though in truth, it had only begun.
In the years to come, Albert Einstein's indomitable curiosity
would lead humanity on an intellectual trek exceedingly more per
ilous than the rain-plagued hike he had just survived. In pursuing
the answers he sought concerning light, furthermore, Einstein
would not rest until he reached the very summit o f scientific
knowledge.
It would be a praiseworthy achievement, but the unexpectedly
frightful view from the top would leave us teetering on the precari
ous pinnacle, wondering what to do next. Should we press onward

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219

and upward, to loftier peaks still? O r should we seek a way back

down again? These, we would come to realize, were questions
science alone could not answer.

VINI

Never before the mid-nineteenth century had there been such

hope o f using the mathematical and experimental techniques o f
science to understand, at long last, the origins and behavior o f ordi
nary people. Surely, pundits predicted, the immediate future be
longed to the human sciences.
In 1859, for example, a British naturalist named Charles Robert
Darwin published On the Origin if peaes} in which he refuted the
biblical story o f Creation. According to Darwin's heretical new
theory, all living things, including human beings, had evolved
gradually, via a two-step process he called natural selection; it was
Nature's version of he artifiaal selection that breeders since the New

Stone Age, 10,000 years ago, had used to domesticate countless

plants and animals.
The first step in natural selection, Darwin explained, occurred
when parents gave birth to offspring. Biologically .speaking,
though they resembled their parents, the progeny were unique in
dividuals, possessing a combination o f genes like no one else's.

The second step, Darwin theorized, began with the assumption

that, at any given moment, in any given region, there always
would be far more offspring coming into the world than conceiv
ably could survive. Therefore, the progeny would be forced to
compete with Nature and each other for the limited resources; in
the ensuing struggle, Darwin concluded, those scions whose

unique genetic traits gave them the greatest advantage would pre
vail and reproduce.

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As an example, Darwin cited the moths that lived in and around

the foliage of London. As a result o f the Industrial Revolution, the
city's buildings and trees had become splotched with sooty pollu
tion. At the same time, Darwin had observed, moths born with
naturally spotted wings had flourished at the expense o f those born
with plain-colored wings; the spotted wings were an advantage,
Darwin conjectured, because they blended in with the background
and escaped being noticed by predators.
Though he believed strongly in his controversial new theory,
Darwin himself was timid about defending it in public. That in
timidating task fell to his bravest friends and colleagues, most nota
bly the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley-who others came to call
Darwin's bulldog-and the philosopher Herbert Spencer.
In the years that followed, Spencer proved to be exceedingly
articulate and persuasive, coining the catchy phrase "survival of he
fittest" to explain Darwin's complex ideas to the masses. In the
process of championing the theory, however, Spencer took certain
unwarranted liberties with it, especially as applied to human soci
ety.
According to Spencer, as a result of day-to-day competition in
society-at home, at work, in sports, and so forth-the least
genetically well-endowed people systematically were being
weeded out in a process he called sodal Darwinism. Though scien
tists, including Darwin himself, scoffed at this perversion o f a legit
imate theory, it became a popular way for unscrupulous entrepre
of of
neurs the Industrial Age to rationalize their exploitation the
poor.
Arguably the most extreme and chilling exemplar o f Spencer
like thinking was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
"W e must seek the superman," he wrote, "who will represent the
instincts o f competition and survival."

Nietzsche laughed scornfully at humility, compassion, and all

the other Christian virtues he believed made people weak and ser-

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221

vile. "Observe suffering well and use it as a source of pleasure," he

advised arrogandy; "destroy the infmn so that our experience will
always be marked by the evidence o f a superman."
Spencer's and Nietzsche's way o f thinking soon led to a full
blown eugenics movement that began promoting the application o f
age-old selective breeding techniques to humans. The man who
named and led the movement was an English psychologist named
Francis Galton; in 1874, he wrote the tract English Men: their Nature_
and Nurture, after which he dedicated himself to eugenics research
and the creation o f national breeding programs to produce intel-
lectual and physical superhumans. -
Predictably, it was not long afterward that the strangely evolving
science of natural selection became an instrument o f evil. By the
1870s, eugenics was being used by government leaders to rational
ize their nationalism and by hate-mongers to rationalize their bigo
tries, including anti-Semitism; to many, eugenics provided indis
putable scientific proof that Jews were an inferior, loathsome kind
of human being.
In 1879, in Ulm, Germany, this rising tide o f scientifically abet
ted prejudice made life less than pleasant for Hermann and Pauline
Einstein. Nevertheless, they had no real choice but to stick it out;
not only was Hermann's business located there, but Pauline was
pregnant with their first child.
Elsewhere in the world, 1879 was turning out to be a historic
year not for ignorance and darkness but for creativity and light: In
Menlo Park, New Jersey, for example, Thomas Edison was invent
ing the light bulb, while in Edinburgh, Scodand, James Clerk
Maxwell was nearing the end o f an extraordinary life, during
which he had been the first to discern the true nature o f a light
wave.
Also in that year, on March 14, the Einsteins gave birth to a boy,
whom they named Albert. In little more than two decades, their
son's brilliance would bum with the intensity o f a trillion light

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bulbs, irradiating a mountainous frontier that stretched farther than

Maxwell or any other scientist had ever ventured; ironically, how
ever, initial indications w e n ~  that this newborn had been born
mentally impaired.
One might say, in fact, that Albert Einstein's initial development
was as slow as light was swift-slow to talk, slow to read, slow to
learn. In short, he seemed destined for anything but greatness.
His uncle Jakob, however, preferred to believe that Einstein was
merely distracted, not dull. Whereas most babies would stare at a
mobile placed above their crib, his nephew's attention seemed to
be fIxed on the enchanting mobiles-the mental i m a g e r y - o f
some unarticulated, inner world.
One of the few times young Einstein came out o f his shell was
when, at fIve years old, he got his fIrst look at a compass, a gift from
his father. The taciturn child had been so startled by the needle's
mysterious ability to point north that, in his words later on, he
"trembled and grew cold."
In the years that followed, Einstein's development became even
more unusual and his upbringing even more unorthodox. His par
ents did not attend synagogue nor keep a kosher house; shortly
after Einstein was born, furthermore, they moved to a Catholic
suburb of Munich and thereafter enrolled him at the local Catholic
school.
The fIrst day of class was traumatic enough for most kindergart
ners, but for young Einstein it was particularly jarring. At home, he
had been allowed his introversion; but now, with its strict rules,
this religious institution forced him to participate in, and conform
to, the outside world.
, Worst of all," Einstein would say one day, "is when a school is
mainly run by fear, power and artifIcial authority. All it produces is
a servile helot." From that point onward, Einstein came to hate
discipline. The more his teachers insisted on conformity, the more
like an outsider he felt; it was an emotion that would stay with him
for most of his life.

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For the next five years, young Einstein complained about hav
ing to attend this particular school, but at his parents' urging, he
persevered. When time came for him to attend the local secondary
school, the Luitpold Gymnasium, things did not improve; he de
spised its rote style oflearning and stem teachers.
Unfortunately for Einstein, the feelings o f disapproval were mu
tual. "Y ou will never amount to anything," his Latin teacher
scolded him one day. It wasn't that Einstein came across as a failure;
he earned decent grades. It was that he gave the distinct impression
o f being a smart-aleck.
That impression, moreover, was not entirely inaccurate; Ein
stein had become quite smart---and c o c k y - b y reading books of
his own choosing; guided solely by his curiosity, he had learned far
more from those books than from his militaristic teachers at school.
During his first year at Luitpold, for example, Einstein cuddled
up to Popular Books on Physical Sdences, an engaging collection o f
volumes written by one Aaron Bernstein. As he read through the
pages, the youngster was astonished to learnjust how very far nine
teenth-century science had come in its description of the universe.
For example, scientists had figured out that the earth spun
around its polar axis like a figure skater, creating a centrifugal force
that would have long since tom the planet apart had it not been
counterbalanced by the earth's own gravitational self-attraction. In
deed, Bernstein explained, more than two centuries earlier, Isaac
Newton had discovered that this epic tug-of-war had caused our
planet to take on the shape o f an orange--slighdy flattened at the
poles and bulging around the equator.
For the next several years, young Einstein filled his head with
Bernstein's wonderful explanations. He was hooked on the en
thralling series, the way many today are addicted to soap operas;
just as soon as the youngster had finished one volume, he was eager
to begin with the next.
In the process, the ten-year-old became familiar with a brilliant
scientist named Rudolf Clausius, who recendy had died in nearby

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Prussia. Because ·of Clausius's arresting discoveries concerning

heat, young Einstein learned, scientists now were hot on the trail
o f explaining the extraordinary brightness o f the sun and primor
dial history o f the earth.
One o f those scientists was an Irishman named William Thom
son. According to him, Einstein read with fascination, the sun was
so brilliant because it was on fire. Long ago, Thomson believed,
the earth, too, had been on fire; furthermore, judging from the
present rate at which it was losing heat, he figured, the earth must
have cooled down enough to become habitable some 100 million
years ago.
Thomson's calculation had unnerved Charles Darwin's defend
ers, Einstein read in youthful wonderment, because 100 million
years was not nearly long enough for natural selection to have
worked its effect. In order to account for the plants and animals
alive on the earth today, Darwin's provocative theory needed ten
times more years than that.
In the process o f reading his way through all the main ideas of
contemporary science, young Einstein even came across a discus
sion concerning magnetism, the phenomenon that had so startled
him as a child. Michael Faraday, he learned, had shown that elec
tricity and magnetism were the two fists o f a single force-elec
tromagnetism-though the power behind them remained to this
day an intriguing mystery.
Concerned that his son was casting himself too far adrift from
ordinary society, Hermann Einstein decided one day to visit the
Luitpold Gymnasium. He was led into the headmaster's office,
where he proceeded to discuss Albert's problems.
The elder Einstein was not an Orthodox Jew, but he believed
that at thirteen, a boy became a man. His son was nearing that age,
he explained, and should be giving some thought to a career.
What, Hermann Einstein inquired politely, did the esteemed
headmaster suggest? "It doesn't matter," came the startling reply.

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225

"He will never make a success of anything."

Over the years, apart from his auto didactic readings, Einstein's
idiosyncratic world had been shaped by his mother's interest in
classical music and uncle Jakob's success as an inventor. As a result
o f their influence, young Einstein had come to believe that the
natural world was like a sublime symphony or a clever invention: It
was beautiful and functioned so well simply because all its parts
worked in perfect harmony.
That conviction was reaffirmed most dramatically, when in Sep
tember 1891, young Einstein came across a geometry book at the
local bookstore. That "holy geometry book [made an] indescrib
able impression on me," Einstein would recall later, because it was
perfectly and harmoniously logical, just like Nature.
Einstein's curiosity about the amity between mathematics and
Nature increased even more when he learned about an intriguing
sequence o f numbers, called the Fibonacci series: 1, 1 , 2 , 3 , 5 , 8 , 13,
21,34, 55, 89, and so on. Even though it was not obvious, there
was a pattern to these numbers: Each one was the sum o f the two
numbers before it (e.g., 13 = 8 + 5).
in by
First Leonardo
named concocted"Fibonacci"
the thirteenth century
da Pisa, an had
the series Italian merchant
been widely
regarded as little more than a numerical curiosity. But then, Ein
stein learned, botanists had discovered that there were surprising
coincidences between the numerical pattern o f the Fibonacci series
and the growth pattern o f many flowering plants.
common
As they developed, for example, the branches of a
sneezewort forked in exact accordance with the Fibonacci series:
First the seedling's main stem forked (1), then one of its secondary
stem's forked (1), then simultaneously a secondary and tertiary
stem forked (2), then simultaneously three lesser stems forked (3),
and so forth.

Furthermore, Einstein learned, the numbers of petals of various

flowers, too, recapitulated the numbers o f the Fibonacci series: An

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iris almost always had three petals, a primrose five petals, a ragwort
thirteen petals, a daisy thirty-four petals, and a michaelmas daisy
either fifty-five or eighty-nine petals.
All these revelations had a single cumulative effect on the young
Einstein: Since there was this wonderful parallel between Numbers
and Nature, then why not use the laws of mathematics to articulate
the laws o f Nature? "It should be possible by means of pure deduc
tion," he concluded, "to find the picture-that is, the t h e o r y - o f
every natural process, including those o f living organisms."
The beauty of Nature was more than skin deep, he had discov
ered, and ifhe wished to describe it artfully, poetically, he would
need to labor long and hard to become numerically literate. There
fore, an older Einstein would recall: "Between the ages o f twelve
and sixteen, I learned the elements o f mathematics, including the
principles o f differential and integral calculus."
During those years, the precocious teenager discovered the se
crets of something one might call the 5hrinkingfactor. It was a math
ematical trick he would call upon many years later when struggling
to formulate his famous equation.
The shrinking factor, written 1 -
referred to any process 5,

where the whole of something-a bank account, a tank o f gas, a

reputation, anything--was shrunk by some small amount 5. For
example, 1 - 0.01 meant that the contents o f a perfume bottle, say,
had been reduced by one-hundredth o f ts original amount, a mere
dab.
The shrinking factor, Einstein learned, could be invoked many
times over. In the perfume example, (1 - 0.01)5 was the math
ematically concise way o f saying the bottle's level had been re
duced by a dab every day forjive straight days. To compute such
cases, the young man learned, there was a simple rule, in which N
stood for the number o f dabs:

(1 - s)N equaled approximately 1 - (N x s)

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In the perfume bottle example, N was equal to five dabs and s

was equal to a hundredth. Consequently:

(1 - 0.01)5 equaled approximately 1 - (5 X 0.01)

That was how much perfume was left after five dabs-about
0.95 o f the original amount, which was to say about 95 percent.
For any budding mathematician, this was an essential trick o f he
trade. For Einstein, it was to be the alpenstock that would assist
him in hiking up and down the treacherous landscape o f his own
revolutionary ideas about the natural world.
While Einstein struggled successfully to master mathematics, his
father strove unsuccessfully to make a go of one business after an
other. When Albert had been but a year old, his father's engineer
ing workshop in Ulm had failed, which was why the family had
moved to Munich. Since then, Einstein's father and uncle Jakob
had operated a small electrochemical plant, but now it, too, was
going bankrupt. "Most o f all," Einstein would reminisce a few
years hence, "I have been struck by the misfortune of my poor
parents, who for so many years have not had a happy minute."
In the aftermath of this latest fiasco, Einstein's parents and
younger sister decided to leave Germany altogether and to journey
across the' Alps to Italy, where a wealthy branch o f his mother's
family promised to help them set up a new business. The fifteen
year-old himself was left behind, to live in a boarding house until
he
finished school; at least, that was the plan.
It took only six months, however, for Einstein and the Luitpold
Gymnasium to come to the same conclusion: He had to go. Fed up
with Luitpold's authoritarianism, Einstein persuaded the family
doctor to write a note excusing him from school, blaming it on
"nervous exhaustion." Deciding not to wait for the letter, Luit

pold expelled him outright, claiming that "your presence in the

class is disruptive and affects the other students."

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Several weeks later, when the young refugee showed up in

Milan, at his parents' house, they were thunderstruck. Without a
diploma, their son would have no chance of garnering any of the
best-payingjobs, whether in the military, postal, or railway service.
Worse still, even his own growing ambition to be a high school
physics teacher might not be realized, because most decent univer
sities would never think o f enrolling a high school dropout.
The one notable exception was the famous Federal Institute o f
Technology (FIT), in nearby Zurich, Switzerland. School regula
tions allowed any students to attend, so long as they passed the
formidable entrance exam. Einstein decided to try but fell victim to
his haughty self-confidence.
The teenager ended up doing very well on the mathematics part
of he test but scored so poorly on modem languages, zoology, and
botany, he failed the exam. It was, he admitted later in life, "en
tirely my own fault, because I made no attempt whatever to pre
pare myself"
At this point, Einstein proved to be every bit his father's son.
After each business failure, Hermann Einstein had never quit; in -
stead, he always had packed up and gone somewhere else to start
anew. Similarly, following his recent failures, Hermann Einstein's
teenage son decided to relocate to the picturesque Swiss village o f
Aarau; there, he would resume his high school studies and prepare
for a second try at the FIT entrance exam.
Though his terrible experience at the Luitpold Gymnasium had
made him dislike school, Einstein was pleasantly surprised by the
Swiss educational system. At Aarau, teachers willingly spared the
discipline and spoiled the mind; they indulged Einstein's unrelent
ing and undisciplined inquisitiveness, and in return, he indulged
them with "happy and responsible work such as cannot be
achieved by regimentation, however subtle."
He but in
attended the Aarau school for only a year, that short
time, his private world, which for years had huddled in the shad-

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ows o f German intolerance, was now suddenly flooded with the

light o f Swiss sufferance. He felt liberated, energized, ready to ex
plode with unconcealed curiosity. "Sure o f himself," a classmate
would recall later, "he strode energetically up and down in a rapid,
I might almost say crazy, tempo o f a restless spirit which carries a
whole world in itself"
It was during this time that Einstein came perilously close to
losing his life while hiking in the mountains. In straining to count
the number o f outer petals in an edelweiss some distance a w a y - t o
see if it was consistent with the Fibonacci series about which he
had learned several years earlier-the sixteen-year-old suddenly
lost his balance and nearly tumbled hundreds o f feet to the ground
below.
It was also during this time he began asking questions about the
speed o f light. Little did the teenager realize that in struggling to
find the answers, he would have to confront a scientific establish
ment no less towering, no less intimidating, than the Swiss Alps
themselves.
Undaunted for now, Albert Einstein graduated from high school
on September 5, 1896. Full o f vigor and optimism, he left Aarau
for Zurich, whereupon he retook FIT's entrance exam and, this
time, passed it.
Feeling freer than ever to pursue his own curiosity, Einstein
proceeded to take advantage o f FIT's relatively relaxed environ
ment. He often neglected to do assigned homework, preferring
instead to.spend long hours reading increasingly technical books o f
his own choosing, including ones describing Faraday's work on
electricity and magnetism and Maxwell's theory o f electromag
netic waves, which he considered to be "the most fascinating sub
ject at the time."
In the process, he became increasingly arrogant, expressing con

tempt for ordinary people and their "philistine" lives. Most o f all,
he denigrated professors who forced him to do their bidding.

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"It is, in fact, a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment o f
seeing and searching can be promoted by means o f coercion," Ein
stein would say later. "T o the contrary, I believe that it would be
possible to rob even a healthy beast o f prey o f its voraciousness
. . . with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continu
ously, even when not hungry."
Einstein even resented having to take final exams at the end o f
every semester. "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for
the examinations," he said, "whether one liked it or not."
"H e made no bones about voicing his opinions," an acquaint
ance would recall later, "whether they offended or not." Unfortu
nately for Einstein, more often than not, his candid complaints did
offend others, especially his instructors.
During a field trip, for example, his geology instructor called on
Einstein to explain the rock formations they had come upon:
"Now, Einstein, how do the strata run here," the teacher asked,
"from below upwards or vice versa?" Churlishly Einstein shrugged
and said: "It is pretty much the same to me whichever way they
run, Professor."
To make matters worse, he also managed to offend his parents
back in Milan by falling in love with Mileva Marie, a young Ser
bian woman of whom they disapproved most strenuously. "You
are ruining your future and destroying your opportunities," Ein
stein's mother pleaded; "no decent family will have her."
Einstein and Marie had met in their freshman year, whereupon

he had exulted at having found "a creature who is my equal, and

who is as strong and independent as I am!" Next to physics, he
professed to love her more than anything in the world, often writ
ing affectionate quartets to her, such as this one:

Oh my! That Johnnie boy!

So crazy With desire,

While thinking of his Dollie,
His pillow catches fire.

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Up untilJuly 27,1900, the love-struck couple had seemed des

tined for a life o f happiness and success. O n that day, however,
having completed their coursework and taken the final examina
tion required by the university, they each received their test results.
The letter Einstein received contained wonderful news: He had
passed the final exam, earning his diploma. MariC's letter, however,
was filled with dreadful tidings: She had failed, having earned good
scores on the exam's physics section, but not its mathematics por
tion.
Adding to the couple's woes, Einstein was forced to pay dearly
for his years o f insolent independence. H e had accumulated what
amounted to a 3.3 grade-point a v e r ~ g e  and had every right to ex
pect the FIT faculty to offer him a teaching position; but Einstein
received no such invitation. Indeed, certain professors campaigned
actively behind the scenes to torpedo any possible job prospects. "I
was suddenly abandoned by everyone," Einstein recalled in later
years, "a pariah, discounted and litde loved."
For the young, would-be scientist, it was a pitiful and hopeless
beginning to the new century. By contrast, science itself was enter
ing the next one hundred years full o f confidence and high
hopes-and for good reason.
Over the past two millennia, science had thoroughly succeeded
in solving the essential mysteries inherent in the ancient Greek
description o f the physical world; as a result, each o f the age-old
elements Earth, Air, Fire, and Water was now the subject o f a
thriving scientific discipline. In recent years, science even had
managed to tie up two important loose ends concerning the age o f
the earth -and the electromagnetic force.
Just four years ago, in 1896, French scientist Antoine Henri Bec
querel had discovered invisible, high-energy emissions coming
from uranium ore. Shordy thereafter, husband-and-wife team
Pierre and Marie (nee Sklodowska) Curie had discovered similar
emanations coming from two previously undiscovered elements,
which they had named radium and polonium.

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Because these emissions gave every indication of being a spon

taneous phenomenon-no one had worked to elicit t h e m - i t ap
peared that science had stumbled on a free source of energy. Also,
this discovery seemed to have given the embattled Darwinists new
life.
Taking into account the heat emanating from these newly found
elements in the ground, scientists had refigured their estimates o f

how rapidly the earth was cooling off. Though still quite specula
tive, some o f their conclusions now indicated the planet could have
become habitable long enough ago for natural selection to have
shaped life.
The other loose end had been tied three years ago, in 1897,
when British scientist Joseph John Thomson had discovered a par

ticle tinier even than an atom; it came to be called the electron-and

proved to be the long-sought-after source o f Faraday's electromag
netic force; scientists were hopeful that this subatomic particle
might also help to explain the inscrutable emissions radiating freely
from uranium, radium, and polonium.
In a speech delivered at the tum o f he century, the Irish scientist

William Thomson congratulated science on having achieved such

a marvelous understanding o f the natural world. All that remained
was a kind o f mopping-up operation, he boasted, requiring little
more than "adding a few decimal places to results already ob
tained."
Thomson, however, had neglected to mention the still
unresolved mystery surrounding the ancient Greeks' fifth element,
the ether, a quintessential substance from which the heavens sup
posedly had been made. Moreover, he had no idea that looming
on the horizon o f science was a small dark cloud whose name was
Albert Einstein; in just five more years, he would rain all over
Thomson's cheery forecast and take by storm science's tidy little
description o f the cosmos.

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VIUI

Light is such an essential part o f human existence that the largest

part o f the brain is devoted exclusively to the interpretation o f
visual information. More than 60 percent of what we know, cog
nitive psychologists estimate, is a direct consequence o f what we
have seen; put another way, ifit weren't for the agency o f light, we
would be 60 percent less enlightened than we are today, putting us
about where we were during the so-called Dark Ages.
Most o f what we learn through our eyes concerns space and mat
ter, the two most tangible aspects o f reality. Merely by looking,
with the aid o f telescopes and microscopes, we are able to know
the size o f the universe and what kind of material it contains.
With our remaining senses, we can fill in the details. In the end,
therefore, by noting carefully and systematically its individual
sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells, we are able to know a
great deal about the natural world at large.
Even with the help o f all five senses, however, we Homo sapiens

are unequipped to apprehend clearly time and energy, the two most
intangible phenomena in the universe. Unlike space and matter,
time and energy are by themselves neither visible nor sensible; in
deed, the only way they are knowable to us is by the palpable
efi'ects they have on space and matter.
With the passage o f time, for example, spatial things tend to

change shape-like a leaky balloon that slowly collapses-and ma

terial things age. By witnessing these temporal phenomena, we are
able to infer what time itself must be like.
The same goes for energy. It has the power to transform space
and matter in myriad ways, for example, via an explosion; by ob
serving those changes, we are able to acquire an intuitive under

standing of what energy itself must be like.

As recently as the late nineteenth century, scientists believed that

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we would never be able to perceive time and energy indepen

dently o f space and matter. Pure energy and pure time, so to speak,
were thought to be as imperceptible to us as a pure personality
that is, a personality unattached to a person!
Amazingly, however, despite the severe limitations of our
senses, philosophers were able to surmise the behavior o f the four
phenomena quite welL By the time Einstein was born, in fact,
scientists had synthesized a clear-eyed, coherent theory of the uni
verse solely in terms of space, time, matter, and energy.
Opposites though they were, for example, space and time
seemed to share at least one very important trait: Both were abso
lutes, in that everyone, everywhere, reckoned them in exactly the
same way. One person's inch was another person's inch; one per
son's second was another person's second; and so forth.
According to this theory o f the cosmos, people never disagreed
as to the length, width, or depth o f anything spatial or the duration
o f anything secular. In that respect, the absolute space and time o f
nineteenth-century science were like universal moral standards,
according to which everyone always agreed on what was right and
wrong.
That strict moral code also seemed to include speed, defined by
the familiar formula:

SPEED = DISTANCE COVERED -:- TIME ELAPSED

For example, passengers aboard two adjacent trains parked at a

station might suddenly be confused i f one o f the trains started to
move forward, ever so slowly and smoothly. Which o f them really
was moving? the passengers looking through their windows at one
another might wonder, unable to feel any rumbling beneath their
seats.

Despite their momentary confusion, science believed, those pas

sengers soon would realize which of the trains was moving and

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which was still p a r k e d - i f not by some subde sensory clue (such as

being pressed against their seats), then by doing some kind o f ex
periment (such as watching the reaction o f marbles rolling around
on the floor of the train).
In principle, the motion o f one train was absolutely distinguishable
from the motion o f another. In other words, when it came to
judging speed, ultimately there were no disagreements. As with
space and time, science believed that speed was absolute, not rela
tive.
The absoluteness o f speed c o u l ~  be illustrated by imagining a
spaceship called the Starlight Express streaking through outer space.
Watching it, let us say, were three tourists, two of whom were
aboard ships o f their o w n - o n e moving toward the Express at one
meter per second, the other moving away at that speed. The third
person, say, was watching comfortably from the window of a space
station parked nearby.
To the space-station tourist, let us suppose, the Express's speed
was 100 meters per second (about 200 mph). To the person mov
ing toward the ship at 1 meter per second, therefore, the Express's
per plus
speed was 101 meters second (the ship's speed the tourist's
own speed). Finally, to the person moving away from it, the Ex
press's speed was 99 meters per second (the ship's speed minus the
tourist's own speed).
According to science's belief in the absoluteness o f space and
time, the disagreements were illusory. All three tourists agreed on
took own
the ship's speed, once they into account their different
motions with respect to the Express; in the long run, that is, they all
agreed absolutely that the Express's speed was 100 meters per sec
ond.
The same was thought to be true about reckoning the speed o f
any kind o f object or phenomenon. If the three tourists were

watching starlight, instead o f a spaceship, they still would come to

the same conclusion; they would all measure slighdy different

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236

speeds, but after taking into consideration their own speeds, they
would all agree absolutely that light traveled at 300 million meters
per second.
Not to be left out, the other pair o f opposites, matter and en
ergy, also seemed to have at least one thing in common: Both were
indestructible; both appeared to obey conservation laws that went
something like this: "Matter cannot be created or destroyed, so the
total weight o f the universe is always the same; likewise, energy
cannot be created or destroyed, so the total energy of the universe
is always the same." (See "An Unprofitable Experience.")
It might appear as if matter could be destroyed, as when a log
was burned and all that remained were ashes. But scientists had
come to believe that in such cases, matter was merely transformed,
not destroyed; that is, fire changed a log from cellulose to carbon,
plus vast quantities of smoky gases, but in the end, the total weight
o f the combusted materials was the same as the log's original
weight.
Similarly for energy. Just as there were different kinds o f
money-pennies, nickels, dimes-there were different kinds o f
energy-thermal, acoustic, kinetic, and so forth. And just as it was
possible to exchange, say, five 'pennies for one nickel, Nature con
stantly allowed one kind o f energy to be exchanged for others o f
equal value.
Kinetic energy, for example, was the energy of motion. In the
shorthand o f mathematics, where m stood for an object's massive
ness and v its speed, the formula for it was simple:

KINETIC ENERGY =m x 1h , r

That is, a lightweight, slow-moving object such as a cork float

ing gently down a river had very little kinetic energy; by contrast,
a massive, fast-moving object such as a boulder tumbling down a
mountainside had a lot o f kinetic energy. (See "Between a Rock
and a Hard Life.")

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237

If he boulder were to slam into a tree on its way down, some of

its kinetic energy would change into mechanical energy Qeveling
the tree) and some into acoustic energy (making a loud thwacking
sound). With what little kinetic energy it had left over, it would
continue tumbling down the mountainside more slowly. The bot
tom line? In the end, the sum o f mechanical, acoustic, and vestigial
kinetic energies would equal the boulder's original amount o f ki
netic energy.
Having come up with this well-organized theory o f the uni
verse, scientists were then faced with the formidable job o f decid
ing where light fit in. It was a topic that always had baffled them,
primarily because light behaved so differently from anything else.
Light appeared to be able to get from here to there instantane
ously, as if exempt from the laws of ordinary, earthbound existence.
Even stranger, its behavior was decidedly ghostlike: Light could
pass unscathed through solid, glasslike materials.
For thousands of years, philosophers from Aristotle to Newton
had defended the idea that light consisted o f tiny particles. Like so
many microscopic fireflies, they had reasoned, these specks of ight
were emitted or reflected by visible objects and received into our
eyes; that was allegedly how we saw things.
These imponderable flecks o f light supposedly were able to
move so sprightly as to appear instantaneous and had no trouble
penetrating transparent solids. Furthermore, Newton had ex
plained, these variously sized whits affected the eyes "according to
their bigness and m i x t u r ~ t h e  biggest [are associated] with the
strongest colors, reds and yellows; the least with the weakest, blues
and violets."
With the weight of Newton's illustrious reputation behind it,
this vision of light had come to be treated very seriously, even
religiously. OnJune 13, 1773, however, there was born in London
someone who was to cast upon the venerable theory a dark shadow
of suspicion.
His name was Thomas Young, and though he preceded Albert

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Einstein by more than a century, both men were gripped by a

supranatural curiosity about the natural world. Moreover, both
were outspoken outsiders, warriors destined to do batde with the
scientific establishments o f their day.
Ironically, as an infant, Young could not have been more differ
ent from Einstein. He was fast to talk, fast to read, and fast to learn;
by the time he was sixteen, for example, Young was fluent in nine
languages, mathematics among them.
Young went on to become a physician as well as an amateur
scientist. At age twenty-six, he dared to suggest that light consisted
o f waves, not particles, and that "colors o f light consist in the dif
ferent frequencies o f vibration. "
The most loosely folded waves-ones whose shape resembled
gendy rolling furrows-caused the eyes to see red. At the other
extreme, waves whose shape resembled the tighdy folded corruga
tions in a cardboard box created the impression o f violet.
In his own mind, Young tended to compare light waves with
ripples on a pond. Whenever two ripples met head-on, he pointed
out, instead o f colliding, they passed through one another in a
ghostlike fashion, just like two light beams; that alone, he figured,
was reason enough to disbelieve Newton's particle theory.
In 1799, after having done some brilliant experiments that
seemed to prove his point, Young decided to go public. He would
take his case to the very heart o f the scientific establishment, the
Royal Society o f London; it was the sanctum sanctorum of English
science, which counted Isaac Newton himself as one o f its most
illustrious alumni.
Neither Newton nor his shade could have done a more arrant
job o f scaring the life out o fY oung's insurrection, however, than
the members who were present that day. One o f them, Henry
Brougham, was especially imperious: Young's proposed wave the
ory was "destitute o f every species o f merit," he scoffed, therefore
"we now dismiss . . . the feeble lucubrations o f this author, in

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239

which we have searched without success for some traces of learn

ing, acuteness, and ingenuity."
It was the first time in his distinguished career that Dr. Young
had received such a dressing down. He was humiliated, to say the
least, but he remained uJ?-deterred.
In the years ahead, he returned to his interest in languages and
accomplished many things. At one point, he even became some
thing of a real-life Indiana Jones, _helping to decipher the hiero
glyphics etched on the famous Rosetta Stone, unearthed in northern
Egypt in 1799.
By early the next century, evidence having mounted in opposi
tion to the particle theory, more and more scientists began to em
brace the wave theory of light. Some remembered to credit
Young, many others did not; nevertheless, when he died on May
10, 1829, Young had the satisfaction o f knowing that his earlier
humiliation had been avenged at last.
In 1864, furthermore, a persuasive new wrinkle was added to
the wave theory: As a result o f oying around with the equations o f
electricity and magnetism, Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell

found that they predicted the existence o f electromagnetic ripples that

traveled at an astonishing speed-roughly 300 million meters per
second.
Coincidentally, that was identical to the speed of light; not ex
acdy instantaneous, as the ancients had once believed, but fast
enough to make it seem so. Consequendy, then and there, Max

well leapt to the conclusion that his hypothetical electromagnetic

ripples and Young's light waves had to be one and the same thing.
In 1888, Maxwell's mathematical conjecture was confirmed
when German physicist Heinrich Hertz used a giant spark genera
tor to produce an effusion of electromagnetic waves. According to
the Bible, God had been the first to create light waves from scratch;

now Herr Hertz had done it, too.

Throughout the rest o f the nineteenth century, the electromag-

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netic light-wave theory o fY oung and Maxwell prevailed. It settled

many questions about the hitherto puzzling behavior o f ight, but it
also created a new mystery: How were these enigmatic waves able
to travel across the perfect vacuum o f space, for surely they did,
otherwise how could starlight ever manage to reach the earth?
By contrast, sound waves were not able to do that. In a well
known experiment, a clock covered over by an inverted glass bowl
could still be heard ticking. When the air was pumped out o f the
bowl, however, the clock fell silent, its sound waves unable to
traverse the surrounding nothingness.
In short, waves needed some kind of material through which to
travel: Sound waves traveled through air, ocean waves traveled
thr ough water, and rug waves traveled through rugs. So how was it
possible for light waves-electromagnetic ripples-to travel across
the vacancy o f outer space?
Perhaps, scientists speculated, light waves traveled through a
material agency that was not easily detectable, some kind o f invisi
ble, all-pervasive ether, they called it. This ether would be odorless,
colorless, and densenessless; and yet, it would enable light waves to
convey themselves from one place to another. How convenient!
. In 1881, American physicist Albert Michelson and British physi
cist Edward Morley began a series o f extraordinary experiments
they hoped would detect the seemingly undetectable ether. It
hinged on one idea: Since the earth whirled around the sun at
30,000 meters per second (about 67,500 mph), it would be ex
pected to create quite a measurable wake in the ether, i f ndeed the
invisible stuff really did exist.
Michelson and Morley proposed to compare the speed of light
in two different directions-along the wake and across it. In other
words, they would compare a beam of light moving along the di
rection of the earth's orbit with a second beam moving across it.
It was as if they were venturing to detect an invisible current o f
a i r - t h e jet stream, s a y - b y observing the speed o f an airplane in

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two different directions. For an airplane flying west to east, the jet
stream acted like a tail wind, so the plane's forward speed was mea
surably increased. By contrast, for an airplane flying north to south,
the jet stream acted like a cross wind, which deflected the airplane's
overall path eastward but left its forward speed measurably untif
fected.
By applying this same logic to their two beams of ight, Michel
son and Morley would know there was an ethereal wake--an
ethereal jet s t r e a m - i f one beam appeared to go measurably faster
than the other. Otherwise, what else would account for such a
discrepancy?
In order to avoid any interference by air currents, Michelson
and Morley placed their light source and fancy speedometer inside
a tightly-sealed vacuum chamber. Strange as it sounded, scientists
believed that even i f all the air was removed from a vessel, the ether
would be left behind, omniscient and unseen; it could never be
eliminated. Consequently, the two scientists reasoned, their appa
ratus now could be influenced only by an ethereal wake stirred up
within the vacuum chamber by the movement o f the earth around
the
sun.
When all these preparations were completed, Michelson and
Morley finally ran their experiment, and all went well-except for
the results. Much to the scientists' surprise and disappointment,
their speedometer had detected absolutely no difference between
the speeds o f the two light beams.

Their task was full of subtleties, however, and their equipment

delicate; therefore, after doing some fine-tuning, the pair o f physi
cists tried once more. But still there was nothing: The speed o f
light in a vacuum appeared to be exactly the same in both direc
tions!
For the next twenty years, Michelson and Morley attempted re

peatedly to detect the ether. They tried it by day and by night, and
in every season o f the year; they fiddled with their apparatus, and

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tried orienting the light beams every which way, but always, al
ways, the speed o f ight in a vacuum came out to be the s a m e -300
million meters per second. History's most prodigious effort to de
tect the ether's ineluctable wake had ended in what now appeared
to be the ether's funereal wake.
The enigma of hese null results sent scientists all the way back to
where they had started: Iflight consisted of waves and there was no
ether, then how was light able to travel across a vacuum? The
obvious answer was that the known laws o f physics were flawed
somehow-either that, or the wave theory o f light had to go.
Rather than concede either of those dreadful possibilities, nine
teenth-century science turned instinctively to its cherished notions
o f space, time, matter, and energy. There, scientists declared confi
dently, they would find a way out o f this crisis; instead, however,
they unearthed two other dilemmas, both o f which called into
question their belief in the absoluteness o f speed.
In the last century, Michael Faraday had proven that, as if by
magic, a moving magnet was able to cause electricity to flow
through a nearby wire; amazingly, that simple discovery had
spawned the Electrical Age, now in full swing, with Thomas Edi
son's light bulbs illuminating cities and homes all over the world.
(See "Class Act.")
What if he wire in Faraday's scenario were moved, instead of he
magnet? scientists had wondered. Would the electricity still be
produced? Yes, they had discovered; countless experiments had
illustrated that electricity was created either way. In other words,
the magical effect was always produced, so long as the wire and
magnet moved relative to one another.
This well-documented behavior o f moving magnets and wires
created a problem for science, because it was in direct contradic
tion with its well-known belief that motion was absolute, not rela

tive. According to that belief, there was a universe o f difference

between the magnet moving and the wire moving: Electricity

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should be produced only when the magnet moved with respect to

the wire; absolutely nothing should occur when the wire moved
with respect to the magnet.
A second scientific dilemma could be traced back to 1851, when
French philosopher Armand Fizeau had discovered that several hy
pothetical observers who themselves were moving all saw light ap
pearing to move with the same speed. This was not how it was
supposed to happen.
In the orthodox Starlight Express scenario, for example, actual
starlight appeared to move at difforent speeds for the different tour
ists; it was only after factoring in their own individual motions that
they were in absolute agreement about the speed o f light- a pro
verbial instance of "All's well that ends well."
In Fizeau's startling experiment, just the opposite was the case.
The tourists, as it were, agreed on the speed o f ight right from the
outset, even before they had made their individual adjustments,
which meant they were at odds afterward; in the end, in other
. words, science was left with differences o f opinion that it had no
way o f resolving.
the
Clearly, puzzling experiments of Michelson-Morley, Fara
day, and Fizeau all added up to imply that something was amiss
with science's notion of speed; and since speed was defined as
nothing more than "distance divided by time," the experiments
also raised the possibility that something was wrong with science's
notion o f distance and time.

These experimental results, in other words, had the potential o f

destroying the very foundation of traditional science; yet, as they
entered the twentieth century, scientists preferred to think of hem
as relatively minor glitches that could be resolved easily. They were
dead wrong, however, and a cocky, unemployed nobody named
Albert Einstein was about to prove it.

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VHI

In the summer o f 1902, things began looking up for Einstein. His

old classmate, Marcel Grossmann, helped to get him a job as a
Technical Expert 3rd Class at the Swiss patent office in Bern; in
that position, Einstein would be responsible for judging the merits
o f people's inventions.
It would not be glamorous, but it reminded him o f his uncle
Jakob, the inventor, from whom he had developed a playful im-
pulse to figure out how things operated. Best o f all, every day after
work, he would have, as he put it, "the opportunity to think about
physics."
Einstein had come a long way from that day when, as a five
year-old, he had been startled by the behavior o f a simple compass.
In recent years, he had begun to think deeply and critically about
magnetism and its alter ego, electricity.
Like other scientists, he was uneasy about the ominous discrep
ancy between the· relativism in Faraday's electromagnetic experi
ment arid the absolutism in science's views about motion. "The
observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion
o f the conductor and the magnet," he noted incredulously,
"whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between
the two cases."
Unlike a scientific insider, the young outcast was disinclined to
brush off this disparity. Moreover, he realized that science's belief
in absolute motion was the result of its deeper-rooted belief in the
absoluteness of space and time; consequently, at stake here was not
just some electromagnetic experiment, but the very essence o f sci
ence's description of the universe.
The longer Einstein thought about it,. the closer he came to the

conclusion that this glaring discordance was connected somehow

to that other puzzling inconsistency-Michelson and Morley's

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failure to find the alleged ether. Also, he sensed, both were some
how connected to his old childhood fantasy about catching up
with a light wave, which was to say, an electromagnetic ripple.
Put another way, Einstein came to believe that science's two
unanswered questions "Why does Nature appear to behave in a
relativistic way?" and " H o w do light waves manage to travel across
a vacuum?" were related in some way to the somewhat juvenile
and whimsical question "Is it p o s s i b l ~  to catch up with a light wave
to see what it really looks like?" The mystery lay in figuring out
what that connection might be.
After work each day, the lowly patent. clerk applied himself
single-mindedly to the task before him. When he needed a break,
the young sleuth would go to the Cafe Bollwerk and bounce ideas
off a clutch o f friends who called themselves the Olympia Academy;
there, into the wee hours of he night, they would haggle about the·
physics o f light.
Einstein's only nonscientific diversion during this time was his
love affair with Mileva Marie. In January 1902, she and Einstein
produced an illegitimate daughter named Lieserl whom they gave
away in secret; the world would not learn about this subterfuge
until 1 9 8 6 - n o r hear from Lieserl herself ever again.
OnJanuary 6, 1903, Einstein and Marie fmally were married. By
August, the young woman was pregnant once more and worried
that Einstein might be upset at the prospect of having to support
yet another person on his meager clerk's salary. "I'm not the least
bit angry that poor Dollie is hatching a new chick," Einstein re
plied in a note to her. "In fact, I'm happy about it."
Unfortunately, the marriage would not last long, for even
though he would father two sons, Einstein's lifelong energies were
to be spent giving birth to a scientific revolution, not a family.
Indeed, by 1904, he was ready and more than eager to revamp our
understanding of the physical universe.
To begin with, in order to be consistent with the relativistic

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246

behavior o f Faraday's electromagnetic phenomenon, Einstein

scrapped the notion of absolute space and time. In his universe,
those qualities would be relative, in that people would not necessar
ily reckon distance and time in exactly the same way.
According to this new theory, in other words, people would not
always agree as to the length, width, or depth o f things spatial or
the duration of things secular. In that respect, the.relative space and
time of Einstein's hypothetical universe were like subjective stan
dards: Everyone had a different opinion about what he saw, with
absolutely no scientific way o f resolving the disagreement.
At this point, a horrified Einstein paused to reconsider where he
was heading with this train o f thought. It disturbed him to think
that the universe could be as anarchic as all t h a t - a s nonobjective
as a roomful of art critics; certainly, he conjectured, there must be
laws to impose reason and order on this imagined chaos o f opin
lOns.
Mter searching for such laws, Einstein finally found t h e m - i n ,
o f all places, the Fizeau experiment. According to its puzzling re
sults, the speed of light appeared the same to people moving with
different speeds; it was only cifter the people had added or sub
tracted their own speeds from what they saw that they were left
disagreeing irrevocably as to the true speed of light.
It was redolent o f that old joke in which a patient complained to
her doctor that it always hurt when she flexed her arm. "Then stop
flexing your arm!" the wise doctor advised. Similarly, as a way o f
curing the Fizeau problem, Einstein decided to advise the quarrel
ing observers to stop using the old rules of absolute space and time.
The new rules would be based on the idea, as implied by Fi
zeau's experiment, that the speed o f light appeared the same to
everyone, everywhere. Though he was fashioning a universe in which
space and time were relative, therefore, Einstein was in reality re
placing one notion of absoluteness with another one.
By asserting the absoluteness, the inviolable constancy of the

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speed of light, the young revolutionary was able to deduce the

bizarre new ordinances that held sway in his novel universe. It was
not easy to accept these new rules, insofar as they defied common
sense, but they were relatively easy to understand.
In Einstein's universe, everything changed in principle about
any situation involving tourists watching the Starlight Express or any
corporeal phenomenon: They could never agree on speeds, simply
because they now had no absolute way of even deciding who really
was moving or was at rest.
The biggest departure from the orthodox view involved the
tourists watching starlight, which was to say, electromagnetic waves
o f any kind. In that case, it was as if he tourists' own motions came
to naught, like joggers running in place on imaginary treadmills.
Irrespective of their own movements-of the readings on their
treadmills' speedometers, as it were--their speed relative to a pass
ing beam of light always appeared to remain the same, 300 million
meters per second.
There was another way o f seeing this mysterious constancy,
Einstein realized. It was as if the different tourists' perceptions o f
space and time changed in accordance with their individual mo
tions, in such a way that the speed o f light-and only the speed of
light-always appeared the same.
According to this interpretation, Einstein's universe was based
on a cosmic-size optical illusion whose confounding effects were
universal. No matter how fast a person was moving, his reckoning
of an inch and a second always changed so as to leave unchanged his
reckoning o f the speed of light!
The effect called to mind Jonathan Swift's most famous traveler.
Had Gulliver's own height changed during his strange j o u r n e y 
had he himselfshrunk while in Lilliput andgrown while in Brobding
n a g - t h e n his impressions about the size ofeverything and everyone
around him would have remained unchanged.
Much to Einstein's delight, such compensatory adjustments

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could be described mathematically in terms of a single shrinking

factor. As a person sped up, he discovered, her perception of an inch
and a second shrank by a factor that involved only two quantities
her speed v and the constant speed of light c, as measured in the
unpolluted vacuum o f space.
Expressed in precise terms, it was rather formidable-looking:

EINSTEIN'S SHRINKING FACTOR = {1 - v2/c2}Y2

Nevertheless, it had the telltale form of a basic, garden-variety

shrinking factor, {1 - s} N. (It was akin to noting that, notwith
standing its details, this phrase had the basic form of a simple sen
tence--subject, verb, predicate.) Consequently, it was possible for
Einstein to simplify it, using the approximation recipe he had
learned many years before:

SHRINKING FACTOR equaled approximately 1 - 1h V2 /C 2

In plain English, for someone at rest (v = 0), there was no

shrinkage at all; the shrinking factor remained undiminished:

1 - 1h 02/c2 = 1 - 0 = 1

For someone moving at a snail's pace--for someone whose

speed v was very small-the shrinking factor was reduced by a very
small amount, like the perfume in a bottle being reduced by a mere
dab:

1 - 1h v2 / c2 = 1 - very small amount

For someone moving very fast, however, the shrinking factor

was diminished considerably. In short, the faster and faster people
moved, the smaller and smaller were their impressions o f an inch

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and a second-surreptitious corrections that resulted in different

people, moving with different speeds, always agreeing on the speed
o f light.
All this raised an important question: "How could Einstein ex
plain Nature's apparent singling out o f electromagnetic waves for
such special treatment?" W hy was it that throughout the whole,
vast universe only their speed appeared to be absolute?
The answer, Einstein decided, was to be found in the repeated
failure o f Michelson and Morley and others to find the hypotheti
cal ether. So far as this pragmatic young man was concerned, i f
there was no evidence for an ether, then there was no ether, period.
That dismissal, if correct, meant that electromagnetic waves
were able in some mysterious fashion to snake their way through
long stretches o f thoroughly empty space entirely on their own,
void o f any material medium; that made them the only waves
known to science not connected inextricably with anything pon
derable. In short, Einstein concluded, electromagnetic-cum-light
waves were unique in the whole of he universe because they alone
represented waves of pure, massless energy!
~ t  was no wonder, therefore, that light always had struck philos
ophers as being so supernatural. Every time one looked at the light
from a star, a flame, or even Edison's incandescent bulbs, one was
seeing pure, incorporeal energy-as fantastic, in its own way, as
beholding a disembodied soul.
For 2,000 years, in one form or another, ether had obfuscated
the true cosmos from science's probing senses, but no longer. With
his theory o f relativity, Einstein had seeh the universe through eyes
unclouded by the ancient ethereal haze; consequently, that hoary
quintessential element was about to become as obsolete as the con
cept of absolute space and time.
As Einstein mulled over his new theory, he discovered it did not
affect just space and time. The shrinking factor also applied to that
other pair o f closely allied quantities, energy and mass-except the

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-50

other way around. As a person's speed increased, his mass and en
ergy did not shrink, they each expanded by the redprocal of the
shrinking factor.
In other words, at rest, material objects experienced no change
in their normal mass and energy. But whenever they moved
slowly, their weight and energy automatically increased. As they
moved more and more rapidly, furthermore, their heft and energy
expanded by leaps and bounds.
What happened, Einstein wondered, when material objects
moved as fast as light itself-that is, when v equaled c? In such a
case, Einstein noticed, the precise expression (not merely the ap
proximation) of his original shrinking formula was reduced all the
way down to zero:

{1 - c2 /c2} % = {1 - 1} % = 0

This meant that for a person traveling at the speed of ight, space
and time-indeed, the entire visible universe-appeared to shrink
down to nothing. Reciprocally, furthermore, the person's mass and
energy appeared to expand up to infinity (the reciprocal of zero
being infinity)!
Neither of those really seemed possible, an incredulous Einstein
concluded. Therefore, rather than take them seriously, he inter
preted those outrageous predictions to mean that his new theory
was trying to tell him something, namely that it was physically
impossible for any material body to travel as fast as an electromag
netic w a v e - t h a t is, to catch up with a light beam.
At long last, the twenty-five-year-old had stumbled on the an
swer to the question that had nagged him since he was sixteen:
"The years o f anxious searching in the dark, with their intense
longing, their alternations o f confidence and exhaustion, and the
fmal emergence into light-only those who have experienced it
can understand."

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It was not, however, an answer he had expected or that made

him very happy. Ifhis theory were to be believed, then mere mor
tals would never be able to catch up with an electromagnetic wave
on its ceaseless flight, to hold it and tum it every which way, all in
hopes o f discerning its detailed nature. The most science would
ever learn about this extraordinary manifestation o f pure energy
would come from whatever fleeting glimpses it could obtain from
the sidelines, so to speak..
These revelations were radically innovative enough, but the coup
de grace was yet to come. It happened in 1904, during one o f his
haggling sessions at the Olympia Academy with a dilettante friend
named Michele Besso. "Trying a lot of discussions with him, I
could suddenly comprehend the matter," Einstein recalled later.
"After my recognition o f this, the present Theory o f Special Rela
tivity was completed."
What Einstein recognized was this: Scientists were wrong to
continue thinking o f mass and energy as being phenomena that,
though allied, were organically different-the way we might think
o f the two sexes. Science already knew that mass and energy were
both
indestructible, satisfying identical conservation laws; and
now, Einstein had discovered, both behaved exacdy alike-that is,
both expanded and shrank by an identical factors. In every impor
tant respect, Einstein concluded, mass and energy were indistin
guishable and interchangeable. They were like a single person wearing
different clothes or sporting different hairstyles; in short, they ap

peared to be organically identical.

In some ways, this androgynouslike view of mass and energy was
reminiscent o f science's recent discovery about the close connec
tion between electricity and magnetism. In both instances, then
and now, science's picture o f the world had become more unified
but also more ambiguous and, therefore, less intuitive.

It helped to clarify things somewhat to think of energy and mass

as being like, say, U.S. dollars and British pounds. Though dollars

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and pounds looked very different, they were both essentially the
very same thing, monetary forms of exchange. Although the two
currencies had different values, furthermore, there existed a rate o f
exchange, a formula that defined the relationship between them.
By analogy, then, the question now facing young Einstein was
this: What was _ he exchange-rate formula that related mass and
energy?
The answer, he discovered, could be obtained by climbing
aboard the Starlight Express one last time. The only thing he had to
bear in mind during this final, madcap ride was that, according to
his theory, the Express's mass would increase/decrease as its speed
increased/ decreased.
Quite simply, therefore, i f he Express were to slow down, then
its mass-let it be represented by the letter M - w o u l d decrease by
an amount given by Einstein's familiar shrinking factor:

This factor, Einstein reminded himself, was merely a mathemat

ical way o f saying that some whole quantity was being diminished
by some fraction, Yz V Z/ cZ, o f hat whole. If we were imagaining an
eight-ounce bottle of cologne being diminished by the fraction Y4,
then the loss would amount to 8 x Y4 ounces; that is, two ounces.
In this case, it was the Express's mass, M, that was being dimin
ished as a result o f ts being slowed down-diminished by the frac
tion Yz VZ/C Z. Consequently, in analogy with the cologne, the mass
loss amounted to M x Yz VZ/ cz.
As soon as he had written this down, Einstein's keen eye noticed
the similarity between it and the well-known formula for kinetic
energy (energy o f motion), which he had learned as a youngster:

KINETIC ENERGY M x 1h v 2
=

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The Express's mass loss was mathematically equivalent to that

much kinetic energy divided by c2 :,

KINETIC ENERGY/c2 = M x 1h v2 /c2 MASS LOSS

In essence:

ENERGY c2 MASS
=
For the same reason it was correct to say that if 6/2 =3 then
6 = 3 x 2, it followed that:

ENERGY =MASS x c2
In the shorthand o f mathematics, where E stood for energy and
m stood for mass:

E=mxc2

Here, then, was the all-important exchange-rate formula he had

sought. He was relieved, and also gratified, because the relationship
between mass and energy had turned out to be so simple, so ele
gant; for all its strangeness, his relativistic universe was far simpler
philosophically than the old one.
Because mass arid energy were interchangeable, for example,
science would no longer have to deal with two conservation laws.
Mass could be destroyed and converted into energy, and by the
same token, energy could be destroyed and converted into mass.
Only the grand total o f all the energies and all the masses in the
cosmos remained unchangeable for all time; that is, there was now
only one integrated Law of Mass-Energy Conservation.
The relationship between space and time, too, had been simpli-

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fied. Because of the spatial and temporal relativity in Einstein's

universe, science no longer would need to distinguish between A
moving with respect to B a n d B moving with respect to A; now only
relative speeds mattered.
Furthermore, anyone fearful of having to cope with these
strange new rules would not need to worry. Within the slow
moving sphere o f human existence, Einstein's Theory of Special
Relativity had an insignificant effect.
For example, even at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour, the
mathematical value of Einstein's shrinking factor remained very
close to 1, which meant that the various relativistic aberrations
were virtually undetectable: In the realm o f everyday life, there
fore, space and time and mass and energy appeared to behave nor
mally.
Even in the future, when astronauts would travel to the moon at
25,000 miles per hour, the discrepancy from normal would
amount to a minuscule five parts in a trillion. Compared to people
left behind on earth, in other words, an astronaut's impression o f
an inch and a second was shorter by that absolutely negligible
amount.
But the news was not wholly sanguine, because for all its bril
liance, the consequences of Einstein's hike up the Swiss Alps o f
human curiosity were fraught with unrecognized peril. His theory
had redefined for all time the spatial and temporal relationships
between observers in a strange new universe; but also, in just four
short decades, its unassuming mass-energy equation was to change
forever the political and social relationships between countries in a
forbidding new world.

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IPllO(;UI

Ever since Albert Einstein had discovered that such a thing was
possible theoretically, scientists had sought a way to transform mat
ter into energy. Stubbornly, scientists had persisted, partly out o f
curiosity and partly because they believed so strongly in the verac
ity o f Einstein's little equation. And why not? Already they had
witnessed the conversion o f energy into matter: An electron whirl
ing around inside an atom smasher grew more massive as it sped
up, exactly as Einstein had predicted it would.
They had persevered also because the stakes were so high; the
potential source o f energy was as prodigious as the material uni
verse itsel£ Once they were able to tap it, scientists predicted joy
ously, the world would have an unlimited supply of clean, cheap
power.
Until that day came, however, people continued to harness
power the old-fashioned way, by burning something. T o generate
electrical power, for example, most industrialized countries in
cinerated wood, oil, or coal; but the process was very inefficient. A
modern power plant burning a lump of high-grade coal, for exam
ple, produced enough energy to keep one light bulb shining for
only about four hours.
Coal had taken millions o f years to form, the result o f dead plants
being buried under layers o f heavy rock and compressed by the
inexorable movements o f the earth's shifting continents. By burn
ing a lump o f coal, the solar and seismic energies that had gone into
making it in the first place were released in the form o f thermal
energy.
Einstein's mass-energy equation promised us far greater yields,
however, i f only we could find a way to convert that same lump o f
coal completely into energy (with no ash being left behind). A sim
ple calculation revealed, in fact, that such a transmogrification

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256

would produce enough energy to keep one light bulb burning for
not four hours but 1,680 billion hours!
In the end, it was to take scientists about 297,840 hours-thirty
four y e a r s - o f hard work to convert Einstein's litde formula into a
blinding reality. The key to their success, furthermore, first ap
peared very early in the century, shordy after Antoine Henri Bec
querel's discovery of radioactivity.

Back then, scientists wondered how uranium and certain other

elements were able to spew out their radiation with such energy.
Where did the power come from? By answering that question,
scientists began to suspect, they would learn the secret o f how to
convert matter into energy.
During the early 1930s, scientists fmally found their answer. By

looking under the hood o f a uranium a t o m - t h a t is, by using atom

smashers to give them an unprecedented peek inside the subatomic .
world-they were able to see what an atom really looked like.
An atom, they discovered, was not like some monolithic billiard
ball; it was an elegant mechanism, with several moving parts. Es
sentially, it consisted o f a nucleus o f protons and neutrons, sur
rounded by an oudying swarm of electrons-not unlike a hive
with its resdess swarm o f bees.
Neutrons, as their name implied, were extremely tiny particles
that behaved as i f hey were electrically neutral. They did not repel
each other; that is, even though many neutrons were crammed
together ever so tighdy inside an atom's nucleus, they made no
attempt whatsoever to escape.
Not so the protons; unlike neutrons, these subatomic particles
were each imbued with a positive electrical charge. Scientists long
ago had discovered that similar charges always repelled one an
other; therefore, protons naturally resisted being confined within
an atom's nucleus.
The only thing that kept them incarcerated was a slighdy over-

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powering nuclear f o r c e - a kind of invisible nuclear glue--but

even that did not always work. Within large nuclei, such as ura
nium, there simply were too many mutually repulsive protons for
the force to keep in check; in such cases, some of the protons
managed to escape.
I t was like trying to hug a bunch of mattress springs. Inevitably,
if he bunch grew to be too large, a few o f he springs would escape
one's clutches and go flying away. Those high-speed escapees from
the atomic nucleus, scientists concluded, were precisely what con
stituted radioactivity.
Following that important revelation, scientists invented ways o f
actually weighing unstable, radioactive nuclei. Those meticulous
procedures, furthermore, led to a startling observation about radio
active nuclei and brought the world one step closer to the Atomic
Age.
After coughing up a subatomic particle, scientists observed, a
radioactive nucleus always weighed less by an amount greater than
the mass o f the escaped particle. Evidently, radioactive particles
effected their escape by robbing some o f the nucleus's mass and
transforming it into energy, an exchange entirely in keeping with
Einstein's equation.
Anthropomorphically speaking, it was as i f protons were like
siblings whose mutual revulsion was so intense it was palpable. In
that· case, one could say their combined weight consisted o f their
individual masses plus the ponderousness o f their pent-up tension.
After a sibling fled, therefore, the remaining family weighed less by
an amount equal to the runaway's mass plus his share o f he material
tension.
In a manner o f speaking, therefore, scientists in the 1930s had
discovered that radioactivity was a heavy, dysfunctional nucleus's
way o f relieving stress. Furthermore, they reasoned, if the nucleus
was so large and tense as to be on the verge o f a nervous break
down, it might be a simple matter to make it fall apart com-

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pletely-and to harvest the outpouring o f hysterical energy that

was sure to result.
At that point, invigorated by such a well-defined game plan,
scientists began to tum their attention toward uranium. Mined
from pitchblende, the element uranium represented the largest
atom found in Nature; its nucleus consisted of ninety-two irascible
protons just busting to get out.

But how did one go about shattering a nucleus? Even for one as
"big" as uranium, the task seemed to require impossibly small
weapons. It was a far cry from busting apart a popcorn ball, say,
considering that the nucleus of a uranium atom was a mere ten
quadrillionths of a centimeter across.
At first, scientists tried shooting the uranium nucleus with an

electron, but the tiny bullet proved too puny for the job. They also
tried shooting it with a high-speed proton, but the repulsive force
o f the nucleus's own protons never let it get close enough to have
any effect. Finally, in 1934, scientists tried a neutron-the only
other subatomic bullet known at the time--and it worked!
The neutron, being electrically neutral, was able to infiltrate the

family o f mutually repulsive protons and break it apart. In the pro

cess, the radioactive nucleus was able to breathe a sigh o f relief, as
it were, letting out a hundred billion times more energy than one
could ever get from ordinary, old-fashioned combustion.
It was, after more than thirty years, a stunning confirmation of
Einstein's equation. More than that, it was an achievement akin to
the discovery of fire: For the first time in history, we had found a
way to liberate the energy that had remained bottled up within
atomic nuclei since the time of their creation, billions o f years ago.
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was the first person to split nuclei
with neutrons, though he did not realize it right away. The same
was true o f he French couple Irene and FrederickJoliot-Curie and
a pair of German physicists, Otto Hahn and Franz Strassmann: In-

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credibly, all these people had succeeded in splitting the uranium

nucleus, but none o f them realized it immediately. Such were the
vagaries o f their complex effort.
It wasn't until January 1939, five years after the fact, that the
physicists finally understood what they had done. However, even
then, though the news of their achievement was greeted with ex
citement and celebration throughout the saentific community, it
did not so much as raise an eyebrow among laypersons.
Scientists had discovered a way to relieve the uranium nucleus
o f ts natural tension by artificial means, but for most people, it was
an academic matter. Their concerns were with the political ten
sions abroad: During the past several years, Japan, Italy, and Ger
many had demonstrated an intention to take over the world.
O n September 1, 1939, Hider's Nazi army invaded Poland, and
immediately thereafter the world was at war. Just as quickly, more
over, the scientists who only a few months earlier had managed to
rive radioactive uranium nuclei became worried: Hider had com
pletely stopped the export o f uranium ore from Czechoslovakia,
which the Nazis now occupied. From this, the scientists guessed
that Hider's brain trust might have discovered the power ofEin
stein's physics.
After trying themselves without success to interest the United
States Navy in their recent atomic tour de force, Enrico Fermi and
others decided to consult with the one scientist whose world-class
stature might make the difference. It was the summer o f 1939
when the group departed for New Jersey; they were going to pay
a visit to Professor Albert Einstein.
Einstein had come to the United States in 1933 and had already
decided to remain when, on April 7, Hider had decreed that Jews
in Germany were to be expelled' from all positions of power.
Before that, in 1921, Einstein had been awarded the Nobel Prize in
physics, though curiously enough, not for his Theory o f Special
Relativity. He had received it for his part in developing Quantum

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Mechanics, a theory about atomic behavior that was even more

arcane than relativity. Einstein had become more famous and
worldly than any other scientist in modern times. He consorted
with royalty, visited with presidents, and became the darling o f he
mass media-hamming it up for the cameras, even agreeing to
pose with Hollywood celebrities.
In 1933, he chose to accept a position at the Institute for Ad
vanced Studies, in Princeton, New Jersey. He had been attracted
by the institute's peaceful rural setting and the companionship o f
old friends who also were moving there to escape the grasp o f
Nazis overseas. Like them, he had renounced his German citizen
ship, though now, in the face o f Hitler's demonic megalomania,
Einstein had begun to wonder whether he should do more than
that.
For most o f his life, Einstein had been an outsider, scientifically,
socially, and politically. Time and again he had referred to himself
as a "stateless" person and had ended up becoming the citizen o f a
politically neutral country, Switzerland.
During the First World War, at the beginning of the century,
while Germany's army had bullied its way through Europe, Ein
stein's mind had bullied its way through science, permanently
ravaging the intellectual landscape with one new theory after an
other; he was able to ignore completely the violent conflicts all
around him.
"Alongside [his] work the problems of daily life did not appear
very important," recalled Philipp Frank, a physicist who had be
friended Einstein during those war years. "Actually he found it
very difficult to take them seriously."
It was only cifter that heinous war that Einstein had been forced
to take seriously the Nazis' growing influence. For one thing, the
Nazis had pressured universities to abandon the promulgation of
his Jewish physics and return to the teaching and practice of German
physics.

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One of the early converts, physicist Philipp Lenard, had insisted

that the practice o f science "is racial, and conditioned by blood."
German physics was superior because it was, in his words: "The
Physics o f those who have fathomed the depths of Reality, seekers
after the Truth, the Physics o f the very founders o f Science."
Einstein had been thunderstruck by this tum of events. All his
life, he had grown accustomed to living in his own world, wher
ever he happened to be and whatever happened to be going on
around him. But these accusations-made, as in Lenard's case, by
some o f his most cherished colleagues-had rousted him from that
introspective bubble like nothing before, not even the Luitpold
Gymnasium or the Great War itself It had been the most revolting
revelation this renegade had made in his forty years: Albert Einstein
Jew.
the Scientist had discovered Albert Einstein the
Now, on the eve o f World War II, he was tempted once
again-and mostly succumbed to the temptation-to stay de
tached and to concentrate on his research. But his rude awakening
after W orld War I had caused him to realize that merely wishing for
peace was not sufficient; one had to work for it.

Einstein had become something of a peace activist, which meant

that after listening carefully to the group of anxious scientists who
visited him on that day in July 1939, he was left with very mixed
feelings. They were, in effect, asking his help to develop an instru
ment o f war, the very thing he hated. And yet he realized that i f he
Allies could beat Hitler at creating a nuclear bomb, it might be

used as an instrument o f peace.

In the end, on August 2, 1939, he agreed to write a letter to
President Franklin Roosevelt:

Sir: Some recent work . . . which has been communicated to me

in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may
be turned into a new and important source of energy in the
immediate future.

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In the letter, Einstein urged Roosevelt to provide money for

further research, without delay. And lest the President not under
stand the need for urgency, he closed with this ominous warning

. . . that Gennany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from

the Czechoslovakian mines . . . might perhaps be understood on
the ground that the son of the Gennan Under-Secretary of
State, von Weizsacker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Insti
tute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is
now being repeated.

When President Roosevelt read the letter, he reacted as most

politicians did to any new suggestion: He formed a committee to
think it over. In November, the committee reported back to the
President, recommending that he do exacdy what the scientists had
wanted him to do in the first place.
Within days, hundreds of scientists working in universities and
labs all over the United States-many o f them refugees from
Europe-applied themselves to the awful task o f giving life to the
most destructive weapon humanity had ever envisaged.
It took five years, two billion dollars, and thousands o f people,
but onJuly 16, 1945, the outcome o f all the effort and expense was
ready to be tested. Einstein, who throughout these years had re
mained at the institute, working on one o f his new theories, chose
not to be at the test site. The device was to be detonated in the
middle of the New Mexico desert, at the Alamogordo Air Base,
twenty miles from the nearest habitation.
No one knew what to expect, so the scientists were cautious in
their preparations. The young physicist who had directed the de
sign and building o f the device, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was
holed up in a bunker ten miles away. With him were the project's
other top civilians and one o f the military directors, General
Thomas Farrell.
Crews had worked all night in preparation for this morning's

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test, and as sunlight rose above the horizon, everyone had a clear
view of the detonation tower. The countdown commenced, and
when it reached zero, the explosion from the device lit up the
world, much as the young Einstein himself had done forty years
earlier.
"The lighting effects beggared description," Farrell would write
later. "The whole country was lighted by a searchlight with the
intensity many times that o f he midday sun. It was golden, purple,
violet, grey and blue. I t lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of
the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be
described but must be seen to be imagined."
Oppenheimer was relieved that his project had succeeded but
also frightened and sobered by what he saw: "I am become
Death," he intoned sotto voce, quoting from Vedic scriptures, "A
destroyer o f worlds." Farrell expressed similar sentiments, explain
ing that following the bomb's powerful air blast came "the awe
some roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we
puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces
heretofore reserved to the Almighty."
When Einstein heard the news, he was heartened by the possi
bility that this horrifying creation now wocl.d cow the enemy into
surrendering, thus -bringing about peace. But three weeks later,
when he and the world saw what this new bomb had done to the
Japanese city o f Hiroshima-and three days later to Nagasaki
-Einstein himself was cowed into having second thoughts. In ret
rospect, he would lament, "I made one great mistake in my l i f e 
when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending
that atom bombs be made."
All his life, Einstein had worshipped the mind's natural inquisi
tiveness about the physical world. While others throughout history
had fought for their right to be free or to worship in a church o f
their chosing, he had fought just as strenuously and stubbornly for
the right to be independendy curious.
During his lifelong struggle, he had come to have utter con-

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tempt for the schools o f his day; he wrote: "It is, in fact, nothing
short of a miracle that the modern methods of nstruction have not
yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate
little plant . . . stands mainly in need o f freedom; without this it
goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
For the second time in his life, however, the consequences o f
war had jarred Einstein into making an unexpected discovery
about his personal beliefs. The A-bombs dropped on J a p a n 
which soon ended World War I I - h a d ended his unqualified wor
ship o f human inquiry. With his own eyes, he now saw an unholy
aspect to curiosity: If the delicate little plant was not nurtured with
caution and compassion, he decided, then it was we who would go
to wrack and ruin without fail.
Following the war, Einstein withdrew into his private world
one final time. His having seen the light, however, did not dimin
ish his scientific curiosity any more than his post-World War I
epiphany had made·him any less Jewish; to the contrary.
Following World War I, he had become an outspoken Zionist.
So much so, in fact, that in 1952, following the death o f Chaim
Weizmann, the Israelis were to ask Einstein to become their new
president, an honor he respectfully would decline.
Now, in the wake of World War II, he became the zealous
champion o f another cause: Einstein wanted to come up with a
single theory that could explain everything about the physical world,
a kind of scientific oracle capable o f divining all answers to all ques
tions the human mind ever could imagine. Physicists came to call it
a Unified Field Theory.
Over the years, though his mind remained active, his body grew
older and weaker. Finally, on April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein died,
in the midst o f his unsuccessful efforts to find all the answers. To
the end, Robert Oppenheimer recalled: "There was always with
him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stub
born."

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Einstein's childlike curiosity always had set him apart from the
pack. Though most humans were born with an unbridled curios
. ity, they usually grew out o f it as they grew up; in that respect,
Einstein had never matured fully.
In the years to come, many looked back on this extraordinary
man and questioned his involvement in the creation o f the atomic
bomb, much as he had second-guessed himsel£ The debate be
came even more sorrowful after 1952, when American scientists
tested the world's first thermonuclear device--precursor o f the hy
drogen bomb-several hundred times deadlier than the A-bombs
dropped on Japan.
Inevitably, critics blamed science--physicists, in particular-for
plunging humanity into an Atomic Age that now jeopardized the
future o f the entire planet. It had taken billions o f years for life to
evolve, they fretted, and yet it would take but a few minutes for
science's terrifying new weapons to wipe it all out.
While these recriminations were entirely justified, critics over
looked the all-important Darwinian assertion that during the entire
course o f our evolution, we had retained only those traits that en
hanced our survivability. If the theory o f natural selection was true,
therefore, it was entirely possible that curiosity-far from being
our nemesis-could tum out to be our salvation.
That was not to imply that, along the way, people would never
be hurt or killed by curiosity. Throughout recorded history, tens o f
thousands-perhaps millions-of innocent persons had lost their
lives for being recklessly inquisitive. But i f curiosity did not ulti
mately serve a useful purpose, then why had such an irrepressible
urge come into being and persisted to this day?
Surely curiosity was not the only double-edged trait that we had
acquired over the course of our evolution. There were similar dan
gers inherent in those other seemingly indomitable human im
pulses, hunger and sex. That is, people routinely became ill or died
from eating spoiled foods or from having intercourse with a

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diseased person, yet no one ever had proposed that we ignore our
hunger or libido.
In short, the need to ask questions appeared to be in our genes,
along with the need to eat and to reproduce. It was even possible
that curiosity was guiding us to some specific destination
whether out there among the stars or right here on earth-to some
special place and time that w ~ u l d  teach us everything we ever
wanted to know about the natural world and how best to survive
in it.
If so, then Albert Einstein's curiosity had managed to lead us
farther along and higher up our genetically driven scavenger hunt
for answers than anyone had before. Understandably, many people
today have become so anxious about the dizzy heights and precari
ous landscape that they wish to climb back down. But if science has
taught us anything during the past 2,000 years, it is this: Retreating
from the earth-shaking consequences o f our scientific curiosity is as
implausible as time travel and, quite possibly, as undesirable as dev
olution.

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A Aquinas, Thomas, St., 30, 39

Absoluteness, 244, 246, 247 Arago, Dominique F r a n ~ o i s  Jean,

Acoustic energy, 198,204,211,237 149, 160, 161

Aerodynamic vehicles, 111 Archimedes, 84-85, 94, 110
Aerostatic vehicles, 110-11 Aristode, 11,27,30,31,33-34,36,
Age of Analysis, 4 37,38,39,48,62,81,134,189
Age ofIdeology, 4 elements in, 27-28, 165-66
Age o f Reason, 4 and fluids, 83, 84
Air (element), 4, 27, 28, 231 on heat, 181

Airplanes, 112-14, 115, 116-17 theory of universe, 27-29, 33, 34,

Albert the Great, Saint, 30 35,53
Alchemy, 50 Armstrong, Neil, 58-59, 61-62,
Aldrin, Buzz, 61-62 . 63
Allbutt, Thomas Clifford, 185 Astrologers, astrology, 4-5, 35, 70
Ampere, Andre-Marie, 147, 149, Astronauts, 61-62
150, 160, 161 Astronomers, astronomy, 26, 34, 35,
Anne, queen of England, 62 69-70

267
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268

Atom, 255-58 Blood pressure, 95-96, 98-99,

Atom bomb, 263-64, 265 102-3,115

Atomic Age, 257, 265 Body heat, 176, 181, 186, 189-90,
Averroes, 30 192,200,201
Ayscough, William, 16-17,20,21, Boltzmann, Ludwig, 211
41 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso, 81, 110
Brahe, Tycho, 33, 34-35, 39
Brougham, Henry, 238
D Bruno, Giordano, 34, 38
Bacqueville, Marquis de, 111 Buoyancy, law of, 84-85, 110
Balloons, 110-11
Banks, Sir Joseph, 139, 143
Becquerel, Antoine Henri, 231 [
Bell, Alexander Graham, 163 Calculus (the), 24, 63, 82, 96, 111,
Bernoulli, Daniel,S, 65-117 157
career, 89-109, 114 D. Bernoulli's work with, 77, 101
childhood, early life, 75-79 discovery of, 40-41, 72-73, 74
death of, 115 Caloric fluid, 188, 190, 199-200
education, 79-81, 82 Caloric theory, 190, 192, 193,
honors, awards, 65-68, 89-90, 195-96, 197, 199
106, 114 Calorimeter, 188-90
publication of works of, 90, 104, Celestial (heavenly) realm/domain,
105, 106-9 10,13-14,39,63
relationship with father, 65-68, in Aristode, 27, 28
76-77, 79, 105-9 Calvin, John, 70, 88
Bernoulli, Jacob the Elder, 70 Cambridge University, 40, 49
Bernoulli, Jakob, 71-75, 76, 92 Trinity College, 21, 23, 24
Bernoulli, Johann, 65-68, 71-77, 79, Carlisle, Sir Anthony, 140
80,81-82,92-93,96-97,104, Carnot, Sadi, 172-73, 178-80, 188,
105-9 199-200
death of, 115 Carnot's Principle, 178-80, 195-96,
Bernoulli, Nikolaus, 70-71, 73 199,202,206,208
Bernoulli, Nikolaus I, 77 Cartwright, Edmund, 123
Bernoulli, Nikolaus II, 77, 78-79, 91 Catherine I, empress of Russia,
Bernoullifarnily,68, 70-71; 89, 114 90-91,93,105
Bernstein, Aaron, 223 Catholic church, 31, 34, 37, 49-50
Bible, 1,49,174-75,240 and Galileo, 38-39
Black, Joseph, 186-89 Catholicism, 56
Blood circulation, 93-94 Cayley, George, 112, 115

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(nJex
269

Celcus,93 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin, 137,

Celsius, Anders, 185 149-50

Centrifugal force, 19,25,60,223 Curie, Marie, 231

equation, 45-48 Curie, Pierre, 231
Charles II, king o f England, 22, 41, Curiosity,
49, 56 in Einstein, 217, 218, 223, 225,
Chemistry, 121, 141, 142 238,264,265,266
Christianity, 29, 30, 31, 34 as evolved trait, 266
Circles, 26, 27 Curves, 26, 28
Civil War (U.S.), 160
Clarke, Katherine, 10, 18, 19,20-21
Clarke, Mr., 9, 10, 18-19 D
Clausius, Adelheid, 165-66, 167-69, Darwin, Charles Robert, 219-20, 224
202-3,213-14 Davy, Humphry, 129-30, 131, 132,
Clausius, Ernst Carl Gottlieb, 171, 140, 142-48, 153-55
173-74 de la Roche, Henri, 142, 143, 145
Clausius, RudolfJulius Emmanuel, 6, Descartes, Rene, 19,37,51
165-214,223 Divine right, rule by, 13 -14, 56
birth of, 172 Dry (quality), 27
career, 165-66, 194-210 Dynamos, 162-64
death of, 214
education, 174-76, 177-79, 197
honors, awards, 201 I
Clement VI, pope, 31 Earth, age of, 175,231,232
Cold (quality), 27; 28 Earth (element), 4, 27, 28, 29, 231
Collins, Michael, 61-62 Earthly domain/realm, 10, 13-14,
Combustion, 189, 192, 255-56 27-28,33,48
Comets, 33-34, 53, 54-55 Edison, Thomas Alva, 111, 163, 221,
Conservation laws/principles, 100-1, 242,249

102-3,236,251,254 Einstein, Albert, 5,215-66

Conservation of energy, 80 and Atomic Age, 260-6 6
Copernican theory, 33, 34, 35 birth, early life, 221-22
Copernicus, Nicholas, 31-33, 37, 38, career, 244 -46
58 death of, 265
Coriolis, Gustave Gaspard, 103 education,215-17,222-25,
Cosmos, 28-29, 53, 57, 63,159, 171, 227-31

233,250,254 honors, awards, 260

theory of, 234 Einstein, Hermann, 221-22, 224-25,
Cotton gin, 123 227,228

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Einstein, Mileva Marie, 230-31, Energy conservation, 198-200,201,

245-46 205-6
Einstein, Pauline, 221-22 equation,S, 198-99
Electric appliances, 163, 195 England
Electric motor, 152-53 civil war, 13-15, 16, 17, 18
Electrical Age, 159,244 Enlightenment, 4
Electrical energy, 198, 204 Entropy, 204-9, 211-13, 214
Electrical power, 256 Entropy changes, 204-6, 208-9, 211,
Electricity, 6, 120, 128-29, 133-35, 213
136,137-41,147,195,217, Equations, 2-4, 5-6, 69

224,243,252 see also under specific equation,

e.g., Fluid-flow equation
Einstein's work in, 244
Esperanto, 2
Faraday's work in, 130-31, 141,
Ether, 232-35,240-42,245,250
149-52, 155-59
Ether (element), 4, 28
and gross national product, 163-64
Euclidean geometry, 30
as spark o f ife, 121-22, 138 Eugenics movement, 221
Electrolysis, 140
Euler, Leonhard, 92-93, 97-98,
Electromagnet(s), 149-50, 160
103-5, 107-9, 115
Electromagnetic equation, 5
Evolution, 66, 266
Electromagnetic force, 231, 232
Electromagnetic induction, law of,
119-64
~ 
Electromagnetic waves, 229, 239-40, Fahrenheit, Daniel Gabriel, 185
247,249,251
Faraday, James, 120, 121, 123-24,
Electromagnetism, 159,217,224, 126,132
244-45,246
Faraday, Margaret, 123-24, 125
Electron(s), 232, 258 Faraday, Michael,S, 119-64, 194,
Elements, 4, 27-28, 140, 141, 224,229,232,242-43,244,
165-66,231,232
Energy, 79-80, 198, 199,233,234, 246
apprentice booksrnith, 119-20,
236-37,242,250-54 121, 127-28, 129, 132,
matter transformed into, 255-59 142-43
pure, 249, 251 birth of, 123-24
relation with mass, 252-54 career, 141-59, 164
sources of, 232 death of, 164

Energy changes, 203-4, 205, 206, education, 124-25, 128, 148

237 honors, awards, 162

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hunrility, 147, 149, 154 Galton, Francis, 221

notebooks, 132, 142, 143-44 Galvani, Luigi, 120, 121-22,
publications, 148 138-39
Faraday, Sarah Barnard, 150, 161 Galvanism, 139
Farrell, Thomas, 262 Geocentric theory, 31-32, 34
Federal Institute o f Technology Geologic forces, 175
(FIT), 228, 229, 231 Gilbert, William, 134-36
Fire, 165-66, 190 Gliders, 112, 115
Fire (Element), 4, 27, 231 Globes, 27, 28, 29, 30, 37
Fizeau, Armand, 243, 246, 247 God, 12,29,30,31,39,70,73,78,
Flight, 69, 87, 109-17 240
Fluid-flow equation, 103, 109, 116, in lives o f scientists, 71, 91, 109,
117 129,216
Fluids, 114 Newton's belief regarding, 49-50,
pressure of, 94, 95 63
static, 94-95 and science, 4, 55-57
study of, 66, 69, 77, 81-82, 83-89, and sovereigns, 13-14
97-103, 106, 115 Gods,25-26,30, 55-57
Flying shuttle, 123 Goldbach, Christian, 89, 90, 99
Forces of Nature, unity of, 133-34, Gravitation equation, 6, 25, 52-53,
137, 159 54,59,60-61,62,63
Frank, Philipp, 260 Gravitational force(s), 46, 47-48,
Franklin, Benjamin, 189 50-53, 133-34
French Academy o f Sciences, 65-66, Gravity,24, 117, 136-7
67-68,89-90,97,104,106, ofearth,51,55,56, 57, 59,62
114 o f moon, 62
Freud, Sigmund, 112,214 reciprocity of, 52-53
Friction, 171, 178, 180, 195,200, universal law of, 9-63
203,208-9 Grossmann, Marcel, 242

Frontinus, Sextus Julius, 85-86, Guericke, Otto von, 136, 137,

94 149
Fulton, Robert, 127 Guglielmini, Domenico, 88
Gutenberg, Johann, 106

Galen, 81, 181 u

Galilei, Galileo, 37-40, 49-50, 88, Hahn, Otto, 258
183, 188 Halley, Edmund, 54-55

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272

Hargreaves, James, 123

Harvey, William, 81, 93-94, 98 Imagination, 6, 7
Heat, 172-73, 181-94 Imperial Academy o f Sciences (St.
Clausius's study of, 175-81, 190, Petersburg), 90-91, 93, 97, 103,
194-210,224 104-5, 107
hot to cold flow of, 171, 178, 180, Industrial Revolution, 122-23, 126,
183,203,209 128,129,152,159,220
irreversible nature of, 180, 203, dynamos in, 163-64
209 "InfInitesimal" (the), 72, 101
measurement of, 182-83, 184-85, Inquisition, 37, 38, 88
186 Irrevocable processes, 169-70
theories of, 183-84, 187-89, 190,
196,199,202,209
Heavenly bodies, 26-30, 32, 35, J
37 James II, king o f England, 49, 56, 62
scientific laws of, 69-70 Joliot-Curie, Frederick, 259
Heliocentricism, 32-33, 34, 37, 38, Joliot-Curie, Irene, 259
55 Joule,James, 194, 196, 197, 198,201
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig von, Junr, Dance, 132
193-94 Jupiter, 37, 52
Heredity, laws of, 112
Herschel, John, 181-82
Hertz, Heinrich, 239 II
Hippocrates, 81, 95, 181 Kay, John, 123
Hider, Adolf, 259, 260, 261 Kepler, Johannes, 19,34-37,39,47,
Hooke, Robert, 42, 43, 50-51, 53, 49,50-51,57,59
55,62 Kinetic energy, 236-37,253
Hot (quality), 27, 28 Krakatoa volcanic eruption, 210-12
Human behavior, 72, 112
Human
beings, 58, 66, 89
Human body, 80-81, 93-94 L
Human nature, 70 Language, 1-2
Human sciences, 219-21 mathematical, 1,2-3, 7, 40
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 220 Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 112
Huygens, Christiaan, 19,25, 74 Lavoisier, Antoine, 189-90, 192
Hydrodynamic equation, 5 Law of Continuity, 87, 100, 103, 116

Hydrodynamics, 117 Law of Energy Conservation,

Hydrostatics, 85, 94 198-99,200,201,204,205

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InJell
273

Law o f Entropy Conservation, 205, Luther, Martin, 31, 32,34, 70, 88

206-7,211 Lyell, Charles, 175
Law o f Entropy Nonconservation,
207-9,212-13,214
Law o f hydrodynamic pressure, M
65-117 Magnetism, 133-34, 135-36, 137,
Law of Mass-Energy Conservation, 141,147,150-52,155-59,217,
254 224,252
Laws o f Nature, 69-70 Einstelll's work in, 244-45
lllequalityin, 209, 213-14 Maimonides, 30
and laws o f mathematics, 226 Marconi, Guglielmo Marchese, 163
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 62-63, Mariotte, Edme, 98
71-72,74,79,80,81,88,92, Mass, 46, 52, 250-53
100-1, 102, 103, 111 Mass-energy equation, 255, 256,
Lenard, Philipp, 261 258
Leonardo da Vlllci, 86-87, 88, 100, conftrmation of, 259
102, 114, 116 Mathematical poetry, 1-7
Leydenjar, 130, 137 Mathematics, 6, 112
Life, 194 Bernoulli brothers rivalry in, 71,
electricity as spark of, 121-22, 73-76
138 Einstelll and, 225-27
ftre as source of, 190 language of science, 157-58
heat and, 181-82 Matter,233,234,236,242
irreversible character of, 170, 182, Maxwell,James Clerk, 158,217,
209 221,229,239-40
as unnatural behavior, 6, 209, 213 Mayer,Julius Robert, 190-94, 196,
Life and death, 166-67, 168-69, 197,201,202
207-10,213 Mechanical energy, 198,200,201,
Light, 42, 55, 233-44, 249-50 203,209,237

Elllstelll's work lll, 219-20 Mendel, Gregor Johann, 112

particle theory of, 237-38, 239 M i c h e ~ o n , A J b e r t , 2 4 0 - 4 2 , 2 4 3 , 2 4 4 , 

wave theory of, 238-40 249

see also speed of light Montgolfter, Etienne, 110, 112
Light waves, 217, 218, 238-41, 242, Montgolfter,Joseph, 110, 112
245 Moon (the), 25, 26, 27, 28, 37-38,
l'Hospital, Marquis Guillaume de, 45-46

73-74,96 centrifugal force, 46, 47-48

Lowell Observatory, 58-59 Moon landing, 57-62,63

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loJex
274

Morley, Edward, 240-42, 243, 244, education, 10, 12-13, 16, 18-23
249 and gravity, 136-37
Morse, Samuel Finley, 160 honors, awards, 62, 63
Motion, absolute, 243, 244-45 influence on D. Bernoulli, 77, 101
Miihlberg, Friedrich, 215-16 notebooks, 20, 23, 44, 54
Musschenbroek, Pieter van, 137-38, particle theory o f ight, 237-38,
139 239
personal characteristics, 12, 43
and publication, 44, 54, 55
N relationship with mother, 18, 20,
Napoleon Bonaparte, 126-27, 141, 24,40,44-45
167 Newton, Isaac (father), 13, 14
National Aeronautics and Space Newton-Smith, Hanna Ayscough,
Administration (NASA), 57--62 12,13-14,16,18,19-20,22,
Natural philosopher(s), 42, 43, 50, 40,41,44-45
81-82,87-89,129,133,138, Newton's gravitational constant,
149-50, 170-71 53·
Faraday as, 131, 132 Nicholson, William, 140
mathematical language of, 157-58 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 220-21
Natural philosophy, 19,20,55,219 Nuclear bomb,S, 262--64
Natural science, 55 Nucleus(i), 257-59
Natural selection, 219-20, 221, 224,
232,266
Natural world/Nature o
Einstein's immersion in, 217, 225, Objects, truisms regarding movement
226 of, 41
Newton's immersion in, 17,22-23 Oldenburg, Henry, 42
simplicity underlying, 133, 136 Olympia Academy, 245, 251
Neptunists, 174, 175 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 262, 265

Neutrons, 256, 258-59 ¢rsted, Hans, 149, 150, 151, 155,

Newton, Isaac,S, 6, 9--63, 66, 70, 158, 160, 161
81-82,88,100,164,170,180,
223
career, 40-57 p
childhood, early life, 9-12, 15-18 Paradoxical undressing, 183
death of, 63, 95-96, 97 Parallax, 33

and discovery o f calculus, 72, 74, Perpetual motion machine, 170, 180,
157 181,207

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275

Phlebotomy (bloodletting), 95, Religious reformations/revolutions,

191-92 26-27,30,31,34,88
Pisa, Leonardo "Fibonacci" da, 225 Renaissance, 88, 93
Plague, 23-24, 30 Renaissance schohrs, 69-70
Planetary motion, 19,27,32,36-37, Revocable processes, 169-70
47 Riebau, George, 127, 128, 130, 131,
equation, 36 132, 143, 147
Planets, 26-27, 28, 59, 69 Riva-Rocci, Scipione, 99

Phto, 25-27, 28, 29,35,39, 55-56

Romain, Pierre-Ange, 111

Platonic rhetoric, 30 Roosevelt, Franklin, 262, 263

Royal Institution, 130, 132-33, 141,
Power loom, 123
143
Primum Mobile, 28, 30
Faraday and, 145-46, 149, 150,
Principle o f Sufficient Reason, 29,
153, 155, 161
51
Royal Society, 130, 164,238
Protons, 256, 258
Faraday and, 153-55
Puritans, 17,21-22,49 Newton and, 41-44, 53, 55, 62
Psychoanalysis, 112
Rozier, Pilitre de, 111
Psychology, 66
Russian Academy o f Sciences, 66

Q
Quantum Mechanics, 259
Sandeman,Robert,124
Sandemanians, 124-26
Science,S, 70, 88, 129,231,244
R Einstein in/and, 260-61
Radioactivity, 256, 257-58 Faraday in, 145-46
Rainbow, colors of, 19,23,42-43 Go d and, 4, 55-57
Refrigerator, 178, 180, 213 as profession, 130, 161
Relativism, 244,246,252,254
Relativity, theory of, 250 view of world, 252
see also Religion, and science
Religion, 25-27, 70, 171 Science fiction, 58
in English civil war, 13-14, 17 Scientific establishment, 122, 238,
in lives o f scientists, 11, 161--62, 239
216 Scientific hws, 112
and science, 29-30, 32, 39-40, 50, and human body, 80-81

56, 191, 197 Scientific method, 136

Religious dissent, 34 Scientific Revolution, 4

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276

Scientific revolutions, 26, 31, 55, 88, T

246 Tatum,John,119-20, 121, 131, 132
Scientism, 88-89 Telegraph, 160-61
Second Law ofThermodynarnics, Telescope, 36, 37, 59
165-215 Temperature change, 203-4, 205
Shrinking factor, 226-27, 248-49, Test Act, 49
250,251 Thales ofMiletus, 133, 134, 135,
Smith, Barnabas, 15-16, 18, 19 141
Social Darwinism, 220-21 Theory of special relativity, 215-266
Solar energy, 198, 204 Thermal energy, 198,200,201,203,
Solar heat, 182, 192 208,211
Solar system, 59 Thermal fluid, 187, 188
Solids, 66, 77,83,88-89, 97,212 Thermodynarnicequation, 6
pressure of, 94-95 Thermometer, 184-86, 187, 188-89
truisms regarding, 96, 101 Thomson, Joseph John, 232
Sound waves, 217-18, 240 Thomson, VVilliam, 111, 195-96,
Space, 233, 234,235,242, 245, 250 197,198,199,201,224,232-33
relation with time, 254 Three-body problem, 60-61
relative, 246,247 Time,233-36,242,244,245,250
Speed,234-36,242 relation with space, 254
Speed of light, 239-40, 242, 243-44, relative, 246,247
246-49,250-51 Tombaugh, Clyde, 59
Spencer, Herbert, 220, 221 Tornado theory, 37, 51, 151-52, 157
Sphygmomanometer, 99 Torricelli, Evangelista, 88
Stars, 26, 27, 28
new, 33, 34
Steam engine, 172-73, 176, 178-80, U
188,199-200,201,206 Unified Field Theory, 264
. Steam power, 127, 152, 172-73, Uniformitarianists, 175

176 United Nations, 2

Stevenson, John, 189 Universal gravitation equation
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 3 see Gravitation equation
Stokes, Mr., 10-11, 12, 20, 21 Universe, 10-11, 191
Storer, Arthur, 10, 11-12, 13,42 aging, 169, 171,180-81,207-210,
Storer, Katherine, 10, 18, 19,20-21, 211-12
44 processes in, 169-71

Strassmann, Franz, 258 reversible character of, 170-71

Sun,26,27,28,36, 182, 192,224 total amount o f force in, 193

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277

Universe, theory(ies) of, 31, 234, Water pressure, 98, 99, 100
245 Water works, 83, 85-86, 88
Aristode, 27-29, 30, 33, 35, 53 Watt, Janaes, 176
Coperrricus,33,34,35 Watts, Isaac, 131
Einstein, 237, 246, 247-48, 250, Weiznaann, Chaina, 264
254 Wesley, John, 139
University of Basel, 71, 73, 74, 76, Wet (quality), 27, 28
82,92,104 Whitney, Eli, 123
Ur.nliuna,232,256 Williana I, king of England, 13, 14,
atona, 255, 256, 257, 258-59 16
Wollaston, Williana Hyde, 152, 154,
155
v World War I, 260-61, 264
Venae, Jules, 58 World War II, 259, 265
Vis viva, 79-80, 81, 100-3 Wright, Orville, 113, 115
Vivisections, 93-94, 181 Wright, Wilbur, 113, 115
Volcanoes, 210-12
Volta, Alessandro, 139-40, 147
Volta's (Voltaic) piles, 139-41, 152, V
156, 162 Young, Thonaas, 237-40
Voltaire, F r a n ~ o i s  Marie, 62, 112

1
W Zanaenhof, L. L., 2
Water (elenaent), 4, 27, 28, 231 Zhukovsky, Nikolai, 114-16, 117
Water-cup problena, 81-82, 89 Zionisna (Einstein), 264-65

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