Newton, in his capacity as Lucasian Chair of Mathematics
at Trinity, did not make a successful teacher. "So few went to
hear him," a secretary recalled later, "and fewer that understood
him, that ofttimes he did in a manner, for want of hearers, read
to the walls." The professor preferred to spend his time in his
laboratory, which he built himself, and in the small garden outside
his rooms. He became famous for his distractedness: he might remain
in his bed all day, working out some problem in his mind; and if
company came while he was wrestling with a new idea, he often went
into another room, and quite forgot about his visitors. But his
absent-mindedness never translated into unproductiveness, and his
laboratory was a one-man hive of activity, a testament to science
as a creative process, a place were countless hypotheses were tried
and rejected, tried and modified, or tried and proved true.
In January 1672, Newton was elected to the Royal Society.
Founded with Charles II's blessing in July of 1662, the Society
was a community of scholars brought together for the purpose of "Improving
Natural Knowledge." It included poets and architects as well as
scientists and mathematicians among its original ninety-eight scholars,
a number that grew considerably in subsequent decades. Most of
the great thinkers of the age belonged to the Society, including
the astronomer Edmund Halley (the namesake of Halley's Comet);
the chemist Robert Boyle; the gifted architect and designer of
St. Paul's Cathedral, Christopher Wren; and the greatest of the
Restoration poets, John Dryden. Newton immediately felt at home;
Trinity College in the 1670s had become a lonely place for him,
and he reveled in this brotherhood of similarly great minds.
But in that brotherhood he found rivalry as well, in the
person of Robert Hooke, seven years his senior. Hooke had belonged
to the Society since its inception, and he possessed a brilliant
and inventive mind, one that darted from discipline to discipline
and discovery to discovery. His principle interests lay in mechanics,
but he also built wonderful microscopes and did landmark research
into the structure of plant cells; he invented dozens of contraptions,
ranging from an early form of the telegraph to a diving bell; he
studied combustion, musical notes, and did research into the nature
of light. It was this last interest that first brought him into
conflict with Newton: in February of 1672 Newton presented his
first paper to the Royal Society, detailing his work on the nature
of light and advancing his theory that white light was a composite
of all the colors of the spectrum. Hooke had his own ideas about
the nature of light--ideas that contradicted Newton's suggestion
that light was composed of particles; Hooke himself believed that
light traveled in waves. Thus he quickly damned Newton's paper
by praising it only in condescending terms--he noted its "niceness
and curiousity"--and then proceeding to attack Newton's methodology
and conclusions. Hooke was hardly alone in this denouncement of
Newton--Huygens, the great Danish scientist, also raised objections,
as did a number of French Jesuits--but because of Hooke's prominence
and his simultaneous work on optics, his criticisms had the most
bite for Newton. Newton displayed the anger and defensiveness
that would, in the future, be his typical response to any critique
of his work. Not only did he deny any shortcomings in his theory,
he also made extravagant claims for its genius and significance,
declaring it "the oddest if not the most considerable detection
which hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature." Laced
with this sort of hyperbole, his correspondence with Hooke became
increasingly acrimonious, and he went so far as to threaten, in
March of 1673, to withdraw from the Society. He only remained
at the pressing of the Secretary, Henry Oldenburg, who assured
him that the Fellows indeed held him in high esteem. However,
even with Newton's self-confidence restored, his rivalry with Hooke
persisted.
In a sense, it is unsurprising that these two men should
have come into conflict. Their personalities, similar in their
quantity of ambition and pride, differed markedly elsewhere: Newton
was devout, and read his Bible daily, while Hooke practiced religion
as a mere formality; Newton lived out his days as a bachelor, and
seems not to have been interested in sex, while Hooke was a sensualist,
who slept with his housekeepers and developed a grand passion for
his niece. More importantly, their approaches to science were
diametrically opposed: Hooke delighted in his reputation as a scientific
butterfly, flitting from problem to problem, making great discoveries
but never pausing to work out what they meant in the larger picture; Newton,
by contrast, painstakingly worked problems to death, and used his
findings to create vast systems of thought. In the end, of course,
his painstaking approach reaped great dividends, and his systems
are with us, in modified forms, to this day, while Hooke's practical
inventions have been forgotten. But in the early 1670s Hooke was
the more famous man, and Newton smarted under his criticisms.
The two men seem to have made an effort to patch up their
differences, however: they exchanged letters in January and February (although
these are littered with subtle barbs), and when Hooke succeeded
Oldenburg as Secretary of the Royal Society, Newton wrote to congratulate.
But soon another issue was looming, one that would precipitate
their final break--Newton's work on his theory of universal gravitation.
