Isaac Newton as Innovator and Icon of the Enlightenment -- Exhibition at The New York Public Library Explores the "Newtonian Moment"

F.M. Arouet de Voltaire, Elemens de la philosophie de Neuton, 1738. The frontispiece to Voltaire's popularization of Newton's ideas shows Mme du Chatelet reflecting the rays of light (truth) emanating from the heavens behind Newton onto the inspired Voltaire, busy at work below.

New York, NY, September 22, 2004 -- Isaac Newton's spectacular contributions to mathematics and physics charted the course of science for nearly two centuries. Yet his influence transcended the domain of the natural sciences. After Newton, the search for universal (and rational) principles shaped the development of ideas in virtually all fields, including religion, history, art, and literature. The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, an exhibition at The New York Public Library, tells the story of the incubation and diffusion of Newton's ideas, as well as the tensions and the often public (and nasty) clashes they engendered. In addition to hundreds of rare volumes, prints, maps, and other items from the Library's collections, the exhibition features a series of Newton's manuscripts from the Cambridge University Library that have never before been shown in the United States. The exhibition is on view October 8, 2004 through February 5, 2005 in The New York Public Library's D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall in the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Admission is free. A companion volume will be published by Oxford University Press, and the Library is presenting two related public programs, on November 30 and January 5. According to the exhibition's curator, Mordechai Feingold, Professor of History at California Institute of Technology, "For friends and foes alike, Newton became an icon to be emulated or rejected, revered or excoriated -- but always there to contend with. Hence, the era of Enlightenment and Revolution may be viewed as the Newtonian Moment."

The Apprenticeship of Genius
Much of Newton's genius consisted of his remarkable ability to simultaneously consume and transform any knowledge he encountered. At Cambridge University's Trinity College, where he arrived in June 1661, Newton quickly assimilated the most recent scientific literature, such as Descartes' Geometry and Principles of Philosophy, Galileo's Dialogue of the Two Chief World Systems, and Robert Hooke's Micrographia -- all of which will be on display -- and within two anni mirabiles (1665-1666) proceeded to revolutionize mathematics, optics, and mechanics. This section of The Newtonian Moment includes many of Newton's manuscripts from his undergraduate years, as well as documents from his tenure at Cambridge during the 35 years he remained there after graduation, including mathematical papers, optical experiments, his design for a small reflecting telescope, and early drafts of propositions for the Principia.

The Gospel According to Newton
In August 1684, Edmond Halley visited Newton to inquire whether the Cambridge professor could determine the shape of a planetary orbit, given a force. An ellipse, Newton replied instantly. Within three months, Newton sent Halley a short treatise that included his demonstration as well as additional material, and Halley immediately paid Newton another visit, persuading him to venture publication. For eighteen months Newton became a recluse, working at a feverish pace on a book that took shape in the process of composition -- the Principia -- the monumental treatise that mathematized physics and unified celestial and terrestrial mechanics under a single law -- universal gravitation. The exhibition includes several editions of the Principia, including Newton's interleaved copy of the first edition (from the Cambridge University Library), in which he noted changes and corrections for the revised edition.

The Opticks was published 17 years after the Principia (the exhibition also celebrates the tercentenary of its publication) and contained Newton's revolutionary theories regarding light and colors, and much else besides. Among the versions of the book featured are the first edition of the Opticks from the Library's Science, Industry and Business Library, and Newton's own copy of the second edition, on loan from the Grace K. Babson Collection at the Dibner Institute and Burndy Library, Cambridge, Mass.

One of the most fiery and long-running disputes surrounding Newton involved the discovery of the calculus, a new and powerful mathematical tool to treat the relations between quantities and magnitudes -- for example, measuring the speed or calculating the changing position of a moving body. Newton developed the fluxional calculus in the mid-1660s, but desisted from publication. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discovered the differential calculus independently a decade later, and published his results in 1684. By 1700, friends and disciples had begun not only to publicize Newton's early mathematical researches, but to insinuate that Leibniz had appropriated without acknowledgment certain of Newton's results. For proof, they went to Newton's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. One of the key pieces of evidence used by Newton's supporters was a 1676 letter to Leibniz, known as Epistola posterior, which concealed the fundamental theorem of the calculus in an anagram. Also on display in the exhibition are drafts of an "anonymous" review of the report by an "impartial" committee of the Royal Society that pronounced in Newton's favor -- both of which were actually penned by Newton himself.

Trial by Fire
The recondite nature of Newtonian science necessitated a lengthy process of assimilation before widespread conversion became possible. Dutch universities, the most popular institutions of higher learning in eighteenth-century Europe, played a central role in the eventual success of Newtonian proselytizing efforts, and the instruction provided by their professors became the model for others to emulate. The third and fourth sections will exhibit writings by such celebrated professors as Hermann Boerhaave, Willem Jakob 's Gravesande, and Petrus van Musschenbroek, whose joint success lay in their ability to brilliantly render Newton's abstruse mathematical physics into visual and dramatic experiments. Even as Newton's new concepts were gaining acceptance and becoming the scientific standard, they provoked controversies. The exhibition includes a rich sampling of the ingenuity of contemporary savants as they sought to modify Newtonian mechanics or optics, and even make it compatible with elements of Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion, according to which the planets are carried around the sun in a huge whirlpool of subtle matter.

A New Worldview Emerges and Science Visualized and Popularized
Before Newton's death in 1727, the diffusion of his ideas was confined to the domain of experts. Wider dissemination required the unique genius of Voltaire and of Francesco Algarotti. What made Voltaire so effective an agent -- apart from an unparalleled ability to seduce an audience by a masterful combination of shock and wit -- was that he was a literary man and an amateur in matters of science. For precisely these reasons his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton appealed to non-specialists. Algarotti's Newtonianism for Ladies was even more successful in transmuting Newtonian ideas into an agreeable dialogue format, chock full of amusing digressions, specifically intended to appeal to women. Other popular expositions of Newtonian science soon followed, feeding a growing market among the upper and middle classes for "au courant" topics of conversation and entertainment.

Reason and Faith
Newton's piety was proverbial. But he was also an anti-Trinitarian heretic, albeit he took care to conceal his convictions from public view. Also concealed from the public was his extensive research into the prophecies of the books of Daniel and Revelation and the history of the Church. Despite his precautions, Newton's presumed religious sentiments -- based on the few gleanings to be had from the Principia and the Opticks -- offered a broad scope of action for proponents of a wide variety of religious (and not so religious) doctrines. On display will be Newton's endeavor to reconstruct the shape of Solomon's Temple, and his chronological researches -- and the critical literature they engendered -- which began to appear just before his death. Also on display are key works attesting to the manner in which the immaculate order that Newton had introduced into nature was utilized as proof of the existence of an intelligent designer -- God.

Humanities and the Culture of Science
The revolution effected by Newton and his successors ushered in a brave new age of reason and light that went well beyond the natural sciences to include the totality of human knowledge. The desire to transplant the "Newtonian scientific model" to other domains was as much in evidence in Giambattista Vico's New Science as in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Furthermore, Newton's contribution to the reconstitution of nature made him the patron saint of reason and enlightenment, celebrated by such diverse enterprises as Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie and Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. In a corresponding development, the so-called imaginative arts also felt compelled to incorporate significant elements of the new philosophy as their subject matter. With the advent of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century, however, the tension between poetic, artistic license and the demands of a (quantified) nature dissolved. The romantics violently rejected the "tyranny" of reason, railing that mathematical abstraction and the attempt to reduce all spheres of life to rules limited creativity, and deadened the emotions. William Blake and Goethe in particular, though begrudging admirers of Newton's genius, highlighted in their works the pernicious effects of science on literature, morality, and religion.

Apotheosis
The deification of Newton began as early as 1687, when Edmond Halley contributed a poem to the first edition of the Principia, the final line of which decreed "no closer to the gods can any mortal rise." For the next 150 years admiration of Newton bordered on idolization. Throughout the exhibition are prints and reproductions by such artists as William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Januarius Zick, and Pierre-Jule Deléphine, who in their paintings sanctified Newton's genius and his contribution to science.

Publication and Public Programs
Oxford University Press is publishing The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture, by Mordechai Feingold, in both hardback ($45) and paperback ($22.50) editions, 236 pages with 200 illustrations.

The Library is presenting The Idea of Sir Isaac: Making The Newtonian Moment, a series of programs including "Man of the Moment: How Newton Moved Mathematics to the Top of the Scientific Agenda," a November 30 lecture by Lisa Jardine, a professor at the University of London, and "The Scientist as Scholar: Newton as Historian," a January 5 talk by Anthony Grafton, Professor of History at Princeton University. Both programs will be held at 6:30 p.m. in the Library's South Court Auditorium. Tickets are $10 for regular admission and $7 for Friends and Conservators. For more information about purchasing tickets please. For more information about tickets, call 212.930.0855 between 1:30 and 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, or visit www.nypl.org/humanities/pep.

Website
Visit the online version of the exhibition at www.nypl.org/research/newton/.


The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture is on view October 8, 2004 through February 5, 2005, at The New York Public Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Library in the D. Samuel and Jeane H. Gottesman Exhibition Hall on the main floor. Exhibition hours are Tuesday and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Sundays, Mondays, and national holidays. Admission is free. For more information about exhibitions at The New York Public Library, the public may call 212.869.8089 or visit the Library's website at www.nypl.org.

Free Docent-led tours of The Newtonian Moment are available daily at 12:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. Group tours are available by appointment; call 212.930.0501 for reservations and fees.

This exhibition has been organized by The New York Public Library in cooperation with Cambridge University Library.

Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation -- Robert and Joyce Menschel; Robert and Mary Looker; Mr. and Mrs. Ira D. Wallach; and The Dibner Fund.

Support for The New York Public Library's Exhibitions Program has been provided by Pinewood Foundation and by Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III.

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Contact: Herb Scher or Caroline Oyama, 212.704.8600.