Isaac Newton: Son Büyücü Bilgin (2013) (BBC)

Isaac Newton: The Last Magician 

Isaac Newton'ın hayatı üzerine BBC'den bir saatlik bir belgesel. Bol bol canlandırma kullanılmış. Newton'ı günümüz insanının zihninde yerçekimi ve elma kelimelerinin arasına sıkışmaktan kurtaran bilgilendirici bir çalışma. Ekonomist Keynes'in Newton'ın notlarını okuduktan sonra sarf ettiği cümle belgeselin ismi olarak kullanılmış. 

Çalışmanın bu dahi bilgin (Geçen gün düşündüm de "bilim insanı" nedir yahu, bilgin gibi her iki cinsi de kapsayan ve kanıksanmış bir kelime dururken..!) hakkında daha fazlasını öğrenmek için insanlarda merak uyandırmak gibi bir amacı varsa bunu başarıyla yerine getiriyor. En azından bende öyle oldu. Sormak istediğim epey soru oluştu kafamda. Neticede bir saatte çok sınırlı bir kapsamı olabiliyor belgeselin.  Biyografilerden birini okuyacağım herhalde. Seyrederken yer yer Alan Moore'u da anmadım değil.    

Dramatizasyonlarda  Newton'ı Strain dizisinde Aldridge rolünde beğenerek izlediğim Jonathan Hyde harika canlandırmış. Newton'ın nemesis'i Robert Hooke rolünü ise  halen devam eden Silikon Vadisi dizisindeki Gary Bates canlandırmış zannettim ama değilmiş :) 

NOTLAR

Newton: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to my self, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Some consider him saint, some genius, his discoveries might well pass as miracles.

In his life time, he was considered as a scientific demigod.

Newton revealed the nature of light. Enabled us to calculate motion and predict change. Distilled the force that unites the whole universe into a precise formula: the universal law of Gravity.

Rational genius who propelled us from medieval darkness to enlightenment

He was also a complex, difficult, and secretive man. Not communicative. Not wanting to work with others. Easily offended. Profoundly neurotic.

Newton was not the first of age of reason, but he was the last of the magicians.

1705’te 63 yaşındayken a pillar of the Brit establishment, just knighted, and recognized across Europe as the “master of the enlightenment”.

Kendine aşırı güveniyor ve doğruluğundan hiş şüphe etmiyor. New Messiah gibi. Dünyayı kurtaracak bilgileri aktaran adam gibi düşünüyor kendini.

Doğmasıyla estrangement from humanity başladı.

Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire. 1642. Xmas morning. Birth.

1640lar İng tarihinin en çalkantılı günleri.  The English civil war left 1 in 10 men dead. King Charles I was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell’s puritanical government waged war against catholicism in the monarchy. Bubonic plague was rampant. People genuinely believed that the world was coming to an end. This time of chaos and upheaval marekd Newton for life.

Dr Stuart Clark. (Author – The Sensorium of God) 

“Newton craved certainty. All of Newton’s work is about finding certainty., finding the truth and things that u can absoultely believe in”

His father died a few months before he was born. His mother rejected and abandoned him 3 yaşındayken.  Zamanının protestan ikliminde büyüdü. Anticatholic, bible-reading, introspective. He wrote a list of childhood sins written in code. Önce çocukça kabahatler sonra ailesine savurduğu tehditler (sizi de evi de yakarım), kızkardeşini darp etmesi.

Geride bıraktığı yığınla yazı, not var. Kendi dünyasında yaşayan bir adam.

20 yy ekonomisti Keynes Newton hayranıydı.

Keynes: “Geniuses are peculiar. The uneasiness, the melancholy, the nervous agitation, in vular modern terms, Newton was profoundly neurotic. “

He relied on no one but himself.

Rob Illife: “He has almost a sort of visceral dislike of folowing other people. He has a very strong belief in his own originality. “

As a school boy, Newton’s innovative mind was already at work. He decided to inent his own way to tell the time.

Newton turned the attic into a giant astronomical clock. Like a sundial. He plotted the sun’s movement as it moved across the wall of his room every 15 minutes. Odaların duvarındaki gölgelere bakarak saati söyleyebiliyor. Light, space, and time were already his playthings.

Newton’s teenage notebooks mention no friends. Instead they reveal his efforts to find his own answers  to practical problems. Like alleviating wind.

Newton’s fertile mind was almost stifled before it could flourish. His estranged mother pulled him out of school when he was 17 to run the family farm. Newton bu işten hoşlanmıyor. Kötü yapıyor.  Dayısı onun okuması gerektiğini görüyor.  

Trinity College, Cambridge. Natural philosophy, study of the physical world ilgisini çekiyor. Yani science. O dönem science saygıdeğer bir alan değil. No degree no career. Useful results sunmamış henüz.

Profesörler Aristo’nun concept of gravity and levity öğretiyor. Smoke has levity because they have a tendency to rise up to heavens. An apple has a gravity, a tendency to fall down. Newton bu 2000 yıllık orthodoxy’yi reddecekti. Newton only believed what he could prove himself.

Newton: “Natural philosohpy shouldnot be founded on metaphysical opinons. Its conclusion can only be proved by experiment. “

He wanted to know everything. He had an insatiable curiosity. 

21 yaşında devised a curriculum for himself. 45 topics that obsessed him for the rest of his life. He called them: “Certain Philosophical Questions”. Tolstoy'da da var bu ilgi alanlarını kategorize etme gençken. 

Gözün çalışma prensibi üzerinde çok düşünüyor. Çalışıyor hatta kör olmayı bile göze alıyor. Uzun bir kürdan olan bodkin’i gözüne sokabildiği kadar sokuyor hatta. İmagination’ın, yani well ve fancy’nin ne kadarının contributes towards vision.

1665’de İngiltere’de Bubonic plague çıktı. 100.000 ölü. Çocukluk evine gidiyor. Compulsive questioning.  He invented the means to compute virtually any rate of change. The moon’s path around the earth. The growth patterns of a spiral shell. The trajectory of a projectile fired from a cannon.  A new type of mathematics was born: calculus.

Everytime u have a changing quantity, calculus has to be used. 24 yaşına geldiğinde buluşlarının çoğunun temelini atmıştı tek başına.

Dünyanın en iyi matematikçisi. Sonrasında ışıkla ilgilenmeye başlıyor.

1665’de panayırdan bir prizma aldı. Descartes’ın book of colors üzerinde deneyler yapacaktı. 

Kepenkleri indirip odasını kararttı. Küçük bir delik açtı. Birmiktar güneş ışığının girmesine izin verdi. Deliğin önüne prizmasını tuttu.

Yüzyıllardır beyaz ışığın en saf enerji formu olduğu dşünülüyordu. A symbol of God’s power. Newton saf olmadığını kanıtlayacaktı.

Prizmanın beyaz ışığı renklere ayırdığını herkes biliyordu. Ama sonra ne olduğu bilinmiyordu. Newton bu renklerin tekrar parçalanamadığını gösterdi. Elemental idiler. White light ise composite idi. Beyaz aslında bir karışımdı. Newton’dan önce prizma bir oyuncaktı. O bunu bilimsel bir araç olarak kullandı.

Ninety percent or more of our knowledge of the universe has come from collectin light from sky, stars, planets and splitting it effectively through prism. Bize muhteviyatı hakkında bilgi verirler. Dönme hızları anlaşılır. Hepsinin temeli ışığın analizidir.

Bulgularını yayınlamaya tenezzül etmiyor hala. Despising acclaim.  John Collins’e mektubunda şöyle der: 

“I do not see what is desirable in public esteem were I  able to acquire and maintain it. It d only increase my acquaintance, the thing I chiefly study to decline. “

Işıkla ilgilenmesi sonucu bulduğu bir buluş sayesinde reclusiveness was shattered. 1660larda teleskoplar basit tüplerdi. Lensler kullanılarak görüntü büyütülüyordu. 6-7 metre. Newton yepyeni bir metodla yaklaştı. Newton teleskobu ise daha kısa bir tübün içinde aynalardan faydalanır. Böylece the beam of light is bent often enough, that the lenses can be much closer together.  Bçylece taşınabilir boyutta bir teleskop çıkıyor ortama. Reflecting telescope.

Newton: “Eğer birilerinin benim için alet yapmasını bekleseydim, I d never have made anything”

Newton’s reflecting telescope was only 15cm, yet it was a powerful as lense telescope. 10 kere daha küçük. Naviagsyon devrimine yol açtı.

Telescope ve clock ile denize nerede olduğunu söyleyebiliyorsun. GPS’e kadar sailing ships aynı ikiliyi kullanıyor.

1671’de, Newton’s mathematics don Isaac Barrow  finally brough Newton to the attention of the world’s first scientific organization: The Royal Society in London. Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley gibi parlak zekalar burada o dönem. Merak içinde bir grup. Edmund Halley astronom ama cannabis hakkında makale yazıyor. Her şeyle ilgileniyorlar, ne kadar saçma da olsa. 1672’de hemen üye yapıldı ve çok ilgi gördü. Prizma deneylerindeki bulgularını “Theory of Light and Colours” olarak yayınladı sonunda. Makalesini curator of experiments in the royal society reviewed who was Robert Hooke. Highly respected inventor and natural philosopher, famous for his drawings of insects as seen through his homemade microscope. Peer-reviewed t and said it was worthless.

Newton:“Am  I bound to satisfy u? “

He’s very quick to defend his intellectual property. He does it in a knee-jerk way with people like Hooke. Sert. Asla eleştiriye gelemiyor ve hemen kendini çekiyor. Everytime anyvody disagree with him, he went into a retreat.

Newton withdrew back inside his mind. Locked in his cambridge rooms, he became a hermit for the next 12 years. Oradaki çalışmaları tehlikeli görüleek ve 2 yüzyıl saklanacaktı.

A bunch of impoverished English nobility  needed to raise some money and started selling papers that had been sitting in storage for centuries.

1936’da Keynes bought some of Newton’s secret papers at auction. Sotheby’s.  What he found revealed an utterly different Newton. Not the rational scientist.

Mesela 1670’lerdeki bir projesinde ulaşabildiği tüm klasik kaynaklara başvuruyor. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, babylonian, chaldean, Newton alleged that these ancient cultures had always known that the earth and comets travel round the sun.

Keynes: “He was the last of the magicians. Last of the babylonians and Sumerians. Newton bu gerçekleri insanlığa açıklamanın görevi olduğunu düşünüyordu. Binlerce yıl öncesinin intelelctual inheritance’ını tarıyor."

“He sees himself in a lineage that goes from Noah to moses to Christ. “

Newton believed that all these ancient civilizations shared one scientific religion.

Newton: “That first religion was the most rational of all others. Till the nations corrupted it. “

Newton was convinced he d found the source of corruption.

He believed something that most christians, protestant or catholic, would find deeply reprehensible, probably deem worse than atheism: Newton denied that God was a trinity. 

Newton: “There is one God. The father, everliving, omniscient, omnipresent, almighty, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ jesus. “

This went beyond event the most radical protestantism, this was heresy. Newton had studied the Bible more thoroughly than any scientific question. He concluded that false texts were inserted into the Bible in the 4th century to assert christ’s divinity.

Anti-tritarianism was illegal. U could be put to death for it. This was a secret that Newton was at desperate pains to conceal all his life.

He was also following a mythical quest. The study of alchemy. Search for the divine ingredient which would turn lead to gold and even give the power of life itself.

He was searching for the philosopher’s stone. Can verecek bir madde.

Newton: “There is a vital agent diffused through everything in the earth, a mercurial spirit, extremely subtle and supremely volatile which is dispersed through every place.”

The idea of having God-like power distilled into a substance yine ölüme götürebilecek bir fikir.

Kimyasal deneyler yapıyor durmadan. Sonuçları titizlikle kaydediyor. His alchemic studies inspired him beyond even his scientific abilities. Avrupanın en iyi simyacısı. His intuition led him to describe a seemingly magical transformation That would only be understood 200 years after.

Newton “The changing of bodies into light and light into bodies is very conformable to nature which seems delighted with transmutation. “

This transmutation anticipated Einstein’s great breakthrough in physics in 1905. Mass and energy are interchangeable, or as Einstein puts it, E=mc2 (MC squared). Mass and energy, body and light.

By being open to ancient wisdom Newton was able to go beyond the thinking of his own time and into the future. The docs in the trunk finally reunited the two sides of Newton’s genius. Mystical theologian and scientist. Seemingly fractured figure.

1684 he was just an obscure academic hiding from the world.

12 yıl simya çalıştı. Edmund Halley’in ziyaretiyle bıraktı. Cambridge’de ziyaret eti ve astronomiyle ilgili bir soru sordu, gezegenlerin yörüngesinin şekli. Halley hemen daha önce bu konuyu hesapladığını ve elips olması gerektiğini söyledi. All the great minds of the day were trying to explain the movements of the planets. Newton’un eski adversary Robert Hooke da bunlarında arasında. Çalışırken bahçesinde yürüyüş yapıyor bazen ve aklına bir şey gelince koşa koşa odasına gidiyor. Sandalyeye bile oturmadan ayakta yazmaya başlarmış asasında. İki sene çalışıyor Halley’İn sorusu üzerinde. Possible explnation değil, definitive explanation peşinde.

Newton: “I kept the subject cnstantly before me, until the first dawnings opened slowly, little by little, into the full and clear light, “

The result was a mathematical way to predict how forces affect movement: Newton’s three laws of motion.

Law I: Every body continues in its state of rest or in uniform motion in its right line unless it is affected by an external force.

Law II: This change in motion is in proportion to the external force, and is made in the direction of the straight line in which that force is impressed

Law III: To every action, there is always an equal reaction, the mutual action of two bodies  upon each other are always equal and directed to contrary parts.

These 3 laws managed to explain the mechanics of how virtually everything moves. But Newton realised there was another invisible element involved that kept the planets orbiting the sun.

From his alchemy, he was quite comfortable with the idea of spirits pervading space influencing things without contact. He transmuted those ideas into one of forces Newton deduced that these forces acted at a distance, across space, between all things

Newton: “The sun attracts Jupiter and the ther planets. Jupiter attracts its satellites. And for the same reason, all planets act mutually one upon the other. “

Newton’s masterstroke was realising that the same force that attracted the planets to one another, also existed on earth.

Newton: “It is now established that this force is gravity.   

Agog

Tüm evreni gravity’nin birarada tuttuğu fikri.

Applying pure thought to mystic clues

“There are ordinary geniuses and there are magicians. Ordinary genius’ın yaptığına abktığınızda çok daha akıllı olsam ben de yaparmışım dersiniz. Magician’ların yaptıklarını gördükten sonra dahi kafanızda tam çözemezsiniz. Newton was a magician. He was somebody who seemed to pull ideas out of nowhere."

1687’de magnum opus’unu yayınladı. 500 pages of densely packed words         diagrams and calcualtions.”The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” “The Principia”

Buradaki formüllerle neredeyse her şeyin hareketini öngörebiliyoruz. Comets, eclipses. Tides. Eventually aeroplanes could be designed and rockets launched.

Calculating forces and movements. Newtonian Age.

The publication also brough controversy. Once again from Hooke who claimed he was the originator of the Theory of Universal Gravitation.

Hooke: “I conceived that discovery of the cause of celestial motions to which Mr Newton nor any other has any right to claim. “

Hooke, Halley gibi bilginler bu konuyu araştırıyordu. Newton was prepared to admit that he built on other people’ work, but not the work of people like Hooke.

Letter from Newton to Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. “

Some believe that this was really a cutting reference to Hooke’s short stature.

Newton Hooke’un suçlamalarını reddetti ve yaptığı hesaplamaları bile  anlayamayacak kadar kötü bir matematikçi olduğunu söyledi.

Letter from Newton to Halley: “He does nothing but pretend and grasp at all things. He should rather excue himself by reaso of his inability.”

Hooke: “Interest has no no conscience”   

Hooke’s repıtation never recovered. He was soon eclipsed by Newton’s fame.

Now Newton was famous. His extreme protestantism was regarded more acceptable under the mew king William of Orange. He became an MP for Cambridge (1692). But Newton revealed nothing about his alchemy studies. Instead he began to popularise his ideas starting with gravity. Elma hikayesi. Ne kadar gerçek bilinmiyor. Scientific myth. Sudden inspirations by God hoşuna gidiyor insanların.

Tam şöhreti yakalamışken yine toplumdan uzaklaştı. 50’li yaşlarında severe nervous breakdown. Sleeplessness, melancholia, fear of persecution. Theories abound on his mental status. Yıl 1693. Robery Boyle ile yazıştığı zamanlar. Simya deneyleri konusunda konuşuyorlar. Close-up use of a lot of mercury. Bu breakdown’da ending of his friendship with a young man called Fatio de Duillier, a Swiss mathematician de etkili olmuş olabilir. De duillier went back to Switzerland. Newton never married. Kadınlarla herhangi bir ilişkisi kayda geçmemiş. John Locke’a mektuplar yazıyor (Keşke gerçekten ölmüş olsan falan). Locke akli dengesinden şüphe ediyor.   

Üç yıl sonra yazılarını topladı ve Cam’den ayrıldı. Transformation. The hermit and academic became a man of power. Tower of London’da Warden of the Mint olur. 1703 sonunda Royal Society’nin başkanı olur. Dominant scientific politico. This power that he has, brings out the nastier side of his personality. Robery Hooke’da aynı yılın başlarında ölür. Royal Society’nin başkanı olunca iilk yaptığı işlerden biri donating his own portrait and this was also the time when Robert Hooke’s picture went mysteriously missing Günümüzde Hooke protresi yok. Promoted his supporters and crushed the doubters. Royal astronomer Flamsteed’den acilen belli bilgileri istiyor ve sert davranıyor.

Flamsteed: “He called me all the ill names, I put him in mind of his passion, and asjked him to govern it and keep his temper. This made him rage worse. Dr Halley gibi onu övmemi istediğini fark ettim."

Psychopath and genius, visionary and misanthrope, revered scientist and lonely old man

Newton lived out his final years as an autocratic civil servant. Fazla yeni işe imza atmadı.

The storm of his genius had blown itself out.

1727. final retreat into himself. 84 yaşında komaya girdi.

Westminster Abbey’de gömüldü with unprecedented pomp and ceremony. New kind of national hero. The scientific genius.

For such a lonely, isolated guy he achieved an unparalleled measure of fame. Daha önce state funeral asilzade olmayanlar için hiç düzenlenmemişti.

Tüm yazılar 2 büyük sandığa konuldu. Keynes manuscriptleri okuyana kadar din ve simya ile ilgili kısımlardan bahsedilemmiş. Rational Man imajı bozulmasın diye.

Newton: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to my self, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, amusing myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Westminster Abbey