84 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



mental science, a method of exchanging vie^vs, and, what was 

 perhaps even more important, a method of publication. The 

 first task of the Royal Society was to begin publication of its 

 Philosophical Transactions^ which has continued ever since. 



In 1642 was born the greatest scientist qf all time, Isaac 

 Newton. It ^vas expected that Newton would follow the 

 farmer's life that had been led by his ancestors, but, w^hen 

 he was sixteen, he showed such incompetence as a farmer that 

 he was sent back to school and thence to Cambridge. In 1665 

 the plague drove him from Cambridge, and in his mother's 

 farmhouse the young man worked out his discoveries of the 

 binomial theorem, the mathematics of infinite series, the dif- 

 ferential and integral calculus, the idea of universal gravita- 

 tion, the production of the spectrum by dispersion, and the 

 formulation of the laws of mechanics, following the work of 

 Galileo. In order to understand Newton's life, we must 

 realize the difference between the attitude of the men of the 

 seventeenth century toward their scientific work and that of 

 the professional scientists of today. The founders of the 

 Royal Society were, as has already been said, amateurs. They 

 were experimenting and speculating in natural philosophy 

 for their own interest. They considered their conclusions 

 and their discoveries to be their own property, -^vith which 

 they could do as they pleased. As Sir James Jeans says, "We 

 see Newton's terrifically powerful mind playing with the 

 problems of science as we play ^vith a crossword puzzle and 

 regard the incident as finished when ^\e have solved it." * 



Newton discovered the calculus in 1665, yet, before pub- 

 lishing it even partially, he allo^ved t^venty-eight years to 

 elapse, years in which Gottfried von Leibniz discovered and 

 published the same thing in Germany. At the same time, 

 he satisfied himself that the force of gravity, obeying an in- 

 verse square law, explained the motion of the moon "pretty 

 nearly" and w^as content to leave it at that until Halley asked 

 him many years afterward what were the orbits of the planets. 



* Sir James Jeans, "Newton and the Science of Today," Nature, 150, 

 712 (1942). 



